Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Narcissus and Terpsichore (partially obscured):
Nederlands Dans Theater review
Nederlands Dans Theater
Memorial Hall
Through March 30
You can tell Memorial Hall Box Office tries to be forthright about the merchandise it sells.
Across the face of my front row balcony ticket for the performance by the Nederlands Dans Theater, a big black box is printed. In it, the words “Possible Partial View” appear, in white.
But since no similar warnings were printed on what were my original tickets for the show — fifth row from the front of the orchestra — this review necessarily begins with something of a consumer advisory.
If your tickets for tonight’s performance are in the center bank toward the front of Memorial Hall — in rows E or F, say, between seats 21 and 35 — you may very well want to exchange them. If you don’t, you might experience what I did last night, and subsequently have to enact some choreography of your own in the audience during the performance: an impromptu seated version of what I've wound up calling “The Dance of the Broken Windshield Wiper.”
A significant portion of Crystal Pite’s choreography in The Second Person, which opens the program, takes place on or adjacent to the floor of the Memorial Hall stage, as dancers crouching, seated or positioned on their sides or backs explore and excavate the area closest to the ground. In addition, most of Willeke Smit’s eerie puppetry, with figures that might be three feet high, also takes place in that zone.
The problem is this: At least the first six or seven rows in Memorial Hall appear to be unraked — that is, set on a surface with no appreciable incline. As a result, in order to catch a glimpse of anything happening near the stage floor, dance-goers five and six rows back from the stage (in what, no doubt, are usually premium seats) wound up repeatedly craning their necks and upper bodies back and forth, looking for a break among the heads and shoulders of the crowd dead ahead of them.
Voila: The Dance of the Broken Windshield Wiper.
The experience was so frustrating I asked to be reseated during intermission — which the Memorial Hall staff did, to their credit, with professionalism and dispatch. But by then, half of the program was over: a difficulty if one’s job depends on actually seeing a dance work in its entirety—not just the top four feet of it.
My advice: Check your tickets before the performance. Avoid my experience if at all possible.
More on the individual works, after the break.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
- Joe Cohn
- Fighting the man? Lee Galbreath as Princess Ida. (Click image to enlarge.)
1.5 stars (out of 5)
Durham Savoyards
Carolina Theatre
Through Mar. 27
It’s long been the Durham Savoyard’s lovably eccentric (and by now, nearly 50-year-old) mission to present the complete comic operas of Mssrs. Gilbert and Sullivan in installments, once per year.
Regrettably, their 2011 production, PRINCESS IDA, calls into question the wisdom of their quest.
To start with, director Derrick Ivey’s game sci-fi reframing of this 1884 work hardly hides the fact that Sir Gilbert’s libretto is an open mockery of what was the nascent women’s rights movement of his time. Theater-goers will not be able to ignore that the work's central premise ridicules the whole notion of the higher education of women.
But equally damning, at least from a theatrical standpoint, is that, one century later, the way in which Princess Ida does this is no longer novel, to say the least.
Second-act songs including "Toward the Empyrean Heights," "Gently, Gently," "A Lady Fair of Lineage High" and "The Woman of the Wisest Wit" set up and cut down the same rhetorical straw men—and women—that have been assaulted repeatedly throughout earlier episodes of the culture wars. By now these lyrics add little insight and less savor to well-worn views on gender roles.
But if feminists would likely find little entertainment in this production, a lesser version of that verdict likely goes for music lovers as well. Where we lauded the unified musicianship of the soloists, chorus and orchestra in last year’s production of The Mikado, the Savoyards’ 2011 efforts were considerably more fragmented on opening night. The results raise, again, the unwelcome question of what levels of competence are to be expected from a community-based opera company—or at least one producing work in the same community that also produces the Long Leaf Opera and the North Carolina Opera.
Yes, we should praise Lee Galbreath’s robust—and unamplified—soprano in the title role, while admiring supporting work by Emily Byrne as a sparkling Lady Psyche and Evelyn McCauley’s dour Lady Blanche.
