Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

Partch, the ensemble, at REDCAT
Photo: mine 2010

With all the Ring excitement this week, it might have been easy to overlook some other worthwhile musical events in town. Included in those would be the annual appearance by Partch, the ensemble dedicated to the preservation and performance of American composer Harry Partch. These musicians returned in their annual visit with their reconstructed versions of Partch’s idiosyncratic instruments to REDCAT this week for an evening that really couldn’t be any farther from the music of Wagner if they tried. This year’s theme focused on “Vernacular Music” or specifically works that are based on speech and often incorporate common ethnic or folk elements. This idea is commonplace to a listener today, but was far more outside the norm when Partch was composing in the 1950s before “World Music” was a category on iTunes. In addition to three pieces from Partch, the ensemble also played the similarly themed Canticle #3 from Lou Harrison and Anne LeBaron’s Southern Ephemera.


The centerpiece of the evening was Partch’s “opera” Even Wild Horses, which loosely incorporates text from Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. Over three acts and eight scenes that ran about 30 minutes, Partch incorporates a wide variety of Latin and African dance rhythms across his oversized marimbas, and various stringed instruments. There is a small amount of half-spoken, half-sung text in Act II, but this is not narrative material by any means. Partch’s music is nothing if not a lot of fun, though it can sometime be tinged with an eerie sense of memory. (Take a look at the clip above from 1968 for a sense of it.) And while this is certainly present in Horses, I was even more struck by the inventiveness in another offering on the program, a film directed by Madeline Tourtelot from 1961 entitled Rotate the Body in All Its Planes – Ballad for Gymnasts. While Partch was preparing a performance of another work at the University of Illinois in Urbana in that year, the school’s gymnastic coach came for a visit to check up on athletes that were involved in the composer’s upcoming performance. The coach was so taken with what he saw, he convinced Partch to develop Rotate to be performed in conjunction with the NCAA championship meet to take place at the University later that year. Partch did, and the resulting music, timed to coincide with the gymnastic performances of these athletes, was caught on film. The film is a product of its time, but amazing in that it’s the product of a collaboration I would imagine being quite alien in today’s ever balkanized world of academia. So while there were no gods falling from grace in Partch’s tinkling melodies, the return of the ensemble bearing his name was welcome this week as it always is.

Labels: REDCAT 09/10

from l-r: Nicole Parker, Josh Grisetti, and Vicki Lewis
Photo: John Ganun/Reprise

Being back in town this weekend, it was time to catch up on some shows before they disappeared entirely. And in most cases, I was glad I did. The Reprise Theater Company wrapped up its 2010 season over the weekend with a revival of Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows’ How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying at the Freud Playhouse on the UCLA campus. Reprise has had a particularly strong season this year, and it appears the leadership of artistic director Jason Alexander is certainly reaping dividends in terms of the quality of the shows overall since he took over the job. Granted How to Succeed is a little past its relevance in 2010. This afternoon pretty much met my skirt-chasing themed theatrical events quota for the year. But musically you couldn’t want for more and director Marcia Milgrom Dodge runs one tight ship. The cast was exemplary, including the always enjoyable Vicki Lewis as wells as excellent regulars Ruth Williamson and Michael Kosroff. I’d be remiss, though, not to mention the superb performance from Josh Grisetti as J. Pierrepont Finch. Visitors to the Freud Playhouse are often stopped in the theater’s lobby by the mini-gallery of memorabilia donated to the UCLA Musical Theater Program by one of its major benefactors, Ray Bolger. The relevance of these artifacts may have seemed greater than normal during the run of How to Succeed because Grisetti’s talent and appearance recall Bolger so strongly at times it borders on the uncanny. One can only hope that he has a career as important ahead of him as that legend.

from Lionel Popkin's There is an Elephant in This Dance

I also caught one of the performances from Lionel Popkin and his collaborators at REDCAT where they brought one of their recent works There is an Elephant in this Dance to hometown audiences after appearances around the country. The title plays with the same kind of irony Magritte used in claiming that “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” despite all visual evidence to the contrary. Popkin’s piece in fact does not have an elephant despite its title, but is instead structured around an unrealistic multi-piece elephant costume. Dancers don parts of it throughout the hour-long work that is often accompanied by video depicting pre-recorded performance of the dancers in the costume as well. The physical movement of the dancer’s can be blunted by the costume either by obscuring their features, or by acting as comic foil by its presence in the video even when the live dancers are not enmeshed in it. Animal movement is everywhere in the piece, though, including a recurrent gesture where dancers attempt to place their fingers in each others mouths similarly to a horse’s bit. There was something fresh in all this, both in its irreverence and avoidance of a sharper focused physicality so common among contemporary choreographers. Popkin’s Elephant is unconcerned with the blurry edges. The piece does drag a little in the middle, and sometimes the dance becomes totally secondary to the background video, but it does suggest the mind of someone with interesting ideas about dance and movement.

