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Tag: Yuval Sharon
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Opera as Double Fugue: The Comet / Poppea
“Double Consciousness” and historical counterpoint‘Man proposes, but [God] disposes’—or so went the biblical proverb as distilled more or less through various Christian medieval iterations. In this simultaneously sunlit and dark-star doubling of two operas—George Lewis’s and librettist Douglas Kearney’s dark distillation of the W.E.B. DuBois 1920 proto-Afro-futurist (and Afro-pessimist) short story, “The Comet,” pushed up and played against (and in and out of) a pared-down rendering of one of the foundational operas of the classical canon, Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea—it is as if this fatalistic chain of causality is viewed in reverse. The ‘gods’ disport, while their human pawns, play at games of dominance, possession, power and pleasure.
Monteverdi’s own Incoronazione plays at ‘doubling’ both in composition and execution—the gods of love and ‘fortune’ (frequently secondary roles for the principals) wreak havoc with their human playthings and messengers, while the principal characters and their accessories plot, scheme, disguise and dissemble in the pursuit of, well—not love exactly—maybe simply a bit of light. (What would any coronation be without it?)
But Lewis and Kearney have put this doubling at the dark center of The Comet—in striking contrast to the bright, willful, triumphalist glow of Poppea. The constellation of characters surrounding Poppea and Nero plot and maneuver, disguise themselves and their motives, but know where they stand and where they want to go. Only the Emperor and Seneca (James Hayden—outstanding voice and stage presence), his counselor and former tutor—in essence the opera’s ‘conscience’ (standing in for what might—but obviously cannot—be Nero’s own) and its voice of Stoic virtue—have neither need nor inclination to be anything but themselves. Not so simple for the characters of The Comet, and more specifically for Jim (Cedric Berry): working class, clever but poor—and Black. In 1920s Manhattan, he is that ‘invisible man’ made suddenly visible amid masses of dead men in the wake of a comet’s freakish brush with some part of New York. From a vault that might have become a tomb, he has found his way to the street, and up an elevator to a still-elegant restaurant. Yet in what amounts to a mass displacement—unlike his privileged ‘foil’ (Ottone) on the other side of history in Poppea, returning “like a line to the center”—he has a clarified sense of place in this ruined landscape. “Where I come from, disaster is a home away from home,…” But the immediacy of his experience of the past, has not disappeared. “Now the avenue is crowded with the silence in my ear / and yesterday they would not have served me here.”
While the demigods of Fortune, Virtue, and Love (Joelle Lamarre—superb) contend with each other over the four-way tango between Nero (Anthony Roth Costanzo), Poppea (Joanna Lynn-Jacobs, Nardus Williams in the June 16th performance) Ottone (Amanda Lynn Bottoms—who doubles as Virtue), and the out-going empress, Ottavia (Whitney Morrison), the practical New Yorker pushes himself past the dead, finds emergency flares and heads to the building’s roof. But predictably, the next arrival is no less random—however appropriately dressed for the setting: a woman (Julia—Kiera Duffy), elegantly attired (the costumes—by Oana Botez—are sumptuous), but reeling in shock—and white. Seeming to take stock of the situation, the two survivors are also—only slightly less consciously—taking stock of each other. Meanwhile in the sunlit domain of the mythically aspiring ancients, Poppea’s seductive spin on the dynamics of power and perception becomes an ironic counterpoint to what is unfolding in the soft lights of this posh restaurant.
“You say you see me. / You don’t see me. / Hidden in your heart, / I cannot be seen by your eyes.”
(The selected arias and duets from L’incoronazione di Poppea were sung in the original Italian–rendered for brevity and clarity in the English translation of the super-title cards.)
Poppea sings this against the brightly lit, tiled and imposingly stepped set for the Monteverdi opera—appropriate to a court ritual, an offering to the gods, or a luxury spa. (It’s a Roman bath that might easily become a sarcophagus.) In the dim light of the restaurant interior (on the other side of the circular, turntable stage), it is glaringly apparent that Jim is seen as more than slightly incongruous. “Have you had to work hard?” Julia asks Jim? Her question is already answered by Jim’s physical presentation; and his one-word response discloses nothing further. Lewis and Kearney use Poppea’s and Nero’s duet as a kind of echo to the “double-consciousness” at play here. (“You see me always, / yet you never see me.”) Place and placement are a kind of imprisonment here, regardless of the circumstances. Where Jim might be seen in one ‘light’ on the street, working in a bank vault, he is seen in quite another in an establishment of luxury consumption; and he clearly judges that distance, that displacement. Responding to Julia’s newfound perspective, “How foolish our human distinctions seem—now….” he underscores the social and racial brutality of his uncertain status in the 1920s—all the more striking against the plush rose and gold velvet Art Deco acanthus wall-covering of the restaurant backdrop. “Yes—I was not human, yesterday.”
