The Dressing

Cavalia: An Equine Love Affair

2009-09-26T17:45:14Z

Intelligence and balance are the operative words for Cavalia, a choreographed horse show with nimble riders, trainers cum horse whisperers (a recent Washington Post article said the main trainer Frédéric Pignon calls himself a horse listener), acrobats, aerialists, and impressive stagecraft with high tech features. On September 23, 2009, at Pentagon City in Washington, DC, the Dresser and her honey strolled into the Cavalia big top--the largest touring tent in North America--to partake of this spectacle.

THE HORSE: GOD'S GIFT TO MAN

The show, developed by Normand Latourelle a former Cirque du Soleil founder, began with a quiz projected on the curtains closing off the massive staging area. How many horses are involved with this show? 64. How many are stallions? 28. How many are mares? Zero. The Dresser's honey who owned and showed horses in the 1980s, whispered to her that it would take only one mare to cause a mutiny, even some of the 36 geldings (neutered males) would remember the allure of a mare in heat. Thus the show progressed with a tight shot of equine coupling (for the inexperienced eye, the image might have seemed all design void of reality) followed by the birth of a long-legged foal and then the first live horse--barely a yearling and the youngest member of the Cavalia stable--entered the arena unbridled and alone.

Several quotes such as "The horse is God's gift to man," an Arabian Proverb, were projected on the backdrop curtains and little by little, the audience learned how well loved the Cavalia horses are and how much these magnificent animals, many of them with long flowing manes and tails, are willing to do for their trainers. Pignon, with his own mane of flowing hair, ran joyfully with the herd. Predominately the horse prowess involves the discipline of dressage. While the Dresser's main squeeze was worried that Cavalia might be the equivalent of River Dance, even the chorus line effect of the show segment entitled "Carrousel," where eight mounted horses side step with absolute precision or are led through their paces including the high-level move known as the flying change, did not break the poetic mood that carries through the entire show.

NO BONDS OR BOUNDARIES

Threaded through the fluid paces of horses galloping, prancing, and even lying down as if they were household dogs are projected images of antiquities such as the Chinese terracotta soldiers with an accompanying terracotta horse. Yes, there are a few elements of the Wild West complete with lasso twirling and trick riding. There is also a daredevil episode of Roman riding involving four men riding four pairs of horses--each man standing with one leg on the back of one horse and the other leg on the back of the other horse.

Live musicians play an original music score by Michel Cusson, a Canadian composer known for his jazz compositions. The Dresser particularly took note and enjoyment of the music set for the cello and the bolero piece played for "Carrousel."

The Dresser's favorite scene was an aerial ballet called "La Vida" that included a white Lusitano stallion named Hades and a buckskin Lusitano stallion named Nacarado. While "La Vida" is sensual, it is not sexual. Throughout the show, the acrobats and aerialists added variety, demonstrating their impressive strength, balance, and daring, however, in the end, the humans were window dressing to the remarkable horses that give the illusion of having no bonds or boundaries. Is this show as awe-inspiring as Cirque du Soleil's "O"? No. Nonetheless, this is family entertainment of the highest order, and the Dresser recommends this as a great date night event, even if your honey is not an equestrian.

In Deborah Bogen's 12-part poem "Within the Porcelain Theater" from her award-winning book Landscape with Silos, the poet weaves together imagery in the section entitled "The Ingénue" that seems uncannily apt to those images experienced in the show Cavalia, where the horses are not broken but seem to be in harmony with the goodwill of their human caretakers.

THE INGÉNUE

What's your belief about the nature
of the body? She gathers her ritual objects

and tries to cultivate a reverence
for explanation. Sometimes her thoughts

are unbroken horses. She's glad
she never had to live on the streets.

Nights return her to the meadow where
they buried her complicated five-year-old self.

She loves blues and satire, a didactic
combination, but edgy, like sacrificial

wine. She believes objects receive their
beauty via gesture, via how they are held.

She believes in love hunger, the power
of black dirt and dragonflies, the children

chasing after them. Even though she
found broken teeth on the ground.

How much truth did you expect from the living?
She believes the cage is never locked.

Deborah Bogen
an excerpt from "Within the Porcelain Theater"
published in Landscape with Silos

Photos by Frédéric Chéhu:
Photo #1 Acrobat on ball
Photo #5 Roman Riding
Photo #7 aerialist on head of horseman

Photo by Guy Deschênes:
Photo #2 Cavalia Big Top

Photo by Cavalia staff:
Photo #3 Sylvia Zerbini with horses

Photos by Lynne Glazer:
Photo #4 Alex Philippe performing trick riding
Photo #6 "Carousel" chorus line

Aviva Kempner's Woman of Principle: Gertrude Berg

2009-09-23T17:42:23Z

The Dresser did it again. In daylight hours, she sneaked out to see a movie and to hear the director producer speak. Aviva Kempner's Yoohoo, Mrs. Goldberg saw its limited premiere July 10, 2009, and that included what the Dresser would call a rave review from The New York Times. However, the Dresser having heard the excitement about this film from friends of her Ladies Lottery Club, decided just before the film closed in Washington, DC, to see it. What particularly drew her to this one hour and 32-minute documentary about Gertrude Berg and the character she created--a large-hearted Jewish mama living with her family in a Bronx tenement--was how the actress-creator of this first-ever television sitcom called "The Goldbergs" stood up to the Joseph McCarthy-inspired anti-Communist witch hunt.

AS THE MARKET FELL, THE GOLDBERGS ROSE

The original 15-minute show started on radio one month after the 1929 stock market crash as "The Rise of the Goldbergs." While Gertrude Berg's program was about Jewish family life as interpreted by Molly Goldberg, who had that old world Yiddish way of speaking English, the show transcended its ethnicity and was popular among viewers of all religions and beliefs. Molly dispensed practical wisdom and was known for offering comfort, especially in the dark days of the Great Depression.

