DC Arts Beat

Madame Freedom, @DJSpooky, and App Art

2011-11-13T23:35:00.000-05:00

Some scattered thoughts—untimely on one week’s delay—seem due for an unusually rich evening of contemporary multimedia at the Freer Gallery. On November 4, DC native Paul D. Miller (marquee name: DJ Spooky) performed a live music score to accompany the progressive 1956 Korean film Madame Freedom. No less important than Paul’s legendary remixing innovation on display was the simple importance of revitalizing this cinematic relic of a country undergoing dramatic transformation. And running parallel to that, Paul’s process raised interesting questions about audience empowerment, or for that matter, the possibility that our idea of an “audience” is evolving into another kind of freedom in the wider example of Björk Gudmundsdottir’s new Biophilia project.

The logistics were wonderfully hybrid: two classically trained musicians played traditional string instruments, reading from passages of notation, and Paul helmed a buffet table of Macbook, sampling, effects, and—centrally—an iPad. That last part is the virtual toolbox that invites blurred lines between stage and audience, or (if you will) the creative class and the consumer. As Paul explained in opening remarks, his free iPad app (millions of downloads and counting) has aims that surpass pro tools for musicians, empowering the casual screen-swiper with cadres of clips to trigger and assemble into music. The extent to which this engine was integral to the functionality of his Madame Freedom performance was unclear, but no one could suffer the mistake that all those sounds spring forth on-the-fly. Forever, this is an artform of meticulous studio performances and synthesizer sequences, locked and loaded in a production process you’ll never know. The subsequent stage, though, of organizing those pastiches to your ear’s pleasure is what the app revolution is all about. Paul D. Miller has been a key innovator in “remix culture,” hence his moniker DJ Spooky. A perfect overview of the innovators in this field can be heard in interviews with Paul and his peers from the 2010 documentary Copyright Criminals.

On fast rewind (now, an obsolete tape term!), I have a memory from the mid-’90s of visiting The Juilliard School to see an opera installation by Tod Machover from MIT’s (formerly) groundbreaking Media Lab. This was a time when electronic music and digital sampling were genuine fresh practices and, to the general audience, a whole bunch of amazing hocus-pocus. Machover, perceived then as a sage of what-is-to-come (while history proved otherwise, and where-is-he-now), introduced his “opera” with a demonstration of the music controllers he invented back at the Lab, to which he attached the term “virtual reality”—a sexy idea at the time evincing badass gloves and boning up with robots. He also apologized that he’d fail to incorporate spoken phrases from the audience who earlier whispered into pre-show lobby pods, because the acquisition computer had crashed. I remember actually seeing that iconic Blue Screen of Death on Windows 95. Like I said, this was the mid-’90s.

One of his “virtual reality” instruments was a wizard wand thingie that frankly sounded amazing. As he moved it around—if you need a visual image for this, think Doug Henning on a Theremin—lustrous string timbres climbed in pitch around a modally diatonic pad of accompaniment. Partly out of jealousy, and partly because I saw myself heroically on the cutting edge of digital sampling at the time (a composer outside those Ivy Leagues), I seized his question-and-answer time with aplomb. After someone in the audience asked, “Did you make that sound just now?” and he beamed “Yes!”, I tore into a lawyer line of questioning that would later evolve into my sellout profession. Without now belaboring the details, my Socratic method went from asking: whether sampled or synthesized, whether triggered or modulated, and whether wet or dry. The end confession, on full public display, was that his magic wand was basically a start button with a volume control. At least, that’s the way I phrased it, and he stupidly affirmed. This would have gone better if he channeled Doug Henning after all, waving his hands and insisting, “The world is full of magic!”

Much has changed since then. Or has it? Enter Biophilia. To start with, I am biased. For a super long time, with intervening competition, I sort of madly believed that Björk was my intended, with whom I should make music and father children; half-serious or less, er something. But to be serious now, I still maintain she is consummate as the artist of our time (forgiving even her insufferable music videos that always manage to command automatic praise). In the spirit of an innocent soul, or a good agnostic, or a good documentary filmmaker, her music manifests receptivity. She navigates between, say, Olivier Messiaen and Karl Stockhausen for organizing organic sounds, using machines (created by human organisms!), while sticking to our dogma of body rhythms and world cultures where we find fundamental urges. Her diverse collaborations result in singularly personal works. She lacks any pretension of avant garde formalism, yet finds no easy place in populism. Simpler put, it’s no small moment when she emerges every few years, and begins to tour.

Importantly, Biophilia’s essence is no different than her preceding catalogue: pure music. You can forget all about her conceptual aspirations toward education and interactivity; what speaks through the music is our human experience—while science is merely the totem. Among these songs, Virus is a good example of her lyrical meditation on scientific phenomena that speaks just as well to our mysterious emotional urge to seek infection, craving the love of those who might bring hurt but build strength—"like a virus," she sings. The beautiful thing of this literary tradition is that it combines an infinitely complex thing (microbiologists typically have Ph.Ds) with a universal human unconsciousness.

Clearly, though, Björk was teased with the ability to involve strangers into her creative process, using an Apple app suite available to anyone (except the ana-hipster Android majority: boo!). But there’s something interesting about this: It arises from a position of power. Rather like Radiohead promising a whole new world of digital music distribution, these models are easiest to pull off by Titans of Industry.

Yet, having strayed so far from Madame Freedom, here’s how that evening went (from my seat’s perspective), as a point of comparison. Paul’s treatment was wonderfully nuanced. He followed the lead of the Korean film’s peculiar incorporation of South American music, while his long stretches of silence served the film where they needed to. Some themes were motivic, and tracked the narrative emotions in a dramatic arc. Cliches of pentatonic scales and foley cues were nowhere found. All of this leads to a frankly simplistic conclusion that might seem Debbie Downer upon the fresh promise of empowerment from remix apps: Always, the result is only as good as the artist. Historically, new technologies curry that admonition almost on cue, like a lazy rhythm, but history also always proves that whenever technology introduces ability/access/empowerment, at the center you find a cool tool for the production of more art. It is a healthy suspicion to question critics of these tools: Are we not, as human beasts, motivated by control? Creativity tends to threaten establishments. So the huge irony (even in these words) is that any critique of new tools is suspect, tantamount to evaluating a Picasso canvas with harsh questions about paintbrushes. Who gives a shit?

There are some concluding things to say about the film Madame Freedom itself. Personally speaking, around the time when I watched it, my father was stepping off an airplane on return from Seoul. He first left his Korean homeland in his late teens, which makes every return visit as an adult unfamiliar, with always the same observation, that he can barely recognize the place. The opposite of that is this: today’s Koreans, Korean-Americans, and even half-breeds like myself have no concept of what Korea was like just over one-half century ago. Madame Freedom captured that world in transition. It shows people hanging around the home wearing Hanboks, not “copy couture” facing West. It shows houses along dirt roads with sliding doors and rice paper walls, not high-rises with stenciled addresses. And at the center of the film, it shows women breaking free from domestic restraints, smoking and dancing, venturing into business, and having affairs. From today’s perspective, the modern social conscience has a boilerplate instinct that venerates Madame Freedom on cue, if only it glorifies progressivism, and it mourns the fate of women who suffered along the way.

But it’s not so simple. That the film was ahead of its time and depicted broken social mores is beyond reproach. That its first audiences (or even its filmmakers) were cheering for the women, though, is not so certain. I am just as prepared to believe that the film channels Puccini’s scenario of Butterfly’s boy waving an American flag while she kills herself. Two scenes in particular resonate here. At the depth of damage in Seon-yeoung’s marriage to Professor Jang, when she finally begins to communicate her unhappiness, she sits in front of a mirror and hastily starts applying make-up, threatening her husband in some sense that this new kind of beauty (with all its Western dogma on how to paint faces) will shift the balance of power. Another scene: when she calls out Professor Jang for flirting and fawning over a younger woman as he teaches grammar lessons, Seon-yeoung finds the gift he got in return, and berates it for being cheap, inadequate, low-class. These small moments of conflict were strangely prophetic in 1956. They continue to resonate uniquely among Asians today, as nearby as those first, second, and third generation immigrants who live among us—whom we marry, whom we go to school with, whom we might see fulfilling terrible stereotypes of brand-obsessed shoppers with counterfeit handbags, and a desperation to assimilate exclusively into upwardly mobile circles and professions. I can’t easily explain why these ungraceful transitions seem the most severe in Asian culture—around more universal truths, that consumerism, family neglect and sexual affairs are poisonous—but the way that Madame Freedom foretells it all is incredibly compelling. Paul D. Miller’s great contribution, through his modest and nuanced score, is to reinvigorate the film for modern audiences.

The Castleton Festival

2011-07-20T03:24:00.000-04:00

Lorin Maazel (photo by Chris Lee)

Well beyond my understanding or appreciation, classical music maintains a lasting tradition of summer festivals motivated mostly for the cultivation of emerging artists. We think readily of examples named Tanglewood and Aspen, seeing them on the biographies of all major concert artists as rites of passage to supplement their formal conservatory educations. The incidental fruit of this tradition is its public’s access to these talents on display for an off-season diversion away from city sprawl. In the Washington, D.C. area, sadly Wolf Trap never quite cuts it. Laudable as its opera program for young artists may be, the productions are flanked by a scattered season of pulpy programming (lately more than ever). This pop pageant violates the spirit of summer sojourn—nothing new is being “tried out” in the fresh outdoors of this otherwise precious woodsy getaway; merely old standards and revivals from tried and true (and old-aged) acts. Wolf Trap is no Spoleto, let alone Ojai or even Ravinia.

Tiresome as that complaint may be, it aims merely to stage the warm welcome for Lorin and Dietlinde Turban Maazel’s Castleton Festival—now concluding its third year in youth. An expansion of their longer-lasting Châteauville Foundation (and literally, of their farmhouse), the Festival was founded around the time when Maestro Maazel concluded his appointment as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic. Centered in the Piedmont region of rural Virginia, the Festival expanded this year for the first time to an outer suburb of Washington, at the new Hylton Performing Arts Center in Manassas. An architectural triumph (while less successful on the inside), the Hylton Center is not just easier accessible to its nearest major market, but also…has good HVAC (compared to the Festival Tent on the farm), and credible acoustics. Moreover, the Maazels are expanding the reach of their Festival in its critical infancy.

For three consecutive Thursdays there, the Castleton Festival has delivered, first, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, then Puccini’s Il Trittico (minus one), and concludes tomorrow with a variety show sort of thing that rounds up American music to commemorate the sesquicentennial of Bull Run.

Less interested in the bookending Americana, I was thoroughly rewarded with the Puccini one-acts. Il Trittico is a marvel in Puccini’s opus. Giacomo’s aficionados readily swoon at the mere mention of his operatic triptych, which moves from a love triangle to a miracle play to a riotous farce. Sadly, it is rarely performed in whole (as intended), owing to a contemporary estimation of audiences’ attention spans. First-to-go, usually, is Suor Angelica, though the Festival gave it (along with the others) their full due at the farm last year. For its Manassas appearance, Il Trittico delivered Il Tabarro and Gianni Schicchi with mostly the same casts from 2010.

Thinking of Il Tabarro in particular that started the July 14 program, you have in this one-act opera arguably the pinnacle of Puccini’s mastery. Compared to Puccini’s larger, evening-length works wherein the composer needed to contend with complex and epic literary narratives, each from Il Trittico is uncompromising musical perfection. Il Tabarro, for all its melodrama, has some of the most wrenching passages of "pure" music that Puccini ever wrote. Freed from set-piece villainry (that we can call, for need of a name, Franco Zeffirelli) and ambitions of scale, these melodic lines carry a primacy unlike, say, Tosca that hems and haws around its outsize characters and narratives. Remembering especially the searing duet between Giorgetta and Michele, of a husband wondering when he lost the affection of his wife, Puccini's delicate mastery between emotional heft and restraint is absolute. And Jessica Klein delivered these moments with expert nuance, while the particular surprise came in Andrew Stuckey’s performance that poured open affection after a preceding dammed-up countenance. Il Tabarro certainly devolves into a rather old-world plot of murderous jealousy, and much screaming at the end, but at its center you can see and hear a certain timelessness, compact and true, about the agonies of lost dreams and points of decision in a marriage.

After all that, Gianni Schicchi is a 180-degree turn into drop-dead comedy, literally. Based upon a situational comedy of squabbling goofs trying to defraud a freshly decedent estate, Gianni Schicchi is a total hoot. It ranks among Falstaff, even much from Mozart, as a rare kind of laugh-until-it-hurts comedic spectacle. Interestingly, its central show-stopper “O mio babbino caro,” so persistently excerpted in recitals for all its lush prettiness, is among the most reliably abused musical passages ever. Out of context especially, but sometimes even inside the opera, Lauretta usually swoons with virgin ambition and teary whimpering, when the moment actually calls for farce. “O mio babbino caro” is supposed to be sung flirty, manipulatively, and cow-towing to the back row of the auditorium. For the Castleton Festival, Joyce El-Khoury really got it right, and for me, perhaps better than I’ve ever seen. (Staged using modern dress for these Italian caricatures, I even dare say that the production designer was channeling Snooki.) As Washingtonians, we had the rare opportunity to attend Gianni Schicchi at the Washington National Opera in 2007—not quite this good.

All the same, you can’t blame anyone for interpretive thriving within the sensuality of Puccini’s score. Almost lackadaisically, the composer burns up some of the most gorgeous themes from his whole lifetime for the sake of slapstick. Rinuccio’s paeans to Florence can easily arouse salutes to betray our faraway Yankee land, but Puccini is playing for laughs. That effortlessness, or even cockiness, is punk rock. At risk of committing hyperbole in saying so, Gianni Schicchi might be one of the greatest operas of all time, thereby timeless.

And this goes to the virtue of short-form opera altogether. As I’ve crowed previously, short operas (which are usually chamber operas) deserve much more serious attention, difficult as they may be for programming into conventional subscription seasons. Speaking personally, from the first time I heard the first notes of perpetual motion sprung from its waltzing overture, Leoš Janáček’s Osud (“Destiny”) has held the mantle for me above the whole operatic repertoire, no-matter-whose and however long. Osud runs about an hour. No one performs it. Musicologists pass it by for extolling Jenůfa, and the Czech’s other evening-length works; but at least for me, Osud is unsurpassed.

As the third Castleton Festival concludes tomorrow at the Hylton Performing Arts Center in Manassas, with a variety concert featuring Denyce Graves, and lastly this weekend back on the farm, one hopes that Castleton, and the Châteauville Foundation, may long out-live its founders. As ornery as it may have seemed many years ago for our brightest lights in classical music to convene at a Colorado ski resort, rural Virginia easily should lead us through centuries of rich tradition, judging by the successful launch of this wonderful new Festival.

With unusual creative skill on a for-hire promotional piece, someone (unnamed!) made a moving documentary portrait that is worth every minute of your time for its quarter-hour running time:

The Tree of Life

2011-06-03T05:12:00.017-04:00

Recent days have seen dewy praise sprinkled onto The Tree of Life, which releases today in Washington after its domestic debut last weekend in New York and Los Angeles. People compulsively refer to the film as the singular vision of one auteur: an opposite of prolific, and famously reclusive. It is a film by Terrence Malick™, and stories about the film are mostly about Terrence Malick, along with his Golden Palm trophy at Cannes after that crazy guy got banned from the festival.

But what is the actual film about?

