lies like truth

The weekend went by in a blur. Some highlights:

1. Watching Project Bandaloop’s amazing aerial dancers swoop and glide off the side of a 100 foot tall building in Oakland in preparation for the company’s upcoming world premiere. The piece, which involves six dancers and is choreographed by artistic director Amelia Rudolph, explores the relationship between the different sides of the self and an individual’s relationship to others. It’s appropriately called IdEgo.

2. Hitting opening night of the new Mark Dion exhibition at the Oakland Museum. It’s called Marvelous Museum and it involves the interjection of strange and unusual curios from the depths of the museum’s storage facility into different parts of the permanent exhibition spaces.

3. Chris Kuckenbaker’s weird and wonderful solo show at the San Francisco Fringe Festival all about William Burroughs. Well, to be more accurate, the piece is about the performer’s imaginary relationship with a Burroughs’-like character in his head. Part self-confessional, part homage to the great, madcap author, the piece avoids being too self-indulgent and is full of humor and dextrous switches between characters.

4. Singing all day at a retreat with the International Orange Chorale in Larkspur. The ensemble with which I sing is performing Milton Babbitt’s Music for the Mass among other new and newish pieces.

5. Hitting Pandora karaoke bar in the Tenderloin. Having sung all day, a group of us continued carousing till the wee hours of the morning. We had a private room, which was probably just as well, as we sang songs from The Sound of Music not to mention the Rod Stewart number, “If you want my body and your think I’m sexy…”

6. Enjoying a Sunday morning “gospel brunch” at 1300 Fillmore. The wonderful soul group Future Perfect performed while we ate. Gospel brunches are tacky things really and the prices are elevated. But we have fun anyway. The bottomless pomegranate mimosas (or “pomosas” as the waiter called the sweet fizzy pink beverages) certainly helped.

This morning I awoke to the headline news of an explosion caused by a ruptured gas line in San Bruno (just a few miles from where I live in San Francisco.) The explosion killed at least six people, injured many more and destroyed lots of homes.

In the grand scheme of things, this disaster is small when compared to the floods, tsunamis, famines and nuclear power plant radiation leaks that commonly make the news all over the world. But irrespective of the size of the event, the repercussions never fail to have a devastating effect on a community.

In the face of this, what’s a culture journalist to do? My colleagues on the news desks of the local and national media were probably up all night reporting the story and continue to make sure that people are kept up to date. The local pub that I contribute to, The Bay Citizen, has been at the forefront of the charge. I am impressed by the organization’s coverage of the blast so far.

But what’s my role as a journalist in all of this? No one cares what an arts reporter/critic has to say about a gas pipe rupture.

I suppose ultimately, at this point in time, my role is not a professional one. It’s simply to be a good citizen by helping people in need while keeping a professional eye on how the story unfolds down in San Bruno.

When the proverbial smoke clears, that’s when I can actually start doing my job — making sense of the event and how it impacts people’s lives from a cultural perspective. But that’s down the line.

A note on Jessye Norman’s performance at the season opener for The San Francisco Symphony on Tuesday night: It left much to be desired.

The San Francisco Symphony Chorus did a beautiful job of sustaining Aaron Copland’s long ardent lines in the haunting a cappella choral work In The Beginning. But the soloist’s effort was bumpy to say the least.There was no flow between Norman’s upper and lower registers and she didn’t sing the Biblical text as if she knew what it meant.

The jazz set of songs by Duke Ellington arranged for voice and orchestra by Patrick Russ was even more disappointing. Norman’s voice sounded thin at the top and bellowing at the bottom. She hammed up the sentiment in all the songs, which included such standards as “Come Sunday,” “Sophisticated Lady” and “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing.)” At a couple of points, Norman’s voice cracked.

Maybe the singer is tired. Clearly she needs a break.

The current sorry state of the arts journalism profession was made very visible last night at the San Francisco Symphony‘s home base, Davies Symphony Hall.