UP AGAINST THE RED CHANNEL

In 1949, the show moved to television and Molly's husband Jake was played by Philip Loeb, an actor who became active in the Theatre Guild and Actors Equity Association. According to Ms. Kempner's film, he supported rights for working actors and civil rights for all Americans. For example, he helped actors get pay for time they spent in rehearsals. Although he had never been a member of the Communist Party, he was accused before the House Committee on Un-American Activities by director Elia Kazan and actor Lee J. Cobb. By September 1950 in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, Loeb was named as a Communist sympathizer.

General Foods, the sponsor of "The Goldbergs," demanded that Loeb be fired. Gertrude Berg refused and General Foods backed off. But, several months later, the show was cancelled. Ever resourceful, Berg had heard that Cardinal Spellman was helping rectify these situations and asked for his support. However, his condition was that she convert to Catholicism, which was not tenable for a woman of such principles.

LUCY VERSUS MOLLY

By the time her show got back on the air in 1952 without Philip Loeb, Lucille Ball's "I Love Lucy" which premiered in October 1951, had taken over her viewers. So "The Goldbergs," a prime-time show with twenty years of unwavering public support, got pushed aside. Now, few people know about the show and its creator Gertrude Berg, who in 1949 had won the first Emmy for lead actress in a comedy show. What cinched the death of the show was when the venue moved from the tenement where Molly leaned out of the window and talked to all her neighbors to the sterile suburbs where Molly had to wait for people to knock on her door.

Never giving up her acting career, she won a Tony in 1959 for her performance as best actress in A Majority of One. Berg also tried to make a TV come back in 1961 with another sitcom entitled "Mrs. G Goes to College." Other accomplishments include The Molly Goldberg Cookbook, a song that Patsy Cline included in her repertoire ("That Wonderful Someone"), and a best-selling memoir, Molly and Me. The Dresser finds it amusing that while Berg told Edward R. Murrow that she taught Molly Goldberg everything Molly knew, Berg was not known for her cooking. So "No," to you ladies who grooved on the Dresser's recent post of Julie & Julia, "The Molly Goldberg Cookbook is nothing like Mastering the Art of French Cooking." Well, on second thought, the Dresser thinks both books are heavy on butter and animal fat.

THE ROSTER OF WOMEN WITH PRINCIPLES

In the talkback session after the film ended, Aviva Kempner said she hurried the film for release, and this was prior to paying for all the permissions (any patrons with deep pockets listening in?), because people in her targeted audience are elderly and rapidly departing this life. However, she is hopeful of gaining a young audience and the Dresser thinks the angle for Kempner to promote is that Gertrude Berg was a woman of principle who did not back down or cave when the angry and scared white men of the 1950s caused her popular show to go off the air. Talking about women of principle, U. S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg appears in this film to talk about her experience of "The Goldbergs." Check the movie website for where to catch a screening of this film.

In Kathi Morrison-Taylor's poem "On Heritage Night at My Children's Elementary School," the poet narrator owns up to her family background in a way the speaks to the honesty that Gertrude Berg lived.

ON HERITAGE NIGHT AT MY CHILDREN'S
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

I show up with brownies, nothing exotic or ethnic
or spicy, no soul food, fried rice, or plantains.
In a Betty Crocker pyramid, I display my dark, sugary fix
awkwardly, pretending a wholesome, American heritage,

while inside, I am the dilute white of my father's alcoholic amnesia,
a translucent fog as homogenous as a mild cold.
I show up with brownies out of a box, whisked with oil,
eggs and water, the color of brandy in his morning coffee,

dense and slightly under-baked. I set them on a table in the gym
wondering what others will think of me, wondering
what I think of them. In an addict's kingdom that's how you think,
sizing up others, who like you, may hear heritage and know

Jack Daniels, gin, or a six-pack could as easily appear as this array
of international casseroles. In a United Nations' stew of young families,
screw my historic English, Swedish, Scottish, French blood lines.
Our parents teach us what to do, or not to do, in my case.

Kathi Morrison-Taylor
from By the Nest

Verge Ensemble: The Pleasure of Listening

2009-09-20T00:45:32Z

The prevailing belief in the general public is that new classical music is, at best, challenging to listen and, at worse, painful. On September 13, 2009, the Dresser had the pleasure of attending Verge Ensemble's 2009-2010 opening season concert at the Corcoran Gallery Art in Washington, DC. Verge, formerly known as the Contemporary Music Forum, presented six works, one of which was a world premiere and three, Washington, DC, premieres. The overall concert was predominately tonal and listener friendly.

Opening the concert was Harvey Sollberger's "Sunflowers," which he wrote in 1976. Flautist David Whiteside and vibraphonist Barry Dove entered the stage each carrying a wine bottle planted with a single sunflower. Indeed this gesture, which seemed straight out of the 1960's love-and-peace movement, set the tone for the Verge concert. As this piece opened, the flute wove a mysterious and languorous melody with accents from the vibraphone. When the piece heated up, occasional jazz rhythms were introduced and the flautist hummed into his instrument. A short and shrill passage on the piccolo briefly changed the prevailing calm. The Dresser guesses that to experience Sollberger playing "Sunflowers" (he is an accomplished flautist noted for exploring new performing techniques) would add another dimension to this piece.

"Birds in Warped Time II" (1980) by Somei Satoh organically followed "Sunflowers" with its wavering, oriental inflection that transitioned into something sounding like a gypsy serenade. The performances by violinist James Stern and pianist Audrey Andrist was both passionate and technically inspired.