The glass ‘windows’ and the elevator are important details. Lewis and Kearney—together with the production team’s superb scenic designer, Mimi Lien—have made the luxe restaurant a kind of telescopic vessel poised at an ambiguous remove from the mortal world below. Jim is also a kind of messenger (the program’s original cast credits list him as ‘Jim/Mercury’)—signaling to Manhattan and the boroughs beyond that life endures in at least one New York neighborhood; and the counterpoint between the two operas emphasizes the fraught ambiguity of the messaging. The message—whether to Seneca (or Seneca’s own admonitions to Nero) or Jim’s flares to the world beyond Manhattan—can only signal, not predict.
While Lewis’s score for The Comet sings of disaster and displacement, the counterpoint between the two scores seems to highlight the more interior oppositions and contradictions. Love and Fortune both are gods of chaos here; yet Love inevitably lends insight to Virtue. But the ‘triumph of love’ (or imperial whim) is brief (as history bears out). Neither the world of the Roman Empire nor any other will be ‘acting on Love’s commands’ any time soon. Lewis and Kearney, alongside director Yuval Sharon, emphasize the fickle transit of these ‘gods’ through these terrestrial and cosmic landscapes—each of them happy to step out of Nero’s Rome (and off the slowly revolving stage) only to step into Du Bois’s 1920s New York moments later. As Ottavia shoves off to obscure refuge, the gods celebrate both Poppea’s destiny and simultaneously Jim’s and Julia’s seeming meeting of hearts and minds—a moving but short-lived moment that makes for a bitter contrast with both operas’ finales. Hope is less a brilliant jewel than the bitter pill that must be swallowed.
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Chagall: Fantasies for the Stage
I walked into the Resnick Pavilion and into the swirling world of color and fantasy that Marc Chagall created for the theatre and remembered again what made me want to live. Much of the work exhibited in this show was actually made in New York. But it’s quintessentially School of Paris, born of that time between the world wars when artists, both French natives and newly arrived émigrés, wandered freely among styles, schools and movements – the émigrés perhaps most freely of all, with freedom itself something of a novelty. Chagall experienced a kind of rebirth in Paris; and his work comes into its purest synthesis during this period: a fantasist surrealism, informed by Cubism, but shot through with the kind of Orphic chromaticism so influenced by the Delaunays and the Fauves before them. Chagall was forever looking backward and forward, searching for an alternate universe somewhere between the shtetl and the City of Light. He brought that wandering eye and imagination to the stage under the auspices of Léonide Massine and the American Ballet Theatre with his stage and costume design for the ballet Aleko, inspired by a poem by Pushkin. In Aleko, we already see Chagall making a kind of moving tableau out of costumed characters and performers and staging, with emphatically symbolist and expressionist backdrops and costuming designed to both wryly silhouette character and kaleidoscopically sweep up the surrounding atmosphere. Aleko is one of the strongest, well balanced between sharply etched character and brilliant movement; though he also had great success with a New York City Ballet production of the Stravinsky/Balanchine Firebird and the Ravel/Fokine/Lifar Daphnis et Chloé in Paris. Chagall’s staging for the 1967 Met production of Die Zauberflöte rounds out the exhibition and I must disclaim objectivity, as this signature (both for Chagall and the Met) production made for an introduction to Mozart opera, Chagall, and high art collaborations generally. I have not recovered to date from that enchantment and hope never to until the last note is sounded (or called).
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
5905 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Show runs thru January 7, 2018 -
Moving Shadows, Constant Stars – Young Caesar
Young Caesar is born of a certain moment – a definably Californian, forward- and global-looking moment. In Lou Harrison’s music and the awkwardly framed conceits of its libretto by Robert Gordon, there is yearning, rather than the ‘ambition’ we might associate with the subject: yearning for an idyll of serenity, an embrace of time that touches both ancient epochs and the infinitude of the cosmos. (It’s – may I say this? – soooo Santa Cruz – of that moment.) Yet this Caesar was ambitious in its own way for the time it was written. It floats – and it makes perfect sense that sea voyage figures significantly in the plot. Harrison was aiming at a sustained lyric sequence or gambol with the structure of this story – really a kind of progress, except this ‘progress’ would also encompass ‘regress’ (and maybe regret). It’s a story about beginnings as well as the ambitions that come later in the history we know. It’s only natural that it unfolds as a dance as much as an opera; and it was inevitable that Harrison would be drawn to Javanese shadow puppets (those of the original productions apparently quite authentic) and shadow puppetry generally. The music itself – long lyrical motives in scales and intonation that mimic (or virtually reproduce) gamelan figures – lends itself to a continuous enfilade of various pairings, serenely ordered assemblies and regroupings, and the occasional divertissement.