But they sang over an orchestra that sounded conspicuously thinner than last year’s ensemble, its rough attacks and occasionally skidding upper strings marring a sound that seemed all but completely unsupported by bass.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
- ADF Co-director Charles Reinhart
So, for that matter, might the festival’s choice for the 2011 Samuel H. Scripps Award: choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Despite an internationally celebrated career that has spanned 30 years and inspired festivals itself, the 2011 season marks the choreographer’s first performance—ever—at ADF. A check for $50,000 accompanying the award for a lifetime’s achievement sweetens the deal when her 27-year-old company, Rosas, debuts—at least, at ADF—with that group’s first work from 1983, Rosas dannst Rosas, June 10-12.
- Tina Ruisinger
- 2011 Samuel Scripps Award winner Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker
After her Pity Party and Various Stages of Drowning moved audiences last summer, we want to see the world premieres of Rosie Herrera’s Dining Alone (6/27-29), and a new work Martha Clarke will create on ADF dance students (7/18-20). Shen Wei is slated to present a world premiere that will display, according to press advances, “a new…side of [his] artistic skill” (7/14-16). The apparently immortal Paul Taylor debuts a new work, The Uncommitted (7/21-23), after Pilobolus presents the world premieres of three team-ups: with Butoh artist Takuya Muramatsu from Dairakudakan, the "engineers, programmers and pilots" at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)—and the Grammy-winning band OK Go (6/30-7/2).
Among notable reconstructions: Bill T. Jones remounts D-Man in the Waters, his 1989 work in honor of deceased company member Damien Acquavella, to live accompaniment by the Durham Symphony (6/16-18), before Dayton Contemporary Dance Company restages Donald McKayle’s 1959 masterpiece, Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder. (The company shows that work on a shared bill in which Ronald K. Brown and EVIDENCE presents their newest work, On Earth Together, to a Stevie Wonder soundtrack, June 23-25). Eiko & Koma continues their multi-year 40th anniversary celebration with a recreation of 1995’s River in Duke Gardens (7/5-6), and two associates of Twyla Tharp reconstruct Sweet Fields on ADF students (7/18-20), three years after Aspen Santa Fe Ballet’s performance of it here in 2008.
Standouts among the other dates this summer include a performance of the complete Chapters from a Broken Novel, Doug Varone’s new work that audiences in Raleigh and Asheville saw tantalizing excerpts from in February (July 11-13). And after the austere dynamics of his 2009 mainstage duets, Emanuel Gat returns with his full company for the U.S. premiere of Brilliant Colors, July 7—9.
The season begins with a one-night benefit gala featuring African American Dance Ensemble, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago performing Ohad Naharin, performance artist John Kelly performing Martha Clarke’s Pagliaccio—and Mark Dendy reprising his memorable solo performance as Martha Graham, June 9.
The full schedule appears after the break.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Perhaps the best way to read Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pp.) is, surprisingly, straight through—but with support. Some books of literary letters are best browsed, like an antique store; but if you prop a copy of Bishop's Complete Poems, 1927-1979 on your lap and Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker on top of that—and have Bishop's Collected Prose near to hand, for additional reference—the great poet's exchanges with her editors at the magazine for which she was, for three decades, probably the most celebrated and most frequently published poet, take on the spirit, if not quite the grip, of narrative. With each poem Bishop submitted to her breathlessly eager editors, primarily Katharine White and Howard Moss—a collection that includes much of Bishop's greatest pieces—the generally congenial, warm back-and-forth between the correspondents enriches the reader's appreciation for the circumstances under which Bishop made her poems, and above all for the poet's extraordinary meticulousness and care.
That is lucky for fans of Bishop's poetry, which for all its depth and beauty tends to be autobiographically very guarded (actually, that guardedness is why the the poetry is so great). Bishop was a lesbian in the days when that was still taboo—even more so, perhaps than male homosexuality—and it's hard not to think that her desire to stay in the closet impelled a broader secretiveness about her personal life. Too, Bishop spent much of her midlife in Brazil, where she wrote some of her very greatest poems (e.g. "Questions of Travel" and "Manuelzinho"), with her lover, Lota de Macedos Soares—whom she usually refers to as "my friend"—making Bishop an even remoter figure in the world of poetry. That she achieved such high fame anyway is a testament to the sheer greatness of her verse.