What particularly drew the Dresser to this concert was the opportunity to hear a composition by Paul Moravec, who recently premiered his first opera The Letter. The third piece offered in the Verge program was Moravec's "Passacaglia" (2005) for piano, violin, and cello. This composition is a rich brocade of rapid fingering on the piano, passionate intonations from the cello, and dialectic responses from the violin. Violinist James Stern, cellist Steve Honigberg, and pianist Audrey Andrist played "Passacaglia" with precision and mounting verve until the close, which sounded like a whistling wind but resolved into a satisfying close. If the concert had ended at this point, the Dresser would have been totally satisfied.

The second half of the concert brought the world premiere of Jonathan Leshnoff's "Six Miniatures for Violin and Percussion" (2008), the DC premiere of Kristin Kuster's "Perpetual Noon" (2008), and Robert Gibson's "A Sound Within" (1982). Robert Gibson who was a member of the Contemporary Music Forum from 1987 to 2000 and who is professor and director of the School of Music at the University of Maryland, College Park, stood up and introduced his piece saying that words often inspire his compositions. "A Sound Within" took its lead from a poem by Yosano Akiko (1878-1942):

Amidst the notes
of my koto is another
deep mysterious tone,
a sound that comes from
with my own breast.
(translation by Kenneth Rexroth. Copyright © 1974, 1976 by Kenneth Rexroth)

What the `Dresser found interesting about Gibson's music is that while this particular piece for piano had some oriental-sounding material, especially in the upper register in the first movement, the musical environment was western. The composition was divided into three movements with the first and second being similar in mood, pace, and structure. The final movement sped up and demonstrated what remarkably agile fingers Audrey Andrist has.

Kuster's "Perpetual Noon" for flute and piano was a demanding piece for the flute with mechanical and sometimes plodding piano accompaniment (no reflection on pianist Audrey Andrist's talent) that made the Dresser think how naked the flute line was. Carole Bean played long flute passages requiring taxing breath control. Ms. Kuster has also written "Perpetual Afternoon (2009)," another composition for flute and piano and the Dresser wonders how this piece might relate to the one heard.

The closing work of the Verge concert was Leshnoff's "Six Miniatures for Violin and Percussion." The performing percussionist Barry Dove commissioned the work. Leshnoff introduced the work and revealed that Dove has a large and exotic collection of percussive instruments that the composer was invited to consider for the creation of this work. However, Leshnoff kept the piece rather simple using instruments in this way:
1. "Flowing" (marimba, violin)
2. "Shining" (vibraphone, crotales, violin)
3. "Pointed" (bongos, frame drum, violin)
4. "Meditation" (gong, marimba, violin)
5. "Glowing" (marimba, vibraphone, violin)
6. "Fast" (marimba, violin)

Violinist Lina Bahn gave a sympathetic contribution to this work focused on the color and texture of percussion instruments. The Dresser found that part 1 "Flowing" and part 5 "Glowing" reminded her of film soundtracks of the 1950s--in short: romantic and accessible. "Shining" created a mysterious mood of time passing and was created in part by Dove bowing the vibraphone. "Pointed" and "Fast" both exhibited exuberant rhythms. Resonating with "Shining," "Meditation" showed off Bahn's virtuosity. Overall the piece was satisfying and demanded little from the listener, which in the world of new music is not necessarily a compliment. However, Leshnoff is known for his romantic styling and certainly the Dresser would be happy to hear more of his music.

The next Verge Ensemble concert will take place January 10, 2010, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The Dresser looks forward to the next program which offers several Washington, DC, premieres and one world premiere.

The Dresser believes everyone develops his or her own private ways of listening or not. In "How She Learned to Listen," Nancy Krygowski provides a psychology of listening that the Dresser thinks is appropriate for how to experience new classical music, which often offers unexpected undercurrents of sound.

HOW SHE LEARNED TO LISTEN

When the father's car pulls into the drive (it was green, he used chewed
Juicy Fruit and Bondo to cover the rust), she slips off to hide

in the closet, the one used to hang coats still cold from the outside air.
(The muffler was bad, an unplaced rattle rattled his nerves.)

She slides behind wool, long and black, behind the brothers'
hooded sweatshirts, the smell of burning leaves. She slips

like air that swallows sound, lets it go steers clear of her own
flowered slicker, afraid its lightness will tip off a sequence of sorry

clinks, empty hangers that clang like a sideways U of the fence gate
as a hand shoves it up (and the gate swings open and a boy walks in.) She stands

like a lamp, like a ketchup bottle, like two trees on a windless day.
She stands like a bookcase, a refrigerator, like a broken leg. She stands until

the father opens the closet door, head turned, arm reaching like a blindfolded kid with a stick, a piñata. She sticks her arms out, yells surprise! (as if it really were)

in her high coat-muddled voice. He goes along with this, mouth puckered
in a small O. (A tunnel. This is where I came from, she thinks.)

Sometime later, she can sit in a room full of people , hear behind their voices
the secret of a heater turning on, the soon-to-be clank of air trapped in pipes.

Nancy Krygowski   
from Velocity

A Blue Ribbon for Julie & Julia

2009-09-04T23:51:29Z

Earlier this summer, the Dresser sneaked off in the middle of the day with a friend to her local nonprofit movie house (Washington, DC's Avalon Theatre) to see Julie & Julia starring Meryl Streep. One of the Dresser's literary colleagues thought this was utterly decadent and perhaps the outing was because the Dresser has taken so long to write her thoughts about seeing the dual stories of Julia Child and Julie Powell who took one whole year to cook her way through Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and simultaneously blog about the results. The movie, which premiered August 7, is now drifting down the pop chart, such that after the weekend of August 28-30, the box office ranking was the 6th most popularly seen film. However, the Dresser has noticed that both My Life In France, by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme and Julie & Julia, by Julie Powell continue to top the best-selling book list of major American newspapers like The New York Times.