Here are the bits and pieces. It is by nature symphonic, heaving instrumental music to accompany its spare narratives and idiomatic visual meditations. Simply, it is some sort of wordless “classical music video” scored with narrative interludes. So we get a persistent line-up of mostly contemporary composers, in the post-romantic and modernist styles (still tonal) to be found in François Couperin, Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms, Bedrich Smetana, Ottorino Respighi, the Gustavs Holst-and-Mahler, John Tavener, Giya Kancheli, Henryk Górecki, and some more obscure Eastern Europeans of today. These are mostly lions of the repertoire we call “classical music,” and weekly you can see a few hundred people—regular patrons—shuffling into the Kennedy Center who crave these delights. The headcount is so miniscule for a region five million large, that it becomes statistically insignificant to represent our cultural priorities. Classical music, as a passion on the level of intramural sports, bridge night, must-see-TV, scrapbooking, bar-hopping, or gardening, is nearly dead among us.

But thinking again of the music itself—the very leaves on this Tree of Life—there is something else going on, and it isn’t a party. Nearly every note of every chosen composition is sacred. The sound world is mostly choral, then some pipe organ. Also: these are not timbres to evince a universal spirit of world religions. These are basically the melodic incarnations of Christianity, through the (recent) ages. In other words, you will find very few four-part choral harmonies and organ pipes outside that faith tradition. (Notably, Werner Herzog similarly fills his recent Cave of Forgotten Dreams with choral and pipe organ music in the style of eastern orthodoxy, for his similar agenda to explore humanity's prehistoric yearning for the divine.)

So we have the gardener (who is the artist); the tree itself; and its leaves. Thinking then of the roots, there is one last thing, and it is obvious: Terrence Malick has written a prayer, to a specific God. These are the bits and pieces of The Tree of Life. Everything else is dressing. It is not a complicated film.

If you can find that conclusion in any other published or blogged review worldwide, please let me know.

All this exposition may seem tedious, even needlessly Socratic, but my facetiousness really is my curiosity at political correctness. From celebrity stud Brad Pitt’s in absentia logline about vague “spirituality,” to professional critics’ desperate avoidance of personalizing their views on organized religion, what might have been most refreshing is a response to match my sense of what really goes on in private conversations. I would have liked to hear from, and to read from, the Nietzscheans among us who honesty say what they mean: That God is dead, or anyway, that Terrence Malick makes pretty pictures but it’s time to grow out of the fairy tales. And: that a whole lot of good people—we’re all good!—get ruined by the pious moralism to be found alone in organized religion.

I should detour for a moment, and explain myself. In my bias, Terrence Malick belongs to a sort of Holy Trinity of film auteurs, alongside Martin Scorsese and Lars von Trier. Old Martin Luther, known for saying something similar to this, would easily observe that these are men who “work out their faith with fear and trembling.” Their behavior coincides with an axiom in creative expression—most everyone agrees on this, while usually from a distance—that people with obsessions produce great art. And, religion is the mother of them all. Even if sex is the stronger one, things get especially explosive whenever artists combine the two.

If Terrence Malick is haunted by childhood, and Martin Scorsese is scarred by mean streets, then Lars von Trier is simply an egocentric provocateur. Or so you would think, from his dumb behavior at Cannes. But even the Dane is spending most of his life looking upward. There is a vital shot in Antichrist that abruptly jerks our view away from the forest cabin, and into the Heavens above. I often think of that anomalous cinematography when I ponder his obsessions. At the climax of Dogville, a badly wronged woman's father shows up to demolish a sort of American Sodom and Gomorrah. And now, true to form, Melancholia is his apocalyptic vision of planets colliding, from above. Fear and trembling. God the Father.

Martin Scorsese seems to have planted a crucifixion in every movie he’s ever made. He is a Catholic who cannot escape its iconography, while anti-Catholic for being obsessed with elusive Protestant grace (partly owing to his Calvinist foil Paul Schrader). When Scorsese’s realization of Silence by Shusaku Endo goes into release next year, he will be back in form. All those preceding mobsters are rogue disciples in his world. God the Son.

Terrence Malick seems interested, more than anything else, in grace—not just its prettiness, but our desperation for it. God the Spirit.

And that is the key to watching The Tree of Life. When I saw the film in New York, no less in a lowertown theater of twentysomethings-at-large, the chatter I heard tended toward one idea: It must have been awful growing up in the 1950s. Whether because they saw divorce happen in their own homes, or because it’s just what they think, “that woman should have just left him.” It is, of course, the contemporary solution. You will understand their judgment when you see the film.

Malick does something bold at the end of the film. It doesn’t work. The great flaw of cognitive geniuses is that they often fail at navigating clichés, because they haven’t wasted a single breath paying attention to them. (Malick famously served as professor of philosophy at M.I.T., while his doctoral thesis was on the existentialist Martin Heidegger.) So, when he lets loose those clichés, even if by coincidence, they may ruin a whole scene, or even the impression of the whole film. The Tree of Life resolves its narrative on a mystical, scenic plain where all the characters from the film converge. It is presumably Heaven, and everyone is in sharp focus, naturally lit, nicely robed, and hugging each other. This is just the kind of material that Trey Parker and Matt Stone took to Broadway. It looks like a fundraising commercial for admittance privileges to a tabernacle.

Still, it is a philosophically concise scene, far from cheap “spirituality.” Whether this scene is fantasy, or real (relating to your own faith when you watch it), you do get an argument for grace. You see that between people, tolerance—which varies through life anywhere and anytime, from the cruel to the tolerable—may find a happy end. This is a peculiar instinct we have as animals, weirdly found the most in historically oppressed societies: That the worse the injustice, the greater the yearning for grace—not animal justice. This theme is easiest for an existentialist like Malick to propose, who might say that justice is a pyrrhic victory anyway because “life is but a dream” of our own. Indeed, the heart of the reform brought by the Messiah whom Christians call their own, was to defy the expectation that pure justice is even possible in this world of warring animals, where love alone can save us...at least while we live, as mystics say, "in this period of waiting."

From even his first film Badlands, Malick regularly cuts away to several species of animals, usually one killing another, and you might find this awkward around his otherwise conventional scenes of character dialogue. But it is clearly part of his thematic design, repeated in Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World, and now this.

To say that Malick has redefined the language of cinema is no exaggeration. Most of his narrative exposition is wordless. This is, simply, how we live. We do not reveal how we feel freely, and we define ourselves by what we do much more than by what we think (and say). Perhaps more importantly—and this is ironic, because Malick is ostracized for slow pacing—there is a liberating economy of words in Malick’s wordless visual narratives. Conventional screenwriters may fill a whole page with dialogue meant to convey simply one revealing thing about a character—yet, one wordless action, combined with nuances of body language and movement, can make a richer case in far less time. There is a heartbreaking scene in The Tree of Life: Between turning pages for his father playing Bach on a pipe organ, the son gazes on his father with a richness that implies—using no words at all—a combination of sympathy, fear, admiration, awe at the music, and a melancholy awareness of the real adult possibility that dreams can die a long, slow death.

The response to The Tree of Life has been unanimously positive, you would think. That’s not necessarily what I picked up on, in that lowertown twentysomething-at-large theater I mentioned, where the end credits rolled to a collective groan. Importantly, too, if Malick’s aesthetic universe held in such momentary high esteem should really remain the walled-in province of formal concert halls and churches, I need to remain skeptical of these “spiritual” plaudits—because I really go to those places, and I’m not seeing their faces. For the moment, though, I’ll see wisdom in the value to underestimate. As The Tree of Life opens theatrically, and reaches an expanding audience of receptive minds, something might take root.

Terrence Malick always selects one repertoire piece to serve as a central motif in each of his films, from Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question in The Thin Red Line, to the second movement of Mozart's 23rd Piano Concerto in The New World. Central to The Tree of Life is a piano adaptation from Les barricades mystérieuses by François Couperin.

Urban Arias: Glory Denied

2011-04-04T01:06:00.001-04:00

Last year during the opening weekend festivities of Artisphere, I wrote about the surprise arrival of a new opera company in Washington called Urban Arias. “Surprise” is a relative term, because we imagine ourselves to live in a city that ranks among the world’s richest in terms of access to culture, and even pools of talent. But we cannot underestimate the scarcity of accomplished opera here, moreso chamber opera which arguably never existed. Much bemoaned at this blog, the Washington National Opera is just about the only game in town, a fine company that -- while utterly conservative -- also delivers reliably competent runs through the core repertory of safe standard fare on a revolving basis, occasionally risking offense to its overwhelmingly classical audience with contemporary works by living composers. But the heart of this dilemma always has been scale, more than substance; large institutions simply never can be counted upon for taking risks (well within their rights, and little to weigh upon their consciences). The saving grace for any chamber opera by a living composer is some abundance of small companies that might not, even taken together, outsize the major institution(s). For example, some so-called “opera aficionados” here crave more than just the now-abbreviated five productions per year at the Kennedy Center. Consider, too, that the smaller scale of chamber opera (and the likely more immediate relevance of contemporary works to a younger audience) holds the most promise for bringing new “aficionados” into a love for the medium. In some sense too, the law of averages can do much good -- abundant opportunities to experience diverse works of art is a much better situation than…well, monopoly power. As an interesting counterpoint, last Tuesday the Czech Embassy screened a filmed performance of the chamber opera Tomorrow There Will Be... about their martyred national hero Milada Horáková, and when I discussed the work afterward with composer Ales Brezina, he conveyed the idea that even back home, audiences were tentative approaching the chamber opera format -- this, even in the Old Country where opera on the whole thrives better than for Yanks. But Brezina testified to the unique intimacy afforded from chamber opera, and in fact has declined offers to stage his opera in larger houses.

As an interlude to those thoughts, I’m writing these next words (the day after the overall point of this piece) into a netbook from the balcony of a Washington Chorus concert dedicated completely to new works by Elena Ruehr, and I’m waiting for the music to start. The music director has arrived about five minutes late to an awkwardly silent room, only to launch into a long discourse about new music that begins with something to the effect of, “wow, a whole concert of new music, poor you!” And having said that -- framing the tired idea that new music always defaults to its audience’s tolerant generosity -- he goes into an opposite, winded lecture about how new music is important (mostly talking about himself). About twenty minutes later, the music actually starts. And it’s pretty schmaltzy stuff, easier to hear than the mean average of new works that strain for atonality, but lacking musically narrative structure and sounding ponderous, rather like a line-up of fanfares. The point of these comments is not to bag on the concert -- it was, after all, a competent performance of a talented composer’s work -- but here you have an example familiar to Washingtonians, even embraced by them, of inflating the broadest of categories (whether race, sexuality, gender or artistic style) in a way designed to promote it, but ultimately subverting it: the masses, for all their legendary skimming, know better than to confuse generality with quality. Audiences do not merely donate good will to a work of art in the sense of tolerating the newness because it is new. Rather, they like something if it’s likeable, and that’s that. No one likes, or likes to admit that they like, a creative act because of its category. Imagine, if you will: a hardcore punk act bombs at the 9:30 Club, but a tweedy intellectual steps out to lecture the liquored up audience about how they should support the creation of new music anyway. That’s inconceivable. Why not elsewhere?

Thinking of all that as a palate-cleanser, the point of the moment is to extol Tom Cipullo’s deeply personal opera Glory Denied, featured in the inaugural festival of Urban Arias. Glory Denied happens to be a work of our time; of special meaning to where we live at the seat of Federal government which dispatches soldiers to war. It engages its audience in tonal melodies, intellectual substance, emotional drama, and a concise narrative arc. It holds its own against the greatest of the classical repertoire, while helping to redefine it at the rarer scale of chamber opera.

Playing for three more performances through April 10 in Artisphere’s Black Box Theatre, Cipullo’s compositional style is chromatically complex only to the extent of its design to intensify a fundamentally lyrical score. Simpler put, he alternates his singers between beautiful and despairing lines that make complete sense in the dramatic whole. As a composer, he must be gratified that Urban Arias gives his score loving attention, beginning with Robert Wood’s nuanced conducting. The four-singer cast is top-rate, headlined by the extraordinary talent of Michael Chioldi, who will sing the role of Lucia's Enrico next season with the Washington National Opera. (It is an interesting coincidence that Chioldi also recently sang the title role in Long Beach Opera's production of John Adams' Nixon in China, another similarly fearless work for tackling a politicized subject, in this medium better known for tavern drinking scenes and hilariously prolonged death sequences.) No less impressive in this production is the assembled chamber ensemble, especially the virtuosic piano backbone of Sophia Kim Cook. The scenic design, too, is expertly devised using appropriately minimal set pieces, complemented with video projections of archival footage largely meant to evoke the artifice of family photographs that serve a sentimental, not documentary, function. As often happens in the attempt to incorporate video with theatre craft, though, these diverse source materials line up onscreen in discontinuity, a mostly stylistic problem (that could have been cured by careful color-grading, or more simply just tamping the entire timeline to black-and-white). As a supplement to the main front screen, projection designer Kevin Frech also creates a video floor from a ceiling projection that sparingly but effectively adds a less representational atmosphere, at key moments in the narrative.

Based upon the same-named book by Tom Philpott, Glory Denied is a morally complex opera that ultimately dignifies its subject, of suffering military men and women, by avoiding easy outcomes. (Compare that, for example, to the cheap rage of The Tillman Story.) Cipullo cleverly devises the two-person drama into four characters, who represent the younger and older versions of Thompson and Alice. We see the longing and the optimism of the young couple unfolding just as surely as we watch the later unraveling of their relationship. (Notably, film director Terrence Malick masterfully explored this dichotomy between idealized memory, and heartbreaking truth, using his idiomatic visual poeticism in The Thin Red Line.) One effect of this antiphony is that our sympathies are equally drawn to the before and the after -- an important device for clarifying (ironically) the moral ambiguity of the Vietnam War era. Cipullo’s execution in this way is deft: after a challenging first half of the opera that begs for clean songwork, an aria finally arrives that is probably the most lush and beautiful of the evening, when Alice sings something to the effect of, “After I’ve had my say…” She is warning her husband, when he has returned after nearly a decade away, that things have changed -- that she has betrayed him. The outrage that Thompson feels is so much larger than that betrayal; in the opera’s most powerfully terse passage, Chioldi sings with his thundering baritone of the way that the world has changed since he left. It is a litany of complaints that seems at first like a script of Conservative talking points; and yet, it might only sound that way to this majority society so slowly desensitized to the erosion of one thing and another over a decade of American life. The opera poses this question, of who has the better insight into truth (past a poisonous relativism that defines our hyper-democratized culture), between the one who slowly tolerates this erosion, and the one whose view of society suspends for nearly a decade, expecting that nothing really changes. And thus, in this way, Glory Denied goes to the heart of one timeless dilemma for veterans, who return from war to a different country than the one they left, in sacrifice to it. There is a moment in the opera when the wrenching sadness of this dilemma seems to be headed for a clean reconciliation, when Thompson tenderly offers forgiveness to Alyce for leaving him while away. In a pitch-perfect twist, she stands him down with bitter cruelty. Wisely, Cipullo (presumably following Philpott’s lead) ends the opera without redemption for anyone, a crisis amplified by the religious tenor of the final scenes. (Earlier in the opera, a cerebral setting of the 23rd Psalm anticipates this unresolved yearning for the divine.) Structurally, there is an unexpected and powerfully serene denouement in the form of a musical interlude, a duet between the pianist and cellist Drew Owen. After that, we are merely left with the vision of Thompson as a man forever haunted by the past, of falling in love, losing her, and losing himself. As an interpretive possibility for myself, I like the way that the mystery of the divine might be the one thing left for Thompson. It intensifies the drama and invites something more than the visceral pointlessness of war. But we are left to ourselves for that thought, and what we cannot ever escape is the fact that we remain a warring species. Recently I came across a video via acquaintance in the local filmmaker community that elegantly (if not melodramatically) depicts the solemn dignity of official ceremonies for our lost Marines at Arlington National Cemetery. Embedded below, it is in service to the daily opportunity we have as Americans to honor the men and women who put their lives on the line, and lose them for our sake.

