The Dressing

Finding the Chinese in Turandot

2009-05-28T14:33:28Z

On May 21, 2009, the Dresser experienced Giacomo Puccini's Turandot, Washington National Opera's closing offering of their 2008-2009 season.

She chooses the word experienced because Director Andrei Serban's popular production that originally premiered at London's Royal Opera House in 1984 and has been staged more than 50 times by opera companies around the world presents Puccini's last opera as a larger-than-life spectacle of colorful costumes, over-sized and face-fitting masks, dramatic props, an elegant red-bannered theater-within-a-theater set, Eastern-inspired movement (i.e. Kabuki, tai chi), and two sopranos--the powerful Maria Guleghina as Turandot and the subtle Sabina Cvilak as Liù --whose performances inspired rapt wonder for different reasons.

NO ONE SLEEPS UNTIL NAMES ARE NAMED

While Argentine tenor Dario Volonté as Calaf, the unknown prince who dares to answer all Turandot's riddles correctly while risking his head (she orders those who fail to fall under the blade of her executioner), provides a reasonable performance but not matching the power of of Maria Guleghina's performance, the Dresser found herself wondering what it would have been like to have heard the original Royal Opera House production when Plácido Domingo was Calaf. Thanks to the immediacy of the Internet and YouTube, one can hear and see Domingo and many other world-renown tenors such as Luciano Pavrotti singing the most beloved Turandot aria "Nessun Dorma" ("No One Shall Sleep").

The story boils down to this: Princess Turandot, based on the fate of a female ancestor, doesn't trust men. She says she will marry any man who solves her three riddles, but when a stranger comes to town and answers her riddles, she reneges. Because he is truly smitten, he offers that if she can produce his name, then she doesn't have to marry him. Meanwhile the stranger has been seen with a blind old man and his female servant Liù. Turandot's servants under death threat unless they discover the stranger's name tortures the female servant who protects her old master by saying only she knows. In fact, not only does she know the stranger's name (and the stranger is Prince Calaf, the son of her master, the deposed King Timur), but also she is in love with Calaf. Although Turandot has a happy ending because Princess Turandot falls in love with Calaf and agrees to marry him, the story has a dark side because the servant girl Liù commits suicide to protect Calaf and his name.

FINDING THE CHINESE IN AN ITALIAN OPERA

What the Dresser (and undoubtedly audience throughout the years) finds odd about Turandot is that here is an opera about Chinese people sung in Italian with three characters--Ping, Pang, and Pong--modeled on Commedia dell'Arte figures. The trio of jesters are the princess' ministers. Granted that Chinese opera has its buffoons and Tan Dun has shown us these kinds of characters in his contemporary opera The First Emperor, Turandot's clowns seem too Italian. As for the music, it proceeds like a Richard Wagner opera--with the music constantly flowing and accented by leitmotifs. Unlike other well-known Puccini operas inspired by real life stories, this one with libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni is based on an invented fairy tale by Venetian magician Carlo Gozzi.

So what to do? The Dresser decided she needed a deeper understanding of Turandot, conducted some research on the Internet and then learned about Zubin Mehta's Turandot Project. In 1997, Mehta decided he wanted to mount a new production of Puccini's opera that cut out the clichés about Chinese people and culture. To do this the maestro went out on a limb and enlisted China's most controversial film director Zhang Yimou, best known to Westerners for his film, Raise the Red Lantern and who had never directed an opera before. Zhang apprenticed to Mehta during the Florence premiere and then after long negotiations with the Chinese government (the films of Zhang were censored by the Chinese government), the pair staged a more spectacular version of Turandot in a courtyard within the Forbidden City of Beijing.

So the Dresser left her blue upholstered computer desk chair and drove to College Park, Maryland, where she visited the non-print media section of Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland where she could see Allan Miller II's 87-minute documentary film on how Mehta made this "more authentic" version of Turandot. The renowned conductor said, "I wanted a China the outside world had never seen before."

GETTING INTO THE SKIN OF THE MUSIC MAKERS

In viewing a scene of the film where Zhang Yimou sits directly behind Zubin Mehta in a Florence, Italy, opera house (he is studying the maestro's every move), the Dresser suddenly flashed on having had a similar experience. In maybe the fall of 2003 with her poet friend Hilary Tham, the Dresser attended a performance of The Barber of Seville at the Teatro Comunale di Firenze. Their seats were directly behind Mehta. They were literally breathing down his neck. Since the Dresser had always pictured herself as a conductor in some other life where she was not a poet, she found herself seeing the opera through the conductor's every gesture.

In October of 2001, the Dresser spent a week with Ms. Tham visiting the haunts of Giacomo Puccini, Ms. Tham's favorite opera composer. This included the house he was born in located in the walled city of Lucca and his house in Torre del Lago where he is buried with his wife (not in the ground of the property but inside the house). Ms. Tham, originally a Malaysian of Chinese descent, told me Turandot was her most favorite of all Puccini's operas, something the Dresser is just understanding having stumbled into Mehta's collaboration with Zhang because of seeing Serban's production which, though quite magnificent, raised more questions than it answered.

CHINESE OPERA IS MESSY

So what did Mehta and Zhang do to make Puccini's Turandot more Chinese? They (well, Mehta and not Zhang who was on the Red Chinese banned list) managed to get permission to use a staging space that matched the grandeur of ancient China, which also meant filling up the stage with a huge number of supernumeraries. Zhang hired hundreds of soldiers to stand on the huge stage. Zhang insisted that costumes mirror the Ming influence built into the Forbidden City. Therefore 900 costumes were made by 100 rural Chinese families (it took them four months) that would be used in the nine performances presented. Zhang also stuck to his guns about how he wanted the lighting to heighten the color of the performers' costumes. In the film this is an interesting cultural lesson because Zhang has to persuade the Guido Levy, a highly respected lighting designer in the opera business. Guido complains to the documentary film director that Zhang wants light everywhere with no subtlety. Zhang's preference seems to mirror how Chinese opera works--as audience you aren't expected to be quiet, people are eating and prostitutes are working the crowd. Zhang says Chinese opera is messy and the audience likes it that way. Additionally Zhang taught the cast of international singers (there were three sets of singers for the principle roles) Chinese gestures and he hired a Chinese acrobat--a four foot ten inch girl whose bones were rubber--to be Turandot's executioner.

Another side benefit from seeing the documentary of the Turandot Project was that I better understood how most directors including Serban prefer that the sopranos selected to sing the part of Princess Turandot are fearsome and strong voices. After all, Turandot says during the opera, "I am not human, I am the daughter of the Emperor of Heaven."

As to Puccini who typically wrote verismo opera and not fantasy, Turandot was his last opera. In fact, he did not live long enough to complete it. That he was not able to complete the work is greatly regretted because he had sketched out a finale that he hoped would rival the finale of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. After Puccini died in December 1924, his family and his publisher hired Franco Alfano to complete the work. There was a boatload of controversy about this choice. Alfano was not Puccini's choice and many, including Toscanini who premiered the completed opera in 1926, had a hard time accepting how Alfano finished Turandot. When Liù commits suicide, this is where Puccini's work ended.

In Serban's notes in the WNO program, he offered, "The composer, possibly sensing the inevitability of his own death, felt the need to address issues larger than ordinary aspects of every day life." The Dresser thinks that Serban's instincts were right in creating a riotous explosion of color, that the masks (though also a big part of Commedia dell'arte) suggest the secretness of the Chinese character (by the way, Mehta had to first have a secret meeting with Zhang to show him the staging area he wanted within the Forbidden City), and that the impressive scroll that is unfurled across the entire length of the stage as Ping, Pang, and Pong sing about where they are from and how their work as ministers keep them from a better life. However, the Dresser needed to see how Zubin Mehta addressed his production of Turandot before she could really appreciate what Puccini was trying to achieve.

Although Puccini died of a heart attack, his end was brought on by complications in treating throat cancer. Anne Caston in Judah's Lion, her book from Toad Hall Press, offers the following poem with echoes of John Donne's sonnet "Batter My Heart, Three-person'd God." Similar to Puccini's Turandot and how Puccini met his end, "Psalm, After the Fall from Remission" addresses disease, death, and a sleepless night.

PSALM, AFTER THE FALL FROM REMISSION

Remake me, Potter, or break me
into three final holy pieces: scatter me
knucklebone, eyelash, and tooth to the wind and rain.
Give what remains of me to the poor--called
last to every table save Death's.

For reasons worse than hunger, I'm driven
into bargaining again with You, the throttle thrown wide.

What a strange affliction being mortal is.
In one night, the camp of the body is made
or broken. I arm myself; I resist; I try
not to enter the one dark pass
where I will be taken.

Tonight my house is full with waking.
I, too, am full of a curtained hour I have not yet known.

When the sun rose today, this iron bed was bright with morning
and all the daily little blisses of ignorance. By the time the sun went down,
the world of the living was closed again to me, even the false light hope gives
off, and I lay feverish in cotton sheets so clean the rain was in them still.
Even the pillowslip was innocent of my undoing.

Anne Caston  
from Judah's Lion

Photos by Karin Cooper

In the Realm of Silent Film and Dreams--Snark Ensemble, Terry Riley

2009-03-31T17:58:09Z

New classical music concerts, the forum where edge really cuts, are often hard to find. Universities with a mandate for teaching composition and the money to back up that imperative are where these concerts erupt with flair. The Dresser uses the word erupt meaning, "to emerge violently from restraint or limits," because not everyone, including regular concertgoers, supports the untamed refusing-to-be-put-in-a-box programming. Recently the Dresser heard two such concerts, one at Catholic University with spankingly new compositions set to silent films and another at the University of Maryland with an eye to the history of Minimalism.

CREATING A RUCKUS

What the Dresser loves about the programs that are presented at Catholic University is that professors like Andrew Simpson take wild and whacky chances with newly conceived work. On March 11, 2009, the Dresser attended "Silent Explosions, Invisible Jumps: Music, Dance, and Film Create a Ruckus--A Multimedia Performance Event Inspired by Early Silent Films of Georges Méliès." This program, one of many during CUA's President's Festival of the Arts March 9 through March 22, explored silent film and live dance through an exercise of new musical composition. In fact, Simpson, a composer himself, instigated the commissioning of seven new scores that were to take inspiration from seven short films by Georges Méliès (1861-1938), a French filmmaker known for his early innovations in filmmaking. One of those seven, "The Luny Musician" is Simpson's composition--here's a professor who leads by example.

The set up for this exercise and ensuing program was fairly complex despite the inspiration being based on silent films ranging in duration from slightly over a minute to slightly over four minutes. The composers' assignment was to view the film and then create music that "supports the on-screen action of the film" (Simpson's description from the "Program Notes"). The music was then handed over to three choreographers to create dance from the music alone. The choreographers and dancers were not allowed to see the films until the evening of the performance. Because the films each had some element of dance, the idea was to see how much commonality blossomed between dance and film as translated by the music, but more so to see how the process of creation unfolds.

One additional layer was the music was played twice (once with the film and once with the dancers) by the talented Snark Ensemble, an instrumental chamber group dedicated to the creation and performance of new original scores for silent film. Two of the three Snark Ensemble members--Andrew Simpson (keyboards) and Maurice Saylor (woodwinds)--made up two of the seven commissioned composers. Perhaps, you, Dear Reader, are now shaking your head and wagging a finger at what seems to be an incestuous opportunity for CUA faculty (and there was a third commissioned faculty member Steven Strunk). Mais, au contraire, the Dresser counters. Given that all the composers only had four to six weeks to write the music and that the senior composers were willing to share the stage with the newbies as well as play all of the compositions, the Dresser sees the project as a freeing and joyful experiment in collaboration.

Of the seven musical compositions, the Dresser liked Steven Strunk's "Silly Music" the best. "Silly Music," an edgy and busy piece for the clarinet, was inspired by Méliès' 1901 film "L'antre des esprits" ("The Magician's Cavern"). The two-minute-55-second film shows the antics of a magician who animates such objects as a skeleton, which not only moves but dances. Dancer Elton Pittman and choreographer Shannan Quinn interpreted Strunk's music as a man bedeviled by some kind of flying thing that manifests in an active hand that zigzags around the dancer's head and pretty soon has him diving into break dance gyrations on the floor.