WHETHER WHIPPING LIONS OR EGGS

What the Dresser adored about Nora Ephron's film is that not only did it make her chuckle and admire how fantastic Meryl Streep was as the whacky top chef who brought French cooking to Americans, but it absolutely put the Dresser back in touch with one incident after another that involves how much the Dresser enjoys eating artfully prepared food and the pursuit of cooking. Whether Meryl Streep is beating lions (as Karen Blixen in Out of Africa) or eggs, she has the ability to absorb the character she is portraying such that the viewer can get lost in the story and isn't pulled up short by the fact that Streep is playing the part.

As Julia Child, Streep was able to modulate her voice to achieve those zany resonances that Julia made as she was executing her televised cooking errors and entertaining the American viewing audience. Yes, the Dresser said errors because half the reason the Dresser watched what Julia did on TV was to see what one could learn from her mistakes and, of course, to be entertained. Seeing Streep as Julia cooking on TV while Julie Powell watched in her living room was a wild ride for the Dresser. The Dresser instantly thought about a particular televised demonstration where Julia Child made a caramelized dome that went over some desert. The dome took at least 15 or 20 minutes of the show to make and once it was finished, Julia stood over it for a few minutes saying some odd thing and then wham, she broke it up over the desert (was it a pie and what did the dome add in eating pleasure?). The Dresser actually found the film scene where Streep-cum-Child is on TV sloppily flipping an omelet to be tame by comparison to personal memories.

THE BLUE RIBBON OF COOKING

The Dresser had another set of flashbacks in seeing the ebullient Julia start her cooking lessons at the Cordon Bleu. The film scene where Julia enters the cooking school's kitchen that is populated only by men seemed to be a triumph for all women in general and so that also gave the Dresser waves of emotional reaction.Photo by Jonathan Wenk, Columbia Pictures

When the Dresser first got her copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she was newly out of college, had just gotten married, and her then-husband and she had a mutual high school friend named Ken who was learning to cook from an unusually tall Parisian woman named Vivien. (The scene in the movie where Julia's feet hang off the short mattress made the Dresser think of the svelte Vivien.) In a few years, Ken threw over his doctorate degree in operations research, moved to Juneau, and opened a successful French restaurant with some barbarian who had the key to the city and who could get a liquor license. Did the Dresser, who also learned Vivien's cooking secrets, feel jealous? No way! The Dresser's grandfather owned a restaurant in which he employed accomplished European chefs and she knew how much trouble service-oriented jobs are.

Around 1999, the Dresser had a dancer friend named Dennis who went on sabbatical from his government job so that he could attend the Cordon Bleu to see if he wanted to make a career change. Dennis informed the Dresser that she could attend a cooking demonstration at the Cordon Bleu in Paris and so she did. Well, while she knew that Julia Child loved all things buttered (that scene in the movie where Julie Powell opens her 'frig to a mountain of butter was enough to turn anyone's arteries to stone), going to the Cordon Bleu completely convinced the Dresser that Cordon Bleu cooking will not only make a person fat, but will also make them quickly dead. However, it was not butter that made the demonstration so appalling, but other animal fat and blood used in cooking some chicken dish that really made her pass on the taste offering.

WHAT ABOUT THE VEGGIE LOVERS?

Then the Dresser did have a little side conversation with herself about Julie Powell. Amy Adams plays Powell and she pales in the wake of Meryl Streep's acting abilities but that didn't bother the Dresser because Powell is suppose to be modest and not a star. The question that kept coming up was why wasn't Julie Powell a vegetarian or vegan like other young women (and men) these days?

Also, the Dresser wondered what portion of the audience for this film were young women and young men. While the film addresses issues about having children (Julia is unable to have children and the news about her sister's pregnancy is poignantly sad), being a successful woman (Julie's friends all have power jobs manifest by their cell phones interrupting their lunch together), and suffering love life spats (Julie's husband Eric, played by Chris Messina, pushes Julie to blog but when the obsession consumes her, he walks out), does this film, despite the blogging, really address what concerns young adults who are the movie industry's best customers?

Would the Dresser enjoy seeing this film again? Yes, she loved the way Paul Child's (played by Stanley Tucci) role was developed. He was a perfect complement to Meryl Streep's Julia. The Dresser also adored Julia's sister Dorothy (played by Jane Lynch) and the scene between the two sisters, who seemed like two giraffes all gangly and wide-eyed. The Dresser thinks Nora Ephron served up loving nourishment in Julie & Julia and the Dresser would be delighted to partake again.

On the subject of love and nourishment, Carly Sachs transforms a trip to the grocery store into a romance. "Love at the Grocery" will be published in 2009 in The Poet's Cookbook, a bilingual (English and Italian) cookbook with subject appropriate poetry collected and edited by Grace Cavalieri and Sabine Pascarelli from Bordighera Press.

