I made the most of a sunny Saturday in the Mile High City. Here are some thoughts about a few of the cultural activities I undertook:

1. The Five Points Jazz Festival: This beloved street festival devoted to jazz music and related arts is in its 10th year. The Denver neighborhood was a jazz mecca back in the day, hosting the likes of Billie Holliday, Duke Ellington and Count Basie among others. This year’s festival was a lively affair with hundreds of people of all ages and ethnic backgrounds milling about several blocks of Welton Street, eating massive barbecued turkey legs and drinking cold beers and pop. Among my personal highlights were a spirited performance by the Colorado Jazz Repertory Orchestra, a big band composed of local jazz old-timers (all of them male) playing standards with flair and dexterity. I was also very much taken by the gypsy swing soundings of Purnell Steen and Le Jazz Machine. I wish I could remember the name of this group’s vocalist. Her take on “Cry Me A River” was spine-chilling. Oh, and perhaps best of all was the break dance lesson which I watched for a while (pictured). Two of the most happy-looking, physically awe-inspiring 20-something men worked with young kids to pull some excellent moves. I was transfixed.

2. The Denver Museum of Contemporary Art: This museum is a gem in downtown Denver. It was practically empty yesterday, which was great for me as I hate visiting museums when there are crowds, but not good for the museum, especially since entry yesterday only cost $1. I made the most of the space. To start with, I engulfed myself in Eduardo Sarabia’s colorful paintings depicting bucolic scenes blurred over by splotches of color that somehow seem to enhance rather than spoil the portraits and landscapes behind them. Then I went to the basement galleries to watch a video installation by Maya Gurantz, The Whore’s Dialogue, which deals with female sexuality, pornography and violence. The installation features three screens in which middle-aged actresses recite sections from a script made out of personal memoirs, court transcripts of violent sex crimes, prostitutes’ blogs and pornographic jokes. The images of the figures are crisp and larger than life on the massive screens. The clarity of their voices seems to be at odds with the hard-hitting and salacious nature of the words they intone. This creates an unresting feeling. I left after about 15 minutes feeling like I’d been slimed over. I ran up to the top of the building and spent an enjoyable hour or so sitting outside the museum’s lovely rooftop cafe in the sun drinking prosecco and snacking on guacamole and chips while watching the vague hubbub of Denver downtown street life below. It was fun to look down on a construction project and see miniature people walk and cycle about. Finally, I took in the expansive and quirky Dance Rehearsal: Karen Kilimnik’s World of Ballet and Theatre. The American artist Karen Kilimnik has a longstanding professional and personal relationship with historical theatre, in particular, the Classical and Romantic story ballets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I love the way the artist’s contemporary, pop-art infused sensibility playfully collides with idealized images of  ballerinas in tutus. In one of the most fun installations in the museum, we enter a little wooden pagoda, sit down on comfortable banquettes and watch a video in which tiny fairy ballerinas pop up against a fecund forest backdrop and then disappear again as if by magic. The exhibition is really much more thoughtful than it is kitsch.

3. The Colorado Symphony: I have been curious about The Colorado Symphony for a while, having heard about its financial woes and having profiled its former conductor, Jeffrey Kahane, for the Los Angeles Times a while back. Happily, the orchestra was in session this weekend, performing an all-Gershwin program with its effusive new artistic leader, Andrew Litton, occupying both the conductor’s and pianist’s positions. First, I really like Boettcher Hall. It’s a big, warm nest with excellent sight lines. I sat towards the back of the mezzanine for the first half on the concert which provided a good view and decent sound, and then moved behind the orchestra, which put me up close and personal with the musicians. This was even better. Litton has an easy, fun-loving manner about him. He clearly loves and deeply feels the music of George Gershwin. I enjoyed his short talks about the pieces and even learned a thing or two — I had no idea, for instance, that the it was the clarinetist in the original performance of Rhapsody in Blue who created the famous glissando slide and wail that starts off the work. Gershwin liked the effect and kept it in the piece. Litton is also a skilled, energetic multi-tasker.  I could barely keep up with the maestro: one moment he was hunched like a plump hedgehog at the piano, hammering out virtuostic cadenzas; the next he was up on his feet waving a baton. He moved seamlessly between the iPad from which he read the piano score to sheets of music, which were scattered on top of the instrument-cum-podium. Sometimes he conducted without referring to the score. I only noticed one occasion when he didn’t move quite fast enough between playing and conducting, causing a trumpet to loudly split a high note. Last night’s concert had a rhythmic, big-band feel. The band moved well with its energetic bandmaster and Gershwin’s music, and the spirit in the hall was infectious. I relished the fact that Litton programmed well known works by the composer with lesser known ones. The lineup included the Overture to Crazy for You, Day Full of Song, Rhapsody in Blue (a startlingly kinetic performance) and Who Cares? A Ballet.