The Dresser was also impressed with the choreography of Shawn Short and associated dancers for John Maggi's composition "The Ballet Master's Dream" danced by Nicolette Jenkins and Dedrick Makle and for Simpson's "The Luny Musician" danced by Tisa D. Herbert and Prentice Whitlow. The Dresser felt the choreographer had a charming sense of the absurd and made good use of the limited time to show the prowess of his dancers.

While the Dresser did not hear any profound outpouring of the soul in the seven musical compositions, she believes that the sum effect, particularly with the added elements of the Snark musicianship and the live dance, will continue to ripple out in the universe to positive creative effect. Simpson's teaching methods in the field of new classical music deserve hearty recognition.

BANGING ON A CAN

What drew the Dresser on March 29, 2009, to the University of Maryland's Bang on a Can Marathon that included percussionist Glenn Kotche with two of five pieces inspired by Steve Reich was an appearance and performance by Terry Riley, creator of "In C" (1964) and, with that composition, the composer at the foundation of the Minimalist movement in music. He takes credit for influencing Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams. While the Dresser remarked to her seatmate composer Janet Peachey that what they were hearing Riley perform (selections from his Autodreamographical Tales) reminded her of work The Kronos Quartet would present, the Dresser had failed to link together that she heard Kronos perform Riley's The Cusp of Magic last year and that she had recorded that Riley has had a long-standing relationship with David Harrington, the founding member of The Kronos Quartet, a group that first piqued the Dresser's interest in new music with their rendition of songs like Jimi Hendrix "Purple Haze." Of course seeing Riley perform, versus seeing another legendary group perform his music, creates an indelible impression.

Photo by Stuart Brinin

Photo by Stephanie Berger

Cut to the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center's Dekleboum Concert Hall as the Bang on a Can All-Stars (these musician have awesome resumes) Robert Black (bass), David Cossin (percussion), Mark Stewart (electric guitar), Felix Fan (cello), Ning Yu (piano), Evan Ziporyn (clarinets) and Riley dressed in his Indian holy man attire of kurta (long shirt worn over trousers) and taqiyah or kufi (a short rounded cap) enter and take their positions to play. Without explanation, Riley begins playing the piano and singing unintelligible words of what turns out to be an unannounced composition or maybe just an improvised warm up number. With Riley's background in jazz and Indian raga, improvisation to him is as natural as breathing.

By the second piece, Riley made it clear he had launched Autodreamographical Tales, because he began talking about a dwarf that synced with the title of the first Tale. Next came "Long Bus Ride" and the Dresser nudged her seatmate and whispered, "this makes me think of Allen Ginsberg" and Dr. Peachey nodded and whispered back "Hydrogen Jukebox," a song cycle by Philip Glass based on the poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Now in writing her blog post, the Dresser is thinking the Magic Bus Trip by the Merry Pranksters who hung with Ken Kesey.

The third Tale "See them out there" begins with whistling that turns into a jazzy song. (It turns out that Riley presents all his dreams in spoken voice while his commentaries on the dreams are sung. The Dresser discovered this difference when she found a November 7, 2008 audio program from WNYC-FM where John Schaefer interviewed Riley and played some of the Tales.) The Dresser's favorite Tales came next. "The Miracle" is what Riley calls a "bopping riff" with a Gregorian chant overlay. The miracle of this tale is that Riley sights "Santa," which made the Dresser laugh loudly because "Santa" made her think of Santa Claus. What with the naïve storytelling style, the Dresser figured Riley was open to any and all interpretations in the free love approach of Stephen Stills' song "Love the One You're With." Oh, yes, Dear Reader, what Riley was presenting was soo retro. "Zuchinni" is a zany landscape starting in Italy, moving rapidly to London, but about a piece of music called "Zuchinni" that people in the dream say is Riley's but he does not recognize it. Maurice Chevalier, the old French movie star of musicals like Gigi, is conducting "Zuchinni" and the end of the concert allows his top hat to roll down his arm.

"Black Woman" concerns criticism Riley is subjected to by a black woman who tells him he is too stiff. The dreamer Riley turns it around by giving the same advice to a black man he encounters. Thereafter, the music turns jazzy and some kind of Dr. Seuss spiel ensues. "The Faquir" opens with the playing of an exotic instrument and an old man--the faquir--climbs into Riley's grocery cart but everyone including Riley starts smoking cigarettes in a place where such behavior is not permitted. "The War on the Poor" is a bluesy piece where All-Star pianist Ning Yu came to the mic to relate her own tale in Chinese. Accenting this Tale was the electric guitarist Mark Stewart also playing a kazoo that made the Dresser think what are these musical pranksters doing in the well-lit environs of a university stage when they belong in the smokey half-light of a club in San Francisco's North Beach?

The second part of Riley's presentation included two pieces from The Autodreamographical Anteriopod, which is essentially a marijuana-induced romp that includes "Cannabis," a Jabberwockyish song filled with nonsense words, and an extended tale into "The Hippy Encampment." In the later piece, Riley sings "Cannabis is a wonderful drug--sometimes you live like a cat on a rug. It makes you trip lightly; I like to take it nightly."

Standing back from the smoke, what the Dresser understands is that Riley's music has its roots in jazz and then Indian raga. Some of his singing in the Bang on a Can concert also demonstrated his skill of raga vocalization, which he learned as a disciple of the revered North Indian raga vocalist, Pandit Pran Nath. Yes, Dear Reader, this concert was more a cut of history than the sharp knife through the new music jungle and isn't it amazing what institutions now support if it comes packaged with an old holy man?

Brandel France de Bravo in "Ostracism" published in her book Provenance explores what can happen in a community if otherness becomes too pronounced. Using Lewis Carroll's poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter," the poet echoes the zaniness of these concerts where the music came out of silent films and dreams.

OSTRACISM

The time has come, the poet said,
to talk of many things:
of shoes and ships and sealing wax
and exile's cruel sting.

In agoras of ancient Greece
if six thousand agreed
by casting votes on oyster shells,
shards, you would--like a weed--
be uprooted, cruelly cast out,
your absence un-grieved.

Socrates, tried by a jury
and found guilty, might well
have been banished from Athens.
Rather than face that hell,
he chose to quaff hemlock, dying
with panache where he dwelled.

Let us not speak of suicide
but murder on the beach.
The walrus and the carpenter,
daring more than eat a peach,
invited bivalve pals to stroll
with them, hands each in each.
They led them to a lonely spot
and made that little speech,
then devoured their briny friends:
an aphrodisiac feast.

The sun still shone upon the sea.
No birds were in the sky.
Not even a lone ossifrage
dotted the clouds on high.
The long-in-tooth and sated pair
with heavy-lidded eyes
reclined against a rock
and heaved several happy sighs.
The surf had long erased
the memory of mollusk cries.

The empty shells--once ateliers,
coats--lay in bony heaps,
like an ogre's ossuary
overturned at their feet,
or the aftermath of some election
where winning spells defeat
and the popular are sentenced
to peristaltic heat.

In this sultry Siberia
the thermometer always reads
98.6 Fahrenheit.

Brandel France de Bravo
from Provenance

Copyright © 2008 Brandel France de Bravo

Exploring the Côte D'azur with Henri Matisse and Friends

2009-03-07T21:07:46Z

Since June 2008 when she was in Paris, the Dresser has had the profound good fortune to see many exquisite collections of French and French-held art. Her stay in the City of Light included a full day at the Louvre and shorter visits to Musée de l'Orangerie des Tuileries, Musée d'Orsay, Musée Picasso, Musée Rodin, Musée du Luxembourg, and Centre Georges Pompidou.

ALONG THE CÔTE D'AZUR

Recently, the Dresser saw "Henri Matisse and Modern Art on the French Rivera" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The exhibition, curated by Michael Taylor and running through November 1, 2009, brings together the Museum's Matisse collection from his Nice period--said to be the largest group of his works from this period outside of France--and work from Matisse's contemporaries who were all attracted to the breath-taking coastline bounded by Marseilles across to Menton.

Raoul Dufy (French, 1877 - 1953), Window on the Promenade des Anglais, Nice, 1938. Oil on canvas, 18 1/8 x 15 1/16 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White Collection, 1967

Of the 40 paintings and sculptures drawn from the Philadelphia Museum of Art and two private collections, the Dresser was particularly impressed to see Matisse's brightly depicted odalisques in the company of works by familiar and not so known artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marie Laurencin, André Derain, William H. Johnson, Raoul Dufy, Pierre Bonnard, Max Weber, Alexander Archipenko, Chaim Soutine, and others.

FAUVISM, CUBISM, AND EXPRESSIONISM

Besides her usual interest in the artists that surrounded Gertrude Stein, the Dresser was particularly set up for the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Matisse and Modern Art on the French Riviera exhibition by seeing at the Luxembourg Museum a short-term exhibition of intensely colorful paintings revealing the underbelly of society by Fauvist Maurice de Vlaminck. Fauvism was a brief flash on the painterly landscape that evolved between 1900 to 1910 from Impressionism and Pointillism, particularly influenced by the work of Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, and Georges-Pierre Seurat. Besides the emphasis on extreme color, Fauvism was characteristically two dimensional, primitive, and often influenced by African sculpture and masks. The leaders of Fauvism were Henri Matisse and André Derain. From 1905 to 1907, there were three exhibitions of Fauvist works. Other Fauvist painters of note (Les Fauves--what the painters of Fauvism were called--means The Wild Beasts) included Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, Georges Rouault, and Georges Braque.

André Derain (French, 1880 - 1954), Portrait of Henri Matisse, c. 1905. Oil on canvas, 13 x 16 1/8 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, A. E. Gallatin Collection, 1952

After Fauvism, came Cubism (formative years were 1907-1911) that evolved from the dimensional experimentation of Picasso and Bracque. One other artistic grouping of note around this period was Expressionism, which might be characterized by the artist's tendency to distort reality and result in a profound emotional reaction. Because the reach of Expressionism seems to have no clear boundaries in historical time (some scholars say El Greco and Edvard Munk are forerunners) and was not defined as a movement like Fauvism or Cubism, Expressionism is far harder to pin down in simple terms. The reason the Dresser brings up Fauvism, Cubism, and Expressionism is that all of three of these artistic categories arise in "Matisse and Modern Art on the French Rivera" exhibition.

While curator Michael Taylor threaded the exhibit based on geography, that is, the French Riviera, the juxtaposition of the individual works of art create a dialectic about artistic approaches and social issues that start perhaps with the decorative female figures by Matisse--the Moroccan-inspired odalisques--but evolve to Cubism (seen in this exhibition with works by Bracque, Weber, and Louis Marcoussis) and then move on to Expressionism (seen in the work of Chaim Soutine and William H. Johnson). As to social issues, what brought an end to the artistic life on the French Riviera was World War II. What's an interesting surprise is the discussion about anti-Semitism and Jewish persecution that crops up in the presentation of the portrait of Moise Kisling by Soutine. Another point of surprise was seeing Pierre Bonnard's "Homage to Maillol" which is a still life that includes Aristide Maillol's sculpture "Bather with Chignon" and on the gallery floor stands the actual Maillol sculpture.

FINDING UNEXPECTED JEWELS

The Dresser enjoyed seeing the work by Matisse, including the "Still Life (Histoire Juive)", but her two golden nuggets were "Leda and the Swan" by Marie Laurencin and "Cagnes-sur-Mer" by William H. Johnson. Although the Dresser (also known as the Steiny Road Poet) had included Marie Laurencin in her opera Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On, she had never focused on Laurencin's paintings until she saw five of them up close at the Orangerie in June where they hang together in their own little gallery. Laurencin, who was the girl friend of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and one of Picasso's inner circle of friends, remains little known and to find her painting in Philadelphia of the lushily pink-lipped Leda in a transparent gown with a blue feather in hair petting a swan with both hands was a rare pleasure.

What was particularly interesting about the Johnson painting which expressed a swath of houses colored in muted greens, ocres, and a trace of blue nestled in an intensely verdant landscape was here was an American and for a long time a neglected African American painter, whose work she was unfamiliar with hanging out on the French Riviera with painters whose work she is always drawn to. Johnson was a student of Soutine and in this exhibition, Johnson and Soutine share a wall and although the details are different, one can see the influence of Soutine's undulating "Landscape, Chemin des Caucours, Cagnes-sur-Mer" on Johnson's painting.