Olivier Messiaen: Magnum Opuses

2011-03-11T04:00:00.008-05:00

On Opening Night of the National Symphony Orchestra's 2010-2011 season, I wrote that the largely stale programming eventually would include one masterwork "worthy of international pilgrimage" for which I would "sit rapt at all three performances." As of tonight: one down, one to go, and an excuse for that one in the middle: I need to hear the composer's other magnum opus somewhere else. Thankfully, none of this requires international travel; a cab ride will do.

The object of this over-the-top affection is Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie. It has been something of an obsession for me over the past two years, because of a relatively minor magnum opus of my own called Financial Capital that aims to set the entire 75-minute musical composition to landscape/time-lapse cinematography. I'm about 30 minutes in, so at this rate I'll be rolling credits in nearly a decade.

People are fond of saying that the work polarizes audiences. Well, a few things about that. It runs 80 minutes (or about 75 if anyone follows the score's tempi, ahem), so it tests your patience. Its lyrical expanse is so ambitious that it either sweeps you away or gets you stuck in the sap. It uses an early synthesizer called the ondes Martenot, rather like a theremin, that sounds timbre-rich to some and sci-fi-campy to others ("Greetings, Earthlings, we come in peace!"). And for those who require genre categories, this work defies them all. It is at once lyrical poetry and chromatic mayhem.

Under Christoph Eschenbach's baton, things go a bit slow and studied; yet the interpretive trick to this work (I believe) has always been to temper its dramatic heft with the spirit that always belied the piece: love of nature. A well known part of Messiaen's biography is that he daily cherished walks in the forest, for listening to bird song as his muse for the day's composing. (Björk has mentioned Messiaen as her archetype; I quite agree, thinking of Selma in Lars von Trier's brilliant Dancer in the Dark; or, that Messiaen's birds are Björk's cracking icebergs.) These nature rhythms need to inform any performance of the Turangalîla-Symphonie, with open tempi even nearing syncopation, especially during the bird calls that occur between piano and orchestra that are structured as loose antiphony. Similarly, there are critical accelerando passages in the second movement that Eschenbach seemed to overlook.

Backtracking just a little, the evening begins with a pre-intermission presentation by music scholar Joseph Horowitz. He is joined by the evening's pianist, Cédric Tiberghien, who starts off playing a lovely solo work by Messiaen called La colombe (The Dove). After Horowitz discusses more of the well-known particulars in the piece, ondes Martenot virtuoso Tristan Murail demonstrates the odd vintage instrument that is his life's passion. As he explains to some extent, electronic music machines preceding its invention, like the aforementioned theremin, could hit notes but never precisely, and without expressive nuance. The ondes Martenot adds clavier keys along with a sort of ribbon controller that the player vibrates rapidly, creating the same intuitive tremolo effect that makes the violin sing so intimately human. Murail joined with Tiberghien to play part of an early sextet that became the beloved pinnacle movement of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, in a fresh arrangement giving economy to the well-known passages. (Thrash-punk-chamber-music-game-theory maven John Zorn once gave his own interpretation with his band Naked City, throwing electric guitar into the mix.)

All of this goes well, and Horowitz's presenting temperament finely matches the intellectual breadth of the forthcoming work (he resists promising roses), but this is naturally a perceived necessity of compromise: that audiences need to be coddled before going under the knife. Leonard Slatkin did it too (speaking from the podium for which he was so well known), and I do have the memory from that first NSO performance -- and others I've seen elsewhere -- of seeing the audience trickle away as the running time grows unbearable. I saw some of that tonight, but not much, which may or may not be a good thing depending upon the baseline question whether averse patrons lately process this stuff for real, or wait it out loathesome.

Because the Turangalîla-Symphonie is basically a duo concerto for piano, ondes Martenot and orchestra, it requires virtuosic performances, and both soloists deliver. As an afterthought, though, something really quite horrible happens -- and I'm loathe to mention it because the mere opportunity to hear one competent performance of this work is almost above reproach. But the man in charge bears all responsibility; and what happens is this: the damn organ is too loud. Which is to say, the conductor has balanced volume from his position at the podium, but the speakers for the ondes Martenot (pictured above) send out unfiltered, unenveloped, pure sine waves straight into the audience's ears. Although this is not something that Eschenbach could have heard from behind the speakers, it is an obvious concern and he should have known better. I can only imagine how much worse this would have been for the NSO's older demographic, who could be seen variously lurching for their hearing aids to turn down the pain. In the definitive recording of this work, by contrast, Kent Nagano turns down the ondes Martenot to its proper volume, where its scored role to largely double other instruments simply finds its place.

So I mentioned taking a break from the Turangalîla-Symphonie's three-evening run. That will be for the whole Quartet for the End of Time that was excerpted at the NSO before intermission, and it will be played Friday, March 11 at 8:00 p.m. in the Library of Congress' Coolidge Auditorium by the Antares chamber music ensemble. According to the usual routine there, ticketed seats by now are gone, however if you line up an hour or so before "curtain" on a standby basis, you are almost sure to get in. And if you miss this performance, you can hear the 21st Century Consort play it on April 16. The Quartet is Messiaen's other magnum opus, at the chamber music scale and written whilst Messiaen was imprisoned by the Nazis. In this work, Messiaen depicts the New Testament apocalyptic vision of Saint John -- a specific religious reference, quite like everything else Messiaen wrote. Rather persistently, I find, people try to secularize Messiaen. By now, it's just something to chuckle at. (Although not quite on that level, I note that Eschenbach contends in his program notes that "Messiaen's Catholicism is not spiritual in any dogmatic sense. He seeks possibilities of belief and possibilities of love." Well, Messiaen believed in all the dogma too, not merely in the possibility, and he famously was organist at Église de la Sainte-Trinité -- a wonderful destination to honor the composer if you should visit Paris -- as he held that post from the age of 23 until his death at age 84.)

Remaining performances of the Turangalîla-Symphonie are Friday and Saturday, March 11 and 12. Using this special link, you can receive $20.11 tickets to seats in the Orchestra Premium and Orchestra Prime sections that are otherwise as much as $78. You can also mention Promo Code 58728 over the phone or at the box office to this same effect.

Madama Butterfly

2011-03-10T03:22:00.004-05:00

Original poster from 1914 by Adolfo Hohenstein (1854-1928)

We've just returned from Intermission. Butterfly spots the Abraham Lincoln coming into port. She has faithfully waited three years for Pinkerton to return, and now believing that he will (for her), she scatters her house with cherry blossoms and high hopes. The stagehands send up the ship's arrival with a simple silhouette projection, and Puccini's music heads into fanfare mode -- colored as for much of the opera with leitmotivic flair no less persistent than Valhalla's ghosts. Then, faced with all that irony -- from "O say can you see by the dawn's early light," to Butterfly's ignorant son waving the American flag -- the audience bursts into Pavlovian applause. It's another night at the opera in Washington, D.C.

Of course, we know that Pinkerton is kind of an asshole, and his arrival is no cause for celebration. We know that Pinkerton brings along his new wife to demand sole custody of the child he earlier fathered with Butterfly. And we know that there's a knife, and someone will die, and it ain't no Yankee.

Or do we? And with that healthy question guiding my thoughts, I go back to the time in my late teens when first I experienced this dramatic work, not only the musical experience but also the high drama, which opera-tes on a different scale than literary or even cinematic fiction. The dramatic arc of Madama Butterfly builds upon operatic conventions of aria and exposition, ascending into its tight, shocking narrative plateau that goes to blackout before the running time leaves room for wandering. To remember this impact, without the baggage of having attended a dozen repeats, is the surest way to survey this opera's place as a repertoire masterpiece -- and thus, all the above harrumphing about audience reaction is not so simple. If Butterfly's original dramatic impact should blanch upon one dozenth showing, what might emerge is this epiphany: Puccini's masterpiece is highly manipulative, and it still works after all these years.

So yes, the audience cheers. (During this extended run at the Kennedy Center Opera House, the Washington National Opera is packing seats with new blood, a winning strategy during this stormy time for the company and the economy.) And having been manipulated that way, the audience willingly joins an artist's architecture designed to arouse an emotional climax. (I might still maintain that the weird applause especially owes to the fact that The Washingtonian -- not least its pertaining genus of early evening arts patrons -- is programmed to applaud flags and fanfare...) I make this rather drawn-out case about manipulation in order to propose that the work awkwardly mingles with our contemporary values, and now we only hope that the narrative simply appalls civilized society once her audience reaches the end. (I've heard on good authority that Washington audiences earlier than mine had affectionately booed Pinkerton for his curtain call, rather like hissing at a vaudeville villain all-in-good-fun.) This expectation for revulsion comes from several directions. The Asian community (of which I am half-a-part) struggles with Butterfly's perpetuation of the classical "Oriental" archetype of a devoted wife who disproportionately subjugates. Indeed, the opera inspired playwright David Henry Hwang in M. Butterfly to subvert the narrative into a gender-bending Broadway play that took Puccini's original snarkiness against Western repression to a whole new level of comeuppance. Asians on the other hand cannot avoid the tragic admission that Butterfly's extreme devotion-unto-death, which seems insane, actually represents something of a crown jewel in the surviving Asian society aesthetic; from outside that culture, you might perceive it from watching a recent abundance of romantic comedy imports (one niche that Korea in particular has owned in recent years). Ron Daniels' expert stage direction here expertly depicts Butterfly's obscene modesty as she stands behind a screen, unlatching just a panel or two for peeking into her moment of deliverance, just enough to preserve the heroism of Pinkerton's imagined homecoming.

From another direction, Butterfly strikes the American audience as suspiciously disparaging against Yanks. Again, our national anthem functions here as an inglorious leitmotif, coming from a climate of Italian nationalism at a time when I cannot say they were on the right track either (fascism had almost arrived). Indeed, if you should focus on the original 1914 poster at the top of this page, you may notice that Butterfly's son is waving a U.S. flag as his own mother kills herself. (Many subsequent productions, and several I have seen, used this archetype.) The ironic message cannot be lost on anyone, and is likely to be Puccini's contemporaneous vision as his society confronted all the wondrous fussing about a New World's greatness from within Italy's old world of richer history.

The Washington National Opera has inherited this production from San Francisco, and it ranks among the more conservative stagings we have seen (alongside cinematic adaptations like the Martin Scorsese production at left). As recently as a couple of seasons ago, we were given a rather weird production, itself a repeat of the same production just a few seasons prior. If memory serves, there was a surrealist wall of numerous dismembered hands reaching into urns and sprinkling cherry blossom petals onto a minimalist stage. Something like that. (And, rather derivative of Cocteau's visions in La Belle et la Bête.) I also recall imaginary reflecting pools around which stage movement got blocked, until at some point the careful suspension of disbelief turned into "aw screw it," and unintended miracles of walking on water ensued. Again, something like that.

Here, you get period costuming, and much use of sliding screen doors all across the set, and a peculiar burka-like hiding of Butterfly's butlers. Of course, the big payoff in Butterfly -- the pinnacle moment so endemic to Puccini and so raptly anticipated (rather like The Three Tenors hauling through their third consecutive damn encore of "Nessun Dorma") -- is the sunset that leads into the Intermezzo between Acts II and III. It might be the most gorgeous orchestral passage of Puccini's whole opus, and this production serves it best at its end: The stagehands send up a silhouette of Japan's rising sun flag. It is the emblem of Japan's imperial military, and it adds nuance to this complicated mix of nationalistic irony and old-meets-new. Most of all, it heads off a finely tuned third act that diverts the audience into wrenching empathy -- bolstered no less by the preceding romance, and prettiness, and ironic fanfare.

In the Washington National Opera's longest run ever, and probably the longest run of any opera locally, this production continues through March 19.

The company has generously donated a pair of free tickets to DC Arts Beat as a gift to one reader and his/her guest. The prize is a voucher that can be redeemed for either the March 14 or March 17 performance. To enter: (1) post a link to this page on Twitter, Facebook, or any other blog; and (2) send a simple email to contest@dcartsbeat.com with your name, phone number, and reference to where you posted. At 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 10, the entrants will be run through this random picker and the winner contacted immediately with the voucher. Good luck!

Nixon in China

2011-02-22T02:43:00.000-05:00

Indulgent as this blog may be with solitary insights, its informal aim has been to stick to the Washington scene, to match the implication of this increasingly comical title “DC Arts Beat” (nowadays manifesting the tempo of a dirge). Yet I’m anxious to break ranks here by invitation of this wonderful rhymed couplet that typifies the masterful poetry of Alice Goodman’s libretto for Nixon in China:

This air agrees with me
Wish we could send some to D.C.

The text, which coincides with the feeling I get every time (these days almost monthly) I visit New York City, is for Richard Nixon after he steps off a staircase that descends from a campy setpiece drop depicting Air Force One. He has landed in China for his historic visit of 1972, but for the past couple of weeks at the Metropolitan Opera House, he actually has been tenor James Maddalena reprising a role he created almost a quarter century ago.

Among other questions we ask of contemporary opera – quite often, “where is the damned melody?” – there is a prescient one after the test of time, to ask whether a work deserves a place in the so-called operatic canon of company repertoires. Mind you, most premieres never get a subsequent run, especially after decades of wide neglect. The reasons for this range from artistic leadership (lately reversed in Peter Gelb’s commitment to operas by living composers, not-so-much-here), to outright rejection. Much of the latter has been deserved, against the pens of “boomers” who had graduated from the Second Viennese School of tone-row terrorists dominating conservatories for decades and only recently begun to be outdated by tonal successors. If you care to think about how punk rock gave the middle finger to flower children, imagine that Minimalism as an artistic movement similarly flamed against the structural fraud of its forebears with punishing simplicity. Two founders from that movement have earned permanence: Philip Glass and John Adams. Both are being revived at America’s opera mecca, the Met, some decades after their emergences: respectively, in Satyagraha and Nixon in China.

As we know from his recent Washington residency, John Adams falls into that great tradition of master composers doubling as maestro conductors. Saturday evening, I took pilgrimage to New York for this premiere of Nixon in China upon the Met stage, with Adams at the podium. I had experienced the birth of this work over two decades ago as a relative kid in Los Angeles, hearing fellow surf punk Kent Nagano conduct the original production in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. It left an immediate and overwhelming impression back then: it dared to be a work of intellectual tableaux on recent events, within an art form that typically finds us suppressing giggles during, say, Rigoletto when that almost-dead daughter revives from her bodybag for one last aria and sings to the back row of the rafters. Nixon in China also mashed up the patent repetitive style of Philip Glass’ familiar Minimalism/Maximalism with a kind of nostalgic nod to mid-century Big Band, a recurrent style in Adams that he has called his “trickster persona.” Between those poles, though, the opera is solidly classical in creds: Adams, surpassing the skills of his Minimalist contemporaries who thrived best in self-serving chamber ensembles, always possessed the Western skill of a master orchestrator, on the level that we know well of, say, Rimsky-Korsakov to Mussorgsky. (One fine example is Adams' orchestration of American folk songs by Charles Ives.) Indeed, a pinnacle musical moment arises from Nixon's ballet-within-the-opera, after a passing thunderstorm, that anyone familiar with the score anticipates for its epic beauty. Around all the surrounding trickster Minimalism, one swears that Wagner’s spirit is haunting the score. While I'm guilty here of hyperbole, it is absolutely defensible to suggest that this moment is among the greatest in 20th Century opera – yet, at the same time, it is played for laughs. Despite being a political meditation injected with such smart debate, Nixon is at heart a hoot of an opera. Saturday, it seemed that some of the humor was lost on the audience, but when Chou En-lai proposes a toast with eloquent poetic ruminations – only to be met with Tricky Dick saying in turn, “Never have I so enjoyed a dinner…outside America!” – we are brought to the same embarrassed laughter as recently we found in our 41st President.