Labels: LA Theater Reviews, REDCAT 09/10, Reprise

from Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies
Photo: Steven Gunther/John Jasperse Company 2010

Squeezed between a number of other events this weekend was an appearance by the John Jasperse Company this weekend at REDCAT with a new dance work called Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies. It’s a piece commissioned by a consortium of groups and it’s receiving a premiere in locales around the country including Minneapolis and New York later this year. According to Jasperse, the two-hour long work examines “what we believe, what we don’t, and why.” Fair enough. Though I’m not sure I quite got all of this out of Truth, I will say that it was an evening of extremely engaging movement and theater.

Truth features five dancers; two men, two women, and Jasperse himself in two segments separated by an intermission. The men and women often operate in same sex pairs contrasting to the other group. In the first half, a dark stage is bordered on the left by a floral patterned L-shaped space. Women in black-sequined mini dresses and men in see-through tanks and go-go shorts appear and soon launch into Jasperes’ unique movement vocabulary. The sequences can look unstable and off the cuff in a way that is at times reminiscent of teens dancing to their stereos alone in their bedrooms. The tone varies from serious to broadly comic, often changing on a dime. In one unexpectedly funny highlight, the dancers disrobe to a blaring recording of Ginuwine’s 1996 hit Pony leaving the bare-breasted women to gyrate as if in a sex club as the two men now clad only in jock straps writhe on the floor, their rear ends completely exposed to the audience. Jasperse often acts as a court jester in the proceedings inserting copious amounts of comic irony. He appears later covered head to toe in a black body suit slinking almost imperceptibly along the back until reaching the floral patterned wall where he makes a sudden run for the other side in a comical failed attempt to maintain a certain mystery. Serious moments have a way of being instantly deflated here with lighter-toned interludes.

The second half flips from a black room, to a totally white one. In this instance four members of the International Contemporary Ensemble appear at the rear of the stage to provide live musical accompaniment to the performance. The dancers appear all in white like some summertime Banana Republic ad and fall to the floor in positions as if they were currently falling from the sky. Later Jasperse appears with a cut out arrow pointer in his hand and engages in a wordless argument with one of the dancers, the arrow serving to identify the flow of the conversation. This later devolves into a slow-mo cat fight. Things become more structured again later on as events move to their final conclusion. What works so well about Truth isn’t just the comedy. Jasperse often seems to intentionally avoid both lyrical fluid movement and bursts of athleticism. Yet, he still manages to extract grace and beauty from something that is still about something more than the small gesture. In my book, funny and beautiful aren't easy things to do at the same time. Even if it doesn't get you any closer to the truth - whatever that is.

Labels: REDCAT 09/10

Sometimes it’s difficult to know what to make of a rarity. There are some performances that are so unrelated to everything around them that it’s hard to know what to make of them. Or at least that’s the feeling that came back to me on Friday when REDCAT presented Canti del Capricorno, a 20-song cycle composed by Giacinto Scelsi for Japanese soprano Michiko Hirayama. Scelsi's music is not commonly heard in the U.S., and this performance was all the more unusual in that Hirayama, now in her 80s, performed the 90 minute cycle written expressly for her between 1962-1972. Scelsi had a pedigree and a disposition made for controversy in the music world. Largely self-trained, Scelsi was born into the aristocracy in Italy in the early 20th century. He developed a reputation as a playboy in addition to one for his love of music. He did not like to talk about his music or give interviews, although he developed many admirers in the later half of the century, including Ligeti, and was influential on later spectralist composers like Gerard Grisey and Tristan Murail.