LOVE AT THE GROCERY

The worst advice I ever got was
if you're looking for love,
try the produce section at your local grocery.
I've been a vegetarian for two years
and I've never taken a romantic stroll
down the lettuce aisle.
I'm alone from romaine to rapini.
Week after week I dream of my prince.
He'll be wearing faded jeans and a button-down shirt,
preferably periwinkle and he'll have on sandals,
either Tevas or Birks, I can't decide.
He'll be holding a bouquet of broccoli
and a shy smile will tiptoe across his face
as he approaches me. "It's my favorite," he'll say.
"Mine too."
Then he'll slip his arm around me
and we'll fill our buggy with corn and tomatoes,
eggplant and bok choy. Anything that grows
out of earth's belly will be fair game.
We'll measure the days in corn stalks and potato peels
and I'll wear dresses the color of habenero and summer squash.
At our wedding I'll carry a nosegay of cilantro and basil.
We'll push that shopping cart around the aisles,
pointing out produce as if we were on a gondola in Venice.
The sign on the back will read, Just Cookin'.

by Carly Sachs

New Opera: Then the Hammer Explained

2009-07-29T21:28:44Z

New opera is always an adventure with risk. Sometimes the critic best serves a new piece by staying silent. This situation happened for the Dresser recently when she traveled to New York City to see a new opera by a composer whose work she had experienced before and, while the first opera was not particularly her favorite cuppa, it showed well. Not so for the second.

At Santa Fe Opera, The Letter by composer Paul Moravec and librettist Terry Teachout premiered Saturday, July 25, 2009. The Dresser has been keen to see it, but other trips and commitments have gotten in the way. By Monday, July 27, not so enthusiastic reviews of The Letter started to surface. Here's what Teachout had to say in his AboutLastNight blog on July 28, 2009:

"Needless to say, not everybody liked The Letter as much as the first-nighters who cheered us to the echo. My old colleagues at the Washington Post, for instance, published a scorched-earth pan on Monday, the thrust of which was that Paul and I should take up another line of work. I can't say I enjoyed reading it, but I believe I can stand the heat. I ought to be able to: after all, I've been dishing it out for most of my professional life!"

The Dresser notes: so far, no word from The New York Times, the major arbiter of what is worthwhile in the world of classical music. And maybe there won't be a Times review.

FROM THE DC FRINGE

Recently, the Dresser attended two operatic productions of the Capital Fringe Festival. On July 18, 2009, she saw the Opera Alterna production of Magnum Opus by Michael Oberhauser and on July 19, by composer Douglas Boyce based on a libretto drawn from Federico Garcia Lorca by Jodi Kanter. Neither opera took the top of the Dresser's head off, but each had some commendable aspects.

First, one should understand a bit about the sponsoring group and festival. A nonprofit group named Capital Fringe supports the Capital Fringe Festival. The festival began in the summer of 2005 in Washington, DC. It takes its lead from the Fringe movement that began in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1947. The idea is to promote and support artists who may not have other outlets. Capital Fringe encourages artists to self-produce in their annual July festival of the performing arts. So, in fact, Fringe offerings are often workshops as opposed to premieres. Artists can enjoy the opportunity to try out their new works in usually less than adequate theatrical venues but without fear of being slammed by the critics.

That said, both Magnum Opus and The Girl Who Waters the Basil were not artists flying solo. Opus was produced by the DC-based Opera Alterna that has ties to Catholic University (as does the composer who wrote this opera for his CUA master's degree) and Girl was mounted with the help of a grant by George Washington University (the composer is a professor there). Opus was enjoying its second production (according to Anne Midgette's review in the Washington Post, Oberhauser premiered Opus in February 2009 at Catholic University) and Girl, its first, but from the program notes, one could ascertain that Girl was being workshopped.

Both operas deal with sexual attraction--young man pursuing young woman. In Opus, the story revolves around a singer named Claire who is married to a blocked playwright named Robert but she is being pursued by a composer named John. The framework of the Opus story is a modern-day telling of the love triangle between Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. In The Girl Who Waters the Basil, a prince falls in love with a peasant girl who spurns him after he initially disguises himself as a peddler and trades grapes for her kisses. When she refuses to see him, he becomes so love sick that he cannot leave his bed.

Musically, both operas are tonal. Opus takes it lead from the music of the real life Robert Schumann and at times, Oberhauser's music seems more derivative than original.
Robert (Tad Czyzewski) being seduced by the Greek Muse Melpomene (Daniele Lorio). Photo by Nickie Brock

 Nevertheless, Oberhauser has created some beautiful ensembles like "We will whisper to you," an exchange between Robert (sung by Tad Czyzewski) and Schumann's muses Melpomene (sung by Daniele Lorio) and Polyhymnia (sung by Tricia Lepofsky). Boyce's music for Girl exhibits more dissonance and vocal demands than Opus but also tends toward numbing repetition.

What made Girl particularly impressive was the talent that came together for this 40-minute "pocket opera" that was initiated in mid March of this year. Playing the prince was tenor Robert Baker, who has sung more than 300 performances with Washington National Opera. In the role of the Shoemaker: world-class soloist baritone James Shaffran (over 40 appearances with Washington National Opera) and in the role of the Shoemaker's daughter: coloratura soprano Rebecca Ocampo. While opera, particularly in the old world tradition, has tended to put the best singers on stage instead of the most visually appropriate, the Dresser found that it was hard to pretend that Robert Baker was suppose to be a young man. The Dresser kept thinking that Cory Davis who played the prince's page looked more age appropriate to be wooing the girl watering the basil.
(L to R) Rebecca Ocampo (Irene), Robert Baker (The Prince), and Cory Davis (The Page) in The Girl Who Water the Basil and the Inquisitive Prince, 2009, Capital Fringe Festival (photo by Douglas Boyce)

BE CAREFUL WHO YOU INVITE

It's no secret that the Dresser (a.k.a. the Steiny Road Poet) admired Michael Oberhauser's student compositions and agreed to help him write a libretto for what turned out to be Magnum Opus. However in the end, the composer decided to write the libretto himself and consequently took a hit for that in Midgette's review. Was Opus, despite its premiere (the Dresser suspects this was the master's degree production and should that production be called a premiere?), ready for a prime time review in a major newspaper?