Indeed, there is a masterful scene early in the opera that for me had always stood above the rest, exemplifying the way that Nixon manages to arouse good comedy and drama out of a physically static philosophical debate. Seated in front of a not ironically minimalist bookshelf setpiece, Nixon and Mao Tse-tung debate Capitalism against Communism to the musical accompaniment of faux-clumsy, persistent syncopation, and a sort of Greek/Communist chorus in Mao’s trio of assistants.

Founders come first
Then the profiteers.

It is during this scene that anyone experiencing this quarter-century revival begins to think about the China we thought we knew, and now the presumed dominance of Capitalist China that awaits us.

All said, for its surprising success as a work of theatre, Nixon always suffered a bit during its latter half. There is a ballet-within-the-opera, brilliantly choreographed by Mark Morris, that nears incomprehensibility when a horny Henry Kissinger camps it up, inciting soldiers to whip a peasant girl to death. Literally (I believe), audiences reach a point when they are forced to ask, “What the hell is going on?” (I had pondered a few months ago that the film Mao's Last Dancer smartly depicted this agit-prop art form in an ironically beautiful fulfillment of Madame Mao's perverse vision.) And then there is the final Act III, which contrasts heavily against the preceding political theatre with its intimate and theatricalistic juxtaposition of the principals settling into bed and ruminating what’s-the-point-of-it-all. Much of this is Peter Sellars’ doing, an offstage eccentric evangelist for the arts and, less successfully on the job, a scenarist who has a reputation for quite honestly ruining good pieces. Adams’ subsequent opera The Death of Klinghoffer is a fine example, where the score and narrative were ever more brilliant, but Sellars staged it using puzzlingly dense scaffolding that was more Hollywood Squares than ambitious experimental theatre. Indeed, documentary filmmaker Penny Woolcock transformed Klinghoffer through her masterful film version; and for Adams’ next opera Doctor Atomic, she was called upon to get it right for the Met debut after Sellars did his thing for the world premiere in San Francisco.

The larger fact, though, is that Nixon in China represents the apex of the operatic repertory from the latter half of the 20th Century. Rather like the surprising irony of Nixon’s legacy itself, the opera has aged well. Importantly, too, Nixon functions as an artfully historical record of two countries meeting, believed now to be vying for dominance through ever-increasing battles of political, financial and intellectual capital. And musically, Nixon represents a precious moment in the development of Adams' idiomatic style, when he was a deliberate Minimalist composer pushing that form's infant boundaries with distinctly American assimilation less obvious than the workings of forebears like Aaron Copland or Leonard Bernstein. There was a moment that I'll never forget, at the end of Act II's raucous wail, "I Am the Wife of Mao Tse-tung," when Adams led the orchestra into his thunderous cadence and confronted the ensuing aural decay with an expression of sheer awe at what he had created. Upon this, the lights faded into darkness – and that is an image, of this great artist humbled by his art, burned into my memory forever.

"I Am Old and Cannot Sleep" (Russell Braun as Chou En-lai), that concludes the opera

Experimental media: Of kisses, ants, bulls, miniatures and waterfalls

2011-01-23T23:38:00.003-05:00

“Experimental media” owns a category of art that might simply be miscellaneous, easily outnumbered by the so-called “plastic arts” of painting, sculpture or crafts that do not incorporate literary or musical media, and that fill the majority of our museums. Similarly, it might be a qualitative term to describe any art evincing experimentation at its core. The latter idea seems problematic since any in-the-moment creativity bespeaks the principle anyway: ius naturale could hold that the barest threshold for new (really, “fine”) art is a navigation around clichés, and an ethic to say something new. Moreover, “experimental media” poses the same quandary as the term “classical music” so often used here: it references tentative or tested creation unto a moment in time, even if the common aim is timelessness.

These debates become immediate when major works from the medium get revived. But their roads to revival can be vastly and even needlessly divergent. This blog essay, as it turns out, begins in New York City and ends back home in Washington, D.C.

The top floor of MOMA currently is filled with a generous helping of films “by” Andy Warhol. (Those quotation marks are all at once facetious and necessary.) As you enter the exhibition, the facing wall reflects his milestone film Sleep, which is as simple as that: a single 16mm movie camera fixed upon a single person who gets a fair night’s sleep (which is to say, the film runs almost six hours, and nothing but its audience happens – a visual equivalent to John Cage’s 4’33” of silence). What we might call an experiment has lasted for over three decades, and has made its way into introductory academic surveys of art history. Similarly we do not call Le sacre du printemps an experiment of Igor Stravinsky, but rather a staple in the “classical” music repertory.

The rest of the Warhol exhibition is two stunning spaces: first, a grand hall of sorts lined all-around with projections of motion portraits, for which the subjects – Allen Ginsberg among them – were asked to stare into a 16mm movie camera for a bracingly awkward and yet powerfully intimate long stretch of time. After that hall, the exhibition takes you to a black box that screens Kiss in a loop: simply a tight shot of a couple deep-kissing, whose effect is to make patrons feel so voyeuristic that their inevitable public guard feels creepily asexual in the face of such privately sticky passion. (A relative genius of our time, R. Luke DuBois, built upon this concept in a work just last year also called Kiss.) But enough about Andy and his progeny of sorts; what I really mean to write about is a few floors down.

Just as I arrived at MOMA last weekend, the international press had reported that David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly became part of MOMA's permanent collection, in northern exile from the political nightmare of our mid-Atlantic swampland. After a few hours making my way down to MOMA’s lower floors, the piece showed up adjacent to Laurie Anderson’s legendary old O Superman hand-gesture silhouettes. As seen in my pictures here, it plays from a modest cathode-ray tube monitor sitting on the ground, paired with another AIDS passion play.

Much has been written about this incident, much of it hysteria. The temptation is to write and write and write about it (which starts the clock ticking on my musings here), but the most refreshing things to read or hear are sage reactions from veterans in the field (c.f. political activists), who have seen this sort of thing happen before and who understand, as artists, that curators and their kings are not inherently beneficent merely because they work in the poppy fields of art. The fact that the Smithsonian Institution (note to journalists: please stop writing “Institute”) is a quasi-public entity certainly complicates this fact, but not much. It is both a talking point and a truth that quasi-public museums live or die from private subsidy, to such an extent that public subsidy is nearly symbolic. The fine arts forever navigate this reality in a free market system of supply and demand, which begins with the principle that artists need to make a living. Therefore the rules of engagement remain, as ever, this rich possibility that a museum or gallery might secure an artist’s work without encumbrance of institutional weeding, since curators of every scale have a better and more localized sense of patrons wanting to see (and buy) the things that they want to show. As such, autonomy is part of this market that liberates curators and their kings to be responsive – and this might from time to time result in pulling a piece just as surely as their happy decision to exhibit. Notably, too, controversy-averse curators regularly rejected A Fire in My Belly, who only now express opportunistic outrage. I reel at two opposing thoughts: first, this hypocrisy; and second, our post-Yankee perception that arts exhibition is somehow democratic and governmental, inside our false and mounting assumption that public institutions properly act as gatekeepers, rather than fighters-in-case-of-fire.

And to indulge for a moment about the merits of the Wojnarowicz controversy: The fact that conservative opposition merely drew more attention to the work is an obvious predestination. Yet, for every hundred eurekas about that, there was something rather opposite to say that never got said. You might know that the work incorporates Wojnarowicz’s deliberately self-produced impersonation of Christ, crown of thorns and all. And of course, there is the famous army of ants crawling across a cross that tends to be the work’s excerpted still. For the niche group who happens to be the majority in America (i.e., Christians), these are uncommon appearances in contemporary art. At the same moment that it is exploitative, it is explorative. Even the most careful theological ruminations can easily dignify the searchings of a suffering man who finds resonance in the passion story. And it cannot be lost on Christians that Christ found no friendship in the organized church during His life. Importantly, these are severable issues from any Christian’s professed line-in-the-sand for moral clarity, and for moral justice, that can remain solidly and unapologetically orthodox in the exercise of free religion. Enforcing that upon society is a whole other matter.

I had never seen the complete work. As I stood watching its imagery unravel, inevitably I winced for most of the time at its gore, homoeroticism, and BDSM. (It might be abundantly clear from this blog that I am utterly conventional.) But I started seeing things that bespoke an alignment with my own work, even where each artist has vastly divergent points of view. Mixed with the foregoing shock imagery, some footage of Spanish bullfighting began to recur. (The structure of Wojnarowicz’s video work is raw repetition.) This blood sport, which is a sacramental element of ancient rituals, mystically complements the surrounding religious metaphors of crucifixion – no less, the army of ants crawling across the cross that could equate to ecumenical corruption. I had gone into much the same thinking space, well before seeing any of this, through a film called El Toro that was to screen in a few days at The Phillips Collection. After a generous Best of Show award at the Rosebud Film and Video Festival last year, El Toro proceeded to win the 2011 Experimental Media Prize from Washington Project for the Arts this past Thursday. The whole surprising episode has proven, in me, a testament to the possibility for art to stimulate ruminations on suffering, ritual, faith, and brutality. But most importantly – and this is really the point – I drew from this convergence at MOMA a vivid understanding (in this visual art world rather new to me) that no good can come from second-guessing an artist’s intentions. Wojnarowicz was vilified by conservatives for assaulting religious institutions. Not so fast. He might very well have had explicit designs to frontally assault every corner of Christendom. But the curator didn’t say so, and as far as we know, neither did he. I propose that if he did, perhaps his work would have failed to survive the test of time, to become this thing we call: a work of art. What sadly gets lost amidst arts controversies and the pertaining rage is this general truth: no matter how shocking the result, an artist’s behavior is tenderness, subtlety, humility. An artist bears witness to deeply personal searching, and invites us to the catharsis of that suffering. You might on the other hand run into utterly cynical, profiteering, shock-jock artists from time to time. Or so you think. And anywise, if that anomaly should cloud our instincts hence when we confront any new work of art, we become the blind following the blind. Meanwhile, Artists worthy of that name – whether you call them experimental or classical – walk into the light.

And that light, after all the searching, can no less manifest innocent joy. Such is the case back home in Washington, at her one reliable institution for the presentation of so-called “experimental media”: the Black Box on the lower floor of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Now that Superflex’s McDonald’s restaurant has continuously flooded and drained a thousand times over, in its wake we have Hans Op de Beeck’s Staging Silence. Set to a perky minimalist music score by Serge Lacroix, the looping 22-minute black-and-white film is a playful pageant of miniature set pieces constantly entering and exiting from one setting to the next, from street scenes to offices to landscapes. After a Friday Gallery Talk presented by Manuel de Santaren – an enthusiastic collector of the artist who calls him a true Renaissance man – I saw something rare and beautiful happening in the Black Box, a trace of which you can see in this mobile phone photo. While the older, dare I say monied and educated, patrons spilled into the Black Box after the Gallery Talk, a busload of school children arrived into the same space and sat in front of the screen. While the council of elders engaged Staging Silence with their cultivated instincts, the children vocally “oohed” and “aahed” at the playful imagery and the percolating music. For them, this was not a loathsome visit to a contemporary art museum; rather, it was a helluva time.

This medium of moving images can be an elegant bridge across generations, and it need not be merely the province of broadcaster-fed instant gratification. Peter Greenaway’s recent Last Supper installation at the Park Avenue Armory, stunning but sadly vilified by most of the New York art establishment, is among the latest entries to his passionate (if not pointlessly academic) argument that cinema is dead. If nothing else, Greenaway’s evangelism is a healthy shot in the arm for advocating arts literacy: he envisions a world where the same temperament that finds art lovers able to gaze at paintings for long stretches might match a restlessness against narrative cinema that prefers formalistic films in gallery spaces. At this juncture, the possibilities seem at once endless and young. Fiona Tan’s exhibition at the Sackler Gallery, which closed this past Friday, is a paramount example of things to come. Apart from the Rise and Fall film for which the exhibition was named – a profoundly melancholic juxtaposition of youth and old age – one particular work seemed to me incredibly prophetic. Provenance was a series of six framed video panels showing Tan’s family and friends going about their daily lives, filmed with the highest production values that we associate with major films, yet drawn at a slow and studied pace that befits portraiture. Inspired by 17th Century Flemish paintings (that aroused my formative memories visiting the Royal Museum in Brussels), I can hardly call the series “experimental.” After El Toro, I find myself at an interesting crossroads, between conventional career, documentary film, and this indeterminate other area of experimental media. Whether these things might still converge, or represent a point of decision, is an exciting world of possibility.

Hans Op de Beeck's "Staging Silence" plays in the Hirshhorn Museum's Black Box continuously during open hours through March 27, 2011. WPA's 2011 Experimental Media Series continues with five further screenings in Baltimore, Washington, Richmond and Philadelphia through April 7, 2011. Visit WPA's Web site for further information.

American Ballet Theatre

2011-01-19T02:48:00.001-05:00

The American Ballet Theatre began an extended run at the Kennedy Center Opera House last night with a mixed repertory program that will repeat on Wednesday and Thursday. After that, Friday through Sunday, the company will present its evening-length work The Bright Stream, featuring the music of Dimitri Shostakovich.

The highpoint by far of the mixed repertory program is Jardin aux Lilas, featuring principals who include the veteran dancer Julie Kent pictured here. Set to the score Poème for violin and orchestra by 20th Century composer Ernest Chausson, Jardin aux Lilas is sensuously lyrical and expertly performed by the Opera House Orchestra (a beautiful sound-world that any balletomane might do well to protest the lack of in recent Washington Ballet performances). This revival of Antony Tudor's choreography faithfully renders Chausson's rich melancholic lines among a minimal set design and expert use of lighting that complements the refreshingly serious tone, especially in the pinnacle pas de deux.

As for the ensuing Duo concertant, though, things don't go so well. Beginning with the score from which its name derives, Igor Stravinsky sends up his harsher chromaticism here, less direct than the bloodbath we know better of Le sacre du printemps. Musical source aside, the on-stage violin soloist simply struggles to hit those notes, and his tension intervenes with the dance performance. Also, oddly choreographed, the dancers begin each movement standing by the on-stage pianist and violinist in a sort of parlour gaze as the music starts, then proceed into tableaux that eventually take them right back to the piano. It is an odd, or perhaps lackadaisical, choreographic design.

The mixed repertory performances end with a Jerome Robbins classic called Fancy Free, which evinces mostly the same vintage (and now, frankly intolerable) shore leave hijinx of sailors pursuing easy and not easy women that evolved into the musical On the Town, also composed by Leonard Bernstein. With a scenic design meant to resemble a bar or diner, it oddly feels constricted around the physical objects of the set pieces that might have better been danced using minimal props in an open design, like Robbins' more refined classic The Concert (or, The Perils of Everybody) that I saw the Joffrey Ballet perform in Chicago last year. Yet this is still a delight to experience, reminding of the company's rich history that traces back to the seminal choreographers of our time -- Robbins developed Fancy Free for ABT. (Fun fact: The original costume designs, still used in this production, are credited to Kermit Ernest Hollingshead Love -- that's "Kermit Love" to you -- who worked with Jim Henson on The Muppets...by coincidence, after Kermit the Frog was named.)