Before the season opener kicked off with a program that included Michael Tilson Thomas conducting Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture, Copland’s In The Beginning for a cappella chorus and solo mezzo-soprano (Jessye Norman), a bunch of Duke Ellington standards (also sung by Norman) and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe Suite No. 2, the organization’s media relations department laid on a lovely party for the media.

The Davies Symphony Hall press room was remarkably packed and the atmosphere extremely convivial. It was nice to see so many familiar faces there.

But it wasn’t until I took my seat for the concert that I realized that there had actually been precious few members of the press in the press room. It was largely populated by public relations people, funders and other assorted arts professionals and hangers-on. Out of a crowd of about 100 people, I counted maybe 10 journalists. Not an encouraging state of affairs.

Shotgun Players is a Berkeley-based theatre company that never stops innovating. A few years ago it was one of the first – if not the very first – company in the United States to switch to solar power 100%. And it’s never scared to be bold in terms of its programming while usually maintaining high artistic standards.

The company manages to pursue these standards both for its indoor productions throughout the year at The Ashby Stage and for its outdoor productions each summer at John Hinkel Park in North Berkeley.

The current run of In The Wound, a new drama by Jon Tracy at John Hinkel Park is no exception. Instead of playing to most people’s summery expectations of lighthearted Shakespeare and other romantic and/or fun-loving comedic fare, Shotgun Players is staging a violent adaptation of The Iliad. The production also sets itself apart from many others on the non-profit stage by having an enormous cast of more than 30 actors (the company’s biggest cast size to date.) Tracy’s production features committed performances and a strong sense of ensemble, especially during the forcefully choreographed fight scenes which make use of Taiko drumming and Asian war dances involving soldiers butting sticks and drums instead of swords and guns.

Yet for all that, I ended up feeling disappointed by In The Wound. I suppose the main issue I have with the production, which runs at weekends through October 3, is the writing. Here is yet another play which seems to say “war is bad” and little else. The language flits predictably (for a modern play about warfare with classical pretensions) between vaguely poetic cadences and slang. The characters only seem to have one dimension to them and the boomeranging structure of the drama is at times confusing. I couldn’t really understand what was gained by flitting backwards and forwards through time in this telling of the story.

Still, I commend Shotgun Players for continuing to push boundaries in terms of its offerings and can only hope that the second Greek epic-inspired play that artistic director Patrick Dooley has commissioned from Tracy for the winter season, based on The Odyssey, will prove more inspiring in terms of the writing.

I imagine that there are few other places in the world you can go where, within the space of an hour or two, you can:

1. Hear Terry Riley (pictured) play freewheeling proto-jazz compositions on the piano while wandering the galleries of the Berkeley Art Museum perusing 16th century Japanese art from the Clark Center Collection, an exhibition on “Hauntology” in art (a movement which tries to capture paranormal and other ghostly pricklings in our lives) and an installation and movie screening by the filmmaker and kinetic sculptor Brent Green.

2. Stumble across a bunch of students dressed in everything from Egyptian mummy’s bindings to a burlesque dancer in the middle of an evening-length role play adventure based on the Cluedo board game.

3. Watch a legion of stunt cyclists tearing up a plaza with incredible balletic feats including moving very fast backwards like skaters moving on ice, doing pirouettes and hopping down concrete steps, all on two wheels.

The relationship between public relations professionals and (arts) journalists often feels uneven to me. PR people seem to know much more about — and are acutely sensitive towards the needs of — the journalism profession than journalists know are are about PR people, as many PR people have been reporters or editors in the past (journalists rarely come to the profession from a career in marketing). And I think there are a lot of journalists who look down their noses at the PR industry. If a journalist leaves the profession to pursue PR, his or her colleagues will often accuse them of “selling out.”

This is ridiculous, as like it or not, journalists rely upon working with good PR people more than they care to admit. 

A few weeks ago, the head of one of the PR firms in the Bay Area, David Landis (pictured), asked me to participate in a new feature on his company’s website called “Meet the Media.” I had to answer a few questions about my job and send in a photo. I did what was asked and the result can be seen here.

The exercise made me realize how little I know about David Landis, and most of the other PR people I work with regularly for that matter.