Karaoke is a wonderful invention because of its power to unite complete strangers through that electric combination of booze and song. The Singing Room, a new comedy by Denver’s Horse & Cart theatre company explores this notion with love and a light touch. Although playwright Sean Paul Mahoney’s script could be tighter, the essential feeling that permeates this quirky comedy can’t help but put a smile on one’s face.

The show basically evolves like an extended improv skit, with various different characters entering a karaoke bar and allowing us to see into a small part of their lives as the songs and the liquor flow. Over the course of the two and a half hour show, we watch such mini-narratives evolve as a 25 year old birthday girl fall out with two close friends, a middle-aged divorcee fail to lure two drunk women back to his lair, and a pair of dorky young lovebirds attempt to figure out the title of a favorite song. Meanwhile, the karaoke bar’s emcee and proprietor, the hilariously strict Sunshine (Dorothy Lee), yells at people to come to the mike.

The singing sections of the evening are fun to watch and sing along with, but perhaps need the most work in terms of how they fit into the play dramaturgically. The actors sing characterfully, but what we know of their stories and personalities from the script isn’t deeply backed up by the the songs they pick to sing and the way they perform.

For example, by far the most professional sounding pipes of the evening belong to Ava (Nicole Paige Campbell) who gets behind the mike and sings a staggeringly competent performance of “Maybe this Time” from Cabaret. This is the only show-tune in a lineup of mostly standard rock and pop songs (“I Love Rock and Roll,” “Wanted Dead or Alive,” “Sweet Caroline” etc) and not only jumps out for being a musical theatre number but also because of the vocal technique, poise and drama of the singer. Sung by a character who otherwise has heretofore come across as a total ditz, it should make more of an impact on the rest of the characters in the room and propel what we know of Ava into a new dimension. But the opportunity is wasted. She sings. The bar applauds. The story continues as if nothing had happened.

Still, the production basically has its heart in the right place. I could have done with it being an hour shorter (why not truncate the songs and use spotlights to isolate dialogue while people are singing rather than have huge, music-less pauses in between musical numbers to enable the chunks of dialogue and action to unfold?)

Finally, if you’re going to make a play about a booze-fueled night of karaoke, where far more shots are drunk on stage than songs sung, then you can’t leave your audience out of the proceedings. It was gratifying that a few audience members were invited by Sunshine to sing numbers on stage as the performance went along, but where oh where were our shots? Don’t Denver theatres have bars for people who aren’t on stage?

Radio Silence is a formidable organization. Founded by teacher-turned-writer/editor Dan Stone, the year-old, print, online and live magazine exists at the intersection between rock music and literature. It’s about time that someone came up with intelligent content in this area of our culture. There hasn’t been a ton of it since the early days of Rolling Stone.

The contributors and discourse include gems like New Yorker editor David Remnick discussing Bob Dylan on a podcast and an essay by Tobias Wolff about his peripatetic musical passions. This is quality stuff. Oh, and and portion of the money that Radio Silence, a 501(c)3 organization, raises is used to buy books and musical instruments for kids.

I became intrigued by Radio Silence quite recently when Stone sent me the newly-minted issue two of the magazine via email. Then, when the announcement came that the organization would be hosting a live event in a loft featuring a reading by Daniel Handler, music from John Vanderslice and a conversation about David Bowie featuring Vanderslice, Handler and Stone, I had to be there.