Discounted tickets are available for all remaining performances; using these special links you can purchase $29 tickets to orchestra-level seats that normally cost as much as $79:

Mixed-Repertory Program, Wednesday and Thursday: Link
The Bright Stream, Friday through Sunday: Link

Urban Arias

2011-01-13T02:44:00.003-05:00

The Washington Post might have done better this past weekend, covering the emergence of numerous new performing arts centers, than to use the puzzling term "polymathic" to describe our region's brightest new light Artisphere. Recall that last year on 10/10/10, its opening weekend ranged wide: from cinematic ballet, to experimental music, to skateboarding art, to chamber music. And then there was this surprising debut, out of nowhere: Washington suddenly got a new opera company. And that, at a time when the big one isn't doing so well.

Urban Arias evidently is the creation of established opera conductor Robert Wood, who begins with the ambition to mount an annual festival of short operas at Artisphere, forthcoming March 31 through April 10. Before that time arrives (and especially if you missed their Artisphere debut), Urban Arias will present a representative selection of "mini-operas" this Friday, January 14 in two performances at 7:00 and 9:00 p.m., in Artisphere's Black Box Theater.

Judging from their performances last November, the affiliated talent is superlative. And quite in the spirit of chamber opera, these apéritifs are not heavy-laden from marquee composers: few but the most, well, "polymathic" patrons would recognize the composers in Friday's line-up of Jack Perla, Jake Heggie, Seymour Barab, Lori Laitman and Jonathan Sheffer. Surely those big hulking controversies surrounding the Washington National Opera elucidate a need for this alternative scale. While debates swirl about the big one, such as whether we can go on living without our dear Placido, and whether the organization should merge with the Kennedy Center once and for all, Urban Arias has dramatically increased the presence of opera in this otherwise drenched swampland for the art form, without the panic of millions to raise in funds, and thousands to seat in...butts. (It is a parallel debate, and quite better suited for another time, that the widely publicized financial woes are partly needless; the all-or-nothing swell of The Grand Opera -- and her pricey A-list of international celebrity -- is simply a self-made horror borne of simplistic notions: that the art form is an over-the-top, all-cylinders-firing spectacle, leaving no room for chamber opera on our major stages.)

Moreover, just as mainstream institutions continue to neglect the major operas of our time (notably, WNO's 2011-12 season is a snoozer of repertoire standards), there is a rich body of work to be found in English-language chamber operas, such as those from last century's master of the form, Gian Carlo Menotti. And today we have numerous works from the great minimalists, notably Philip Glass' Les Enfants Terribles for duo-piano and two singers, or Michael Gordon's chamber opera Van Gogh. These works can be staged for small audiences, by small companies, and with utmost intimacy of a kind unmanageable in the Kennedy Center. (Purists even say that, for lions of the Baroque repertoire, a 2,300-seat theater is outsized sacrilege.)

Yet boundaries still stand erect between these scaled-down conventions of operatic form, and the futurist possibilities to integrate whole experiences of digital media, digital synthesizers and genre-jamming with acoustic ensembles. Very few companies outside New York City and scattered college town visionaries have been willing to go there, yet perhaps Urban Arias will make room in this humble swamp. Down by the river.

Tickets are available online, at the door, or by calling (888) 841-2787.

An interview with Robert Wood from WETA-FM's Classical Conversations

New Minimalism at the Strathmore

2010-11-10T04:00:00.056-05:00

So it’s rather widely known that the founding composers of this genre dislike the term for generalizing their oeuvres. And among these composers, the two most likely to be memorialized by musicologists as defining pioneers are Philip Glass and Steve Reich. And they are likely to be labeled Minimalists anywise for future generations to study and contextualize within the overall picture of late 20th Century musics, who broke free just barely from the rigid monopoly of the Second Viennese School heading into the 1970s.

From the other side of the Atlantic, it was Michael Nyman who first coined the term, himself a latter composer who adapted this style into his own unique idiom of European band-hall sounding modernism. Later it was suggested that Minimalism is in truth a sort of “maximalism” – it uses patent repetitive structures to elongate the listener’s sensation of harmonic rhythm that is the fundamental basis of Western music theory (and the true nature of momentum in a score). Well and good.

Whatever you call it, the next few days will deliver a rare opportunity to hear the two original masters, both at one place. Thursday, America’s reigning purveyors of new music, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, will give an all-Reich concert at the Concert Hall at the Strathmore. And on Sunday, concert virtuoso Robert McDuffie will deliver Glass’ new Violin Concerto No. 2 for its Washington premiere in the same space.

Speaking just for myself, and invoking a populist cliché, my sentiment about Minimalism is rather like, “You had me at the first repeat.” This is a form that people evidently love, or hate, with few feeling in-between. You might wax poetic about why this is: perhaps it is the way that it evokes “existential dread,” in the words of documentary filmmaker Errol Morris who has called upon Glass for scoring his finest works (e.g., The Thin Blue Line). Whether or not your philosophical disposition resonates with this notion of “existential dread” might have something to do with whether you prefer to see Planet Earth from outer space (in a vacuum, I suppose) or with your feet firmly planted on the ground. This is the fundamental divide that is famously depicted in a fresco of Plato pointing to the ground, and Socrates pointing to the Heavens. It always seemed to me that Plato is song-and-verse, while Socrates is all chorale. Or something like that.

But this divide takes us back to the founders’ objection. Rather than harping from an endless debate about whether to define music by its mere extent of repetition, I suppose that the objection has to do with the reality that this Minimalist school not surprisingly evolved. John Adams best epitomizes this fact; you could compare his early works like Shaker Loops and China Gates to his recent Son of Chamber Symphony and take a backwards journey from Minimalism to Serialism. To a lesser extent, Glass’ music has become increasingly lyrical, and deliberately cognizant of Baroque/Classical forebears. Early Glass works were most likely to end in a way that sounds like a power outage; now he seems actually comfortable with the music theory mechanism called “terminal cadence.” This would have seemed preposterous in those years when his original Ensemble played to weed-smoking New Yorkers sitting cross-legged at industrial lofts in a reactionary, avant-garde spirit. Now that Glass has joined the legion of “immortal beloveds” within the pantheon of classical composers, he is actually more than ever simply sounding like them.

Sunday’s performance bespeaks this to the most obvious ever extent. The evening pairs Glass’ new work, subtitled “The American Four Seasons,” with Antonio Vivaldi’s actual “The Four Seasons.” Glass wrote the score specifically for Robert McDuffie, who is aggressively touring the country in an extensive commitment to the work that is unprecedented for the introduction of any new concerto. Recently we had the intimate opportunity to hear McDuffie perform the finale from Glass’ preceding violin concerto at the Phillips Collection’s Music Salon (on a program that included his perfect performance of Igor Stravinsky’s neo-classical masterpiece Suite Italienne). McDuffie proposed, during an informal chat afterward, that Glass stands nearly alone as a modern composer whose work is deeply idiomatic and thus instantly recognizable. (He also told a priceless anecdote about how he came to procure his priceless violin, by way of Georgia bankers and Southern charms; it got the audience in stitches laughing.)

This notion of a singular style rings true for Reich too, but to these ears, his music seems after so many years merely persistent, in some sense obliged to a rubric of his own making. Even his new chamber work 5x2 on Thursday’s program, which makes use (for the first time, his record label boasts!) of rock-and-roll instrumentation, sounds largely indistinguishable from his early works – the same pulse, the same unison percussion, the same vocal drones. While any new Reich work still is a rare thrill to hear, he leaves open the question of how history will treat him as an important composer in the Minimalist canon. It has been many years since he invested the kind of epic depth to be found in his 1983 choral symphony of William Carlos Williams poems, The Desert Music.

The Thursday performance is at 8:00 p.m.; the Sunday performance is at 7:00 p.m. Both are in the Concert Hall at the Music Center at Strathmore.

Alexandria Symphony Orchestra

2010-11-05T02:47:00.017-04:00

There is just a trio of orchestras in the greater Washington, D.C. region that have a ready reputation (and physical placement) for being the "default" purveyors of symphonic and operatic music: at the Kennedy Center, we have the National Symphony Orchestra and the Opera House Orchestra; at the Music Center at Strathmore, we get visits via I-95 from Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. All of these orchestras are top-rate, and we are lucky to have them, grumblings aside.

But in the surrounding communities, there is room for more than just those house orchestras: more neglected repertoire to be played, more talented conservatory graduates not employed by the big three, and more venues to fill with music. Among such suburban symphonic ensembles, the Alexandria Symphony Orchestra stands apart, and can come as a surprise to anyone who never bothered crossing the Potomac River (or city limits, for that matter) to give them a try. This Saturday evening is as good a time as any. They perform at 8:00 p.m. in the Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall, which is right off I-395 near King Street.

The highlight of the program (to these ears) is Samuel Barber's lush Violin Concerto. This year we are celebrating the centenary of this American composer's birth, and as recently as last Thursday, one of Barber's most important advocates Thomas Hampson gave a thrilling recital of the composer's art songs at the Library of Congress' Coolidge Auditorium (preceded by a lecture from authoritative Barber scholar Barbara Heyman), and the Library bestowed its rare Living Legend award at the concert, in tribute to Mr. Hampson's tireless efforts to preserve the American art song, including the legacy of Samuel Barber, through his Hampsong Foundation.

The Alexandria Symphony Orchestra has programmed surely the most often-performed and beloved works from Barber's opus (excepting his overplayed Adagio for Strings that fails, for all its melancholy brilliance, to represent Barber's idiomatic balance of classically-rooted tonality and modernist chromaticism). Performing as soloist is the amazing local virtuoso Jenny Oaks Baker. I had the privilege to film the rehearsal of this work last night, and from what I heard, Maestro Kim Allen Kluge has really gotten it together: the orchestra is in fine form, and Mrs. Baker performs the work with expert nuance and confidence. And of course, the music itself soars. To say that Barber's Violin Concerto is the greatest of its genre that any American composer yet has produced is a view widely held, and not at all preposterous. Mrs. Baker flatters the score among the ranks of famous readings from Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Joshua Bell, Gil Shaham and (my favorite, dating from my mid-'90s crush) Anne Akiko Meyers. Don't miss it.

Rounding out the program is more Americana from Aaron Copland, including excerpts from his Appalachian Spring, and the close relative of variations on its famous Shaker tune by film composer Sam Cardon. You can purchase tickets online or call the box office at (703) 548-0885.

An interview with Music Director Kim Allen Kluge from WETA-FM's Classical Conversations

IBIS: A Chamber Music Society

2010-10-15T02:46:00.001-04:00

Another quick post, on the heels of hearing Korean violinist Chee-Yun tonight play "Louange à l'Immortalité de Jésus" from Messiaen's transcendent Quartet for the End of Time. (Adding to that, her encore of Rachmaninov's Vocalise was one of those rare opportunities to witness a deeply affective performance -- she was visibly moved, in mind of her announced dedication to a loved one recently lost). The recital was the formal beginning of the Kennedy Center's Fortas Chamber Music season, which stands as Washington's centrally prominent series for chamber music.

But while Fortas sets its sights on importing international talent, there are numerous local chamber music societies in the Washington area, and the best among them by far is Arlington-based IBIS. Founded by violinist Joseph Scheer and harpist Susan Robinson, joined with other local professional musicians, IBIS all at once maintains a high level of excellence while keeping everything affable, accessible and relevant -- you won't find any academic commitments in their programming to run through "all the great works" of any certain master, and they have no fear of the "crossover" label, which they invoke for a January concert with Dar Williams at Arlington's new Artisphere. IBIS just gives great concerts, to a loyal following, and if you've never experienced them, you have an especially unique opportunity this coming Sunday: at The Belmont Mansion in Dupont Circle, as seen in the picture above. The 2:00 p.m. concert is followed by a champagne reception, and proceeds will benefit the MusicLink Foundation. For more information, click here.

Were I not in Chicago at the time, hearing Thomas Hampson in Macbeth (and meaning to hear Ricardo Muti's CSO debut until he fell ill), this is where I'd be. IBIS sent out notice last night that tickets are nearly sold out; you can call The Belmont Mansion at (202) 667-4737, or email susan@ibischambermusic.org to see what's available.

Cathedral Choral Society

2010-10-14T02:42:00.003-04:00

This is a short post to give notice of a wonderful concert this coming Sunday, October 17, 4:00 p.m. at the Washington National Cathedral. J. Reilly Lewis (whose keyboard virtuosity I have the privilege to hear every Sunday) will lead the Cathedral Choral Society in a concert of French and Belgian music, including works of the Franco-Belgian Organ School. Click here to read the program notes by Robert Aubrey Davis, who also interviews Lewis about his forthcoming season in the following short video:

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As of this writing, and if you have never before attended a Cathedral Choral Society concert, you might be able to secure free tickets to this concert by calling the box office at (202) 537-2228 and mentioning code MAS001. More details here.

The forthcoming season will present a Russian program in May with the Russian Easter Festival Overture of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and an American program in June with the transcendent Agnus Dei of Samuel Barber.

Salome

2010-10-08T03:28:00.018-04:00

Salome is about religion.

There, I said it. Because it needs to be said; because religion gets utterly marginalized every time Salome comes to town, and journalists (whether late hipster aspirants or the mainstream establishment) wander through the work saying "whatever" to all that Biblical stuff, ultimately wanting to know how much skin we see after the seventh veil, and whether Jokanaan's decapitated head would meet Madame Tussaud's approval. This matches the rallying cry of much media consumption today, which basically asks, when do we get to see all that sex and blood you promised, and could somebody please tell that religious fanatic in the dungeon to shut up?

Quite an irony there. These shrugs at the modern productions of Salome are no different than Oscar Wilde's original scenario for the Tetrarch's essentially areligious court (or at least a superstitious one lacking any monotheistic moral order). The characters lack faith in anything much more than themselves, yet from Princess Salome's ironical innocence, a healthy objectivity intervenes. And of course, that is the stuff of a great protagonist, who can drive a dramatic structure of conflict, discovery, and tragedy.

To be clearer: I don't think that Oscar Wilde wrote the play cackling by candlelight in anticipation of a glorious slaughter to silence the Baptizer, and a cast of characters to make it happen. No less, Richard Strauss' intentions sing clear through his music: When Jokanaan, and later the two disciples, describe a man at Galilee, we hear the epic strains of Wagnerian leitmotif -- not parody, and not judgment. Had Strauss meant to tinge this evangelistic moment with irony, he would have done so with all his master skill. Instead, he conveys the transcendent heft that we could hear last weekend in his Four Last Songs.

Salome does not have the hots for Jokanaan. She hears him berating her parents all day long, but like most tweens would, she probably rather likes that. So she is not a cunning little vixen intent on avenging the Baptist for all his fire and brimstone against her incestuous royal family. All the same, she knows that the Baptist's vitriol is grouped against her, too, and his wholesale judgment eggs her on as an innocent. Importantly, Wilde surrounds the Princess with admirers who are ready to throw themselves at her (and eventually, over a cliff), but Salome wants Jokanaan. In the Washington National Opera production that opened last night, director Francesca Zambello adds a clever stage direction that I have not once seen in a dozen or so productions around the world (and this is an opera worthy of pilgrimage!): After Jokanaan descends back into the dungeon, some guards sexually assault her. This is critical and rare because it feeds the central dramatic idea of the scene: That the world waiting for the Princess after all those seven veils come off is ultimately predatory. Jokanaan pronounces a damning moral order upon the Princess and her court, but that promised land of wrath could seem indistinguishable to her from the vultures circling overhead, or grabbing at her body, or ogling her from the throne.

It's a well-known hermeneutic detail among Christians that there was some ambiguity early on about who the Messiah would be, or should be: Jokanaan, or Jesus. (Martin Scorsese portrays this theological confrontation elegantly in his pinnacle masterpiece The Last Temptation of Christ.) Jokanaan famously pontificated, "Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." And of course, Jesus changed the subject to, "Love one another."