So I decided to ask David if he would return the favor and answer a set of very similar questions to the ones he had asked me so that I could find out about what he does and post the findings on my blog. David obliged.

So here’s the first installment of “Meet the Marketer,” my response to Landis Communications’ “Meet the Media”:

David Landis, President & CEO of Landis Communications

1. What’s your top project for today?
Today, our LCI team is pitching a new health-related business in the far reaches of the East Bay.  Pitching new business isn’t the worry, I love learning about new businesses and helping them think strategically about how to communicate their value – the real issue is how am I going to get there and avoid the traffic/construction and arrive on time?  I’m also meeting a former staffer for lunch who now lives out there.

2. Tell us about your dream client.
A dream client is one who truly partners with LCI so that we can be successful.  What does that mean?  That they hold up their end of the bargain – make sure to respond to us with information, honor our weekly meetings, pay on time – and most importantly:  get back to us asap when we have an interview opportunity.  We also want partners who understand that the true value LCI brings to the table is strategic counsel – clients may elect to not implement that counsel, but it’s important to be heard.  Often times, it’s the PR professional who can bring fresh ideas, new directions and a unique way of approaching the business.

3. Describe the wackiest marketing campaign you’ve worked on.
Here are a few from which to pick:
When we launched Old Navy, we did a program to help promote their $5 Flag T-shirts.  We partnered with summer reading programs at libraries throughout the U.S. and had actresses impersonate Betsy Ross (the creator of the flag) to teach kids about the flag.  We launched on Flag Day and then culminated the campaign with small-town parades in cities across the country for July 4th.  The greatest part was that the T-shirts sold out in record time and those T-shirts have become an annual anticipated event.
With a holiday shopping site called Santa.com, we produced the first-ever Santa.com holiday parade with a then unknown singer named Christina Aguilera as the emcee.  She was very young and wasn’t paying attention – and when the music started, she forgot to start singing!
For Match.com, we created a new expert program with the in-house PR person – letting the press know that our expert could address all questions related to the dating world, either online or off-line.  Instead of just trotting her out to the press, we re-named her the “VP of Romance,” and suddenly the press was calling us, asking if they could get expert commentary from her.  As a result, we placed her on the Today Show, in the New York Times and all throughout the country.
This isn’t “wacky”, but it was amazing. With the California Academy of Sciences, one of their researchers found research that would indicate that humans had actually been using tools 1,000,000 years prior to what had been thought before.  When that news broke, it made Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, NPR, New York Times and more – and prompted opposing scientists to immediately question the science – a PR person’s bonanza because controversy always means more exposure!
And years ago, to promote the Symphony Pops, we created the first “champagne cork-popping” contest with area celebrities – to see who could pop a champagne cork the furthest.  SF Chief of Protocol Charlotte Shultz of course won – with her indomitable style and class.
We also did a “Mozart look-alike” contest at the Symphony – partnering with Macy’s – but only got 2 entries:  a guy on a boat with a beer can in his hand and a single Mom from Antioch.  I’d say that one fell a little short of our expectations!

4. What is your journalism pet peeve?
We’ll do our part to make sure we’re pitching you appropriately (i.e., we’ll do the research, make sure we understand your beat etc.)  Just get back to us and let us know whether or not you’re interested in the story.  We really don’t want to be a pest, but if we don’t hear back from you, we’ll assume there’s still a chance for that story.

5. Top trend in the industry you’re currently interested in.
I think social media is already changing and will continue to revolutionize the way we conduct PR and how the business operates.  No longer will a majority of our work as PR professionals be dedicated toward interesting media to write about our clients (although unlike some, I predict this will still remain an important component of our business).  But what social media affords PR and our clients is the opportunity to communicate directly with our customers without the filter of the media.  That is groundbreaking.