Cecily Parks is a poet intensely involved in landscape. In her book Field Folly Snow, she offers "How to Read a Mackerel Sky," a poem that keenly fits with the artistic intensity of "Henri Matisse and Modern Art on the French Rivera."

Henri Matisse (French, 1869 - 1954), Interior at Nice (Room at the Beau Rivage), 1917-18. Oil on canvas, 29 x 23 3/4 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, A. E. Gallatin Collection, 1952

HOW TO READ A MACKEREL SKY

Out of the clouds I make
the whirlpool of shipwreck. I make a stampede.

I make dry leaves spinning
away from piles, a house reduced to shingles,

buttermilk curdling
on a linoleum floor. It's easy

to divine undoing--
flood all the unknowns with your fear, tailor

vapor to harbinger,
and lower the billowing sails of your

keeling soul. Loosed
from any charted course, forsake your grip

on the helm as the sky
becomes sea--silver-scaled with mackerel

teeming to every
horizon--and the shingled house around

your heart quakes for the want
of diagrams, equations, plans. That's when

to look for me, swimming
in leaves the size of fish, dismantling

the ocean and spilling
buttermilk across the sky. I'll be gowned

in linoleum, and you'll
hear hoofbeats, love approaching.

Cecily Parks
from Field Folly Snow

Kaspar Hauser: Opera for the Full Body

2009-02-27T14:12:00Z

Because the Dresser wears many hats, her reach is larger than the average critic in the following way. On February 13, 2009 as president of The Word Works, she was in Chicago at the Associated Writing Programs convention where she expected to hear composer Elizabeth Swados speak on the panel "Page to Stage: How Fiction, Non-Fiction, or Poetry Becomes Theater." Moderator Susan Terris commented that Ms. Swados was absent because her new opera was going into previews much sooner than expected and had remained in New York.

SNEAKING IN THE POET

In 1985, the Dresser merely known in those days as an undercover poet working for the Federal Department of Justice (yes, she had those credentials that she could flip open like an F.B. I. agent) attended the New Playwrights Theater (a DC theater company now defunct) production of Swados' music theater piece The Beautiful Lady, which focused on the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Despite never opening in New York, The Beautiful Lady won Swados a Helen Hayes Award. The undercover poet loved Swados' music and the whole ambiance of the Stray Dog Café where that story unfolds. Someone the poet was close to in those days (he is now dead) made a bad bootlegged recording of the live show. The Dresser wonders whatever happened to those cassettes, but knows they should have never been made in the first place. Now the Dresser notices that Swados does not mention this work on her website. Swados has clearly had much bigger successes with other work such as her Broadway and international smash hit Runaways.

Officially opening February 28, Kaspar Hauser: A Foundling's Opera concerns a wild child found on the streets of Nuremburg, Germany in 1828. The Dresser saw this high energy and emotionally loaded show February 19 in spite of the fact that producers and directors do not usually allow journalists into a show in previews. But then, on the other hand, the Dresser is not your ordinary opinion maker and had come to New York that weekend to promote Gertrude Stein's and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts.

In The Life of Poetry by Muriel Rukeyser, the author wrote that Americans fear poetry because it puts the reader in touch with his or her emotions and often leads to disclosure. Rukeyser also says poetry contains so much truth and encourages so much communication that people cannot handle the power of poetry. This is exactly the level at which Elizabeth Swados works.

DICKENS' ENGLAND OR HITLER'S GERMANY?

When the Dresser entered The Flea to find an empty seat, she had to walk across the staging area and close to Preston Martin already in role as the chained up teenager Kaspar Hauser. Kaspar was rolling a toy horse on wheels back and forth. Because Kaspar had been kept alone in a dungeon, the boy had not learned to speak.

Informed up front, the audience knew that Kaspar was stolen from his mother immediately after his birth. The mother was told he died and the audience sees her grieving throughout the play. Eliza Poehlman as Kaspar's bereaved mom makes a sympathetic performance in this role, but the Dresser wanted to get out of her seat and take the beautiful longhaired woman by the hand and put her face-to-face with Kaspar after he was released from his dungeon into public view.

The focus of Swados' opera, which has a libretto co-written by playwright Erin Courtney, is on communication, particularly as it affects truth. Throughout the opera, the people of the town where Kaspar emerges into the world are swayed by inflammatory gossip about the boy even to the degree that the crowd psychology made the Dresser think of Nazi Germany. Given the town is Nuremburg, site in the twentieth century of the trials for the prosecution of Hitler's leading government and military officials, the leap seems just as likely as thinking the setting with an unfortunate foundling could be Charles Dickens' London.

SWADOS' MUSIC: A FULL BODY WORKOUT

The power of Swados' music in Kaspar Hauser translates as a complete body experience, particularly when the cast known as The Bats belt out and move in a choral number. (The Bats make up the young resident company whose members get selected competitively and who perform in long runs of demanding classics and new plays at The Flea.) Even if the floor of The Flea were more rigidly stable, the vibration from the emotionally charged music and words would be enough to shake up everyone seated or standing in the house. In a couple of the mob scenes, the Dresser thinks Swados has created a scary rave where the crowd alternately looks like they are dancing in strobe lights or are raucously pounding the floor with their feet. Maybe like Elizabeth Swados, who had a difficult childhood, the Dresser is susceptible to stories where children are abused. Nonetheless, something more than child abuse happens in this work.

IN THE SHADOW OF A POET

Some of the imagery in the opera provokes questions. Why is Kaspar assassinated in the shadow of a statue of a poet? Why is Kaspar's unknown father depicted as a horseman? While the story of Kaspar Hauser comes from real life, the story of Swados' opera contains variations on the unsolved case about who this foundling was. In both versions, the question arises was Kaspar an impostor? Did he kill himself? Swados, however, makes it clear Kaspar was an innocent.

One compelling story variation involves Lord Henry Stanhope (played with appropriate arrogance by Marshall York) whom costume designer Normandy Sherwood dresses in a red Mephistophelean outfit of breeches and cutaway coat. In real life, Stanhope may have been a benevolent caretaker of Kaspar, but in the opera, he is under the thumb of Kaspar's mother's evil stepsister Louisa (Beth Griffith) who seemed to have orchestrated the kidnapping of the infant boy. Once Kaspar comes out in the light of day, Louisa worries that her son (who ascended in royal rank after Kaspar's so-called death) and she will be deposed. Therefore she blackmails Stanhope about some misdeed he carried out and orders him to 'take care' of Kaspar in some kind of final solution. In their duets, Griffith as Louisa and York as Stanhope effectively pour forth their evil, which stands in stark contrast to the abused boy's innocence.

Experiencing the work of Swados again makes the Dresser want to see more of what she offers as well as more productions by The Flea, which was co-founded by the playwright Mac Wellman, a poet The Word Works published in 1977 (In Praise of Secrecy). In her book The Bag of Broken Glass, Yerra Sugarman has many poems that speak to themes put forth in Kaspar Hauser. The Dresser offers "The Dominion of the Name," the last section of the four-part poem "The Boundaries of the Body," as an echo to the tension Swados sets up between the two royal stepsisters.

4. THE DOMINION OF THE NAME

I was a moth, Hagar's
motherhood the light
that burnt me.

A wound, the calendar made me
feel shame,

my bones scuffed with time,
barely useful.

Then God changed our names:
to Sarah and Abraham.
And we laughed until our throats hurt

when we learned I'd give birth,
although we knew we might never
live to see our child grown.

I'd thought it could work:
our two boys raised together.

Might it have worked?

Ishmael and Isaac --
one river splitting at the mouth
to an interminably violent sea.

by Yerrra Sugarman  
from The Bag of Broken Glass
Copyright © 2008 Yerrra Sugarman

Photos by Ryan Jensen

A Scandal in Bohemia, Chinatown & Elsewhere

2009-02-24T20:44:49Z

At this time, the Dresser would like to talk about scandals--as in trap, stumbling block, temptation.

TRAPPED IN CHINATOWN

Scandal #1, starting backwards in time on Saturday, February 7 at 11:15 a.m., the Dresser encountered three chicly dressed Caucasian teenage girls in a bus station in Philadelphia's Chinatown. As the Dresser entered the waiting room, one of the teens said anxiously, "Are you going to DC?" When the Dresser answered yes, the girl replied, "Good! At least there will be one other white person on this bus."

SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA

Scandal #2 on Friday, February 6, 8 p.m., the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, the Dresser attended the world premiere of A Scandal in Bohemia, a new chamber opera
by composer Thomas Whitman with a libretto by poet Nathalie Anderson loosely based on Arthur Conan Doyle's short story by the same name. More about this full-length opera shortly.

WHICH HEAD--CRITIC, PUBLISHER, OR POET?

Scandal #3 concerns the connection the Dresser has to one of the co-creators of A Scandal in Bohemia. In 1998, The Word Works, a nonprofit literary organization of which the Dresser is president, awarded Nathalie Anderson its Washington Prize for her poetry manuscript Following Fred Astaire. The Prize included a handsome monetary purse, book publication, and distribution of said book to all contest entrants. Why is this a scandal? By itself, it is clearly an honor and a coveted résumé builder for any poet. However, in combination with a Dressing review of A Scandal in Bohemia, many purists would cover their eyes and ears, saying this is not comme il faut.

In the world of poetry and new opera, the reality is eventually everyone becomes friends or enemies. Unlike the anxious teenager on an outing away from her white neighborhood, the Dresser belongs to the artistic community she writes about and always is in a state of mental Rorschach--opera critic, poetry publisher, or poet writing opera? Who is the Dresser? The Dresser is the perpetual student interested in process and scandal. She believes she can add value by writing about Anderson's and Whitman's Scandal, especially because she collected inside information.

TAKING OUT THE MAGNIFYING GLASS

First, the Dresser will provide an executive summary. Running just over two hours and presented concert style with four principle singers playing seven characters, this opera is organized in two acts with a number of orchestral interludes. The story concerns British detective Sherlock Holmes, who is outwitted by an opera singer named Irene Adler. Scandal features one soprano and numerous baritones, including a base baritone. There are surprisingly no tenors, not even in the all male chorus.

The Dresser who spoke briefly to the composer said his musical influences are (and they can be heard in Scandal) Benjamin Britten, George Crumb, Gustav Mahler, and Guiseppe Verde. Additionally, the Dresser noticed that Whitman has a well-established investment in gamelan music, which was manifest in Scandal by the use of harp, xylophone, vibraphone, and marimba. In fact, Whitman's music for Scandal had many dramatic flourishes accented by percussion, but also by standout parts for the brass instruments and for the winds, especially the bassoon. While the opening bars of this opera are dark sounds by the strings, the prelude to Act II was bright and lively and fully engaged the ear and the body with its vibration. Celebrating its 20th anniversary season, Orchestra 2001, conducted by James Freeman, produced a satisfying concert attendant to the composer's emphasis on sometimes surprising texture created by percussion instruments. Orchestra 2001 Executive Director Ronald Vigue

Many comic moments expressed in the music (as well as the words and story) of the opera bring the necessary lightness and counter balance to the heaviness of the male voices. Markus Beam as Holmes vocally delivered the authority necessary for the great detective, but he was also effective in giving way to his emotions as the detective falls in love with the soprano he is suppose to be investigating for his client the King of Bohemia. Playing the King, a stuttering minister, and the narrator (known as The Reader), base baritone Julian Rodescu, gave visceral punch to his fine delivery. David Kravitz as Watson (the sidekick of Sherlock Holmes) and Godfrey Norton (the man Irene Adler marries in a mock wedding ceremony, a ploy to confound her former lover--the King of Bohemia) effectively plays the two male roles each in the shadow of a dominant character.

An important musical passage found on the Internet and taken from Irene Adler's mock wedding provides an excellent example of how the composer mixes the sacred sound of bells (gamelan-like sounds) with the mostly male voices. In this passage, the baritone voice of the detective (he is in disguise spying on Irene Adler), the comic base-baritone voice of the stuttering minister, the love-struck Godfrey Norton who really wants to marry the singer, and the anxious singer who seems to have something besides marriage on her mind come together with a giddy emotional load.