The event took place in a loft in The Mission last night and it was a casual and warm affair. There were about 100 people squished into the room. Handler read from his book Adverbs, and Vanderslice talked about his new set of songs based on David Bowie’s seminal Diamond Dogs album. Handler got out his accordion and joined Vanderslice on some of the musical content from the Bowie cannon. Wine and snacks flowed. It was fun. I am looking forward to the next one.

After a visit to the Piedmont Bird Calling Contest on Friday night, as detailed in my last blog post, my weekend took a more serious turn with performances of The National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch at the American Conservatory Theater and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and an excerpt from Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli at the San Francisco Symphony.

A few words about each:

First, to Davies Symphony Hall. The combined forces of the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas made a glittering, robust sound and made much of the whopping contrasts between the epic ensemble sections and the sudden quite moments for solo voice and/or violin and quiet accompaniment. Of the soloists, I was  most moved by the performances by mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, who’s warm utterance of “et incarnatus est” in the “Credo” movement transported me, and tenor Michael Fabiano. The high-pitched heroic opening to the mass, which sees the tenor “battling the elements” against full orchestra and chorus was chilling. Hearing this tenor made me wish that I could have been at one of his performances of the Beethoven song cycle “An die ferne Geliebte” last week. The performance was preceded by a warm and emotional performance by the a cappella chorus of the “Kyrie,” “Gloria” and “Agnus Dei” movements from Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli. I tend to prefer Palestrina’s works performed on a slightly smaller scale for the sake of intimacy. There were 120 singers on stage for this rendition and under the circumstances, they made a warm, emotional sound and beautifully captured the contours of Palestrina’s writing. The piece made for a somewhat truncated first part to the concert, and yet helped to draw the link between the high Renaissance style and Beethoven’s use of its modes and moods in his great Missa.

Now for some quick thoughts about Black Watch. It’s so often the case that by the time big touring theatre productions make it to San Francisco they are over. By this, I mean that they’ve been seen by audiences everywhere and written about to death. More often than not, the productions feel stale too. Black Watch, a play about a famous Scottish platoon’s rough time backing up the American army during the war in Iraq, dates back to 2006 and has circumnavigated the globe several times since then. Only now is it reaching our quaint little backwater, imported by the American Conservatory Theater. Yet despite the “yesterday’s news” issue, I found myself quite engrossed by the show. Part of its glow stems from the use of the cavernous, military-historied drill hall of the Mission Armory. Beyond that, the whole thing feels more like a surreal ballet than a play. I found this to be refreshing after sitting through countless more character-focused, narrative-based stories about the war in Iraq. It’s harder to tell a story about an entire platoon on stage than it is to draw people in with a compelling tale about a single person or a couple of people. But playwright Gregory Burke and director John Tiffany manage to do so with humor and pathos. The all-male cast dances and sings during the play, giving it a dream-like quality.   A passage in which one soldier tells a potted history of the famous 42nd Regiment (aka the Black Watch) while being pushed and lifted around by his colleagues as they use him as a model’s dummy upon which to show off how the battalion’s uniform changed over the centuries. It’s a beautiful, lively sequence. Another amazing moment occurs near the start, when the red-topped pool table upon which soldiers have been playing a game in a bar transforms itself into a bloody womb, out of which two newly-minted soldiers rip and tear their way into the narrative. From that moment we realize that this is no easy birth. Only the framework that surrounds the Iraq story, concerning a researcher collecting information from the members of the platoon for a possible movie project, feels superimposed.

The annual Piedmont High School Bird Calling Contest has to be one of the hidden cultural gems of the Bay Area, like some rare species of owl.

I say hidden, but in fact this eccentric and marvelous competition which has been going since 1963, get quite a bit of exposure: The winners appear every year on the David Letterman show to perform their winning calls to millions of viewers. Before Letterman started inviting the high school bird call aficionados to perform on air, they were annual guests on the Johnny Carson show.

Yet despite this mass publicity, I hadn’t even heard of the competition until a guest on VoiceBox, whistler Jason Victor Serinus, mentioned it in passing when we recorded a show together last fall. I’d been thinking about doing a show on the relationship between human song and bird song for several years and realized at that moment that the Piedmont Bird Calling Contest had to be in the mix.