It’s really a kind of court dance – and that is more or less the way Yuval Sharon and his Industry/Los Angeles Philharmonic cohorts have staged it here – with broad white runways curving down from a platform upstage and encircling the ensemble of L.A. Phil New Music players, which in addition to winds, spare strings (though including harp which figured prominently in certain sections of the score) and keyboards (the always essential Vicki Ray at piano and Lisa Edwards at pump organ), included an array of eastern stringed and percussion instruments that encompassed gamelan, and eastern zither and reed intonations and timbres. Musically, it channels a kind of Ravel chinoiserie by way of Henry Cowell and Virgil Thomson.
But it’s also a long dance not quite sure which aspect of the history it favors – the political tug-of-war (which was often literal and bloody) or the family saga, which in the case of Julius Caesar frequently intersected. I’m not quite sure if that’s what hung Robert Gordon up in putting together his exposition-heavy libretto – but it continues to weigh down the dance. Or simply interrupt it – since a good deal of it is delivered as straight narration. And however much punch narrator Bruce Vilanch could put into his speak-sing-chanting delivery, it did little to urge the dance-action forward. (A silent reading of Robert Graves would be far livelier.) Fortunately, Sharon makes maximal use of the backdrops – not simply as scrims for the shadow puppets, but as moving panoramas (projections beautifully designed by Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. Thompson) that evoke both classical decoration and classic mid-20th century design and illustration. During those moments when the narration (or for that matter the arias) dragged (or when I simply lost the thread of it), those beautiful projections were delicious relief.
I almost wonder if Gordon (and Harrison?) were slightly hung up with the novelty of situating a de facto homosexual relationship in a historical (and classical) context. ‘Get over it and get on with it,’ I can imagine anyone from Graves to Wilde to, well, Shakespeare advising them. (Consider the way Shakespeare addresses the dynamic between Caesar and Marc Antony. The passion there goes somewhere beyond political ambition – and I’m sure most of us were aware of that before we were out of grade school.) Fortunately (as Graves also reminds us), there are interesting women to push the story forward – and Harrison has not only given us a Julia, but the aunt Julia to mentor as well as match her nephew, and Nancy Maultsby makes the most of her role. Delaram Kamareh does pretty well, too, with her slightly mournful lines as Caesar’s young wife, Cornelia.
And then, after a bit of bloody family drama which plays far more tediously than it should, it’s all about the boy (Adam Fisher) Nicomedes (of Bithynia – played by Hadleigh Adams) is mad about. Well, as the masque (or is it the character himself?) wants to (constantly) remind us, you take your chances. The problem with this is that it’s too frequently the same chance (and always with the wrong partners – that much is as true to life as to history) – and also that the extended recitatives (as well as narration) really don’t do much to drive the plot, the dance forward.
The flip side of Chance in Harrison’s scheme is Time – the infinitude of which, as aunt Julia reminds the youthful Caesar is a luxury only the dead can enjoy. Sharon and his Industry collaborators certainly don’t squander it. The opera (which at one point was close to two hours) has been trimmed to a manageable 90 minutes-plus. But narration, recitatives and arias all need a fresh scrub. (Or maybe Gordon, et al. just need to have a look at I, Claudius and The Sopranos side by side.) And maybe the opera’s notion of time itself demands fresh examination. That would be at least as compelling as anything fluid about young Caesar’s sexuality.
But what Sharon, the L.A. Philharmonic, Industry, et al. give us finally is a finished work – the first really compelling, finished production of this opera fit for the opera/dance stage – or a king’s court. Harrison’s/Gordon’s characters are far too cultivated to be ‘masks’ for our most visible global oligarchs, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to see such a dance playing out at the Kremlin – a ‘phallic riot’ to offset the ‘pussy’ edition of a few years back across town at the Church of Christ the Savior – that icon whose debut 2,000 years earlier presaged the end of Rome’s Caesars.
As Harrison’s one-time contemporaries, Sonny and Cher, might have put it, the beat goes on.
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Intersections, epicenters and wild orbits – Making it new and making it work in the centrifugal city
I am preoccupied lately (see any number of my blog posts, especially recent ones), with the evolving/devolving culture(s) of Los Angeles, the way art is made and experienced in this city, the way we connect with and experience that art and culture, and the way we connect (or don’t) with the city.