Scelsi was interested in microtonal music and in some ways was the original one-note Charlie. Many of his compositions were notable for their use of single notes only rarely moving in small steps away from the central tone. His music relies more on timbre and dynamics as a source of variation as his musicians plays the same note again and again. Scelsi found a muse for his vocal writing in Hirayama for whom he wrote multiple pieces including Canti del Capricorno. Hirayama performs these songs with very little accompaniment; three of the songs use percussion, one a bass, and one a saxophone. Otherwise she is left on her own in these wordless pieces that can vary from chant to wailing to barking at the moon. They are not pretty and the vocal writing is not meant to be. There is something more primitive about the pieces and Scelsi's focus on very restricted ranges of tone is clearly related to a much earlier period of Western music including chant. Hirayama has these songs in her blood and in her 80s the Canti take on a whole new life. She has the voice of an elderly woman, but the unsteadiness and variability that comes with a normally aging voice seem custom made for this context where the music is not about perfectly hitting a variety of notes as much as the sound that is produced in the natural variance of always trying to hit the same one. For a taste of what I mean see the video above taken at the 2008 Ravenna Festival. Friday's appearance at REDCAT was fascinating. And while I'm not sure Scelsi's Canti is great music, it certainly was memorable in its own way.

Labels: REDCAT 09/10

Dancers in Rosanna Gamson/World Wide's Tov
Photo: RG/WW/REDCAT 2010

You can’t go home again. This is true both emotionally and, as it turns out, genetically. At least that’s one of the many points made in a hugely ambitious new work from Rosanna Gamson and her varied troupe of collaborators who operate under the moniker of World Wide. The roughly 90-minute dance work is called Tov which means good and is a reduction of the expression “Gamzu l’tovah” meaning, “This too, is for the good.” The piece concerns 1930s experiments to recreate an extinct breed of horse, the tarpan, through selectively breeding for their traits among a group of latter day animals. It didn’t pan out, and we know now that though specific genes may live on in other races after an extinction event, once you’re gone, you’re gone. The tarpan story is used as a springboard to reflect on the fate of Gamson’s specific Polish horse-trader ancestors, and more broadly that of Polish Jewry in the 20th century, though Tov does so in an admittedly oblique fashion.

There is a lot going on here. In addition to the dance, there are vocal performances, spoken dialogue, and theatrical activities of all stripes in between with requisite pre-recorded music. The audience was arranged in a hallway pattern on either side of the performance area where an unusually large amount of stuff was falling from above. There was a “snow” station in one corner and a “salt” station in another. In fact, salt plays prominently in the work. And trust me when it rains, it pours. Virtually everyone in the cast gets their shot to poor salt out of any number of black boxes all over the floor at one time or another in the evening, outlining bodies or the borders around the audience. In a climactic sequence, all these pretty patterns are disrupted in a solo dance by one of the troupe’s members. In addition to the narration, there are mini-scenes in both Polish and English and even a large riser on wheels that supports a candle-laden table and four chairs that is periodically lugged around the performance space.

Tov has a lot on its mind, and while these are all great ideas, the sheer amount of stuff going on here can be a bit much to sort out. The actual dancing in the piece is great. The diverse troupe gets all the performers involved regardless of body type. Even tenor Timur Bekbosunov gets into the act, crawling around on hands and knees when it’s called for. But with the amount of narration, singing, and other activity going on, it was hard to avoid a sort of stop-and-start feeling to the work. At time the points being made seemed too oblique, and at others I wished the performers would just stop talking. There is plenty of beauty, but there’s a lot of salt to be poured as well to get to it. Still, I’d rather have the ambition than not, and, while Tov didn’t work for me as a cohesive whole, it wasn’t dull and isn’t just more of the same. The performance runs at REDCAT through next Saturday, March 27th.

Labels: REDCAT 09/10

from North Atlantic
Photo: The Wooster Group 2010

The Wooster Group is back in town at REDCAT for two weeks and, as usual, it is cause for excitement. Elizabeth LeCompte and her cast recently committed to an ongoing residency with the downtown CalArts venue that will include several works, both new and old, kicking off with North Atlantic, one of the group’s landmark pieces, which premiered in 1983, and has been revived several times since then. The Wooster Group has favored works that were adaptations of specific classics on their two prior L.A. visits, including a video-obsessed Hamlet and an outerspace spin on Cavalli’s opera La Didone. This current revival with its many references to the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, is far more oblique in its attack, but every bit as funny and challenging. Although North Atlantic has taken several different forms and casts in its lifetime, the core elements remain the same – a sharp satire of American militarism and its association with gender issues, and in particular, the way these topics have been taken up by Hollywood and the media.