And that we have her letters with Moss and White (the wife of E. B. White, author of Charlotte's Web and the indispensable Elements of Style)—which finally, after some years, imply that she became friendly with and trusting enough of them to come out out to them—proves beyond a doubt how much of her time, and of herself, she poured into her work. The New Yorker was there for all of it, a mutually beneficial relationship that this new book honors by revealing, over the course of its pages, as much about the magazine's evolving ways and means as it does about Bishop's: The New Yorker is revealed to have been as fussy as Bishop herself could sometimes be.
Friday, March 18, 2011
The dangers of slighting a vivid imagination:
Robert Lepage's THE ANDERSEN PROJECT
4 stars (out of 5)
Ex Machina
Carolina Performing Arts Series
Memorial Hall, UNC Chapel Hill
Through March 18
Never slight a person with a vivid imagination.
Perhaps that’s the largest takeaway from Robert Lepage’s frequently inspired, technically innovative—but still overlong—one-person performance, THE ANDERSEN PROJECT, which closes tonight at UNC Chapel Hill’s Memorial Hall.
It’s tempting to call this intermissionless two-hour performance a theatrical roman a clef, except that one of the names apparently hasn’t been changed at all. For on the basis of earlier interviews with the Canadian quintuple threat—stage director, playwright, film director, scenic artist and actor—one gets the definite sense that some experience with the Paris Opera (possibly his 2001 production there of Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust?) left an extremely bad taste in his mouth.
Et voila! (as the French themselves might say): this subsequent 2005 work depicts the dilemmas a Canadian librettist encounters upon being manipulated by an unscrupulous artistic director. At the Paris Opera.
During the course of The Andersen Project, the writer twice addresses an audience at the Opera—standing with his back us, but facing a projection of the famous, filigreed three-story house prominently featured in the film version of Amadeus. He is talking with them about a work they’ve been prevented from seeing on this particular evening. Given the visual riches and technical coups this work regularly scores, it doesn’t spoil much here to note that, the second time, the building is going up in flames.
Not that Lepage need worry at this point about burning any bridges behind him. His Canadian Opera production of The Nightingale and Other Short Fables (also based on the works of Hans Christian Andersen) performed at Brooklyn Academy of Music at the beginning of this month. His work, The Blue Dragon, premiered at London’s Barbican Theater in February. And the Metropolitan Opera will stage his version of Wagner’s Ring Cycle—featuring 3-D projections on stage—in April 2012, after a production of Siegfried there in October.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
- Courtesy of Rebus Works
Drawings
Rebus Works
Through March
Remember that guy in high school who was always drawing? You always wanted to sit in the row next to him so you could peek over during class to see what he was scrawling there, hiding the paper with an arm so the teacher couldn’t see what he was up to. I have a feeling that Jason Whitman was one of those guys.
Whitman’s 25 or so pencil drawings currently at Rebus Works in Raleigh still show something of that album-cover, adolescent hand, featuring painstakingly shaded animals under various degrees of ironic duress, but through their seriality he’s developed a more critical mischief.
Almost every drawing fits into one series or another. Putting the titles of the drawings in this review is really a bit of a spoiler, as it’s the moment that you lean in close to Whitman’s work to read the title, written in tiny fullcaps, that you really see the piece. Whitman has developed a vocabulary of drawing-title relationships that spark more often than they fizzle.
- Courtesy of Rebus Works
Some of Whitman’s titles pun off the animals too simply—a disgruntled sea turtle scowls out of “Shell of Your Former Self.” But when he pairs two animals in one drawing, the implied conversation works better. A retriever turns its head to a chimpanzee in “So Now What?” A lynx and rabbit stand awkwardly beside each other in “True Love Will Find You In the End.” Whitman’s earnest hand and clear stylization denies any sense of simple gore. You don’t imagine a stripped-away animal body somewhere. The animals themselves seem unperturbed at the absences of their bodies.
In the “Breathing Exercise” series, animals in profile emit multicolored curled shapes from their mouths. Something between a wordless voice bubble and a watercolor paisley, the shapes seem like an essence is betraying or fleeing these stoic rats, rabbits, and squirrels.