THE MASTERY OF THE MATRIARCH

Without question though, the star of this production was Laura Heimes as Irene Adler. Heimes has the vocal sureness necessary to be the only female voice among so many baritones. Perhaps this is unfair to note, but Ms. Heimes who was eight and a half months pregnant at the performance immediately drew the audience's attention. When she sat down on a chair in a scene where she, as the opera singer Irene Adler, was practicing the solfège syllables "ma me mo mu," the Dresser couldn't help noticing that those syllables elicited the primal maternal call and, not to mention, the gasp from a woman sitting behind the Dresser who was worried that the soprano was about to deliver more than an aria about the problems of being intimate with the Bohemian King. While the Dresser heard that Heimes held back in the dress rehearsal to protect her voice, in the premiere she demonstrated vocal control of an experienced professional at various sound levels. Most impressive was at the end of the opera when Heimes brought the level of sound down and had the audience attentively leaning in to hear her.

True to her poetic pallet, Nathalie Anderson layered into Scandal her spare lines that repeat at appropriate intervals. Periodically, Holmes sings, "I observe, I deduce, I know." Even without Whitman's lyrical music, Anderson's words sing. At the end of the opera when Ms. Adler steals the detective's words, "I observe, I deduce, I know," the Dresser was reminded of the eloquent economies and carefully turned repetitions Nat Anderson employs in all her poetry. A Scandal in Bohemia is the second opera (the first was The Black Swan) from this well matched team of Anderson and Whitman (and no, Dear Reader, Thomas is not related to Walt--that was the first question the Dresser asked the composer).

Given that Sherlock Holmes uses masks and disguises while he is investigating Irene Adler, "The Dream of Eros," a poem from Nathalie Anderson's book Following Fred Astaire, could easily be text lifted from A Scandal in Bohemia.

THE DREAM OF EROS

You have a friend who travels incognito,
who comes and goes under cover of dark,
who wears a mask to bed. Out of the shadows,
lilies on the wind, rose petals drifting
into your hands, your sleeping arms: "Expect me

when you see me." (You may as well enjoy
a joke so sweetly double-edged.) In between,
you're left with busy-work--the grains of rice,
the automatic writing, the black river
to swim again and again. You're ready

for the test, for the pool to swallow you,
ready for the night to twist in your hand,
ready to be seared awake, but beauty
keeps itself dark. A ring of braided hair,
breath stirring through your lips: "You'll know me

when you see me." (Another joke, when
every face seems likely, but turns out wrong.)
You've got sentries at the borders, you've got
spies in the alley-ways, but love slips in
and out before your eyes can open.

Always some spoiler handy with a box
for empty dreams, with mirrors to reflect on--
so many faces, so infinitely
superimposed. The trace of a caress
inscribed on your inner thigh: "You'll see me

when you least expect me." Oh sisters, sisters,
congratulate me, be happy for me.
In my alchemical marriage, the dark
beats heavy wings, the arrows are flying,
I lift my face, and love, love strikes its light again.

by Nathalie Anderson
from Following Fred Astaire

Redeeming The Deserter

2009-01-31T15:39:50Z

Herewith the Dresser proclaims that the following is merely talkback to the informative review on the 18th century opera Le Déserteur her good friend and able colleague Charles Downey wrote for The Washington Post. In case you are wondering, Dear Reader, the Dresser saw Opera Lafayette's production of this comic opera by Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny with libretto by Michel-Jean Sedaine in the company of musicologist Downey on January 29, 2009, at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. But furthermore, the Dresser had no intention of writing a review herself because she is overbooked with travel, talks to present, and her own libretto which needs to be finalized for her collaborating composer.

THE BLAH BLAH AND JUMPS-IN-PLACE

So the talkback is this--while Dresser agrees that Le Déserteur is a minor work with mostly historic value, Opera Lafayette's production, done in concert style but with costumes, dance, and small props, gave the Dresser breath and serenity in her sea of overbusy. Briefly the story concerns a mean trick pulled on the young soldier Alexis who is in love with Louise. A local Duchess decrees that to test Alexis, Louise must mock-marry her daffy cousin Bertrand. In despair, Alexis tries to desert from his army post but gets sentenced to death.

Photo by Julie Lemberger

The Dresser disagrees with her venerable friend that the dancing and narrative assistance by Caroline Copeland was "perhaps superfluous." Au contraire, Copeland's mix of 18th century dance form with more modern ballet movement (and oh, how the Dresser loved the dancer's prim punctuating jumps-in-place) gave energy to what was mostly static stage presence of the singers. Another activity of the dancer was to present the titles (in English) of the scenes. She did this by placing large white placards on an easel. This was in lieu of projected surtitles and enhanced the French text and translation printed in the Kennedy Center Playbill.

HELAS--WHO CAN READ, WHO CAN SING?

One final action of this production was having the chorus (and yes, the Dresser noticed that Claire Kuttler who appeared prominently in John Musto's opera Later the Same Evening was the only female singer in the choral lineup) hold up the words for an audience sing-along. The Dresser realized that in trying to do her part by singing that Monsigny's music wasn't so easy produced from an unfamiliar tongue. Great respect and a doff of the Dresser's beret sweeps low to Dominique LaBelle as Louise and William Sharp as Alexis. And the Dresser must say she loved the charming number between David Newman as the young Montauciel and Tony Boutté as Bertrand, the simple cousin of Louise. One other thing not lost on the Dresser is the sub-text about how Montauciel who is the opera's narrator (the role is done by actor John Lescault and the singer David Newman) can just barely read.

In this time of diminishing reading and now, Dear Reader, have you noticed that not only has The Washington Post cut out arts reviews in their Sunday edition of the paper but they have also deep-sixed the Book World section? So here we are, people will say this is a problem caused by the success of the Internet, but we all know deep down there are many people in our current day world, like Montauciel, who just don't have good reading skills.

The Dresser leaves the talkback with Margaret Ingraham's poem "Satiety" from her new Finishing Line Press book Proper Words for Birds that has many poems about song. This one, however, ponders the question of the great beyond and whether we as humans have any control over our lives.

SATIETY

The shore birds
eat their fill
and yet still
never give themselves
over to the question
how tide decides
what to take,
what to leave.

Margaret B. Ingraham
from Proper Words for Birds

Playing the Hydrogen Jukebox

2009-01-22T19:01:11Z

Leading up to our 44th president's inauguration came Georgetown University's and American Opera Theater's production of Hydrogen Jukebox by Philip Glass based on a libretto of poems by Allen Ginsberg. On January 16, 2009, the Dresser had the pleasure of experiencing this Washington premier to a sold-out house in the University's Gonda Theatre at the Davis Performing Arts Center.

THE EYEBALL KICK

This song cycle, often called a chamber opera, made its fully staged premier in 1990 at the Spoleto Music Festival, which had also commissioned the work. The title Hydrogen Jukebox comes from Ginsberg's long poem Howl and the phrase is what Ginsberg called an "Eyeball Kick" --two unlikely things put together that might represent something weak with something strong, a mix of high versus low culture, a juxtapositioning of sacred versus profane. The collection of songs presents a portrait of America from the 1950s through the late 1980s and deals with such social issues as the anti-war movement, the sexual revolution, drugs, eastern philosophy, and matters of the environment. If another production gets mounted, do not bring young impressionable children because Ginsberg lets it all hang out in his colorful language.

What struck the Dresser immediately was how contemporary the piece seemed with its mention of Bush (albeit Bush Daddy and not the Decider son who has thankfully retreated back to his Texas ranch), Allah versus Jaweh, violence, drugs, same sex love songs (e.g. "The Green Automobile"), and the yearning for a natural landscape in the midst of a huge city. What also hit the Dresser foursquare was how accessible Philip Glass's music is in this 90-minute piece. The music actually seemed less repetitious than what is Glass's usual approach.

OF SLOW LIGHTNING AND COWBELLS

What the Dresser adored about the music was its whimsical soprano sax and often droll percussive sounds--lots of woodblock and cowbell taps. And yes, Glass does love percussion in spite of no percussion in his Gandhi opera Satyagraha. And the Dresser was indeed reminded of the music of Satyagraha in the opening number of American Opera Theater's (AOT) production of Hydrogen Jukebox:

"Lightning's blue glare fills Oklahoma plains, the train rolls east casting yellow shadow on grass Twenty years ago approaching Texas, I saw sheet lightning cover Heaven's corners... An old man catching fireflies on the porch at night watched the Herd Boy cross the Milky Way to meet the Weaving Girl... How can we war against that?" (From Iron Horse, 1972)

Picture the words drawn from Ginsberg's poem above accented by flashes of slow lightning and an able tenor singing serenely on a stage, nearly bare except for boxes to stand on (representing a cliff) and occasional projections. This is how AOT's artistic director Tim Nelson filled his stage: with accomplished student singers or recent graduates, minimal props, interesting lighting accents, and well-selected projections. And hey, the costumes by Heather Lockard, but particularly the shoes had the Dresser drooling. The dancing was made all the more agreeable by those splendid shoes.

JUKEBOX REMIX

Thinking outside the box, Tim Nelson produced a different Hydrogen Jukebox from the original versions (including the 1993 Nonesuch recording that features the voice of soprano Elizabeth Futral and Allen Ginsberg as narrator) and he added three more singers to the original list of six. Nelson's intention by reordering the songs was to create more of a dramatic arc and to feature what is more universal. Here's what Nelson had to say in email exchange with the Dresser:

In the recording, there were several movements not recorded. Those included "Patna Benares Express," "And the Great Rush," "The Long Stone Streets," "Consulting I-Ching," and "How Sick I Am." The latter two were originally in the first part (where we had the instrumental movement "Mad Rush"). We moved them to the second half to provide movements about spiritual and emotional emptiness that can afflict modern society. "And the Great Rush" has the same bass line and melody as "P.O Box Calcutta" (or something like that). We cut that movement and just included the one that is left out of the recording. That is the only movement we cut, and the instrumental movement "Mad Rush" is the only one we added (it is originally a piano piece of its own). "Green Automobile" was originally after "Aunt Rose." We moved it into the first half because we felt it depicted the American dream which was conceived in the automobile. It also made a nice transition into "Crossing the Nation" which is all about air travel.

The Dresser thinks that without seeing this production more than once and knowing at least the Nonesuch recording, it would be hard to say how successful Nelson was in strengthening the storyline. What came across to the Dresser as previously stated is that the piece vibrated with contemporary events and concerns. And the Dresser and her seatmate left wanting to see and hear the work again. The last number which is also the way the original production ended is a New Age barbershop quartet kind of piece called "Father Death Blues" and this piece sent the Dresser and her friend out into the frigid night humming and glowing. There were no bombs dropped in this appealing production.

Here the Dresser gives Allen Ginsberg the last word.

FATHER DEATH BLUES
(DON'T GROW OLD, Part V)

Hey Father Death, I'm flying home 
Hey poor man, you're all alone 
Hey old daddy, I know where I'm going 
 
Father Death, Don't cry any more 
Mama's there, underneath the floor 
Brother Death, please mind the store  

Old Aunty Death Don't hide your bones 
Old Uncle Death I hear your groans 
O Sister Death how sweet your moans  

O Children Deaths go breathe your breaths 
Sobbing breasts'll ease your Deaths 
Pain is gone, tears take the rest  

Genius Death your art is done 
Lover Death your body's gone 
Father Death I'm coming home  

Guru Death your words are true 
Teacher Death I do thank you 
For inspiring me to sing this Blues  

Buddha Death, I wake with you 
Dharma Death, your mind is new 
Sangha Death, we'll work it through  

Suffering is what was born 
Ignorance made me forlorn 
Tearful truths I cannot scorn 

Father Breath once more farewell 
Birth you gave was no thing ill 
My heart is still, as time will tell.

by Allen Ginsberg

500 Clown Makes an Elephant Deal

2008-12-25T17:44:00Z

So the Dresser, being bored with the music selection during a big dance party at a fabulous house in DC's Rock Creek Park this holiday season, asked her friend Victoria, what was the elephant deal? OK, here's what the two of them knew going in--the University of Maryland commissioned 500 Clown to do a new work. The work would be developed with selected students during a 500 Clown residency at the University. On December 14, the last day of 500 Clown and the Elephant Deal, the Dresser and her friend Victoria showed up at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center Kogod Theatre and in an effort to stay out of the action of the play, the Dresser carefully selected seats, knowing from having seen 500 Clown Macbeth not to sit up front or on the aisle.