Trust me, this blog is not a Bible study. What I find so prescient, though, is Wilde's artful creation of the dread in Salome's world that cries out for grace -- literally, for Jesus more than Jokanaan. Wilde inserts a brief scene of loudly debating rabbis, which usually results in caricature onstage that I find insensitive (and this production is no exception); but that dynamic of passionate debate was quite real at the time, built on centuries of defining who should be the Messiah. Surely the most gentle way that Christianity confronts this question vis-à-vis the Judaic heritage is not to say that the old religion needed to be replaced by the new religion, but rather that the time had arrived for "love one another" to surpass all the former legalism.

And yet, at the dramatic climax of the opera, Salome sings that "the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death." Thus the great enigma of Wilde's and Strauss' Salome is that she felt drawn most to the man who berated her, unattainable. She reflects to his severed head that the Baptist would have loved her, if only he really looked at her -- and this moment has nothing to do with lust. Perhaps the Princess of so few years had enough wisdom to dismay the areligious world she knew, awakened by hearing Jokanaan's crude litanies of moral order. Perhaps Jokanaan, no matter that he faithfully "prepared the way," represented the failed old guard of legalism; that he would suffer from this imprisonment, let alone from knowing that he wasn't meant to be "the one," is the stuff of great drama.

We know enough from the essential bits and pieces of Oscar Wilde's biography to find it peculiar that he would send his heroine so relentlessly in pursuit of the moralizing Baptist's acceptance. Of course, that kind of agnosticism is the discipline of any literary genius, but I have long suspected more purpose in the playwright here. As surely as "the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death," there are certain things about love that transcend gender, circumstance, and morality. It desires perfect control, and a taste of paradise that is not to be found in a predatory world. Yet, the physical mechanism of love itself...is predatory after all. This paradox, the true "voice crying out in the desert," has been the stuff of much poetic rumination -- think of Johnny Cash and his progeny Nick Cave, whose "murder ballads" find spiritual resonance in the scene of Salome planting her lips onto the severed head of Jokanaan. It is not so simple as the adage, "can't love 'em, can't shoot 'em." Infinitely more complex is the dilemma that we will spend life pursuing self-fulfillment -- these days, more than ever -- yet we may, at Salome's young age or after a long life of searching, find that our Self is the Devil. For that, I'll just cue Lars Von Trier's brilliant newest film Antichrist (streams via Netflix) and let it go.

The quick parting thought is: Whether or not you take this not-often opportunity to see and hear Salome onstage, there is a priceless jewel in the canon of interpretations that you can experience at home. In 1974, German director Götz Friedrich defied the convention of merely filming a stage production, and shot this opera as a work of through-composed cinema, on a controlled set using 35mm film and multiple camera edits. Teresa Stratas sang the titular role, on par with Deborah Voigt or better, but with a physical authenticity to age and beauty that is unsurpassed. Just recently, the film was lovingly restored onto DVD, at the same time as another film from the same production team, of the subsequent and very similar opera from Strauss' opus, Elektra.

Tickets are still available to the remaining performances of Salome, and if you haven't purchased tickets from the Washington National Opera since September 1 of last year, use Referral Code 522567 after clicking here for a 25% discount on up to four tickets.

Classical WETA's Nicole Lacroix interviews Deborah Voigt about Salome:

VelocityDC Dance Festival

2010-10-05T02:57:00.003-04:00

Last year, the velocityDC dance festival debuted at Sidney Harman Hall with great success, fulfilling the momentum found in its name and hopefully ensuring many years into tradition. At risk of hyperbole, you can say that it is an overwhelming or exhausting encounter with Washington's finest formal dance, compressed into two programs across four performances October 7-9. Conceived as a sort of sampler for each respective troupe's season, already it has poised itself to be the official start for Washington's whole dance season, and easily the most important single event above all else. Yet it comes and goes quickly: with just four performances October 4-9, there are two programs/line-ups that showcase a variety of our best dance companies. And more, each respective company showcases its finest work in the time they have. This non-stop procession of master performances is breathtaking, and in the spirit of promoting patronage through the forthcoming season, seats are made affordable at a flat $18 for each performance (from the "your nose will bleed" seats, to the "you'll get splashed with sweat" seats).

To these eyes and ears, last year's highlight was the Washington Ballet's presentation of Edwaard Liang's brilliant Wunderland (pictured above), choreographing various string quartets of Philip Glass including his pinnacle No. 5. (We had another occasion to experience the work later that season, as mentioned here.) In an opposite order to that -- of repeating a work from velocityDC within the company's formal season -- this year we have the great privilege to experience a work at velocityDC after further refinements from its initial development when CityDance Ensemble performed +1/-1 by Christopher K. Morgan earlier this year. From what I saw at that performance, you are in for a masterpiece. Most of its appeal for me is the music that it sets; Michael Gordon's Weather arguably revitalized (in the wake of his Trance) the whole genre of minimalism that had ironically, for all its avant-garde pretensions, begun to sound conservative. Weather represents the evolution of that species musically, and Morgan does wonderful things with the score that I can't wait to see in final form. At last year's velocityDC, CityDance had put on a brilliant performance of Paul Taylor's Last Look that it also revived later in the Spring. With similarly stunning but even more agitated music by Donald York, Last Look was a psychotic display of physicality that effectively (and reflectively, through mobile mirrors) set its audience up for a restless night of nightmares.

It is advised again this year to get tickets as early as possible, since the shows may sell out. Wisely, velocityDC has ditched an experiment from last year, a late-night cabaret show that sort of pandered to hip-hop culture, and awkwardly at that; but this year's fewer stagings leave fewer seats for attending the festival, so you'll want to get on this now. Though you could try to attend both programs, I'd argue that the golden ticket is Program B, which solely features that Morgan work, along with the Washington Ballet, and another favorite local troupe, Dana Tai Soon Burgess & Company. (Goofy sidebar to that: I've been stopped several times across the years by random people who thought I resembled the virtuoso for whom the company is named -- I am half-Korean too -- but the inevitable double-take on my comparative physique only results in a quick correction. That is of course an easy compliment to Mr. Burgess.)

National Symphony Orchestra: New Beginnings, Again

2010-09-28T03:21:00.006-04:00

With its gala performance on Saturday night, the National Symphony Orchestra opened its 2010-2011 season under the new leadership of Christoph Eschenbach. Not unfamiliar to Washington audiences, given his trial runs over the prior season and his Philly-stine reputation that precedes him, Eschenbach has officially arrived to modest fanfare, a gigantic salary, and a donation last week specifically to cover it. More about that later.

On paper, the program was idyllic: he would be joined by two celebrity artists of international repute whom he can claim to have "discovered," Renée Fleming and Lang Lang. And the repertoire would include waltzes, in tune with Eschenbach's heritage along with the evening's aspiration to be a gala celebration. Also on the program, the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss -- so sacrosanct a work (certainly to me) that it transcends analysis -- would be sung by Ms. Fleming, who has done her time singing Strauss. And of course, Lang Lang can polish the keys with just about anything, but there could be few better matches than Liszt for the pianist's outsize stage personality.

What happened, though, was less than an idyll. After Eschenbach's reading from Die Fledermaus, which cannot as a light overture arouse strict scrutiny from even the strictest (certainly not me), onward came Richard Strauss and his ethereal dirge. Delicate as it is to go there after the comic sway of Die Fledermaus, the transition went worse because of, no joke, a diva joke. When Fleming reached center-stage, she shook the hand of the conductor along with, as is custom, the concertmaster. But Nurit Bar-Josef was wearing a silk evening gown in a perfectly matching shade of green, and Fleming twice-over jokingly hesitated, pretending to head back for a costume change. Then, within moments, she began to sing about death.

OK then. Well, a few things. First, for all the comic opportunity to be mined from this hopefully unplanned sketch, no one could have been more familiar with the tone of the ensuing work than Fleming, who should have known better. But even if we pretend it never happened (and it is possible to be objective), the resulting performance did not play to her strengths. To take issue with the nearly universal respect that Fleming commands is credible -- she is taking care of that herself as she forays into indie pop, poorly -- and though she has pulled off bravura readings of Strauss in passages of coloratura from, say, Der Rosenkavalier, the Four Last Songs represent another side of the composer that trace to his deep affection for, and influence from, Richard Wagner. His is a sound world that requires heft, an "evocation of the gods," and more than just a pretty face. The opportunity will arrive next month to hear from Strauss' canon another work of such Wagnerian proportions, and though that diva will be surgically trimmed down from her better-known formative years, Deborah Voigt possesses an innate capacity to carry Salome over the voluminous orchestrations characteristic of Strauss when he is chasing after Wagner, rather than Mozart. As for the Four Last Songs, you can do no better than the privilege of hearing it done right under the late Giuseppe Sinopoli, with Cheryl Studer giving it her all. In that context, you will not hear "September"'s transcendent horn solo fall flat as it did on Saturday, though Bar-Josef played "Going to Sleep"'s violin solo in a way that rivaled the recorded Sinopoli performance, and any other I've heard.

The gala audience, in any case, applauded anxiously between all the songs, roused perhaps in the opportunity to attend Fleming's celebrity that is also the classy face of Rolex ads, and when she announced from the stage that she would be singing Strauss' matrimonial Cäcilie for her encore, the first-floor patrons in particular let out a hearty laugh. I have no idea why.

Next to the scene (after a little more waltzing) was Lang Lang, who for the first time I can remember was not wearing a velvet dinner jacket. As you would expect, there was much waving of hands from the bench, no matter the actual conducting a few feet higher, and his Liszt flew by with technical precision and heart to match. Most endearing of all was the precious opportunity to hear the concert pianist joined by his mentor on the same bench to play duets of Debussy; although Slatkin was a crafty pianist himself, this is a conductor who whose tenure will deliver virtuosic piano performances at a level worthy of solo recitals (reminiscent of Daniel Barenboim in Chicago).

But of course, the central subject of the evening was Christoph Eschenbach for his debut as permanent music director. Washingtonians are counting their fortunes, quite literally, that they have scored among the world's greatest conductors, whose prior gig netted a $2.3 million salary that was more than double Leonard Slatkin's. Indeed, just three days before the gala concert, the Kennedy Center's new chairman made a $5 million donation specifically earmarked to cover Eschenbach's salary. Money matters aside, journalists have made much of tensions between Eschenbach and the Philadelphia Orchestra's musicians that led to his departure, a routine entropy which always requires a healthy dose of skepticism. Consider Slatkin, who was dogged not only by a persistently creepy string at the Washington Post of three successive adversarial critics, but also some mumbling about his relationship with the orchestra and the Kennedy Center management, his preparedness, and his proclivity toward contemporary music. No matter these things, our loss of Slatkin to Detroit was tragic, and our sense of it will only grow with time. Music directors have a profound impact on the sound of an orchestra, no less (and more critically for us) the repertoire that it performs. After all those personality conflicts behind-the-scenes, what remains is the music itself, and the audience for whom it plays.

The forthcoming season roster (and the example of Eschenbach's earlier tenures) make clear that we are headed back to conservatism and EZ-er listening. There are endless amounts of Beethoven in store, along with the gushing melodramas of Gustav Mahler ad nauseum. There are barely any American composers (who were Slatkin's special emphasis), such as Samuel Barber who merely receives his billionth performance of the Adagio for Strings. November does deliver The Miraculous Mandarin of Béla Bartók, but after that, no more Eastern Europe (which was the special treat of our time with Iván Fischer). English composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams or Edward Elgar are nowhere to be found (apart from the clockwork of Handel's Messiah, and an evening of William Walton). The most we'll hear from France is a passing Faun, apart from the Turangalîla-Symphonie of Olivier Messiaen which is the one concert for which I (speaking selfishly) will sit rapt at all three performances -- a piece worthy of international pilgrimage to hear!

Issues swirl around all of this, such as whom to please -- the monied older generations, the academes, the uninitiated tiptoeing into classical music? Can we say that a challenging repertoire filled with new ideas, sound worlds and living creators is a long-term investment in the vitality of an ensemble -- the better payoff than expectations of a pleasant "date night"? If the challenge to sustain an orchestra institution is like throwing a party, what do you play on the jukebox before people pick up and leave? Do you take a vote? And when the party becomes so expensive that the stakes on these questions reach deadening proportions, is the party over? On the other hand, is it fair to answer the generosity of gala patrons and their like with abstract musics that might alienate them?

Welcome to Washington, Maestro.

Art and Flora on the National Mall

2010-09-20T17:54:00.002-04:00

A little diversion from the on-again/off-again event coverage here. This short film wanders from the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden, to the museum's ColorForms exhibit indoors; then to the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden; and finally to the Smithsonian Institution's Enid A. Haupt Garden. It is a quick trip through the art and flora of our National Mall.

Since tripods are not allowed anywhere in the District without a permit, the footage is shaky (with my apologies). And overall this represents more a leisurely stroll than careful shot composition, so by all means, lower your expectations! This is simply a celebration of art on a beautiful day in Washington, D.C.

The music is composed by Steve Reich, Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards (1980) performed by the San Francisco Symphony under Edo de Waart's direction. The camera is my new acquisition of the Sony NEX-VG10 (this video was my first trial run), and I color-graded the footage using Red Giant Software's "Looks" filter in an Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 editing workflow. Playback here is at 720p when the HD icon at the bottom-right of the frame is red; if your Internet connection or graphics card gives you trouble, though, pause-to-buffer or just toggle it off. Note too that there is an icon at the bottom-right of the frame to fill your screen.

The Tillman Story

2010-09-03T07:00:00.031-04:00

For one last time before the fine arts season goes into full swing -- by one measure or another, upon next week's opening night of the Washington National Opera -- here is yet another meditation on cinema, even farther removed from the classical tradition of performing arts but, as documentary (a discipline dear to me), vital still to the universe of creative expression as surely as Wiseman went to the heart of ballet. The Tillman Story opens today in theatrical release to a broader Washington audience than its first appearance in June closing out SILVERDOCS at the local branch of the American Film Institute. In a sense, that festival screening de-marked the end of a spotless run inside the festival circuit, met with suspiciously unanimous praise despite the narrative's potentially divisive nature. Yet: it is not crudely simplistic -- or "divisive," for that matter -- for anyone to approximate that documentary filmmaker peers and festival screening audiences are somewhere on the political spectrum as solidly to the left as the iPhone 4 drops calls. (Nerd humor.) The broader distribution of this film incurs the stricter scrutiny of a more diverse audience, just as surely as we may admit that middle America has cultivated many more soldiers in proportion against those who may hail from inside the Beltway. On the other hand, documentary films more than ever fail as a multiplex exhibition medium: with the ubiquity of reality television and 1,000-channel line-ups, it takes Michael Moore's vaudeville antics for the vocal majority to justify choosing the genre over make-believe acts of cynical entertainment (running the gamut from Eat, Pray, Love to Avatar). So be it. And if the audience for this film only marginally enlarges its diversity in theatrical release, what will the reviews say?

So far, you can Google until "I'm feeling lucky" turns to "I'm feeling owned" and you won't find a single twitch from any established media (save for the New York Post, which is a tabloid I stay as far away from as Fox News on the boob tube). It is this unanimity, rather than the film's own harrowing narrative, that bummed me out to such an extent that I question whether creative artists (the very soul of our society) value anymore the collective didactic discipline of searching for truth -- in the greatest traditions -- rather than drawing low-art caricatures inside utterly un-epic battles of petty egoes. That great academic humility, of knowing that there are infinite unknowables, is meant to be the ultimate fruit of higher education. Anything less is tantamount to being that insufferable part of the audience who wants to let you know how the movie will end, instead of watching the damn thing, or leaving.