I accompanied my reporter, Rachel Hamburg, to the 48th iteration of the event, at Piedmont High School in the East Bay on Friday evening. It was a rewarding evening, though it appears that standards in bird calling among students have somewhat fallen in the decades since the competition kicked off. But what the students have lost in terms of technical expertise, they have perhaps gained in theatricality and comedy.

The format is simple: The students pick a bird, create an introductory skit around it that weaves in a few pertinent facts about that bird, and then, at the climax of the skit, imitate the bird’s call. A panel of judges awards points based on “authenticity of call,” “poise and delivery,” and “content of introduction.” The audience and judges get to hear a recording of the bird’s call prior to each performance.

Back stage before the competition began, all was a-twitter. Kids dressed in makeshift wings and beaks milled fussed with their costumed and huddled in corners practicing the call of such species as the snowy egret, the laughing gull and the greater prairie chicken.

When they got up on stage though, the students all showed great poise. Among my favorite skits was Dina Zangwill’s sweetly bristling red-throated loon (Dina is pictured above.) The bird had an unexpectedly loud and searing call. Dina won second place and was jumping about with excitement at the prospect of doing her loon on Letterman. She gave Rachel and I a massive hug. I also loved Billy Ireland, Wes Dunlap and William Meredith’s snowy egret. The three students created an absurdly funny sketch around a yoga class that seamlessly and hilariously integrated facts about the bird with the call and clever humor. This sketch didn’t place however.

The entries were complemented by fun extras such as a performance of a couple of songs by a student a cappella quartet, who gave a tuneful rendition of “Rockin’ Robin,” and a presentation of some video from the Piedmont competition’s first appearance in 1963 on the Johnny Carson show.

From watching this footage, it became clear to me that student bird calls today aren’t what they were back then. The early birders did much more technical stuff — imitating birds with complex whistles. No one attempted anything virtuostic this year. It was mostly a lot of squawking.

On the Carson show, the competitors don’t get to perform their skits; only their calls. So I didn’t get to see any footage of the actual competition. I’m guessing that students place more emphasis on the comedy and whackiness of their sketches than the complexity of their calls these days, though I can’t say for sure.

 

Experiencing the San Francisco’s Ballet’s new version of Cinderella created by Christopher Wheeldon to the music of Sergei Prokofiev in a co-production with the Dutch National Ballet last night made me think about how much better ballet does, in general, at communicating figurative ideas over literal ones.

The weakest section of Wheeldon’s darkly sublime take on the classic story happens at the start, where the dancers are forced to pantomime their way through tons of exposition explaining why poor Cinders ended up becoming a lackey to her sisters and step-mother. The mugging and gesturing of the dancers, no matter how extreme, rarely conveys the meaning in Craig Lucas’ libretto. Only the hilarious shoe-trying scene, where a motley assortment of non-Cinderella-like hopefuls line up to try on Cinders’ slipper, succeeds on the literal front. This is because the scene is funny and surreal: The queue of toe-wiggling wannabe princesses include male courtiers and twiggy-fingered/tuber-headed woodland spirits, the fanciful creations of the productions brilliant scenic and costume designer Julian Crouch.

Contrastingly, the most powerful sequences in this Cinderella, which dispenses with the fairy godmother and pumpkin coach in favor of four steely yet avuncular Fates and a massive, magical tree, are the ones that allow the choreography, music and design elements to weave a more metaphorical tale.  In this production, thanks in part to the work of puppet master Basil Twist and lighting designer Natasha Katz, chairs, trees and chandeliers “dance.” The scene in which the tree (a spirit manifestation of Cinderella’s deceased mother) becomes the centerpiece for a gorgeous, colorful sequence in which whirling spirits prepare our heroine for her night at the ball, is intoxicating to watch. Wheeldon’s steps are characterful and yet abstract. We are lifted for a moment out of the story and into a more emotional realm. And then the whole thing explodes into one of the most vivid moments of stage spectacle I have ever witnessed. Large wagon wheels covered in leaves and wooden horse heads materialize from the tree. Held aloft by spirit dancers, they merge to form a ghostly carriage that whisks Cinderella off into the a. It’s intoxicating stuff.