NEW OR OLD?

In the director's note of the playbill, Leslie Buxbaum Danzig confesses that back in 2006, her group started working with composer/lyricist John Fournier on an idea to adapt Bertolt Brecht's play Mann Ist Mann (A Man's a Man) during a three-year residency at University of Chicago and this is how 500 Clown and the Elephant Deal at the University of Maryland got started. In Brecht's play, one of the characters asks, what is an elephant compared to a man?

Now, what about the elephant deal? OK, the Dresser isn't there yet, just like she wasn't one with the Cajun/zydeco selections at the holiday party. Here is what she knows about A Man's a Man. This comic play about a naïve man who is made into a killing machine premiered in 1926, but between 1924 and 1938, Brecht rewrote the piece at least ten times. One part of the play became a one-act surreal farce called The Elephant Calf. In The Elephant Calf, the naïve man whose name is Gayly Gay is a baby elephant accused of murdering his mother.

LOOKING FOR A PATSY

Are we there yet--the elephant deal? And why didn't the Dresser ask the hosts of the dance party to play more swing which is what she prefers? Dance etiquette says a dancer needs to shut up and follow; therefore she enjoyed the art on the walls and the pick-up live jamming of folk tunes being done in a backroom of the house. Now here's a sketch of what took place on December 14. Like 500 Clown Macbeth, the first order of business was for the players to interact with the audience and make late-arrivers to 500 Clown and the Elephant Deal part of the show. And this was pretty intimidating because the three players starting the show were dressed in army fatigues and like the opening of A Man's a Man, the soldiers were looking for a patsy.

MORE BUST PLEASE

The next scene (and mind you, all of this show is fluid with no intermission, no set changes, and no pause between scenes) brought Madam Barker (played by 500 Clown Molly Brennan) climbing into the audience from the back of the house (this happened in 500 Clown Macbeth too). She set up the play and acted as a middleman between the soldiers and the musicians who were at the back of the staging area. The setting is East Berlin, this is her cabaret, and she confesses to having done "some terrible things."

The Madam also asked the audience to invoke their imaginations to provide what might be missing, like the chair she planned to sit on. So while she went on about the missing chair, the soldiers scrambled in the darkened theater and plunked down a chair to the great "surprise" of Mme Barker who thanked the audience for their powers of imagination that had "moved matter" and then the madame pulled on the bodice of her blouse and said, "Now do my tits." (Bada bing! Ah, the burlesque!)

ALL THE ROADS TAKEN

A series of songs, some of them smooth jazz, some of them tango, some of them rock, ensued from this point including one that is about an elephant deal. Name-dropping--Myrna Loy, Oscar Wilde, Mack the Knife--happens. Quotations from known literary works occur--for example, from Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" came the line "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood." And most importantly a patsy though not really a Gayly Gay (played by 500 clown Adrian Danzig) is found in the audience and his girl friend is dragged into the action of the play.

Eventually the music morphed from delicious original to stolen (shh, don't tell anyone!)--there are riffs on the samba song "Brazil" and "Jumping Jack Flash" (remind the Dresser some time to tell you how in Prague through her bedroom window, the Rolling Stones serenaded her with this song). The Dresser also was reminded of game playing by Cocky and Sir in The Roar of Grease Paint, the Smell of the Crowd--why? Because the rules of the game changed or a new game was called when the alpha male started to lose.

HOWLING AT MY MOM IN THE DRIVING RAIN

What the Dresser liked best about 500 Clown and the Elephant Deal was the clever song lyrics (how about "The Ax of Life" or "I'm So Sorry, Mom"), the way Mme Barker could belt out a song, the movements of the big-eyed girlfriend of the patsy (played by Tzveta Kassabova), the spotlight made out of a series of nested paint buckets, and the talkback session with the cast after the action of the play finished. Process is what 500 Clown is all about and that is what the Dresser loves. What the Dresser felt was missing was the thrilling circus moves done on the gymnasium bars. Well, the show is still a work in progress, so the Dresser is sure things will change in the next production.

And by the way, while Victoria thinks the elephant deal might be something whacky, the Dresser believes it involved death-by-falling in a big pachyderm thud from the gymnasium bars by the soldier called Skip (played by founding 500 Clown performer Paul Kalina and "didn't that hurt" someone asked the post-show dazed-looking Kalina in the talk back) and so the Dresser, despite some interesting characters like the Cajun bozo wearing lime green pants, a pale red shirt, black leather jacket, and black bucket hat, left the party at 1 a.m., having waded through twelve inches of coats thrown down on the coat closet floor to grab her still-hanging wrap (well, actually her husband did, the Dresser thinking he had less scruples about walking on the carelessly placed coats) and she didn't stick around to hear what the music was like later though she told Victoria if a woman with a green violin showed up to play live zydeco she would have stayed and maybe even danced.

The Dresser thinks there should be more to Madam Barker's story and so ends this ramble with a poem from Cass Dalglish's Humming the Blues, a collection of poems inspired by Nin-meSar-ra, Enheduanna's Song to Inanna.

THEN THE MUSIC ENDS

and I'm left alone in the dark, whispering my songs like a bird in the night.
I'm Enheduanna, I'm your priest. I'm your poet, but tell me, Innanna, am I sacred
or am I taboo? I've fallen into the hands of shadows, and as a smoldering south
wind blows cinders through the strings of my harp, smoky shapes rub dust
on my cheeks and cover my mouth, my song, my wild honey blessings. I try
to call to you, "Where is my voice?" But my mouth tangles your chants,
it twists your blessings. I try again, "Sister, do I pray? Sister, do I surrender?
Where is my voice? Where are my sweet words, the happiness I had in the
mountain crocus? My saffron satisfaction?

By Cass Dalglish
from Humming the Blues

Celebrating Elliott Carter and Randy Hostetler

2008-12-20T12:03:44Z

This past fall, the Dresser entered the Living Room of Randy Hostetler where a tenth anniversary concert of experimental music played. Not without regret the event receded into the past before the Dresser could apply her fingers to her keyboard to make note of the October 13, 2008, program held at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. (Yes, this is the school where President-elect Obama is sending his daughters.) What has brought The Randy Hostetler Living Room Music Project concert back into view was a Library of Congress concert in tribute to Elliott Carter on the occasion of his 100th birthday December 11, 2008.
A number of people who either participated in or attended the Living Room concert also were seen at the Carter tribute concert reminding the Dresser of the earlier concert. Furthermore, one does not have to search very hard to see that concerts including the music of the wunderkind Randy Hostetler, who died at the age of 32, invariably showcase the music by the esteemed centenarian Elliott Carter. After all, experimental classical music commands a small but rarefied audience.

CARTER'S ONE HUNDREDTH

First the Dresser will talk about the more recent concert which was one of many mounted around the world in honor of Carter. Carter was in New York on his birthday at a tribute concert there. The Library of Congress program was spearheaded by composers Steve Antosca and Judith Shatin both of whom were premiering compositions inspired by Carter's thematic interests in time and wind. The McKim Fund of the Library of Congress commissioned both Antosca's and Shatin's new works. Antosca, as Artistic Director of the accomplished Verge Ensemble (all the musicians who played at the Carter concert were Verge members), was also the concert's co-producer with the Library of Congress.

TIME OUTSIDE OF TIME

Antosca's piece "kairos - time outside of time for violin, harpsichord, and computer" opened the tribute. The Dresser felt transported beyond Earth into space. But since the Dresser just read in John Adams's memoir Hallelujah Junction that there is "no music in outer space because there is no air to transport the vibrations," the Dresser must be influenced by György Ligeti's music in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A space Odyssey. Antosca's composition seems to be about texture and color, but the underpinnings are complex rhythms. Violinist Lina Bahn and harpsichordist Lura Johnson responded brightly to the computerized sounds manipulated by Antosca from the rear of the Coolidge Auditorium.

WRITING IN THE WIND

Next on the program were three separate compositions by Carter: "Scrivo in Vento for solo flute" played by Carole Bean, two movement from Eight Pieces for Four Timpani executed by percussionist William Richards, and "Enchanted Preludes for flute and cello played by Bean and Tobias Warner on cello. Of these three compositions, the Dresser enjoyed best the solo flute number that featured a fluid and seductive melody with odd bursts of tooting. "Scrivo" is based on Francesco Petrarca's (Petrarch in English) lyric sonnet and the Dresser understands the touting to be the wind interrupting the poet's writing.

Shatin's four-movement work Tower of the Eight Winds for violin and piano opened the second half of the program. For the Dresser, this was the pièce de résistance and she would like to hear this again. While Shatin is known for her electronic music, the instrumentation was solely acoustic. The Dresser characterizes the four movements of Tower (all named for specific winds) as follows: "Taku" (a gusty October through March Juneau, Alaska wind): intense, very emotionally engaging; "Barber" (a wind carrying freezing spray): delicate; "Caver" (a gentle breeze of the Hebrides): lyric, especially played by the agile Lina Bahn on violin; and "Williwaw" (a sudden blast of wind originating in the snow and ice covered mountains and moving forcefully through the Aleutian Islands and Straits of Magellan): soulful and strong.

The program concluded with work by Carter--two more movements from Eight Pieces for Four Timpani and A Mirror on Which to Dwell for Soprano and Chamber Orchestra. The latter composition is based on six poems by Elizabeth Bishop. The Dresser liked the setting of the fourth poem "Insomnia" and the fifth poem "View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress." What appealed to the Dresser's ear in both of these settings was the musical texture. Particularly appealing in poem 5 was the voice of the clarinet. The Dresser thinks soprano Kathryn Hearden gave a reasonably good performance of particularly difficult music.

RANDY'S WAKE

By comparison, the Carter tribute seemed conservative in the wake of the Living Room concert where an empty armchair sat on the stage for Randy Hostetler. Here's a quick scan of what was presented with each composition's date of premier, composer, performing musicians and a short comment.

Kalimba (2005) by Karlheinz Essl, played by Jenny Lin on toy piano with CD playback. The Dresser was both fascinated and annoyed with this piece. It was hard to tell where all the sounds were coming from. At first the Dresser wondered if the pianist was playing accompaniment to a recording. Some of the exotic sounds seemed like those from a gamelan ensemble. In one passage, annoying ascending and descending scales seemed like a waterfall. In another passage, the sound produced was like a loudly ticking mantel clock.

Electric blue pantsuit (2007) by Alexandra Gardner, played by Jennifer Choi on violin and Gardner on computer. The Dresser found this piece satisfyingly textured with the violin and computer engaging in conversation that included minimalist riffs.

Short Talks, for Piano and Drum (2008) by Greg Sandow, played by Jenny Lin. Although the Dresser found this piece gimmicky--the pianist plays the keys with one hand while the other taps what looks to be a homemade drum that sits in her lap--the piano line was graceful and the drum accents appealing.

Emerald Run (1990) by Michael Henderson, played by played by Jennifer Choi on violin. This piece began in almost a whisper and then progressed in volume with double stops.

Thracian Sketches (2003) by Derek Bermel, played by Bermel on clarinet. Bermel emerged from the darkened auditorium and progressed to the stage while he played. The piece sounded like a snake charmer riffing.

Try to Believe (2008) by Randall Woolf, played by Jennifer Choi on violin with UMBC students of Eric Dyer working with film projection. This work was a kaleidoscope of images that put the lush jazzy music in the background.

SchiZm (1994) by Derek Bermel, played by Bermel on clarinet and Ruth Rose on piano. The Dresser found this piece to be an engaging mix of texture and tempi that ends with tango.

8 Ball (1986) by Randy Hostetler, played by Jenny Lin on piano with 8 ball. This is a performance piece to see. The pianist, regulated by a metronome, played the keys with her elbows, the sides of her hands, and juggled an 8 ball.

Five V+W Songs (1928-1938) by Jaroslav Jezek with arrangement and singing translation by Maurice Saylor sung by tenor Ryan Murphy and played by Ben Bokor, alto sax; Ben Redwine, clarinet and tenor sax; Davy DeArmond, trumpet; Joel Borrelli-Boudreau, trombone; Blair Goins, tuba; Tony Asero, percussion; Jeffery Newberger, violin; and J. J. Wright, piano. All sorts of zany things go on in the playing of this five-part work. Most memorable was in Part I "Life is Chance," the violin was held like it was a ukulele and plucked. In Part II "A Ghost is Haunting the House, the music has roaring Twenties sound complete with wood block and whistle accents. Part 4 "Tragedy of the Water Nix" and Part 5 "It's Clothes that Make the Man" have whimsical touches. The Dresser thinks Jezek's jazzy piece makes a party. The Dresser wanted to dance in the aisle.