But this brief description makes the work sound much more dry and straightforward than it is. It's actually more like South Pacific and Top Gun put in a blender with just enough methamphetamine to make things interesting. Things barrel right out of the gate with five male officers discussing their ongoing intelligence mission aboard an American vessel in a manner that is both highly idiosyncratic, rapid, and off-kilter. Soon they are joined by five female cast members who act as a sort of “ladies auxiliary” to the mission, spying by day and excitedly planning for the wet uniform contest to take place that evening. The women sit behind a long desk atop a steeply raked riser endlessly spinning reels of tape as they exchange a sort of manic dialog with the men around them. But let’s not forget this is a musical and soon the cast break into one of a variety of cowboy songs invoking Oklahoma! as much as the more obvious South Pacific. There’s an overlay soundtrack at times, too, involving loud explosions and other noise. And don’t worry, even Richard Wagner’s Liebestod fromTristan und Isolde is dragged into the mix. The combination is often very funny, although the effect can make the one-act 90-minute show drag along at times as well.

The cast contains regulars such as Kate Valk, Ari Fliakos, Scott Shepherd and Koosil-ja Hwang, but Wednesday featured guest performances from Frances McDormand and an almost unrecognizable Maura Tierney (sans hair) as well. And while the group could clearly have used just a bit more rehearsal with the wordy and rapid exchanges, the performances overall were first rate with an arch and witty quality. Although written during the Cold War, North Atlantic has enough links to popular culture of the 20th century to still pack plenty of satirical punch. Just as American militarism never goes out of style, neither does the criticism of its down side. And while it might not be the ideal event for a valentine’s outing, North Atlantic should certainly be seen and is luckily running at REDCAT all the way through the 21st.

Labels: REDCAT 09/10

Members of Grupo de Rua

The REDCAT downtown has kicked of their Spring season with a slate of impressive shows to come including a return engagement from The Wooster Group in February and a celebration of the life and work of Betty Freeman in May. But perhaps the most exciting events on their schedule are a large group of dance performances from a number of important contemporary artists and companies including Lionel Popkin, John Jasperse, and Rosanna Gamson to name a few. But before we get into that, this weekend brings us Bruno Beltrão’s Brazilian Grupo de Rua with his latest work H3. It’s a remarkable, athletic and energetic piece featuring nine male dancers going full bore for over and hour.

Beltrão has made his name by adapting Brazilian “street” hip hop dance styles into a more traditional Western high art dance context. Yes, people do occasionally spin on their heads. And there is that whole hot Brazilian guy thing. But the similarity to what you might see in an average music video pretty much ends there. In H3, the dancers appear often in small groups interacting through a series of small, almost introspective gestures that may suggest confrontation as readily as tenderness. All of this is punctuated by much larger ensemble moments where the dancers charge and fly at each other in a sort of dance equivalent of a chest bump. I know this makes it sound like the work is weighted down by a certain machismo, and that is partially true. Beltrão acknowledges this himself in program notes for the performance. But he has also explores other aspects of male relationships in his work that should not be foolishly dismissed as nothing more than male bravado.

In H3, the men dart around one another in large circles often running backwards or exiting the stage bent over backward as if being dragged by the hair. The movement and visual sense of the work draws you in. Their immediacy to it as well best represented by the frequent sound of sneakers squeaking against the glossy floor like a basketball game without all the stops and starts. The rather minimal and stark lighting creates the sudden surprising effect of men simply hovering and spinning in mid-air at times. Now I know nothing about Brazilian street culture, hip hop or otherwise. So I can’t really vouch for how authentic or not any of purported cultural aspects of the troupe's performance are. But I can tell you that it’s a great show watch and worth seeing especially now that the rain has stopped. Grupo de Rua’s H3 continues at REDCAT through Saturday this weekend.