Not only from sheepishness (being such the minority here), but also just to call out the film on its lack of nuance, there is little more to say than all that, before really digging into it. All the same: The Tillman Story is about a professional athlete in a sport that many people love, many people are indifferent about, and many people fundamentally dislike for its violence and overwhelming corporate capitalism. Pat decided to become a soldier instead, but made it very clear that he wanted to go about it low-key and without favor. Predictably, everyone betrayed this intention (arguably, too, his own family). The rest of the film is about that betrayal.

Pat is deployed, calls the war "fucking illegal" (by one person's account), comes back to the States, and is offered an honorable discharge with the ability to resume a full professional football contract. Despite (allegedly) having just called the war "fucking illegal," he rejects that offer and returns to war. In a logistically dangerous canyon, from a split troop caused by a car breakdown, Pat bravely but maybe not (in hindsight) wisely storms up a hill accompanied by an Afghan in Afghan dress, and other rangers accidentally start shooting at the Afghan, presuming he is a Taliban fighter. Pat emerges from cover, exclaims "I'm fucking Pat Tillman!" and gets shot in the confusion. (Later, Pat's mother -- in no uncertain terms -- accuses the soldiers of murder, saying that they had a lust to kill.) The Army hushes the surviving witnesses pending an inevitably long investigation -- surely this takes time during a war that has higher priorities, such as avoiding bullets and bombs -- but the news media takes off with the story (remember, some Americans love football). Hastily (and wrongly), someone in the military, or a few people in the military, or the entire Federal government in stunning lockstep, withholds the detail that Pat was killed by friendly fire (or as Pat's mom would have it, lustful killing fire) amidst all the world's attention. It is possible that he/they/everyone on the flowchart adjudged this to be the most graceful way for the family to remember a hero, or it is possible that he/they/everyone behaved like warmongers and negated the truth solely to sustain positive propaganda. Pat's family wants to know. I sure would.

At the formal funeral, Pat's youngest brother goes up to the podium in jeans and an undershirt holding a glass of beer, chugs a bit, and says, "Pat isn't with God, he's fucking dead. He wasn't religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he's fucking dead." Director Amir Bar-Lev asks if he regrets that years later, and his answer is hell no.

Pat's mother and father continue pursuing the case separately (they are divorced) and Mr. Tillman, a small-town lawyer, writes a letter to the highest levels of government that ends with, "Fuck you." An Inspector General opens an investigation and concludes that it was inappropriate to withhold the information about Pat's death by friendly fire. The Tillmans still want confessions from everyone on the flowchart of their minds, and they press on with a bi-partisan Congressional hearing where the military's top brass recite that they cannot remember precise dates and manners that this all went down because they were in the middle of managing a war. (No less, Pat's wish, to not be treated specially inside his larger call of duty, rings in our ears; or it doesn't.)

One of the soldiers who was closest to Pat, who provides the most insistent narratives and opinions in the film (such as the account of Pat saying the war is "fucking illegal"), refuses to complete his duty and a military tribunal charges him for violating the law. You might think that his resolve to serve was as fragile as this relative political news blip -- and he does say in the film that he only joined the military simply to get a scholarship.

All of this is in the film. It is one of the most beloved documentaries of our time, perceived as a slam-dunk invective against our government. So far. If it wins Best Documentary at Hollywood's annual celebration of itself, the unanimous like-minded community will leap to its feet, believing that the world has changed.

There are caveats to end with here. I have deep respect for the men and women who put themselves in harm's way: even just by enlisting, they outdo everything I've done for my country over a lifetime. I am grateful to Pat Tillman and his family in this regard, unqualified. And one more thing: It is possible to have disagreed with the decision to go to war all along (as I did and still do), yet watch this film and be revolted by its simplistic caricatures, its stunningly agnostic treatment of arrogant assumptions, and most of all, its missed opportunity to dignify Pat Tillman: as one American hero among thousands of heroes in uniform -- not numbered jerseys. That's how he wanted to be seen. Or so I assume.

Ballet on Film

2010-08-23T01:19:00.005-04:00

Against that continuing adagio of summertimes and local arts much bemoaned here and here, performers seem to have tiptoed en pointe onto the silver screen at an unusual scale for the past few months. In the area of symphonic music, we have received two fine hybrids of Russian and French cinema, Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky and Le concert, the latter of which will be the subject of a forthcoming post (shorter) at DC Arts Beat. More timely, though, is this weekend's wide release of the film Mao's Last Dancer, lending an opportunity to look broadly at the subject of Ballet on Film.

To begin with, certainly you can find already a substantial body of work that strains, almost patronizingly, to propose that balletic brilliance is a spiritual matter knowing no boundaries, inviting the fundamentally marketable opportunity to juxtapose classical ballet with hip-hop beats and urban-plight dramas with all the grace and charm of those motivational assemblies that were mandatory in high school. (Center Stage, Save the Last Dance, Step Up, Billy Elliot...) A long, unfortunate string of filmmakers have found endless inspiration from the notion that classical ballet (which includes contemporary ballet in the classical tradition of through-choreography) is a judgmental barrier designed to shut out a demographic that is not the blanched Aryan ideal, skinny and privileged. This is, of course, nonsense. Ballet is an art form that has carefully evolved from fundamental principles and a choreographic vocabulary over centuries. It is passing strange for any ego, of any culture, roused by any emotion, to appropriate the form without paying deep respect to its esthetic rooted in a history that generally corresponds to the Caucasian archetype.

Mao's Last Dancer is based on the same-named autobiography of Li Cunxin, whose talent was cultivated by Communist China and lent to the United States on a cultural exchange, leading to his defection and fight for freedom. Central to the film (before you get to the sentimental tacks) is the arrogance of China's Cultural Revolution, and the struggle of Cunxin's wisest teacher to sustain balletic tradition inside that oppressive environment. Chairman Mao's wife (similarly parodied in a ballet-within-an opera from John Adams' masterpiece Nixon In China, being revived next year at the Met) demands that her state-run troupe evolve the medium into something with "more rifles," evoking the military might of her regime. With some irony, it is in this section of the film that you see the most innovative choreography: Graeme Murphy, Sydney Dance Company's lasting legend as Artistic Director, takes to the task of choreographing this film with fresh invention. We are not meant to applaud the ballet-within-the-film that delights Madame Mao, for all its harsh and abrupt concision, but it is an amazing sequence anyway. Inside the plot, though, this trend agonizes Cunxin's teacher to such an extent that he is exiled (perhaps to somewhere like the Soviet Gulag). As a parting gift to his most promising pupil, he sneaks a videocassette of Baryshnikov to young Cunxin, who marvels at the Russian master's perfection and discovers his impetus to excel at the craft.

For most of the film, Australian Bruce Beresford helms with a remarkable sensitivity to ballet's seriousness, which is far away from any commonplace Saturday instinct to dance the night away (itself, a recreation more like imbibing than any creative act). Mao's Last Dancer certainly is the kind of studio picture that you approach fully expecting a pageant of Nutcrackers, Swans, Giselles and maybe even the stuff of those aforementioned pop-art pix. Beresford delivers something else, ranging from Christopher Gordon's often chromatically rich musical score, to the modernist choice of Stravinsky's carnal Le sacre du printemps as a contrasting underscore to the film's already heavy sentimental resolution. (Rather like that last match-up you expect at the end of a sports drama, yes indeed, Cunxin gets to perform for his long-lost parents and, right on cue, the audience wells up in tears. I certainly did.) Notwithstanding, the film's overall restraint becomes so much stranger when the film's final note is a silly homecoming scene of impromptu dance in the ancestral village, to ridiculously sappy EZ-listening music and that most egregious of cinematographic techniques: slow to freeze-frame, fade-to-black. Moreover, the film's human drama commits that other timeless sin of biography: Details are utterly rushed through, so that the dissolution of Cunxin's first marriage (so charmingly developed in the narrative) is reduced to a single melodramatic scene that appropriates simplistic ideals of feminism and artistic passion. (Literally, Cunxin one day gets pissed because the house is unkempt, his wife says she can't go on living a lie because she really wants to dance; the camera cuts away to her loaded-up car, and she drives away forever. And: Scene!) From what I understand of it so far, Life is not quite so tidy.

But the overall strength of Mao's Last Dancer is its authenticity to the art. Beresford has cast real dancers, including the Birmingham Royal Ballet's principal dancer Chi Cao for the title role. And against the weakness of all those other contemporary films about ballet, Beresford trains his lens on process and technique more than spectacle, leaving proper respect to the incredible stamina and humility that ballet dancers practice day-to-day. With that same humility as an audience, we can peek even closer into this reality through the recent documentary film La danse of Frederick Wiseman, whose life's work was honored at this year's Guggenheim Symposium of SILVERDOCS at the American Film Institute in Silver Spring. La danse: Le ballet de l'Opéra de Paris is no exception to Wiseman's uniquely raw style, not quite vérité in its pretensions because its truthfulness is not stylistic; it just is. At the symposium, we were treated to a film reel from Wiseman's body of work, including relentless long sequences of heavy breathing from a terminally ill patient, and a single tracking shot of a blind boy walking through the corridors of a school. The symposium was moderated by Davis Guggenheim, made famous from winning the Best Documentary Oscar for pointing a camera at Al Gore's PowerPoint presentation on climate change. (Charles Guggenheim, for whom the symposium is named, was his daddy.) Mr. Guggenheim, Jr. moderated a discussion with Wiseman after the film reel, in among the most awkward interactions I've ever seen, putting on full display the opposite ends of theory in documentary filmmaking. Wiseman was utterly spare in his description of process, even blighting the staged gimmicks of Michael Moore (against the collective gasps of the filmmaker community in attendance). For me, frosh into this field, Wiseman revealed something fundamentally timeless about the medium: that the highest good in documentary films is for the subjects, in action, to speak for themselves -- that with interviews and agendas in play, things can only get worse, or for that matter, less truthful.

La danse is no exception to this principle (improving upon his 1995 film Ballet focused on the American Ballet Theatre). Wiseman received unfettered access to the Palais Garnier (regarded to this day as the "Paris Opera," but mostly ballet's domain after opera productions moved to L'Opéra Bastille, Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-be-damned whose Phantom disco epic will play the Palais when hell freezes over). Indeed, the building is as much a character as the ballet -- the audience gets to play church mouse in all its recesses. However, Wiseman shows remarkable restraint for this rare access. In fact, the impression left by La danse is that it does little to advance to the art of documentary film, no less the career of Frederick Wiseman. The experience is to watch almost three hours of long, lingering, single-camera setups trained on training (interspersed with plain vanilla cutaways to Paris traffic). Slowly but surely, though, the case is made that this troupe and its Palais are protecting something of such value that it defies explanation as surely as it functions in isolation. Perhaps most revealing are the silent scenes of costume shop artisans, who are hand-stitching unrepeatable patterns for single productions as if industrial machines and assembly lines were not yet invented. This is not the world we live in. It makes much more sense to seek out faster, cheaper, easier ways to satiate the mean average of audiences according to an estimation of what they may notice.

Another subtly important scene: Artistic Director Brigitte Lefèvre meets with her staff to discuss the fund-raising obligation to give donors of €25,000 or more the up-close experience of sitting in on a rehearsal in the sanctimonious upper room of the Palais Garnier that is the space where we see most of the film's rehearsal footage. Lefèvre agonizes over this, even if the donors are a mere dozen or two, and a compromise is reached to preserve the rehearsal's integrity. The implications from Wiseman's simple account of this routine administrative meeting are profound: not only do we perceive a fierce protection of process from the troupe's chief steward, but we ourselves are reminded of the privilege accorded from this medium: In the simplest of terms, it costs us nowhere near €25,000 to look in on a rehearsal of among the most important ballet companies in history -- even so, we get to see more than those wealthy benefactors. This privilege is the very soul of documentary films.

Far from that vitality, though, Ballet on Film has a history too in the realm of fantasy and melodrama (leaving out of our minds the aforementioned pop-art mash-ups). The Red Shoes of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger ("The Archers") is the world's most lasting, most adored, most cited movie about ballet without a doubt. The ballet-within-the-film (rather like The Archers' The Tales of Hoffmann) is based upon the same-named Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, but its surrounding melodrama amounts to less than the movie's proclaimed theme of artistic obsession, and more a kind of immersive celebration of Technicolor and production design dating to the earliest days of cinema. It has always held the highest affection from Martin Scorsese (certainly my favorite auteur, with odd choices like this to call his favorite films), who recently spearheaded an aggressive restoration and Blu-Ray release last month, which looks stunning (and surely better than any original theatrical print).

Rounding up this round-up, there is one last piece somewhere between biography (Mao's Last Dancer), documentary (La danse) and fiction (The Red Shoes) that might, and certainly should, always be regarded as the finest film ever about ballet. Robert Altman's The Company is true to his idiomatic approach that incorporates storytelling with the documentarian's instinct to point a camera at something and let it do what it will. In this case, it is the real Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, with a few trained actors mixed in (one of which, Neve Campbell, actually has a background in classical ballet), and the reliably creepy Malcolm McDowell (his eyes?) as its artistic director. In tune with Altman's whole oeuvre, it is largely non-linear, hardly scripted, and not really about anything at all. But the atmosphere of The Company and its company befits Altman's style perhaps better than anything else he gave us. True to form, Altman even allows a guest choreographer's vision to play out unto the film's juvenile climax involving some sort of fire-breathing dragon setpiece (not much stupider than Francesca Zambello's Fafner-Transformer/dragon-bot in her ridiculous, expensive staging of Siegfried last year that is this season headed to San Francisco for more laughs). By taking us through the goofy finale with such seriousness, Altman pulls a trick for which he is well known: He allows his characters to undermine themselves in ways that bespeak fundamental conflicts; here, the division between commerce and art, crowds and autonomous visionaries. But before any of that, The Company is full of truthful tableaux portraying committed dancers living their lives -- a simple beauty to relish, with all the artful attention that narrative cinema affords past the boundaries of biographical and documentary film.

Soon we'll have the opportunity in Black Swan to see what auteur Darren Aronofsky can bring to this rich legacy of Ballet on Film. Of course, as for most major studio pictures, its trailer is a cobble of insufferably intense emotions and a rapid fire of that mandatory foley effect for trailers: the sound of a bank vault door slamming shut. But for curiosity's sake...

David Mamet and the Fringe

2010-08-08T18:28:00.003-04:00

At the dead center of summer, performances in the fine arts screech to a halt (the subject of some whining and excusing in the past few posts here), thus museums for the plastic arts become medicine for creative cravings as they lack that international behavior of shutting down for the summer. Having spent the day at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, enjoying a silent-era Salome screening (notwithstanding the dated synth-pad timbres of its accompanying jazz-fusion-y score, which merely anticipates the relative brilliance of Richard Strauss in October), and the Norman Rockwell exhibition that's already finely covered in local blogger Brieahn DeMeo's piece at Artistic Culture, there's little more to write.

But wait: Wolf Trap? Whether because of the economic downturn or because of new management, or some other barely-outside-the-Beltway reason, there's not much music playing at the Filene Center these days besides pop repertory repeats. Even the brief annual residency of the National Symphony Orchestra has fallen further into that vintage slump of staples like Gustav Holst's The Planets and "favorites" mash-ups on one theme or another. In contrast, I have fond memories from not long ago when we were treated, under the lively direction of Leonard Slatkin, to challenging works like -- one example -- the local premiere of Richard Danielpour's Elegies, to which Frederica von Stade sang World War II letters from her father she never knew...this, to the accompaniment of light rain and distant lightning, against the hum of trees all around buzzing buggy nocturnes. This simply is not the sensation I get when hearing Joshua Bell slosh "Around the World."