Think about it this way, music critic Anne Midgette of the Washington Post reviewed and panned The Letter. Santa Fe Opera is known for presenting exciting new operatic work. It has staged over 40 American premieres and commissioned nine new works. The last time Santa Fe Opera commissioned an opera was Bright Sheng's Madame Mao. Santa Fe Opera premiered it in 2003 and most major newspapers were there to cover this premiere. Granted, the newspaper industry is now sliding into the black hole of the Internet and no one is sure how journalists will get paid to cover major events, but Paul Moravec is no newbie composer. Although he had not written opera prior to The Letter, he has had lots of New York Times coverage -- he is, after all, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in music, along with such other composers as Steven Reich (2009), David Lang (2008), Ornette Coleman (2007), John Adams (2003) and should the Dresser say very few composers win a Pulitzer for opera?

What the Dresser is poking her critical finger at is what happens if the creators and producers of a new work invite the critics and they come? Well, if you are a big opera company, a premiere is not complete without critical reviews and if you are a small company, it's ok if everyone is absolutely sure that the work is ready and nothing more can or will be done to improve it. The consequence is that sometimes creators get pigeonholed and can never escape that first review. So in the case of Michael Oberhauser, it is time for him to let go of Magnum Opus and move on to write his second opera with an experienced librettist. Douglas Boyce, on the other hand, needs to further develop his pocket opera and see where it can take him. The Dresser has absolutely no advice for Paul Moravec. In fact, she would still like to see and hear The Letter and decide for herself how she would rate it. In the case of the New York City opera premiere that she refuses to review, she knows you can have an audience stand up and shout bravo while the critic cringes in her seat, hoping no one notices she is there.

Wayne Miller in his poem "The Book of Props" from his book by the same title published by Milkweed Editions seems to have captured what critics do and how this intermingles with the human condition that is all about finding love and connection. So now the Dresser will put down her hammer and remove the nails pursed between her lips.

THE BOOK OF PROPS

Then the hammer explained
the arm's strange gestures,

and the hanging frames
hinted at walls that served

as frames. The glasses
left out on the brownstone

stoop caught light
as we passed by, and so

we gave them great
significance. Later,

in the unfamiliar dark
of a stranger's house,

I found the stairwell
by running my fingers

along the edge of a table.
Out back, people

were smoking, drinking
from painted bottles

as they pumped wood
into the chimenea.

O the songs they sang--
as still the fountain

poured water-sounds
out into the dark street

and the bay lured travelers
to pause on its midnight

ferry. All the saints
kept wringing themselves

through the contortions
of their names. Even

as the undertaker
undressed his childhood

sweetheart in preparation,
even as the trenches

grew into monuments,
then the monuments

into disrepair,--we knew
about the body

and the soul that fills it
with its own idea.

But what of the bed of nails,
the net of red marks

the audience admires?
What of the old man

lying there, counting
sheep in comradeship

with the shepherd? Now
the cup is held aloft,

and now the blood
comes pouring? Please--

come along to the garden,
we'll sniff the flowers,

let the birds chirp us
into romance. I'll put

a dandelion in your hair.
And when the cars

slip past like sharks,
we'll mock their glowing

ground effects; and when
the pistol is waved

in the air, we'll watch
the shimmering

of the runners' shoes.
How we longed to be

those lovers in the cab's
back seat, unmindful

of the driver thumbing
his matchbook--.

--Those poor lovers
drifting sexward in a river

of lights: now even
their kiss has become

another object pressed
between them.

Wayne Miller  
from The Book of Props

Fade: State of the Art Versus Green

2009-07-23T00:53:56Z

For as much as the Dresser would like to see every new American opera that comes to the stage, the commitments of daily living, particularly family events, often compete for the same schedule. Because the Dresser had been following the mounting numbers of productions for Stefan Weisman's and David Cote's Fade--there are now four that were presented in Philadelphia, London, San Francisco, and New York, she was eager to learn more about this 30-minute opera and therefore sent dramaturg Maxine Kern to hear the work. Here's what Ms. Kern had to say about Fade.

COMMENTS FROM MAXINE KERN

On July 17, 2009, Stefan Weisman's one-act opera Fade written with librettist David Cote was performed at Galapogos Art Space in Brooklyn. The work, developed in a 2008 libretto workshop by AOP (American Opera Projects) tells the musical story of an increasingly strained relationship between a young couple who are moving into a new state-of-the-art house in the country. Their relationship fades as their dreams and plans for the house come into conflict and end in disappointment. This realistically depicted story achieves larger dimension when dreams are sung by Gertie, the wife (soprano Amy van Roekel), and Albert, the husband (Jonathan Hays), and countered by cautionary musical inflection in the singing of the housekeeper (mezzo Pamela Stein) who sees the flaws of this anachronistic edifice and wants only to get home as soon as possible.

The character of the music changes as the three people realize their positions and come to terms with the house itself. The new house, a six-bedroom summer home, replaces Gertie's grandmother's old mansion. At first the housekeeper sings with rich, carefully chosen words and she is addressed with sweeping romantic dialogue, mostly expressed by Jonathan Hays as Albert, with his strong and flowing baritone. The dialogue itself creates suspense immediately, questioning everything. What is the housekeeper's name? What is in the boxes that are collected in the house? Are there still ghosts here from the old house that has replaced the new? The housekeeper, a young woman alone with two children, muses about whether she would like to live in a big house like this one miles from town and tucked into the woods.