COMING TO IN THE AFTERLIFE

The Dresser feels that these two concerts married with her reading of John Adams's memoir Hallelujah Junction has opened a large door into the world of experimental and electronic music. In fact, she thinks these experiences have an afterlife in the Dresser's tool kit of how to process what's new in the landscape of classical music. Here's Kevin Prufer's take on what comes after. The Dresser thinks the poem, besides drawing on the themes of time and wind, captures how artists, struggling with what is experimental and "on the edge," fare.

THE AFTERLIFE

Here are boys, still weak. When they speak 
......................................................................... snow falls from their lips. 
Pale of hand and cheek, the motors that whirred in their chests 
have failed.
+
Their new city--buildings like a scrim 
.............................................................. a god unfurled for them 
so it waves in the wind.
+
Lovely, strange, and chill. 
The boys are laughing weakly in the street
+
so the snowbanks build and stir. 
.........................................................It is a city of lost children, 
of failures: the weak-hearted, pigeon-toed, transparent lispers,
the recently dead who have no name for it,   ........................................................................ or do not care
+
to name it. An empty time they had, coming here--
..................................................................................... a long ride 
on a quiet train, and now, on the moonlit avenue, 
they talk among themselves. 
.................................................. A boredom, one says, over the rails.
Someone nods. I was thinking of the good things, candy,
when at last the coughing stopped. 

+
For my part--I have grown
............................................... accustomed,
My window that overlooks more buildings and the bay,
.......................................................................................... the voices 
and the endless snow. Like anyone, of course,
+
I expected a better landscape--a warmer breeze,
................................................................................. a breath, a relaxation 
of the senses. Cancelled, cancelled. A passage like moving 
from one town to another, warmer town,  .....................................................................but the city is new, 
the population pale, unsteady. When at last they covered me up-- 
the coughing stopped. 
........................................ I counted on a god and, thus,
+
judgment--a smile from above, a You have passed or not. A hand 
from the clouds to lift me up, 
................................................... a gentle voice to call me 
blameless. 
................. The boys in the street below 
search for their wallets. The city squats on the bay, and I, 
who am one of them, 
................................... smile at the squalls from their mouths
+
as, from far away, another train pulls into the station, 
sighs, and, with a shudder, 
............................................... stops.

Kevin Prufer
from National Anthem

Photos from the Elliott Carter Concert by David Jones

The Mysteries of Grey Gardens

2008-11-24T22:21:19Z

Before the Dresser can make any cogent remarks about Studio Theatre of Washington, DC's production of the Tony award-winning musical Grey Gardens with book by Doug Wright, music by Scott Frankel and lyrics by Michael Korie, she needs to reconstruct why she wanted to see this documentary-turned-Broadway-hit.

LET ME COUNT THE WAYS

Reason number one: she is favorably familiar with some of the operatic libretti by Michael Korie and most recently The Grapes of Wrath.

Reason number two: every political family in the public limelight has their back rooms of relatives who embarrass them. This was the case for the former First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy whose aunt and cousin are the eccentric protagonists of Grey Gardens. As the United States moves closer to the day when President-elect Barack Obama moves into the White House, the issue of a problematic relative (a Kenyan aunt in trouble with the U.S. Immigration Service) has already surfaced. So understanding one political family's scandal often informs another's.

Reason number three: The show got ten Tony nominations, including Best Musical. The story has a life of its own. Besides being based on the film documentary, there are also two plays inspired by the story--Little Edie & the Marble Faun and A Few Small Repairs--as well as a film made for HBO by the same name. Furthermore, fans who saw the Broadway production multiple times were known to dress up in odd costumes.

NOT EXACTLY MOMMY DEAREST

Like the oddball film Running with Scissors, the story of Grey Gardens involves a would-be artist (poet in Scissors; singer in Gardens) who creates problems for her child. In both Scissors and Gardens, the man of the house quickly steps out of the picture. Both works are based on the lives of real people. The antics of real people are often more puzzling than fictitious characters and the Dresser likes to think about the complexity of puzzling characters.

The two-act musical with a prologue is set at the East Hampton estate known as Grey Gardens. The prologue and second act take place in 1973 and the first act, in 1941. The hinging event is an engagement party for Little Edie Beale and her fiancé Joseph Kennedy, Jr., the older brother of the U.S. president-to-be John F. Kennedy. At the party is prepubescent Jacqueline Bouvier and her younger sister Lee. The party is spoiled by the big Edie's intention to use the party guests as an audience for her singing performance, but worse occurs when Edie scares off Joe Kennedy either as a way to protect her daughter from Joe's chauvinism or because she (the mother) is jealous of her daughter's good fortune. The second act reveals an aged mother and daughter living together with an uncounted but impossibly large population of cats and raccoons among the ruins of the once splendid estate.

IS THE MUSIC CONTAGIOUS OR JUST THE COSTUMES?

The music like any popular Broadway musical is catchy and even infectious, but in that old way of musicals of the 1930s and '40s. Especially songs like "The Revolutionary Costume." By act II, Little Edie has morphed from a debutante sought by the most powerful men in the United States (other suitors were Howard Hughes and J. Paul Getty) to a whacky over-the-hill spinster who thinks wearing her skirts upside down (waistband at the knees, if you please, with the hem gathered up and tied at the waist) is a trendsetting revolution in fashion. The lyrics compliment the perky song. Here's a small snatch of Little Edie's fashion philosophy from this song: "The best kind of clothes for a protest pose is this ensemble of pantyhose, pulled over the shorts, worn under the skirt that doubles as a cape." Part of this number involves spoken dialogue such as this repartee about East Hampton, "They can get you for wearing red shoes on a Thursday. It's a mean, nasty Republican town." But hey! Although Jackie and Lee came back in real life to save their relatives from being thrown out of their house (Jackie put $25,000 into the house for repairs) for health code violations, the democratic relatives were more concerned about political embarrassment than the well being of their aunt and cousin. (And the Bouvier sisters were not seen or spoken about in Act II.)

THEN THERE IS THE MATTER OF DOUBLES

Barbara Walsh who plays Little Edie in the Prologue and the second act, but takes the role of big Edie in Act I, carries the show as the actress must in this play. She is convincing as the debutante's annoying mother who is trying to steal the attention away from her blonde daughter (played by Jenna Sokolowski). In short, Walsh covers the craziest roles with convincing equanimity. To someone like the Dresser whose mother for many decades could wear the Dresser's clothes and look good in them, having the same actress play the younger mother and later play the ageing daughter presented that torturous nightmare that elicits from the Dresser--Oh, my God, don't let me turn into my mother!

Barbara Broughton plays big Edie in her seniority in the way the Dresser is accustomed to seeing performances by Vanessa Redgrave. Yes, big Edie is whacky but her whacky is more eccentric than crazy. Besides, she plays the old mother who still likes to sing, but she doesn't wear her clothes upside down. The song "Jerry Likes My Corn" that the old mother sings to a young man who comes to visit is both endearing and, well, corny.

In the intimate space of Studio's Metheny Theatre, this is the perfect musical to take a grown up family to, including the grands and the greats. It is entertaining without being controversial. It's great fun to see the budding Jackie Bouvier soon-to-be one-half of the Camelot presidential couple (Jackie and Jack Kennedy) as a little girl. Actually, Jackie's presence in Grey Gardens provides a nostalgic vibration to the young Obama family. So many people want to be at the Obama inauguration, just like my mother did and she made a fancy gown and went to one of the Kennedy inauguration balls.

The Dresser, however, found the clever lyrics and formulaic music of Grey Gardens cloying after a whole evening of this. She wanted to know why the aged Little Edie reputedly was bald. The audience sees her wearing turbans that not only cover her scalp but also her neck. (Supposedly these turbans were fashioned from Little Edie's sweaters.) A little sleuthing on the Internet turned up an essay that suggested at some point in her days sequestered at Grey Gardens with her ailing mother, Little Edie set fire to her hair. At only one point, the character Little Edie slips and says her estranged father wanted to have her committed. Committed is that polite way in America of saying the person needs to be put into an institution for the insane. Something the Dresser remembers was whispered about her own mother.

Something else that bothered the Dresser as she was watching the show come to its close was the character Jerry, the teenage handyman who visits the old mother. What the Dresser didn't realize during the show was that Matthew Stucky played both Jerry and Joe Kennedy, Jr. Little Edie worries that Jerry will move into the house and replace her. For some reason unknown to us, Little Edie calls Jerry The Marble Faun, after Nathaniel Hawthorne's strange romantic novel. The Dresser kept wondering when Jerry was going to take advantage of the two women, but that doesn't happen and the women don't seem to be preying on him either. Another search on the Internet turned up an interview with Jerry Torre who was the real-life handyman at Grey Gardens. It turns out Jerry is gay.

And so what's the verdict? The Dresser liked Running with Scissors better than Grey Gardens. Scissors was a tougher look at a dysfunctional parent-child relationship.

In the poem "What Drove Me into Math," Marion Deutsche Cohen, author of Crossing the Equal Sign, explores the subject of mystery in the context of domesticity. If Little Edie Beale had been less dependent on her mother, why she might have outgrown the game of dress up and learned how to multiply.

WHAT DROVE ME INTO MATH

What drove me into math
was not Fermat's last.
I preferred the factoring of the difference of two squares.
And cantor's stretched-out one-dimensional lace.
Also, the center of a circle is inside the circle.

What drove me into math
was not the Mystery of the Unknown
but the mystery of the known.

Other early influences:
the point of light just happening to coincide with the only visible
....... corner of our living room
those dark-red shapes when you close your eyes tight
and that spot, that nightmare
of many bloody colors.

by Marion Deutsche Cohen
published in Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics, edited by Sarah Glaz & JoAnne Growney

Photos by Scott Suchman

Between Trains: The Nakedness of Becoming

2008-11-23T15:11:03Z

Between Trains by Juanita Rockwell and directed by Leslie Felbain in it's first fully staged production at the University of Maryland Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center is a theatrical experience aimed at addressing all the senses. Start with water dripping from the ceiling of the performance space and puddling on the floor. Eventually, in the mini lake, Dawkes (played by Aaron Bliden), a benign crazy man, floats his toy sailboat. He sits in the shallow water, but did the Dresser mention Wendell, the protagonist who emerges from a fetal curl at the edge of this lake? Wendell played by Kelly McGuigan stands up slowly in the darkened theater. Her youthful female figure and blond hair conjure Botticelli's Venus in his painting "The Birth of Venus," and, yes, Wendell is naked, though quickly shielded from view with a shocked stranger's newspaper. Soon after, she finds a coat in a valise left by a careless traveler.

ONE SIDE MAKES YOU LARGER

Hunger presents itself as a basic human need--Wendell, who first has no clothes, also has no food. When she finds a dog biscuit in the pocket of the newly acquired coat, the owner of the so-called cookie makes her read what is inscribed on the hard surface of the bone-shaped biscuit. "For Dawkes." "That's me," he says. She gives it back saying she is so hungry, but he licks it, then bites into it. Is he a dog masquerading as a human? Wendell, who has now migrated from Venus on the half shelf to the naked Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden, takes on the life of Alice-in-Wonderland--what happens if she had eaten the bone cookie? Would Wendell, like Alice, grow into a giant? A midget?

The Dresser doesn't know, because the scene quickly changed to a primitive version of the Tom Jones eating scene (in the film based on Henry Fielding's novel by the same name). Carrying a picnic thrown into a checkered cloth, Momo and Mimi erupted on stage bantering in a strange language of their own making. Mimi says, "Warm encrusted lamborghini mahi mahi xbox botox." Momo answers, "Sweet godiva spagghettini drown in oil well buttered rolex." Is this a food fight or are they playing like two rutting mammals ready to engage in a procreative act? As Wendell hid under a railroad station bench, Momo (Mark David Halpern) and Mimi (Judith Ingber) carelessly allowed an apple to escape from the picnic cloth and the apple rolled to Wendell's open hand. Later like Eve, she got her bite, but no more before Mimi snatched the apple from her mouth. A compassionate hot dog vendor (Zachary Fernebok) with a tiny points-of-light umbrella (don't expect this parasol to shield the user from sun or rain) struck a Depression era bargain with her and she walked away with not one, but two hot dogs.