6. Tell us a little about yourself.
What most people don’t realize is that I started my career as a pianist.  I studied piano performance at Northwestern University in Chicago and then moved into arts administration, before going into television.  I started the agency business more than 20 years ago in my bedroom and we now have about a dozen employees, are part of an international PR network (Public Relations Global Network – www.prgn.com) but also remain committed to helping businesses grow – and helping the community through our nonprofit work.  I think having a creative outlet – like my music – has allowed me to think differently about business in general and bring some fresh thinking and ideas to the table.  For those going into any business, I think a background in the arts is essential. I also love to travel, love skiing and hiking, can’t get enough of San Francisco’s amazing culinary scene and adore theatre.  Meeting Stephen Sondheim a couple of years ago was a true high point in my life.  I’m married to my now husband of 21 years, Sean Dowdall, who is Chief Marketing Officer for Rabobank and we live in Pacific Heights (and in Tahoe) with our two adorable American Eskimo dogs, Shasta & Whitney.  My other career if I weren’t in PR would be playing cocktail music in an upscale lounge.
 

As someone who resides in a country where the terms “professional” and “amateur” have become practically meaningless in the world of the theatre, I was fascinated to read in yesterday’s edition of The Stage that Britain’s mighty Royal Shakespeare Company will feature “an increased focus on amateur theatre” when it re-opens on November 24 in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Alistair Smith’s article quotes RSC director Michael Boyd as saying:

“As part of a programme of work between now and 2012 with the World Shakespeare Festival, we are very interested in trying to renegotiate the relationship between amateur theatre and professional theatre in this country. We’re sticking the amateurs centre stage with our opening – with an open house night of local amateur performers, with another night where there’s amateur choirs from across the UK, as well as a major thing from school kids…There’s been a sort of crucifix and garlic mutual relationship between the amateur sector and the professional sector for too long. It’s been fine for professionals to work in ‘community theatre’, that’s been kosher, but to actually acknowledge that quite a substantial proportion of people working in professional theatre started out in local amateur groups, that is a well kept secret. People pretend they know nothing about it, but it is the case. I think there is something about the relationship that an amateur theatre has with its audience that we in the professional theatre can learn from, and there are obviously skills that we can share.”

The RSC’s decision is very much in keeping with a general trend where museums, symphony orchestras, dance companies and myriad other types of arts organizations are looking for ways to make their work more inclusive and interactive.

I wonder if theatre is the final frontier in the UK for bringing so-called amateurs and professionals together? It strikes me that there has always been such a stigma against “am dram” in Britain. This view doesn’t exist to the same degree in the US. I don’t think that it will go away just because the RSC has decided to acknowledge the place of community theatre, especially since much of the amateur-inclusive programming appears, at least as it’s described in the article, to be more of a gesture to draw attention to the launch of the new RSC than a concerted effort to engage amateur theatre people in the long term. It’s a laudable gesture, mind you. But perhaps the RSC’s move signals the start of a greater acceptance that the worlds of amateur and professional performance have a lot more in common than people like to think?

Over here, the two categories have been bleeding into one another for decades, partly because of the paucity of funding for theatre at any level. The Brits could learn a thing or two from watching how the worlds of amateur and professional theatre, such as they are, interact in the US.

A friend and I had a discussion this morning about how possible it is for an audience member to detach his or her experience of seeing a staging of a play from the play text itself. We disagreed.

My friend thinks that if a play is great, you can still enjoy a production of it, even if the production is very bad. He looks at the staging as an inconvenience and a distraction, but no matter how ham-fisted the mise-en-scene is, it ultimately doesn’t stop him from enjoying the play — as in the words on the page — itself. “It’s hard to fuck up Macbeth,” is what he said.

I feel very differently about this. A bad production can completely wreck a play for me, no matter how great the source text might be.

I envy my friend’s ability to divorce the text from the staging. I have never been able to do it. For me, plays are no good simply sitting on the page. I mean, they’re OK. I like reading plays. But plays are meant to be put on stage. That’s where they’re supposed to come to life. A lifeless production cannot help but kill the dramatist’s words.

Every day I read articles in the press about how important it is for anyone involved in the arts world (or indeed, any world) to use social media as a way of marketing one’s “product”. I know how useful tools like Twitter and Facebook are from what I’m told by others. And technologies that enable organizations to mail out information to select members of their mailing lists or entire lists at the touch of a button has revolutionized the way we spread the word about what we’re doing, reach new and familiar audiences, generate enthusiasm and even build funds.