For a short while, humor surfaces in the face of suspense and questioning as the wife grounds the conversation in contemporary concerns about eco-friendly values, which get short shrift in this outsized mansion. The husband engages the housekeeper in a friendly contest to dismiss these concerns about too many rooms. The music does a fine job of pacing the delivery of these arguments in overlapping and ongoing dialogue. When the subtext between the couple overwhelms them into dismay, the music fills in for deliberate gaps in their singing. As such the music continues the original building of suspense, this time by indicating an underlying emotional tension, which chokes up their dialogue.

After that, the dialogue and the music allow for arias and contrasting sounds and rhythms. The wife's arias are sweet, romantic and soaring, taking on a Straussian quality; the husband's, perfunctory yet strong. The suspense is diminished, even as lights in the house go out. At this point, the composition tries to regain its original storyline about what will happen, yet also reflecting the fading of the couple's energy and their mutual but discordant disappointment. The continuo, a repetitive musical style in the manner of Philip Glass which has maintained an underlying presence throughout the piece, takes prominence, but it lacks color and becomes monotone. With diminished emotional energy concluding the opera, Fade lacks the musicality in the end to maintain the richness of the musical storytelling initiated at its beginning. While this follows the theme of an overly strained relationship, it also runs out of steam musically, which disappoints and disengages this listener from the story and the operatic experience. The challenge here is to have the relationship fade while keeping the audience attentive and involved.

PAST AND FUTURE

In 2008, the Dresser interviewed Stefan Weisman for an article on how an opera is birthed. In that article, she spoke with Weisman about his opera Darkling based on the poetry of Anna Rabinowitz. There will be a production of Darkling in Philadelphia this fall.

The Dresser was pleased to see that the libretto of Fade is offered in full on the composer's website, making easier for her to understand Ms. Kern's remarks. David Cote's libretto is worth reading on its own. Cote posts regularly to Histriomastix, his theater blog.

In her poem "L'Affaire Dictation" from her new chapbook American Gothic, Take 2, Maria Terrone competes with computer technology for her husband's attention. In Fade, the state-of-the-art house doesn't match up to the wife's principles for a "green" house or to her memories of what the former house belonging to her grandmother meant to her in terms of family relationships. More and more, technological advances interfere with human relationships.

L'AFFAIRE DICTATION

And like music on the waters
Is thy sweet voice to me.
Lord Byron

My husband is alone behind a closed door
without a phone and yet he speaks,
repeats himself in the slow, deep tones of Thor.

Just training the software, he says. Merde!
I know this geisha was created
to treat men like gods, hang on every word,

flatter by mimicry. He doesn't know
I've peeked, seen his eyes read the monitor
like a love letter, that I've heard him roll

out sweet nothings like taffy--a mantra
of syllables to stamp his voice
on her brain. After a month of this drama,

they're so attuned, she speaks his lines,
plucks words from the oblivion of air
and saves them in on-screen valentines.

Dinner at eight all right? I call, slipping
inside their den. Caught off guard,
he shuts down mid-sentence, as she spits

back, Beginner, hate all night!
my rival's feeling toward me
revealed in glaring black and white.

by Maria Terrone
from American Gothic, Take 2

The Beggar's Opera: Maazel's Own Brand of Mendicants

2009-07-21T15:55:58Z

Lorin Maazel's gloriously green estate in the rolling hills of Rappahannock County, Virginia, was alive with operatic zest for the July 16, 2009, performance of Benjamin Britten's The Beggar's Opera. Although the Dresser arrived hungry, only to learn Châteauville's chef had seriously sliced her finger which closed down the alfresco café, the feast of taking in the maestro's menagerie--a flock of gawking emus in an enclosed landscape of dense ferns and pond complete with a prima donna swan and the exotically colored camels located in a paddock just beyond the art gallery hung with views of Virginia's rural inhabitants and habitats more than distracted the Dresser's appetite. Besides, her companion, composer Janet Peachey, had taken the precaution of packing carrot sticks and bing cherries, which she shared as well as her knowledge about how to find Lorin and Dietlinde Maazel's 550-acre home, a property that, in rush hour, is over a two-hour drive from the upper northwest section of Washington, DC.

RAKED, TRAPPED, JUDGED

Much to Ms. Peachey's surprise, The Beggar's Opera was being performed in a huge tent and not the state-of-the-art Theatre House. This, however, is not to say that the theater experience was diminished by this arrangement. Au contraire, the tent was fully air-conditioned, the raised stage was raked tipping it toward the orchestra pit and audience, also the stage extended in a catwalk around the pit and there were numerous trapdoors in the stage and catwalk to allow surprise entrances and exits by the cast. While most of the audience seating was arranged in counter-raked tiers in front of the stage, there was also box seating for some audience members built atop the side walls of the stage and these audience members seemed to take on a role as not just observers but judges of the play's proceedings.

Atop the back wall of the stage, cast members--usually the chorus--occasionally made appearances. One particularly memorable appearance included some of the female cast, partially hidden by the protective wall, presenting themselves as just shoes and legs in an earthy sex scene. Yes, Dear Readers, this was total use of the space with cast making entrances from unexpected doors at the top of the audience risers and along the same paths that audience had followed from the lobby to get to their seats.
Photo of Macheath (Dominic Armstrong) with Lucy Lockit (Sarah Moule) and Polly Peachum (Julia Elise Hardin) by Vale Rideout

And the cast, particularly Dominic Armstrong in the leading role as the womanizing highwayman Macheath, worked the audience, taking up seats on the risers and in the boxes, making eye contact, and Macheath actually drew to the catwalk a young woman sitting in the front row. Even the intermissions had theatrical contact as t-shirts were sold out of the saddlebags of two large llamas that didn't mind being surrounded by curious audience members.