And then there was the Capital Cringe festival. One wishes it were rather like a low-budget Spoleto Festival with a same unconventional sense of purpose (sans the agony of sojourning to slim pickings of overpriced inns, and the festival's swarm of notorious post-seersucker patrons). Yet the Spoleto Festival, like other reputed summer establishments, decidedly procures. Against that tradition, the Capital Fringe festival aims to bomb that establishment ceiling open, and as documented in Chris Klimek's fine City Paper article, it has unresolved growing pains. Logistically, it can be a nightmare for patrons, not only in terms of parsing the plethora of unpredictable shows on offer, but also in terms of ticketing problems that simply result, often, in getting turned away from a show that "gets legs" from word-of-mouth. And although there were a few chamber operas in the festival, their scores (from what I heard) simply were not through-composed works in any serious sense that would exceed jam-session instincts.

This leaves me merely to ruminate on something sort-of related to that, but not tied to any event date other than mine alone finishing David Mamet's Theatre, leaving a sense of urgency to evangelize his otherwise vilified new tome of cranky essays (on the heels of Joy Zinoman's valedictory production of American Buffalo at the Studio Theatre). Largely confrontational, Mamet's book attacks the atmosphere of prevailing theatre craft that elevates the actor, director, and other machineries of production higher than the essence of a play, which really is the text. This crowing comes as no surprise from Mamet who primarily writes plays, but his ulterior complex doesn't moot the vitality of his criticism. In his crosshairs is the egocentric theatrical rubric, from actors in particular who strain to "inhabit" their roles with authenticity but end up fulfilling externally justified doctrine, that any dramatic work requires reinvention and application unto context (such as modernity and political theory). To Mamet, this sanctioned ritual is absurd, and where his posture gets interesting is his historical associations. Mamet views the prevailing doctrine, with the Strasberg Institute (and related Actor's Studio) as its mother church, to be fundamentally...totalitarian. Quite seriously, he associates the widely practiced artifice of "method acting" with Strasberg's deep affection for Constantin Stanislavski's rambling treatises on acting, which only blossomed into historical importance through the Russian master's collaborations with Anton Chekhov. As Mamet sees it, Stanislavski's vitality was borne of his need, along with Chekhov, to navigate Russia's totalitarian control of the arts -- fighting fire with fire. In such an environment where the static text was much easier censored than the living performances that grew from the text, it was solely the actor's opportunity to enliven the true meaning of a play -- a sort of sneaking subversion. That Stanislavski's "method" in that context survives to this day is, in some sense, utterly ironic. Playwrights are liberated here and now to tell true stories. No amount of acting, stagecraft and interpretation can exceed that space. And a bad play will always be a bad play. (In my view, Mamet has written a few stinkers himself, and engages in odd side projects too that betray his fundamental talents, rather like his younger peer Neil LaBute.)

The controversial parts of Mamet's tome are his associations of this behavior with contemporary American stigmas, most especially political correctness, which is itself a form of totalitarianism. He likens method acting to psychoanalysis, which is (for the mentally sane) a pointless exercise in confession and guilt which in turn breeds political correctness:

The supposed aim of confession in psychoanalysis as in Method acting is freedom from inhibitions and, thus, an increased ability to attend, happily, to the business at hand (life or the play). But neither psychoanalysis nor the Method actually works. They are both interesting models for the understanding of human behavior, but neither functions well in practice. For the question in each is, "Now what?" ...We note the same in much contemporary liberal thought: Everything is always bad, and that the wise liberal is aware of it and so somehow more worthy than those who are not. This worthy person actually does nothing to alleviate the woes he professes to perceive (global warming, hunger, poverty, social injustice), finding the mere profession a more than sufficient proof of worth. This is the meaning of candlelight vigils, "walks for," and Live Aid concerts, which, like charity banquets down through history, are merely a celebration of the excellence of the hosts.

All of this brings us back (with some stretch, and to the tick-tock of your attention span) to the Fringe. It's relevant to ask how this egocentric totalitarian likeness has pervaded theatre and film with such ubiquity. Certainly we live in a country where two-thirds of the economy hangs (by a thread) on the need for robust consumer consumption -- quite literally, two thirds of everything we do is buy stuff and hawk stuff. Hence, it cannot surprise anyone that this infrastructure facilitates a cult of celebrity (and pertaining value of brand association), leading so-called "creatives" to lose their sense of place. Moreover, the controlling bourgeoisie and beyond are so obese in their expectations from life that whenever routine foibles arise, action and sweat (accountability!) fail to inspire when: endless therapy, Oprah's couch, and the placebo of consumption are just...well, one paycheck ago away.

Mamet's distaste for these things traces to his years in the burgeoning Chicago storefront theatre scene, which was probably the most fertile period for drama in our country's history. I have fond memories from the mid-'90s of escaping the dread of law school in the Midwest for monthly visits to Chicago. I came of age experiencing Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night at the Touchstone. Similarly, I sat within spitting range of Arthur Miller's All My Sons (which is to say, I literally got sprayed from the all the filial dysfunction onstage) in a tiny storefront theatre that adjoined a bar. (The memory is, I lingered too long at the bar during intermission, chatting with "the working class," and the stage manager crossed through the wall's cut-away to say: "Mr. Moon, the show is about to begin." This is not an experience you'll have at Arena Stage.) On a recent return to Chicago, I couldn't find it -- but the bar was still in business. Mamet has a sentimental affection for this coming-and-going of troupes, which is barely to be found in Manhattan, no more here in Washington. The worst poison for theatrical fertility, in his mind, is any venture built primarily on subsidy, whether from grants or the somewhat indiscriminate cash flow of season subscribers. In this context, if a show doesn't sell well, it does no good for the visionary to shake his fist at God and The Fates; he need merely move on to the next venture and try harder to get butts into the seats. Mamet's masterful new play Race was repeatedly extended and continues to sell well, even with its new cast after the first string I saw in January. Notably, it does not kowtow to political correctness, while critically avoiding sympathy to either "side." More from Mamet's Theatre:

The theatre exists to present a contest between good and evil. In both comedy and tragedy, good wins. In drama, it's a tie. ...Drama is about day-to-day life. Its motto, rather than "The gods will not be mocked," is "Isn't life like that?" Comedy and tragedy are concerned with morality, that is, our relations under God; drama with man in society. Well and good. However, drama, being the less tightly structured form, allows for infinite mitigation of even its social concerns.

And with that finally, we are back to the Fringe. There you have an environment where artists convene in Washington somewhat at their own risk; if tickets don't sell well, they may lose money after their up-front costs. There are no jurors or curators who would impose any litmus test of social conscientiousness. All the same, there are no jurors or curators who would impose a litmus test of basic talent. Whenever the Capital Fringe Festival arrives every year, it amounts to this bittersweet infusion of good medicine during these doldrums of summer.

Christopher Walken, on "method acting"

Chuck Close (and more) at the Corcoran

2010-07-18T03:12:00.003-04:00

Today (Sunday, July 18) is the last day of a wonderful convergence at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Although you would most associate the museum with "static" art, for the past few months it has been featuring two exhibitions that are in some sense bookends to the breadth of cinematic history (and today is your last chance to see them). The exhibition "Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change" profiles this important photographic artist whose work never quite reached the official start point of cinema technology. But I think it's a winning argument to say that he was the true inventor of motion picture science (framed by a lecture I attended last Wednesday): after all, Edison (who wears the crown) was somewhat of a corporate egotist who packaged it all together; and similarly, the Lumière brothers contributed portability and access to the science (rather like the Sony of their day). It was Muybridge who first captured moving images onto photographic film, against a long outdoor wall with regular electrical trips that would trigger camera shutters as animals et al. ran past.

He was also in some sense the kindred spirit via photography to naturalist John Muir, as they both explored and documented the majestic landscapes of California, including the mammoth sequoia trees of Mariposa Grove. (To discover this today was especially meaningful to me, on the heels of my trip just last week to Sequoia National Park making a moving picture of my own.) He photographed these landscapes and trees onto large plates that required virtuosity in process, needing to guess exposure times and process the film on-site almost immediately (foreshadowing the ongoing exhibition of Chuck Close, which is all about process...).

But it gets odder from there. He was a peculiar man, and around every corner in the gallery you get newer, weirder factoids on the guy. He shot and killed a man he suspected to be cheating with his wife. Surprisingly (though maybe not for their time) exonerated, he went on in his senior years to photograph his saggy self nude, in numerous sequences of progressing frames.

All of this staged an interesting contrast with the contemporary work of another artist whose commissioned film is showing through today in the Corcoran rotunda. American Falls by Phil Solomon is a video artwork projected onto three consecutive screens (mirrored for three more) that makes use of damaged film stock for visual effect. In fact, it's rather (suspiciously?) similar to an earlier film by filmmaker Bill Morrison called Decasia, which also made use of mostly decayed old film stock including, as it turns out, Muybridge footage. (Though Solomon's musical score is mostly ambient, Decasia commissioned the aggressive, through-composed minimalism of the great Michael Gordon, who in turn collaborated for subsequent screenings of Decasia with R. Luke DuBois, the subject of my new documentary screened on Friday.) It is a fascinating art form that takes a while to soak into; the intense flickering and abstractions are a strain on the eyes, but you do - or I should say, can - receive a sort of melancholy from the barely recognizable images, which are deliberately iconic and American, as they progress (surely as Muybridge's sequences) into failing memory and entropy.

So, all of that is to describe what closes today; but you also have until September 12 to see "Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration." And yes, it's all about process. Walking through the generously dedicated gallery spaces, you will certainly see every bit of his staff's process on all dozen or so of his subjects - Close is known for coming back, over and over, to certain photographic portraits, and the one that first won me over (and now hangs on my wall, though I can only afford a reproduction!) is his mad-scientist shot of composer Philip Glass, as seen in my snapshot above of four consecutives, each using a different - you guessed it - process.

For the Chuck Close exhibition and for the rest of the Corcoran's galleries, admission is free on Saturdays through Labor Day. UPDATE: A documentary about the artist will screen at the Corcoran on Wednesday, July 21 at 7:00 p.m.

Laurie Anderson

2010-07-15T02:32:00.004-04:00

The blog has been rather catatonic for the past few weeks, essentially fulfilling that stereotype of the medium: new blogs get-it-on for just a few months, because everything's fresh - but after that, nothing.

Well, maybe the book of life will say so in a year, but my intentions run to the contrary. So for now, I'll only say: the dog ate my homework (with a promise to pick up the pace, even though the DC art scene beats weakly during these lazy days of summer).

But something else was going on: I trekked about Peru, then returned Stateside to Sequoia National Park followed by the task of getting ready for a documentary screening this Friday, which includes a new film by this frosh filmmaker. Which rather feeds into the actual preface of today's posting, and an odd one at that: I'm most anxious to share the fact that Laurie Anderson is in town Friday too, yet if she's not your cup of tea, there's that little film I made running at the same time. (This conflict bummed me out the moment I heard, yet I'm of course more excited to get my film up on a screen.)

Laurie Anderson needs no introduction to some, but frankly confuses most as sounding rather like the name of an ex-wife to Burt Reynolds, instead of the actual wife she is to Lou Reed. Nonetheless, within the nebulous realm of "performance art" and its very genre if you can call it that, her oeuvre dates back to the early days of the form when the field was wide open. From vocoders on her voice, to her stage works incorporating multimedia visuals, to her fusion of popular music with the avant-garde, she deserves notice as the true pioneer of performance art. Yet also there was something, all along, that set her apart from the sideways burgeoning realm of performance art: She infused a classical sense of humor without pretension, fulfilling the legacy of the very unexpected thing she nailed down as artiste: the craft of the monologist. Anywhere from the great Mark Twain, to her contemporary colleague Spaulding Gray, you could find in this format witty insights about our "American experience" that seem now, cynical as we are, filled with wry innocence.

And as the years have passed, one might rightly question her vitality. As a case in point, she was on The Late Show with David Letterman last night, and delivered a highly politicized, mostly-spoken, and sorta-sung musical number that simply seemed strange (and probably sounded like mumbling to the tourist audience). She didn't have control of the set and setpieces as she usually does, and her instrumentalists basically backed her like a common rock band. I suppose that in private, or in any case within the ease of a documentary interview, she would explain that mounting large multimedia productions no longer works, or that she's not up to it in her autumn years. But the inevitable truth is that musically laundered ruminations coming out of nowhere are dramatically problemmatic.

Having said all that, I do think (a sad thought) that she still has no equal in the peculiar niche she founded, reminding that performance art for all its promise never matured well into a marketable medium (to venues or most importantly to our tastes). We still abide by common strictures of entertainment, don't we?

All of that was meant to make the case that there's nowhere better to be than the Laurie Anderson "concert" at the wonderful Birchmere Music Hall of Alexandria on Friday at 7:30 p.m., where you can ingest Musique concrète-infused ruminations on Middle East policy while chowing down a rack of ribs on their red-checkered community tables. Tickets still appear to be available.

But if for some reason you don't make it there, then...

Reduced Shakespeare Company: Completely Hollywood (abridged)

2010-06-22T00:19:00.002-04:00

From the East Coast, we say with some amount of pride that not a lot of greatness hails from the Left Coast in this realm of "fine" performing arts. (It is no accident in this sense, yet was a painful episode for my other senses, that I left a beach house in Newport Beach for this swampland.) All the same, anyone working in film and television knows that southern California is our capital city. For a few weeks here in Washington, we are being treated to a fusion of the two that will make you laugh to death: The RSC is in town, and not the one from across the Atlantic. This one hails from my stomping grounds in Californi-way, and RSC brings back memories of seeing them when they were a smaller-time "pass-the-hat" troupe, including gigs at the University of California in San Diego that were always worth the drive south from Orange County. The invention for which they are named has been always a comedic reduction of all the Bard's plays into about an hour-and-a-half. Their latest mash-up is called Completely Hollywood (abridged) and it opens tonight at the Kennedy Center in its Terrace Theatre, playing through July 11.

Here is a "secret link" that will get you $29 best-available tickets (normally $39-49) for all the performances June 29 through July 4. (You can also mention Promotion Code 51806 over the phone or at the ticket window.) [Update: For the June 23 performance only, click here or mention Promotion Code 52099 for $20 tickets. Update 2: For the June 24 performance only, click here or mention Promotion Code 52101 for $20 tickets.]

There only appears to be one DVD in print of any of their shows, which dates from 2003 (and it rather shows its age), but it is a nice way of supplementing your experience with the genesis of their comedy, the compete works of Shakespeare reduced. You can also listen to RSC podcasts by going to their Web site here. And finally, below you can watch the official trailer for Completely Hollywood (abridged). Have a great time!

Art Scouts at Arlington Arts Center

2010-06-17T23:55:00.000-04:00

So the blog has been in Peru for the past week, missing the beat in Washington but trekking across Inca territory to a very different beat. Yet there is something coming up today (June 18) queued for a quick mention here. In mind of the way that some DC residents deliberately dare not cross the vast Potomac for Arlington arts, it can come as a surprise that such community organizations are quite often the most vital and innovative new work coming to light on any given night in the greater Washington area. You might find this to be true if you can make it to the Arlington Arts Center on Friday, June 18 anytime between 6:00 and 9:00 p.m. for the opening reception of their new exhibit Art Scouts, which runs through August 21. The concept behind the exhibit is that six local artists present other artists who use the same materials or methods of each six: Zoe Charlton (drawing), Mary Early (sculpture), J.J. McCracken (performance and installation), Maggie Michael (painting), Jefferson Pinder (video), and Kerry Skarbakka (photography). If you've never visited Arlington Arts Center, it's within walking distance of the Virginia Square Metrorail station on the Orange Line, at 3550 Wilson Boulevard, and there is ample lot parking. Apart from the opening reception, normal gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.