SOJOURN OF A NAÏVE

While the audience, sitting in two sets of seats that faced each other with the performance space positioned like a runway between, did not smell those hot dogs, the man smoking a cigarette made up for that lacking olfactory experience. The auditory was best experienced through the sound design and original songs of Chas Marsh. Even before the show began, musicians circulated through the audience. One played a saxophone; another a guitar and ukulele. Plain lyrics were married to simple melodies. This musical approach worked for a sojourn of a naïve like Wendell. For example, the lyrics to "No Sense" is set to a lilting ditty that sticks in the head.

one word followed by another word
followed by another word
followed by another word
shattering music
making no sense
shattering music
no sense

PROCESS, PROGRESS, STUCKNESS

The Dresser believes that she has provided enough of the playwright's process to say that the play is about process, the process of sensing and becoming. As the playwright states in her notes, Between Trains is a journey through the six realms of Samsara. Those realms from bottom to top deal with hell, hungry ghosts, animals, humans, demi-gods, and gods. It's a subject to pour a lifetime of study, but the Dresser thinks the audience can be ignorant about the playwright's inspiration and still leave the play with a lot to think about. From the beginning, the Dresser got a lot to ponder from Rockwell's New York workshop of this play done in 2006.

What worked best about this production seen November 19, 2008, was the moments of stop-action dramatic imagery and that the cast, though for the most part are students, did outstanding work in their roles. Some of the actors performed several roles. Over the last couple of years, the Dresser has seen most of these actors in other productions directed by Leslie Felbain, including The Ash Girl, The Green Bird, Mad Breed, and What's a Little Death.

By accident (when she saw the publicity photos), the Dresser discovered that she missed a dramatic projection--the face of a character called professor was projected in the pond. From where the Dresser sat, she not only could not see it, but had no idea what Wendell was doing on her hands and knees at the edge of the puddled water. In fact, the Dresser believes that this scene contributed to the Dresser thinking the 90-minute intermission-less play needed to be cut by ten to fifteen minutes.

Wendell's journey deals with stuckness particularly at the end of the play as her train approaches. When the train comes, does she board? In "John Deere," Michael Wurster grapples with the stark reality of getting stuck in the journey out of his past.

JOHN DEERE

I'm wearing this gold and green t-shirt.
John Deere ....... Moline, Illinois......... est. 1837

I was born in Moline August 8, 1940.
My father worked for John Deere at the time.
He was an industrial engineer.

When I was a child my cousin Martha,
who was several years younger than I,
bit me on the nose.

When Katho and I went west
to Gothenburg Nebraska at Christmas 1982,
we stayed overnight in Moline.

We stayed overnight at an Econo Lodge
right across from a John Deere facility.

In the morning
we had breakfast at a Denny's
right beside the motel.
Outside the window we could see
a big billboard: John Deere.

When we got back on the road after breakfast,
I said to Katho,
"I think that was cousin Martha
in the booth behind us at Denny's."

Katho said,
"Why didn't you speak to her?"

What would I have said?

by Michael Wurster
published in Along These Rivers: Poetry & Photography from Pittsburgh, edited by Judith R. Robinson & Michael Wurster

Photos by Stan Barouh

Finding the Russian in Carmen

2008-11-20T16:13:10Z

Now that the Dresser knows about the connection between George Bizet's opera Carmen and Alexander Pushkin's poem "The Gypsies," she believes that she has found a new way to think about her departed, green-eyed mother. But first, let the Dresser backup and provide some anchoring details.

SEXUAL ALLURE ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON

On Sunday, November 16, 2008, the Dresser attended a performance of Washington National Opera's production of Carmen. In the lead role for that day's show was the powerhouse mezzo Denyce Graves. And even performing for a matinee audience typically filled with elderly operagoers, Ms. Graves exuded an unbridled sexuality that exceeded the energy expended by her leading men--Thiago Arancam as Don José and Alexander Vinogradov as the bullfighter Escamillo. The Dresser suspects that both Arancam, who bills himself as the Italian Brazilian lirico spinto tenor (spinto meaning "pushed" and characterized by the capability of being heard over a full Romantic orchestra), and Vinogradov, who possesses a rich bass-baritone, were capable of more vibratory passion in their singing. She also thought the chorus was dragging down the energy.

What was the low energy about--Sunday should be a day of rest? For this performance, Steven Gathman substituted for conductor Julius Rudel and therefore the conductor didn't have the connection with the players on stage? Everyone in the cast was so awed by Ms. Graves that they wanted to spend their energy absorbing her performance? The Dresser does not know--her eyes were fixed on the electrifying brightness of Washington's own diva. Denyce Graves graduated from the Duke Ellington Performing Arts School and she loves performing in Washington, DC, where audiences rightly stand up for her.

OPÉRA COMIQUE MEANS SINGING AND TALKING

Carmen, filled with some of the best known and loved operatic songs-- "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle" (Carmen's seductive Habanera "Love is a Rebellious Bird"), Carmen's lilting seguidilla folksong and dance tune "Près des remparts de Séville" ("Near the ramparts of Seville/At the place of my friend Lillas Pastia") and Escamillo's Toreador song ("Votre toast, je peux vous le rendre" ("Your toast, I can give it to you")--concerns the story of a fiercely independent gypsy woman who steals the soldier Don José from his fiancée, gets him into trouble with his commanding officer (who wants the sexual favors of Carmen), makes Don José choose between her life as a smuggler and the honest life of a soldier, and then dumps him for the bullfighter Escamillo. Although Carmen's fate is to die at the hands of Don José, this work is categorized as an opéra comique and was premiered in March 1875 at the Opéra Comique of Paris. The Dresser notes that according to the French operatic tradition, opéra comique combines singing with spoken dialogue, similar to the German Singspiel music drama (for example, Mozart's The Magic Flute). However, opéra comique derives from popular French vaudevilles.

PUSHKIN'S GYPSIES

The libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy is based on Prosper Mérimée 1845 novella Carmen. Mérimée's character Carmen was drawn from the real life Countess of Montijo, mother of Empress Eugénie of France (Eugénie was the wife of Napoleon III). Cycling back to the Dresser's opening statement, Mérimée's story was influenced by Pushkin's poem "The Gypsies," which Mérimée translated into French along with other works from Pushkin such as "The Queen of Spades." (Tchaikovsky, who was influenced by Bizet's Carmen, based his 1890 opera The Queen of Spades on Pushkin's short story.) What fascinated Mérimée about Pushkin was his attention to cruelty and psychological drama.

Pushkin's story of gypsies, like Mérimée's, concerns a man on the run from the law who takes refuge with gypsies. Unlike Mérimée's Carmen, the outlaw is the focus of Pushkin's tale. In the opera, Carmen's defiant challenge to Don José is to kill her or let her go. This comes directly from Pushkin's poem.

Since the death of her mother Rona, the Dresser has come to believe that her beautiful mother, born of a Russian father and who married five times (four husbands, the last one she married and divorced twice), deserves an opera. However, after the Dresser saw Denyce Graves play Carmen, the Dresser no longer feels the need to write a new libretto for the mother who once hurled a dinner plate at the Dresser's loyally loving dad.

In the operatic story of Carmen, jealousy flows around the gypsy with the fiery temper, particularly embodied by Don José. In the case of the Dresser's mother, the irony is that Rona was filled with jealousy over what she believed she did not have. In her poem "My Husband Discovers Poetry," Diane Lockward spins an unexpected study on jealousy.

MY HUSBAND DISCOVERS POETRY

Because my husband would not read my poems,  
I wrote one about how I did not love him.  
In lines of strict iambic pentameter,  
I detailed his coldness, his lack of humor.  
It felt good to do this.

Stanza by stanza, I grew bolder and bolder.  
Towards the end, struck by inspiration,  
I wrote about my old boyfriend,  
a boy I had not loved enough to marry 
but who could make me laugh and laugh. 
I wrote about a night years after we parted 
when my husband's coldness drove me from the house 
and back to my old boyfriend. 
I even included the name of a seedy motel 
well-known for hosting quickies. 
I have a talent for verisimilitude.

In sensuous images, I described 
how my boyfriend and I stripped off our clothes, 
got into bed, and kissed and kissed, 
then spent half the night telling jokes, 
many of them about my husband. 
I left the ending deliberately ambiguous, 
then hid the poem away 
in an old trunk in the basement.

You know how this story ends, 
how my husband one day loses something, 
goes into the basement, 
and rummages through the old trunk, 
how he uncovers the hidden poem  
and sits down to read it.

But do you hear the strange sounds 
that floated up the stairs that day, 
the sounds of an animal, its paw caught 
in one of those traps with teeth of steel? 
Do you see the wounded creature 
at the bottom of the stairs, 
his shoulders hunched over and shaking, 
fist in his mouth and choking back sobs? 
It was my husband paying tribute to my art.

Diane Lockward
from Eve's Red Dress

Photos by Karin Cooper

Lucrezia Borgia--WYSWIG? Not!

2008-11-04T15:27:35Z

Recently-old tags like babelicious, studly, and racy are the words that come to the Dresser's tongue about John Pascoe's new production of Lucrezia Borgia, a bel canto opera that first premiered in 1833 by composer Gaetano Donizetti with a libretto by Felice Romani based on Victor Hugo's play by the same name. On November 1, 2008, the Dresser attended Washington National Opera's packed opening night performance with Plácido Domingo conducting.

The story involves a ruthless, beautiful woman who encounters her grown up illegitimate son and thinks he could redeem all her evil doings. The trouble is her jealous husband believes this young man is his wife's lover and therefore wants the other man dead.

LUCREZIA, THE HOTTIE

In the starring role, Renée Fleming made a spectacular WNO singing debut though not because she is a master or mistress of the challenges presented by bel canto. With her décolleté and not-quite-spiky pixie haircut that is a new look not matching her publicity shots for this show, she proved to be the sexually alluring blonde even a lost son would rise or fall for. And initially Gennaro, Lucrezia's unacknowledged son, could tentpole over the magically babelicious woman who wakes him from a nap al fresco with a kiss.

Before you, Dear Reader, cry not, the Dresser must hurry on to say that although the spiky-haired blond, dishy, and full-throated tenor Vittorio Grigolo playing Gennaro (and you ask how is it possible with the same hairdresser that no one told him about Lucrezia, the Hottie?) was aroused by his poisonous mother, he really had the hots for his sword buddy Maffio Orsini. Whoa, Dude! Here's where things got heated up and were sooo not what they appeared.

EX-SQUEEZE ME--WHO'S KISSING WHO?

Lusty mezzo-soprano Kate Aldrich in a pants role plays Maffio Orsini. When Gennaro and Maffio kiss passionately, the Dresser lit up like a Vegas slot machine when all the lights and horns flash and blare. What exactly was happening on stage? That excellent young tenor Vittorio Grigolo (reputed to carry Pavarotti's torch sang the role of Rodolfo in the 2007 WNO production of La bohème), who surely most women and some men in the Kennedy Center were panting for, was kissing who? Oh, mezzo Kate Aldrich--a guy kissing a gal--but No! This was Gennaro kissing his male friend Maffio. Forget incest between two pieces of ear-and-eye candy, in this case, same-sex interaction was much more racy because it was so confusing.

ORGIA LIKE NO OTHER

And what happens when the boys party on? Well, Mistress Borgia, whose name Gennaro defiles by kicking off the "B" from "Borgia" which was mounted on a family monument, shows up looking for revenge at the Negroni palace for what is, in fact, an "orgia" (Italian for orgy). Wearing a suit of armor that mirrors her son's, she suspects the culprit is one of Gennaro's friends. Surprise! All the men who are friends of Maffio and Gennaro have been poisoned by the wine and ditto the lover boys. Gennaro goes after Lucrezia with a sword, but stops when she reveals that she is his mother. This is Gennaro's second time around at being poisoned that day by his mom's lethal wine. He knows Lucrezia can save him, but he refuses the antidote because she doesn't have enough to save Maffio.