MANY LIVES OF MACHEATH (LOOK OUT MACKIE IS BACK!)

The Dresser suspects that most theatergoers have had more experience with Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera (premiered in 1928) for which Bertolt Brecht wrote the libretto (in German) based on a translation of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (premiered in 1765). Certainly for the Dresser, Benjamin Britten's 1948 adaptation of John Gay's groundbreaking piece (first ballad opera, an opera without recitative, an opera focused on thieves, whores, and the poor versus gods or emperors) had to compete with her intimacy with the Weill-Brecht opera. Britten's music is based on a reinterpretation of the popular British tunes of the 18th century that Gay selected but were arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch. While the Dresser (a.k.a. The Steiny Road Poet) was recently deeply excited by the Washington National Opera production of Britten's Peter Grimes, she wasn't entirely tuned into what was Britten and what was the old folk music. Mostly she decided that what was the melody line was the old music and what was texture, rhythm, and inflection was Britten. That said, the variety of musical styles included jigs, jazz, ornamented arias, bluesy ballads. Clearly a musical feast enhanced by Britten's masterful handling.

THE INTIMACY OF THE MAESTRO

Particularly appealing was the intimacy achieved between orchestra, Maazel as conductor, the players, and the audience. Two examples that stick in memory are Macheath addressing a quote from Shakespeare ("If Music Be the Food of Love, Play On") directly to the harpist and Macheath proclaiming "I must have women" to which Maazel turns to the highwaymen and says "I know."

AND THE STORY IS...

The short synopsis of the of this three act opera is that Polly Peachum (Julia Elise Hardin) has secretly married the infamous highway man Captain Macheath but her mother (Melissa Parks) finds out, tells Polly's father (Michael Rice), and then the parents decide to have Macheath arrested and executed so that the Peachums can reap the benefit of Macheath's estate.

Photo of Mrs. Peachum (Melissa Parks) with Filch (Donald Groves) by Makiko Ishii

Despite Polly's warning, Macheath is arrested with the help of two prostitutes. He is thrown into Newgate prison. In prison, he is visited by the jailor's daughter Lucy Lockit (Sarah Moule) who is furious with Macheath because he promised to marry her. Nonetheless, Lucy steals her father's keys and helps Macheath escape. By chance, Mrs. Trapes (Sarah Simmons), a gaming house madam, spills the beans on Macheath's whereabouts to Mr. Peachum and jailor Lockit (Darren Perry) who have joined forces to find the Captain. Macheath is captured again and sentenced to hang but at the last minute he is pardoned.

While all the singers and players performed admirably, tenor Dominic Armstrong's acting made him a clear standout. The Dresser's favorite scene occurred in the whorehouse--women came out of trapdoors on the catwalk. It was raucous fun, but perhaps, stage director William Kerley could have coached Maia Surace as Jenny Diver to be more seductive and more devious (she is one of the ladies of the night who betrays Macheath). Here the Dresser admits the influence that The Threepenny Opera had on her and how she expected Jenny Diver and Suky Tawdry (Rebecca Luttio) to compete for attention with Polly and Lucy.

WHO ARE THE BEGGARS?

For the most part, the Dresser enjoyed Nicholas Vaughan's costuming, which was predominately middle class 18th century. She grooved on the long curly black-locked wig worn by Mr. Peachum. What she didn't care for was the proliferation of orange jumpsuits worn by Macheath and choral members in the last act. The modern-day prison jumpsuits clearly breached the time wall and made the audience confront issues of current day incarceration. This also made the Dresser question why thieves, whores, and jailor were costumed in the respectable togs of 18th century burghers. Then she thought, well, this puts the onus of who is the beggar back on the audience.

As serendipity had it, the Dresser sat down in her seat only to see her poet friend Mary-Sherman Willis waving in her direction. As it turned out, she and her film-producer husband Scott Willis were housing a few of the artists associated with this production and they knew many people in the audience, some of whom had traveled from New York City and others who frequented the Big Apple often, including one woman who had seen the Dresser's opera Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On. So was this an audience of beggars? No, but the Dresser did encounter one man at the refreshment counter who broke a large cookie in two and asked if he could share it as long as the Dresser paid, because as he explained it, he had royally supported the Castleton Festival and his pockets were bereft of cash. This is where the story returns to the Dresser being fed by a total theatrical and operatic experience, something that often goes begging in other theatrical renderings.

In Deborah Bernhardt's epigraph and opening section of her long poem "The Only Universal Tongue" from echolalia, winner of Four Way Books Intro Poetry Prize, the reader enters a universe filled with familiar but, yet, not quite known music much like what the Dresser encountered with Britten's interpretation of Gay's The Beggar's Opera. Like Gay, Bernhardt is attuned to her literary contemporaries (and Shakespeare) and her larger poem, rendered in five parts, treats a subculture of modern day big city life where colorful but unsavory characters reign.

THE ONLY UNIVERSAL TONGUE
Who gets to be the man? grew increasingly irrelevant,
replaced by who am I really, now that I'm with you?
--from the "Brown Boys" chapter of Taboo by Boyer Rickel

I. Local Overture

Music is an intimate at first brush. Music is,
when you want it, graspable as your own chest. On
the soundbar of your sternum--feel the slipped bass.
Where is your surge protector? Double, double, tinfoil treble.
Spacey antenna. Gracenote bubble. Warmups like mei me my mo moo.
May I have this dance?--a doffing of waltz, among the brazen decibels,
with a borrowed libretto. I've heard you somewhere before.

Excerpt of " The Only Universal Tongue " from echolalia
Copyright (c) 2006 by Deborah Bernhardt.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Four Way Books.
All rights reserved.

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