 

On Friday, I was invited to take a specially organized private tour of  The Voice Center for Medicine and the Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The tour was carefully and skillfully arranged by Nina Eidsheim, an assistant professor in the university’s musicology department, and Jody Kreiman, a professor at the Voice Center (along with Jody’s team). Nina is editing a forthcoming volume of essays about singing from Oxford University Press to which I am contributing. Jody is the author, along with Diana Van Lancker Sidtis, of Foundations of Voice Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Voice Production and Perception. 

The UCLA Voice Lab is a fascinating place. This is especially the case for anyone who wants to know a lot about the human larynx.

I know a few things about this most delicate of human systems owing to listening to guests talk about it on VoiceBox, my weekly public radio and podcast series about the human voice. But I had no idea until Friday morning that scientists have so much trouble keeping this small and highly complex bit of flesh and muscle alive outside of the body in order to carry out research on it. Unlike muscles like the heart, the larynx can’t so easily be kept “working” artificially when it’s removed from the throat.

Recent experiments on dog larynxes (which are quite close in shape and function to those of humans) have enabled scientists to develop a system to keep human larynxes “alive” for around eight hours in isolation. It’s an exciting breakthrough as it enables a depth of research to be done that simply wasn’t possible before. Experiments on “dead” larynxes aren’t all that helpful and you can’t do all the things you might want to do to a larynx when it’s inside a working conscious human body. So the discovery will hopefully lead to the solving of many mysteries and pathologies to do with the human voice.

Here’s what Jody told me in an email about the importance of being able to “get inside” the voice box in this intimate way, as it relates in particular to singers:

I have been thinking a bit more about why a singer would want to know about voice physiology.  In many arts and crafts, knowledge of tools is really important–the different brush fibers, the pigments, the kinds of wood or stone and how they vary with season and point of origin and age, and so on.  It’s hard to be a good artist without being a good technician, I think.  Knowledge of voice physiology would let singers know the limits of their tools, what is possible and what is not, how to reach closer to those limits safely, an understanding of what can go wrong and why–lots of advantages.  This might not contribute much to artistic sense or interpretation, but it might add range to their craft (especially contemporary vocalists) and length to their careers, and maybe that extra layer of understanding might ultimately affect their artistry as well.

So there are artistic applications of the Lab’s research, as well as the purely medical ones.

The trouble is that acquiring human larynxes from fresh corpses isn’t easy. Bruce Gerratt, a colleague of Kreiman’s, told me that it’s often the case that the Lab will hear word of an organ donor, only to have the promise of the delivery of a fresh larynx revoked at the eleventh hour when the family of the soon-to-be-deceased changes its mind about giving up their relative’s parts to scientific inquiry.

In the absence of a constant supply of authentic human larynxes to study, the scientists at UCLA are making do with silicon ones.

Post-docs make the artificial larynxes, slivers of jelly-like substance that resemble tiny gaping mouths, in the lab. Scientists like associate professor Zhaoyan Zhang (pictured above) mount different combinations of simulated laryngal tissue onto slides and blow air through them to see how they react. The experiments are conducted on a zany-looking contraption (pictured) that looks like it’s been cobbled together by a bunch of scientists, which in fact it has.

I am looking forward to keeping in touch with the UCLA voice specialists and seeing how their research goes. In the meantime, if anyone out there has a larynx to donate, don’t hesitate to call Jody, Bruce, Zhaoyan and their colleagues at UCLA.

When August Strindberg’s Miss Julie first appeared on the stage in 1888, people were understandably shocked by the author’s unflinching tale about an upper class woman’s affair with a servant and the ensuing power struggle that leads her to take her life.

Making the play feel as raw to a 21st century audience as it did to theatre-goers in the 19th isn’t easy, especially an audience as awash in “upstairs-downstairs” narratives as our post-Downtown Abbey-inhaling one is.

But Neil LaBute manages to make Strindberg’s masterpiece feel fresh and feral nonetheless. I saw a performance of LaBute’s world premiere adaptation of the play at The Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles a couple of days ago and I’m still reveling in its raw power.