- Courtesy of Rebus Works
The coolest piece in the show is a standalone drawing that perhaps represents a new direction for Whitman. “Don’t You Take Anything Seriously?” is a mélange of elements and characteristics that trusts the viewer to look closely enough at the image to discern Whitman’s mischief without a title to point it out. There’s a striped animal body with a foxtail, hoofed back feet, and cat-paw front feet. Atop its head is a long swoosh structure that goes up to a crowned and beatifically smiling cloud, glimmering with sparkle lines.
This drawing is goofy and creepy all at the same time. It made me want to buy a football franchise and use it as my logo, just to see burly guys with it on the sides of their helmets. If this is where Whitman is going, then we should follow along.
An older and mellower Tom Green: a conversation with the creator of Freddy Got Fingered
- Courtesy of Marleah Leslie & Associates
But these days, the one-time MTV sensation who famously broadcast his testicular cancer surgery on the air has embraced a perspective he calls “conservative.”
“I just talk about things that make me laugh, and that the mainstream doesn’t necessarily talk about,” says Green in a call from Los Angeles. He plays Goodnight’s Comedy Club March 18 and 19.
“You don’t necessarily hear people talk about how Facebook isn’t good and we need to get off it. I like to take on the status quo a little bit. If you see my show, you’ll see it’s very R-rated, I’m swearing and going on about things in a very graphic way, but in some ways it’s very conservative.”
Age has apparently mellowed Green … somewhat.
“I’m starting to feel like an adult, and looking back at life as I turn 40, this changing world,” Green says of his stand-up set.
“I talk about gadgets, and pornography, and I think it surprises a lot of people because I approach it from kind of conservative point of view.”
Though he’s long been a visible figure in the world of comedy, Green’s only been doing stand-up comedy full time in the last year and a half.
- Photo by Lauren Shute
- At 311 Gallery, Friday night in Raleigh
My friends and I paired our most chic outfits with our highest heels for First Friday earlier this month, eager to fit in with the Raleigh art set. We sipped white wine and nodded along with the artists, trying to understand the explanations behind their artwork while techno music played from hidden speakers in the galleries.
The Mahler, located on Fayetteville Street, was a refuge from the artisan stands hawking their wares just outside. With soft spotlights illuminating each painting that lined the walls of the long gallery, The Mahler carried the elegance of the artists that its walls contained. Friday marked the opening of its new exhibit, “Celebrated Artists: Students of Marvin Saltzman,” where each artist displayed was at one time a student or protégé of the UNC-Chapel Hill legend.
“If you look around, no piece of artwork is the same,” said Rory Parnell, co-owner of The Mahler. “It really shows how Marvin allows each artist to find his voice.”
The pieces shown in the gallery ranged from political cartoons to boldly colored woodcuts. Tom Guiton, a painter who studied under Saltzman in the late 1970s, displayed a frieze with an array of Navaho and western religious symbolism. When asked about his artwork, he enthusiastically pointed out the hidden menorah, the circular and squared head shapes of the Navaho and the Jesus fish.
“Any painting can take your eyes dancing, but it has to be a good dance partner,” he told us.
Of course, Marvin Saltzman himself took that as a cue to enter the conversation, gesturing around the gallery and proclaiming his pride for the wide array of artists. “I’m proud of all these people, they’re all making beautiful work.”
He let the praise sit for a moment before he narrowed his eyes and said, “I’m interested in them, not the critics, not how important they are. They make good work, that’s what matters.”
Afterward, we made our way to the 311 West Martin Street Galleries and Studios. The gallery was showing detour, a collection of work by the graduate students of East Carolina University’s School of Art and Design. Right upon entering the gallery, we were confronted by a sort of Degas’ ballerinas wearing gas masks painting done by Jonathan R. Peedin, entitled “Aluminum Dance.”
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Want to see National Theatre's FRANKENSTEIN Thursday?
Fly to London. Or drive to Southern Pines.
FRANKENSTEIN
National Theatre Live
Sunrise Theater
Southern Pines
March 17, 3 p.m.
Reservations: 910 692 8501
We've got another one of those insanely
great—and totally last minute—performance
opportunities for you.
If you'd like to see a live performance of Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle's controversial production of FRANKENSTEIN, at London's National Theatre on Thursday, March 17, you have two options.