What I struggle with though, is finding the time and mental capacity to both keep track of others’ social media outpourings and develop my own. I’ve been feeling a bit stressed about it lately because I keep getting emails from Twitter telling me that someone wants to “follow” me via the tool, but I just can’t bring myself to add tweeting to an already overwhelming amount of daily activities from writing this blog and filing articles to newspapers and magazines to doing all the fundraising, producing and hosting of a weekly public radio show and teaching.

I have a Facebook account which I rarely visit. I also have a Twitter account, which is an even bigger joke. I set up the account about 13 months ago as an aid for a class I was teaching to a bunch of teenagers on a summer school program on writing about theatre using different media. I haven’t been to the Twitter website since, figured out how to send Tweets, or signed up to receive anyone else’s.

The long and short of it that I’m swamped and don’t have the mental capacity to add more regular activities to to my already buckling brainload.

I just about manage to keep up with this blog five days a week. VoiceBox, my weekly public radio and web project, has a Facebook and Twitter presence. But luckily for me, my wonderful intern, Victoria Lim, handles updates via those tools. If I were responsible for keeping people informed via Facebook and Twitter of what’s going on with VoiceBox, I would very likely forget because I’m extremely overextended as it is with the business of producing and hosting the project. Maintaining the project website, remembering to send out an e-letter to my mailing list once a month updating people about the upcoming shows in the VoiceBox series or spreading other news is about as far as I can go at this point with the slim resources I have. I am so glad at least to be able to outsource the social media part the project.

I suppose the solution is to get to a point where I have enough money to hire someone to handle all the communication aspects of the project. But that’s probably a way off. It’s sort of a chicken and egg situation though, because if I were more actively using social media, maybe I’d be in a better position to generate the funds I need to actually be able to hire someone to take care of this stuff for me.

Facebooking, Tweeting, maintaining an active website and sending out emails to mailing list members are important activities in today’s world. I just wish that I could understand how people manage to juggle all of this stuff though without feeling completely overwhelmed.

Just returned from a revivifying trip to the UK. Saw a couple of shows while I was there, which couldn’t have been more different in terms of the emotions they provoked in me:

The Merry Wives of Windsor at The Globe: Mark Shenton, a wonderful theatre commentator for The Stage, theatre junkie and all-round mensch, invited me to be his guest at the press night performance of Shakespeare’s one-joke comedy. The one-joke in question is about fat people, which gets old pretty quickly. But the production, which features Christopher Benjamin as the play’s overweight anti-hero Falstaff, moves swiftly and left me feeling elated by the end. Strong ensemble performances and director Christopher Luscombe’s energetic direction, which sees the actors running all over the place including a boardwalk in the middle of the groundlings area and the musicians’ balcony, keep the action bouncing along. But the acting often falls prey to too much hamming. One example of this is the several occasions when Mistresses Ford and Page talk about Falstaff behind his back with the intention of having him hear what they’re saying. On the other hand, there are one or two startling moments of comedic styling. My favorite is when the male actors treat a corset from the laundry basket where Falstaff is supposedly secreted like it’s diseased. They throw the object between them with disgust and can’t wait to get rid of it. The kicker occurs when the corset finds its way into the hands of the effete Slender, who reacts completely differently to the rest of the male company: He shows genuine interest in the garment.

War Horse at The New London Theatre: The National Theatre’s intelligent and deeply affecting production of a play adapted by Nick Stafford based on a novel by Michael Morpurgo made me cry. I think this has happened only once before to me at the theatre. The other time, the actors on stage were practicing very strange hypnotism effects on the audience, which is what caused the tears to flow, I’m pretty sure. Art about animals often pulls at people’s heartstrings it’s true, but Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris’ production creates an impact not so much because of the animal-focused narrative (the play follows the fortunes of horses used in battle in the First World War) but because of the overwhelming combination of puppets and humans on stage and the epic nature of the storytelling which makes the most of dramatic moments of pathos and near-tragedy. The sinewy, life-size horse puppets created in collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company provide much of the production’s visual impact. The horses seem extremely real because the humans that manipulate the puppets have captured equestrian movements and sounds that are utterly life-like, from the way in which the creatures eat to their nervous movements when in the presence of people they don’t trust. The production is kinetic and intense. It’s an emotional ride as we learn to care deeply both for the animals forced into combat and the humans whose lives are also at risk from warfare. The dramaturgy gets close to melodrama especially at the end (which I don’t want to spoil so I won’t say anything more about it.) We come close to a state of devastation in the final moments, which leads to a feeling of catharsis which is more releasing than anything I’ve ever experienced in a theatre before.