LaBute manages to keep the audience on its toes by moving the play to 1920s Long Island, just before the stock market crash that lead to the Great Depression. Witnessing the events of the drama unfold in an era that mirrors the precipice-like circumstances in which we live today in this country cuts close to the bone.

The play’s punch also stems from a combination of subtle and not-so-subtle moments of stage action imposed on Strindberg’s text by LaBute.

For example, when Kristine (the excellent Laura Heisler) awakes from a slumber in a nearby chair to the sound of Julie and John audibly having sex in the closet stage left, her feelings are made palpable with a slow walk towards the closet door. Kristine doesn’t open the door, cry or make a scene. She simply sees a pair of open beer bottles on the table, walks towards them with a look of heart-stopping anguish and slowly takes the empties to the sink before quitting the room. It’s a moment of earth-shattering depth and tension, carefully staged and tightly written.

At the other end of the spectrum, we see John (Logan Marshall-Green) take a cloth and gently clean up the blood between Julie’s (Lily Rabe) legs, having just divested his boss’s daughter of her virginity. The discombobulating action is as violent as it is touching. Both actors play the scene in a way that keeps us guessing as to the nature of their feelings. It’s a perplexing mixture of passion, confusion, exhaustion and politics.

The action feels so taut that even everyday sounds, like beer bottle corks being popped, make us (echoing Julie’s jangling nerves) feel unavoidably edgy. And when the master’s bell goes off near the end of the play, the effect is electrifying. John isn’t the only to jump out of his skin and spring into action at the rude but by no means ear-splitting noise; many people in the audience almost leapt out of their seats in shock the night I was at the show.

Director Jo Bonney’s pacey and compressed mise-en-scene demands that the three actors constantly negotiate the space. No one ever has the upper hand for long — neither psychologically, emotionally nor physically. The pressure-cooker feel of the production is further exacerbated by Myung Hee Cho’s scenic design — a cavernous, white 1920s kitchen that seems like it ought to be caked in blood and mud by the end of the play. That this doesn’t actually happen underscores the sense of “business as usual” when the master’s bell rings. Oh, but so much has changed in that kitchen — and beyond.

When it comes to connecting with an audience, a singer’s body language is as important as the power of his or her voice and material.

This is why last night’s concert by Caitlin Rose at The Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles was so disconcerting: The young, Nashville-based country rock artist was saying one thing with her voice and quite another with her body. The two were in conflict. I’ve been wondering if this is a good or bad thing. At this point, after some hours of reflection, I see the lack of cohesion as a strike against the singer.

Rose has the kind of voice that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning, fling open the door and dance down the street barefoot, regardless of what the weather’s doing. Her instrument is clear and bright and full of youthfulness. It lends depth to whatever it is that she’s singing about, from heartache to new love.

I felt immediately drawn to Rose’s voice when I first heard the singer’s music on YouTube. But in person, the sweetness and clarity of her singing don’t quite level with the way she carries herself on stage.

With her hands clasped somewhat awkwardly on front of her torso or crotch when she doesn’t have a guitar strapped to her chest, Rose appears to be on the defensive. Throughout last night’s concert, it seemed to me that she had something to hide. I could not warm to her, despite the beauty of her sound.

I have seen plenty of vocalists put dark and brooding lyrics out there and cover their voices and stare at their shoes. The medium in such cases fits the message — one can be drawn in deeply by the all-consuming nature of the performer’s introversion or negativity. But I don’t think I have experienced such an emotional disconnect between the way in which a performer sings and their body language as I did last night at Rose’s gig. It was quite confusing and ultimately off-putting.

Perhaps a really skilled performer might be able to manipulate a dissonance between their singing and body language to great effect. Rose isn’t one  of these people though. I love the singer’s music, but I felt estranged from her in the live format. Perhaps I’ll stick to her recordings from now on.

 

Why is it so often the case that the most stimulating and beautiful works of art and the most creative and smart artists go relatively unappreciated while the people who do things that are altogether less inspiring reap wild favor and applause?

I’m thinking about this today in light of Mark Jackson’s bracing-taut production of Max Frisch’s The Arsonists (trans. Alistair Beaton) currently playing to two-thirds-full houses at The Aurora Theatre in Berkeley.