Labels: REDCAT 09/10

Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher in Maybe Forever

Are you missing Pina Bausch and wondering who might step into her enormous yet fleet-footed shoes? Well how about Meg Stuart. I would be remiss to pop out-of-town to San Francisco this weekend without mentioning Maybe Forever, the dance program this week at REDCAT featuring Stuart and her collaborators, dancer/choreographer Philipp Gehmacher and musician Niko Hafkenscheid. Stuart has been working for years primarily in Europe with her own company only periodically appearing in the US. Gehmacher, whose troupe is based in Vienna, found a kindred spirit in Stuart that led to Maybe Forever, a work that also incorporates music and lyrics from Hafkenscheid. The single act, 80-minute piece has an austere beauty in the face of a decidedly anti-lyrical approach to movement.

Maybe Forever opens with two barely visible figures lying on what appears to be a beach in the near total darkness of the REDCAT theater. The two roll and struggle on the neutral shore as electric music drones in the background. It was fascinating and not at all overdone. When the lights come up, a small curtained room that could be anywhere appears. Hafkensheid enters with his electric guitar and begins to perform the solo tracks that accompany Maybe Forever. They are tuneful songs which alternate with pre-recorded bits of sound and music all of which mirrors the claustrophobic feel of the gray carpeted room. There is a small riser on the left but the space surrounded by heavy dark curtains is only remarkable otherwise for a giant photo of dandelions against the back wall that appears black-and-white initially, but with a change in lighting, bursts into full color. The space feels both anonymous and domestic at the same time and while the dances will later on pull back the curtain and walk out of the space and back, the sense of enclosure and forced normalcy pervades.

The movement is not about great romantic sweeping gestures but more often than not gives off a feel of everyday woes and distress. Often Stuart and Gehmacher seem to be embarking on the same kind of expression you or I might have sitting in an office or at home as we stretch or arch to scratch ourselves. But its exactly this contrast between an ordinary world and the surprising presence of movement that makes Maybe Forever fun to watch. There are implications of a relationship between the two characters as they seem to mimic everyday intimacies - sitting, watching, and holding hands. But the piece never seems to stray into a cliche story of a relationship. There are spoken word passages as well that punctuate the activity but never submerge into the realm of bad poetry. It's a very good show on a rare visit from Stuart and Gehmacher and Los Angeles was lucky to see it.

Labels: REDCAT 09/10

Much Ado About Nohting at REDCAT
Photo: REDCAT 2009

REDCAT opened its doors this week for a performance from a collective of young musicians and artists from around the world working together with Martine Bellen and David Rosenboom on a project under the moniker “A Counterpoint of Tolerance: Ah! Opera No-Opera”. What exactly is meant by this is still unclear to me, but I can tell you the title perfectly describes it – 90 minutes that test the limits of virtually any audiences’ tolerance. According to the program notes, “[t]he intention was to create a genre-blind, culturally inclusive experience blurring boundaries that often separate media specializations and people.” To accomplish this, Rosenboom and Bellen developed an “interactive opera generator in the shape of a Mandala with 13 interlinking, hyperlinking stories and their movable pathways.” These text bits, which were mostly spoken in overly serious and unvarying tones, were accompanied by music. And if you’re wondering what the music sounds like when composers from all over the world work together as one, the answer is pretty much what you’d here on an FM smooth jazz station.

Ironically, while the description of the performance would seem to imply some level of variability and interactivity, the performance was about as predictable as one could imagine. If there was anything out of the ordinary, it was the amount of pointless discomforts the audience was asked to tolerate. Everyone was asked to remove their shoes (or put on surgical covers) before entering the space which had been covered in a canvas surface for projection and told that we could move around the performance area. Everyone was brought down and seated on amazingly uncomfortable high stools around the space where they were left perching and battling numb feet until 90 minutes in, when they were invited to actually sit on the floor closer to the performers for about the last 4 minutes or so of the evening. If the show was meant to be interactive, it apparently didn’t occur to anyone that observers do not automatically jettison years of audience behavior context without some prompting.

Instead everyone sat with their legs going numb while we observed 12 or so musicians stationed in a circle around the floor where a single female dancer shuffled around as three vocalists occasionally sang but mostly recited their texts. Video was projected on the floor from above, which was mostly generated live by a cameraman who caught both the performers and the dazed, blank looks of the audience. And while I’m sure there were many talented people in the room, Ah! suggests that the very divisions that we use to define ourselves and culture may in fact be central to the creation of art in the first place. There are two more performances this week on the 17th and 18th which I believe can be viewed on the web if you’d like to sit in the most uncomfortable chair you’ve got at home to emulate the live experience.

Labels: REDCAT 09/10