Three very contrasting cultural experiences this weekend. In brief:

1. Euouae at Old First Concerts: A new a cappella ensemble with an unpronounceable name gave its first concert at Old First Church on Van Ness Avenue on Friday evening. The repertoire consisted of sacred music from medieval France: the Tournai Mass, organum from the Magnus Liber of Leonin, and Obrecht’s  six voice Salve Regina. What was palpable for me was how much better the music sounded when the conductor, Steven Sven Olbash, wasn’t conducting. I couldn’t figure out why Olbash chose to direct some pieces but not others. But the flow of the phrases seemed so much more organic when the singers were left to their own devices. They listened to each other more carefully and conveyed a greater sense of the undulating, horizontal movement of the line. The women’s chants suffered particularly from being led by Olbash. Wedged awkwardly into pews above the dais (as opposed to the men’s choir which moved around more and was seated on the “stage” itself) the women were forced to follow the skinny maestro’s fussy, angular movements much of the time. The music felt pedantic as a result and some of the edges, ragged. Olbash assembled a fine team of vocalists though. The music had me enraptured with its contorted dissonances and ethereal monophony. Plus, solo and small group passages scattered throughout the program beautifully showcased individual voices. For future concerts, the conductor should consider a) sitting out during concerts entirely or simply joining in as a singing member of the group, and b) taking a less academic approach to this repertoire in order to let the music breathe.

2. SF Chefs opening night after party at E&O Trading Co: Friday night switched gear entirely after the Euouae gig when I headed downtown with my friend to attend the opening night shindig for SF Chefs week at a spacious upscale Asian restaurant. The week-long culinary event is fast becoming a huge deal in the Bay Area’s cultural life. It attracts the most happening names in the food, wine and spirits world as well as, seemingly, all the beautiful people of San Francisco. The E&O party featured delicious Asian street food (lamb lettuce wraps, spicy corn fritters, fried banana pieces, spring rolls etc) in plentiful amounts and unusual cocktails (the one I had with banana cream, vodka and curry powder was a bit of an acquired taste mind you.) Highlights of the evening for me were dancing to the cheesy 80s music provided by a DJ and listening to an absinthe maker from Paris and his partner, who’s based here in the Bay Area, talk about the craftsmanship that’s grown up around the culture of drinking the spirit. The two men collect absinthe-related ephemera such as old absinthe posters and special spoons and glasses that craftspeople have created to serve and advertise the beverage. They also spoke very interestingly about the hype that grew up around absinthe during the 80s and 90s when it was illegal in the US. Fascinating stuff.

3. Obscura: A Magic Show at the Exit Theatre: Local magician and actor Christian Cagigal performed his macabre jewel-box of a magic show before a packed house on Saturday night, his last performance in the present run. The tiny Exit Theatre Cafe stage was transformed into a sparkling den of stories and tricks. Cagigal gracefully wove spells into a variety of quirky cautionary tales about people who got on the wrong side of the devil (or a force of nature like him) and lost. He handled his sleight of hand escapades and mind games using a variety different sets of playing cards with the punctiliousness of a fastidious and bookish widowed uncle. Though the rhythm and pace of the show became somewhat predictable at about an hour in, Cagigal managed to maintain our attention. Cagigal returns to the Exit in October. It’s well worth checking out the work of this most theatrical yet understated of magicians.

Finally, I am heading off to the UK for a couple of weeks starting this evening. I most likely won’t be blogging while traveling. Please check in with “lies like truth” again starting on August 30.