Could it be that director, set-and-costume designer John Pascoe has given everyone in the audience something to rise to his or her feet for? In Washington, DC, the Dresser thinks that all too often audiences grant standing ovations to reasonable productions--or does this happen because people are anxious to dash out the door or unable to see the assembled full cast if they remain seated? Well, nonetheless, here was a little produced melodramatic opera where most of the music seems overly cheerful considering the number of people poisoned and the seamy sexual goings on. What the production had going in its favor were world-class singers in the major roles (the Dresser also appreciated the commanding bass Ruggero Raimondi as Duke Alfonso, Lucrezia's husband), handsome sets with lots of stony hard edges in keeping with the characters, and characters with surprising sex appeal. The language of Wayne's World aside, the Dresser found the production fascinating, but not because she loved the music or the story.

In her poem "Sappho's Voice," Gray Jacobik explores the contours of voice in the "perfect creature" "formed for poetry's sake"--that being Sappho. What John Pascoe and Renée Fleming have done with the character of Lucrezia Borgia is softened her sharp edges so that the audience feels sympathetic despite her vileness. Fleming does this largely with how she controls her voice, but also Donizetti's upbeat music deserves credit for Lucrezia's ability to countermand her detrimental behavior. Pascoe has set up an curious study of human behavior.

SAPPHO'S VOICE

I love the traffic of percussives in her voice,
her susurrations, her fricatives, the wave slaps
and ululations that run counterpoint, polyphonous

syllables that lift to words that run to sentences
so dazzling in intonation, one thinks of angels
with silver tablets on their silver laps composing

under olive trees in the Mediterranean
of the soul's true home. Well, she is a perfect
creature, a criatura, formed for poetry's sake,

so one ought to expect her voice to spill
across her lips as fluidly as water slips across
a lip of fountain stone or drips from the tips

of olive leaves after summer storms. I would
lick each drop, each word as it slips, filling
my spirit with the sound of her good sense.

Can grace turn on a voice, the way a body turns,
grace and the body in a kind of auditory spin,
or spinning flight that makes sound waves its sky?

Her voice leaps with light turned back upon itself,
light turning to sound then back to light;
now desire, now the mind's surrender to desire.

Gray Jacobik
from The Double Task

Photos by Karin Cooper

Kay Ryan and "This Laureate Thing"

2008-10-31T17:14:30Z

What excites the Dresser about Kay Ryan, the new United States poet laureate? After the Dresser heard Ryan during her inaugural reading at the Library of Congress on October 16, 2008, she bought two of her books--Say Uncle and Elephants Rocks--and she arranged to trade books with a friend who bought The Niagara River. What Ryan manages to stuff into a few spare lines--rhyme, metaphor, allusion, philosophy, wit, and cliché--surprised and delighted the Dresser.

BLUNT

If we could love
the blunt
and not
the point

we would
almost constantly
have what we want.

What is the
blunt of this
I would ask you

our conversation
weeding up
like the Sargasso.

LOVING BROMIDES

Like Gertrude Stein, Kay Ryan seems to be intent on recovering words that have lost their meaning, except Ryan bravely tackles platitudes and clichés. In fact, she said during this reading that she "loves bromides." What "Blunt" says to the Dresser might be understood by substituting some words: if we could love what is dull and not sharp, as in unlearned versus intelligent, we would not be disappointed but what and who mostly populate the world. Wryly, the poet suggests that a person could arrive at what is not spectacularly interesting--something akin to the tangle of seaweed in that strange part of the Atlantic Ocean (the Sargasso Sea)--and still maintain that mysterious human connection through interactive talking.

Here, the Dresser would drop back stubbornly and ask what is the point of this poem that seems to conjure up in the last word, Sargasso, a world beyond ordinary commerce. What world? In our world, the dangerous Bermuda Triangle, which is part of the Sargasso Sea, a sea defined by four ocean currents and not by the shores of any land. In the world of imagination, Sargasso alludes to Jean Rhys' 1966 novel The Wide Sargasso Sea, a story about a white Creole woman who seems to be the mad first wife of Jane Eyre's husband Edward Rochester. (Charlotte Bronte created Rochester and his wives in her 1847 novel entitled Jane Eyre.) To the Dresser's mind, Ryan delights in taking contrarian turns that remind the audience to stay alert.

TURNING UP THE LIGHT

Reported to be reclusive and fond of silence, Ryan completely defies that profile. The Dresser was amazed about how chatty and spontaneously witty Ryan was behind the Library of Congress mic. Ryan maintains that "you can say something so ridiculous and still have some truth in it." She says this after reading her poem "Lime Light."

LIME LIGHT

One can't work
by lime light.

A bowlful
right at
one's elbow

produces no
more than
a baleful
glow against
the kitchen table.

The fruit purveyor's
whole unstable
pyramid

doesn't equal
what daylight did.

The truth of this poem for Ryan is that a poet like herself is not comfortable working in the glow or limelight of the public eye. She prefers the literary kitchen where something as ordinary as a piece of citrus fruit can break through an abused idea or word like limelight to produce something initially silly such as the idea that a lime can produce light but later turns into a meditation on what produces the light that a writer--or anyone with a creative idea--needs in order to work.

RYAN IN A STEINIAN KITCHEN

The Dresser finds again that Ryan, in choosing ordinary objects and scenarios, has much in common with Gertrude Stein. Unlike Stein, who intended that anyone could read her carefully chosen, easy-to-understand, mostly Anglo Saxon words, Ryan usually slips in a word that is not so easily grasped. In "Blunt," she tosses out Sargasso and in "Lime Light," she inserts purveyor. A purveyor is someone who provides provisions, especially food. In the kitchen where the narrator of this poem sits thinking about the light that is not shining from a whole pyramid of green-skinned fruit, the supplier or purveyor seems intrusive. What's more, the poet says this pyramid is unstable as well as not up to a comparison with the natural light of day.

THIS LAUREATE THING

Choosing poems like "Lime Light" and "Blunt" for her inaugural reading in the most esteemed position of poetry in the United States says a lot about who Ryan is. Among her easily tossed off comments were such statements as "I'm used to coming into a half empty hall to give a reading. This laureate thing does it to you. I'll have to tell others about this." --she was reading to a packed hall with people standing along the walls and to an unseen group in another room watching her on a closed circuit monitor. Or this comment when she decided to start a poem over again, "I'm laureate, I can do this."

Having already had this conversation with a number of friends, the Dresser knows there will be many who will dismiss Ryan's work as incomplete and colorless, and they will say that the comparisons to Emily Dickinson will not hold under scrutiny. The Dresser believes Ryan, published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review and winner of such awards as the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from The Poetry Foundation in 2004, a Guggenheim fellowship the same year, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship as well as the Maurice English Poetry Award in 2001, will bring a whole new audience to poetry. The Dresser cheers the new laureate for that, and also intends to hear her again. Happily, the Dresser lets Ryan have the last words.

SAY UNCLE

Every day
you say,
Just one
more try.
Then another
irrecoverable
day slips by.
You will
say ankle,
you will
say knuckle;
why won't
you why
won't you
say uncle?

Poems quoted in this essay are drawn from Say Uncle published in the Grove Press Poetry Series, 1991.

The Red Face of a Bold Soprano

2008-10-07T21:09:51Z

For nine consecutive years, The New Yorker magazine has been hosting an annual festival led by the accomplished writers of the 83-year-old publication to celebrate well-known artists and politicians featured in issues of the magazine. Many of the events in the three-day festival this year focused on the 2008 presidential election with New Yorker staff and guests helping register New Yorkers who had not previously registered to vote.

UPSHAW: A CATALYST FOR NEW WORK

Photo by Dario Acosta

On October 4, 2008, the Dresser attended a low-key and nonpolitical talk between The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross (author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century) and soprano Dawn Upshaw. The image the Dresser left with was the embarrassment of a very down-to-earth performer who seems to be constantly judging herself. Emphasizing this behavior was a film clip showing director Peter Sellars coaching Upshaw about how he wanted her to make large gestures in a scene where she washes her hands. The intensity of self-doubt about whether she could move in the way Sellars suggests produced a poignant moment when Upshaw cupped Sellars face. Instantly the audience knew that this is part of Upshaw's process in finding the intensity required of her roles. And these roles tend to be characters that require thoughtful development because the operas are brand new.

Awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2007 because she represents "a catalyst for the creation of numerous works through her passionate advocacy of contemporary composers, both established and emerging," Upshaw sat anxiously on the stage of the Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater as she and Alex Ross watched herself in a video clip from Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin. Finnish composer Saariaho, who moved to Paris and was influenced by spectralist composers Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail, created L'Amour de loin for Upshaw. Other opportunities created for Upshaw include roles in such works as John Harbison's opera The Great Gatsby, John Adam's oratorio El Niño and two works by Osvaldo Golijov-- Ainadamar, a chamber opera, and Ayre, a song-cycle.

FROM A FAMILY WITH A MESSAGE

What's interesting about Upshaw's development as musician (this is the term she prefers for herself) is that she grew up in a family singing protest songs of the 1960's. (They called themselves the Upshaw Family Singers.) She quipped that hers was a "family with a message." She studied piano and oboe. While she loved oboe, she "felt best when singing." However, in high school she didn't make the top choir. If she had a dream, it was to become a singer-songwriter but she quickly rejoined that she had "no gift as a songwriter."

Revealing about what motivates her is that "satisfaction is not my goal" as is not ticking off, from a list, the top opera houses where most opera singers might want to perform. She says what interests her is process. However, the process that most interests her lately is working with young singers as she is doing at Bard College. She worries about them and said she was "not sure where [they] were headed still exists." Her best advice to them is to "build your own program with two to three other students and learn how to promote what your doing in your community." And she cautioned to do all of this for "the great love of it" and not expect any money for the effort.

A WHISPERED CONVERSATION

What surprised the Dresser about the event was that it had a hefty entrance fee of $35. Although the auditorium was respectably filled, she suspects that there were a number of seats filled without money changing hands by opera insiders and local university students. Given the current economic situation in the United States, the Dresser guesses that a lower-priced ticket might have encouraged more people to attend. Between Ross and Upshaw, certain subjects were touched on as if everyone in the dance theater knew what they knew. Understandably Upshaw's 2006 bout with cancer, which was the same cancer that killed Upshaw's dear friend soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, was mentioned quickly without any background. Connecting the dots after the Festival event, the Dresser has a fuller appreciation about why Upshaw seemed so circumspect as if she was guarding herself from too much public exposure. Also not mentioned was that Ross was awarded a 2008 MacArthur for "offering both highly specialized and casual readers new ways of thinking about the music of the past and its place in our future."

The Dresser believes that it would have been better for Ross and Upshaw to have more actively treated this occasion as an opportunity to teach the public about their amazing and laudable efforts to bring new classical music and operatic work into general public view. Ross has as much to offer on the subject as Upshaw. As it played out (and check out how Ross promoted the program on his website The Rest Is Noise with a colorful performance photo of Upshaw and the unusual audio clip of Upshaw singing from Osvaldo Golijov's Ayre), the event seemed like a whispered conversation dotted with a few colorful bursts of video footage and audio sound bytes.

In her poem "Silhouette of Woman Alone" from her new book Ashes in Midair, winner of the Many Mountains Moving Press Poetry Book Prize selected by Yusef Komunyakaa, Susan Settlemyre Williams evokes a woman defined and swallowed up by traumatic loss. While the poem exposes, it also creates the kind of dramatic tension that Dawn Upshaw develops in L'Amour de loin as Clémence, a 12th century woman loved from afar by a young, idealistic troubadour.

SILHOUETTE OF WOMAN ALONE

Defined by what's cut away:
Last name. Breast.
What's left after the cutting is silence.

White bath. Snow light on gray walls.
Two rooms close and cold as a snow fort.
The windows look blank

on other walls, a flat roof. She tilts the blinds
till nothing comes in but light. In the stillness
the razor's snick on her legs is loud.

And why bother? No one will know how
smooth she is all over. Ice sculpture
under the surgeon's white scrawl.

All the color cut away. She forgets
if she has color sealed inside. She only sees
how sleek her vacancy has grown.

Once she went out at two a.m.
to watch the meteors. Lay down on the pavement
and disappeared. Over her, stars

blindly scribbled the dark, their flight
sudden, then broken off.

Susan Settlemyre Williams
from Ashes in Midair