Plan A: Fly to London and take your chances on a scalper's ducat or a last-minute cancellation. Price: ~$1,500—up.
Plan B: Drive 90 minutes to Southern Pines, where you can see the performance, broadcast live via HD satellite feed, at the historic Sunrise Theater. Price: $20 ($10 with a student ID). Plus gas fare.
We happened upon the National Theatre Live website by accident, while researching a different story altogether. When we did, we discovered that two venues in North Carolina have been broadcasting the renowned London company's full season this year in state-of-the-art HD projection. But since the other venue is a 50-seat classroom somewhere at UNC Wilmington, your best bet is probably going to be down 15-501 (or Highway 1 from Raleigh) in Moore County.
Critical reviews of the production have been, for the most part, incandescent. "What to say about", the Guardian's "summary judgment" column of collected reviews, begins:
If the critics' advice should ever be followed, and if you can get a ticket, then Frankenstein at the National is clearly the place to be. There was always going to be hype around any production that could promise Danny Boyle's return to the theatre, the presence of television's Benedict Cumberbatch and American television's Johnny Lee Miller, plus an original score from Underworld. (That's a three-way Trainspotting reunion, '90s fans.) What is never guaranteed is a good reaction from the reviewers. Let alone the kind of ecstasy that Frankenstein provoked.
For those who have yet to take in an HD satellite live performance, the viewing promises to be an experience different from—and possibly superior to—a live theater experience. By showtime, the theater and the production company should have scoped out optimum sight lines and viewing angles for each scene, with visual fields varying from the entire stage to extreme close-up. The HD technology produces an image several times crisper and clearer than 35mm film. "In some ways," notes Sunrise Theater administrator Patricia Wallace, "it's a more intimate experience than you'd have if you were actually at the National Theatre."
The Sunrise will be screening the last production of the National's 2010-2011 season, with Zoë Wanamaker starring in The Cherry Orchard on June 30. They've also committed to broadcast the National's 2011-2012 season this fall.
All seating is reserved. The live performance starts at 3 p.m. — to coincide with the show's 8 p.m. curtain time in London. The runtime for the production is 2.5 hours. With graphic scenes, the production is intended for viewers 15 years and older. For reservations, call the theater at 910 692 8501.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Illness, privacy and reality TV: The Independent interview
with Now You See Me playwright Neal Bell
It’s her television—even though, a certain David Byrne lyric notwithstanding, they are not good friends.
Bell’s dark comedy, whose world premiere opens Wednesday at Manbites Dog Theater, is a sharp-eyed critique from an industry insider of a medium that has proven, in its own way, to be every bit as metastatic in our culture as the carcinomas are in Claire’s body.
Now You See Me asks to what lengths will a television network go in order to insure what it might call the “human continuity” in its latest smash reality TV series—a show focusing on people who are gravely, if not terminally, ill? Why would anyone watch the show in the first place? And under such circumstances, if a producer offered you a promising new cancer-fighting drug—and a shot at stardom—why might you really not want to sign that contract?
We spoke with Bell for an hour by phone last weekend.
INDEPENDENT: That oddly prescient ’80s TV news network drama Max Headroom was supposedly set “15 minutes into the future.” The world in Now You See Me has a similar sense to it. It’s not tangential to our time, but a logical extension of it.
NEAL BELL: I hope so. While I was writing it, I actually thought that maybe this premise—a reality show about dying people—was so far out there that it went beyond parody into ridiculousness.
But while I was writing it, a British reality TV star named Jade Goody, who’d been a big hit on several different Big Brothers because she was so apparently abrasive and obnoxious, finally ended up on one in India, where she was diagnosed—on camera—as having terminal cancer.
She quit the show, went back to England and basically sold the rights to her death to a television company, which filmed as much as they could of her final month or two. She got married—though she was barely able to walk down the aisle—to the father of her two children. It was a huge media event in England.
And I thought, well, (laughs) I guess I didn’t make it up. It’s actually happening.
As Lily Tomlin said, “No matter how cynical you get, it’s impossible to keep up.”
I think that’s true. It goes beyond the “stranger than fiction” thing. I think cynicism is exactly the right word. You just cannot calculate the bottomless desire or appetite for the most invasive glimpses into people’s lives.
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