Every seat should be filled every performance during the run with someone leaning forwards, prickly, tense, and furrow-browed. That was me last night. But an actor from the production told me that the show is not selling well and won’t be extended. It pains me to think that this is the case.

Jackson’s take on Frisch’s Gogol-esque satire about a well-off family’s self-destruction as the result of their complacency and stupidity in the face of human disaster, is seat-of-the-pants stuff. Set in an unspecified time and place, and lacking any reason for the rampant arson attacks committed by a motley crew of renegades at the heart of the narrative, the drama purposefully avoids pointing a moral finger but asks the audience to be guided by its own sense of right and wrong. Jackson is clearly striking the perfect balance as according to the cast member mentioned above, audiences are labeling the play as being both a right- and left-wing parable.

This drama isn’t easy to pin down. Frisch, a Swiss native, wrote The Arsonists as a critique of his country’s neutrality in the Second World War. Experiencing this drama today in the wake of the Boston marathon bombings — an act of terrorism — and the fertilizer plant explosion in Texas — an act of corporate malfeasance — is utterly unnerving.

Jackson’s seismic pacing, tension-building use of sound and use of eye-popping imagery, balanced against the cartoonish performances from the brilliant ensemble cast, serves to discombobulate and arrest the viewer.

The most powerful of all the many vivid physical images occurs near the climax, when rows of metal oil drums descend from the rigging and ominously hang by ropes above the performance space, like so many dangling corpses. Dangerous stuff.

Only a lame-o quip referencing a couple of local theatre companies undermines the thrilling thoughtfulness of Jackson’s conception. Of course, this had to be the moment when the audience laughed the loudest at last night’s performance. I guess even a steely auteur like Jackson feels the urge to throw the groundlings a bone on occasion.

So why aren’t all the seats at The Aurora packed with bristling, sweating people all on the edge of their seats? One reason might be that the playwright and his play aren’t familiar names to Bay Area audiences, even though the drama, under its alternative titles of The Fire Raisers and Biedermann and the Firebugs, is very commonly produced in Europe. Another is the public’s scant appetite for really chewy food.

Here’s hoping people manage to find it in their hearts, minds and stomach to get to The Aurora before the run’s out on May 12. This play’s on a short fuse and to miss it is to commit an act of gross stupidity and complacency in my view.

 

For a while now, I’ve been questioning the usefulness of the standard categories under which most arts coverage is organized in the media. You know — the “music”, “theatre”, “movies”, “dance”, “visual art”…headings. Oh, and let’s not forget “multimedia” — that weird catchall descriptor that so many sites (including my own) have for putting stuff that doesn’t comfortably fit in anywhere else.

The fact is that arts experiences rarely fit comfortably into this framework — and in fact probably never have. Opera is as much music as it is theatre. And there’s sometimes a fair amount of dance and multimedia going on.

And individual artists habitually resist fitting into comfortable categories — not deliberately so, but just because of the myriad influences on their work.

These days, the habit among content producers is to tag particular pieces of arts content so that they appear in several different sections of a particular website simultaneously to reflect this reality. But this leads to annoying duplication. And if the content appears in enough places on a single site, the categories are rendered almost redundant.

Yet because we’re a society of compartmentalizers, and because there’s an overwhelming amount of content in the world, the stuff needs must be organized somehow.

So what are the alternatives?

One way is to organize by format e.g. “review,” “feature”, “profile” etc. But these forms seem to be merging and melding into one another more than ever before. Not sure this is the answer.

Another common system is chronological. This is pretty handy when you’re looking for something to do on a particular date, but otherwise often overwhelming, especially if you live in or are visiting a relatively busy urban area.

In both of these cases, the standard taxonomy (music, film, visual etc) ends up being part of the picture anyway, with editors using tags to help people navigate otherwise brain-exploding amounts of content.

Here’s a whacky thought:

In tomorrow’s world, I foresee the five senses as an interesting taxonomic possibility for arts journalism. Right now, technology more or less only allows us to “listen” and “see” things. But eventually, maybe arts experiences could fall into “touch,” “taste” and “smell” categories in the media of the future.

How helpful would these categories be, I wonder? Maybe not very. But they somehow help to make cultural experiences seem more immediate than the traditional classification standards.

I’m mulling over other possibilities. Maybe things could be categorized by mood or by ticket price or by…????

It’s fascinating to see how amateur artists are forming the backbone of some of the most ambitious, site-specific cultural happenings in the Bay Area these days.

The Bay Area has a ready source of people who make art simply for the love of it rather than for a living, and who also possess a healthy spirit of experimentation. These qualities greatly facilitate the mounting of large-cast, non-mainstream productions.

Prominent upcoming examples include Lisa Bielawa’s Airfield Broadcast which will involve hundreds of musicians at Crissy Field in the fall, and Helen Paris/Carolyn Wright/Jocelyn Pook’s Out of Water, a performance art work scheduled to take place at the end of June at San Francisco’s Fort Funston Beach involving a large chorus. The casts of these projects are predominantly drawn from the community.

This past weekend, Bob Geary, the director of three singing ensembles — The San Francisco Choral Society, Volti, and The East Bay Piedmont Children’s Choir – collaborated with the Leah Stein Dance Company to stage a production of the Leah Stein-David Lang dance-music piece, Battle Hymns. The show involved a legion of amateur singers drawn from Geary’s choruses.

The setting of Kezar Pavilion (the San Francisco 49ers erstwhile home which resembles a militaristic-looking mess hall) isn’t conducive to good acoustics unfortunately. But visually the work is stunning as a result of the size of the forces involved and the precision of the music and choreography with such a large group.

I didn’t go for David Lang’s music, which lacked the icicle delicacy of the composer’s Pulitzer-winning little match girl passion and seemed even more repetitive in its minimalistic shards of melody and text. (Some of the singers I spoke with after the show said that the piece is extremely tiring and monotonous to sing.)

But the group of 150 or so performers created some arresting patterns in the space and sang with conviction. The execution was almost flawless.

That so many people gravitate towards these artistic community spectacles is gratifying because it shows a level of engagement that goes beyond mere spectatorship. And professional artists like Lang, Geary, Stein, Bielawa, Pook, Wright and Paris seem to be enthusiastic about the idea of bringing non-professiobals into the fold. I am excited to find out how Airfield Broadcast and Out of Water transpire.

Some additional notes about two other events I attended over the weekend which involved a strong community element:

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Residency at Cal Performances: The esteemed New York-based dance ensemble has been coming to the Bay Area since 1968 and has built up a massive local following over the decades. The hordes that attended Friday evening’s performance at Zellerbach Hall whooped and cheered inexhaustibly for the dancers at every turn. They created opportunities to show their enthusiasm in fact. And they never seem to get tired of watching the Aileys perform their signature work, Revelations, which was on the otherwise-diverse program all week. The piece dates back to 1960 and somehow still feels muscular and socially relevant. In line with its Berkeley residency tradition, the company did much more last week than perform seven shows. Company members worked with local teachers, undertook master classes with UC Berkeley students and gave workshops for schoolchildren. But to return to the performance I witnessed on Friday: My favorite piece was the opener, Another Night. This work set to Dizzy Gillespie’s A Night in Tunisia choreographed by Kyle Abraham explores the roots and development of jazz culture. It is the perfect showcase for the rippling physiques of the Ailey dancers and their scorching charisma.

Public Square: Future Soul Edition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: All day on Saturday, top local choreographers and dance teachers including Claudia Anata Hubiak, Ramon Ramos Alayo, David Dorfman, Kim Epifano, Cera Byer and Amara Tabor-Smith offered dance classes to members of the public for 50 cents a piece. 50 cents! The styles on offer ranged from Afro-Cuban modern and modern to hip-hop and roots. No experience necessary. I caught some of Ramon Ramos Alayo’s Afro-Cuban class. What an amazing opportunity. The dance classes were followed that evening with performances by some of the companies whose leaders had taught classes earlier that day, artist discussions and a dance party.  I value the way in which YBCA works hard to create these spiraling, in-depth arts experiences with a strong community engagement angle. They shrink the traditional divide between “professional” and “amateur” creators, inspiring a more focused and engaged audience for the first group and a memorable, pheremone-inducing experience for the second.