One of the keynotes—perhaps the hallmark—of the 2014 edition of the Hammer Museum’s biennial, Made in L.A., was its cross-sectioned view of the L.A. art-making community through the perspective of the ‘microclimate’; its recognition of the diverse L.A. art community as simultaneously hyper-localized and cosmopolitan; that L.A.’s ‘microclimates’ were shaping the way art was made and apprehended, and even exhibited throughout the city. Microclimate should be understood in the most generous sense here—pertaining, not merely to physical locations, specific sections of the city or artist-heavy neighborhoods in the Los Angeles metropolitan region, but to groups of artists loosely allied or aligned; some grouped formally in collectives, others laboring in varying proximities to each other, but sharing similar concerns, affinities, aesthetics. I think it was Olga Koumoundouros who first pointed out to me the extent to which L.A. artists over the past few years were beginning to address the issue of where and how they lived—the contingencies of location, site, space; the convergence of physical, social and economic, as well as aesthetic factors shaping the artist’s perspective and working decisions. (Her own work has addressed these issues acutely.)
Made in L.A. threw a spotlight on a few of these loose-knit or ad-hoc groupings and collectives, including Public Fiction, Lauren Mackler’s evolving not-ready-for-prime-kunsthalle-but-can-we-talk?-art(?)-players, in unpredictable residence behind a Highland Park storefront; K-Chung, a public access radio station seemingly hijacked into a 24-hour stream-of-consciousness art bull-session (morphed yet again into a television broadcaster for the duration of the Hammer show); also (still more loosely defined), the James Kidd Studio, and even the nominally individual projects of artists like Emily Mast, Wu Tsang and Samara Golden. Emblematic of this gestalt (as I indicated in my review of the show in the September-October 2014 Artillery) was the Los Angeles Museum of Art, embracing both this sense of contingency, the transient points of intersection among distinct sensibilities (themselves, in part, the product of these ‘microclimates’) while recontextualizing and setting the work distinctly outside its ‘microclimate’, and a certain curatorial transparency.
I hardly think it was Alice Könitz’s (the prime instigator and curatorial intelligence behind this initiative) conscious intention to ‘show the seams’, so much as to simply craft an idea or piece together such disparate or fragmentary ideas into coherent visual expression. But it might easily describe some aspect of the work or working method of each of the artists on the REDCAT panel.
The panel also addressed the parallel problem of how ambitious, broadly platformed and multi-dimensional work might sustain itself within the evolving urban context, and how artists themselves sustain their visions and cobble together livelihoods in the continuously evolving local and international environment. (In other words, if it takes a ‘village’ (or, I suppose, a single ‘microclimate’) to raise an artist, it takes a city to sustain one.)
Acting as moderator, CalArts’ Steven Lavine had Michael Ned Holte lead off by tracking back over the process of identifying the “intrinsically Los Angeles” elements he and Connie Butler were looking for in putting together their roster of 35 L.A. artists: their early identification of artist-run, cooperative, collaborative studios and work-spaces; the fragile economics of such spaces and art practices; and how artists were thinking about the city. A sense of contingency was built into their approach – open to the bracing discontinuities between the various installations and exhibits. They were aware that they were creating a ‘context that [didn’t] already exist’; accounting for aspects of built-in obsolescence; sensitive to the physical/cultural anxieties surrounding contemporary art-making, as well as the on-going relationship to the art economy. (Steven Lavine seemed elated to hear Holte recall their early impression that they had managed to “reproduce the feeling of walking into CalArts” with their installation.)
Lillian Barbeito’s approach to putting together an art (in this instance, dance) practice/collective/company in Los Angeles seemed both wedded to her particular theory and technique of dance (countertechnique, originally developed by dancer/choreographer Anouk van Dijk) and the sheer serendipity of making connections in Los Angeles. Even her transition to Los Angeles (from New York) seemed to have more to do with a desire to support her husband’s film industry career than any ambitions of her own in or out of the dance world. I had the impression that half the reason her company, BodyTraffic, came together was simply out of the need to continue pursuing her personal dance practice. A critical mass of fellow practitioners essentially gave her the core of what might become an informal company. The key intersection was with another dancer, Tina Berkett, who it turned out was looking for exactly the same thing. The next priority was finding a space to perform, which manifested (together with a husband-wife team of choreographers from Israel) in the space of the Sinai Temple in Westwood. (I’m guessing the Israel connection was key—but if that’s what it took to move the project forward, why not?)
Since that time, they’ve gone on to perform at the Colburn School, the Alex Theatre in Glendale and the Japan-America Theatre. BodyTraffic is now, essentially, a partnership between Barbeito and Berkett, taking on dancers and choreographers on a project-by-project basis. They’ve recently been working with the choreographer, Barak Marshall (who’s worked with such disparate entities as YoYo Ma and the Batsheva Dance Company).
Since I have yet to see anything BodyTraffic’s done, it’s hard to gauge their approach to dance within the specific context of the L.A. dance or arts community. Barbeito expressed a fascination for the ‘vast panorama’ of Los Angeles, the appeal of being able to move quasi-nomadically between sites and stages at some distance from one another—mimicking the cross-town ‘traffic’ that is part of the character of L.A. and the texture of its life. But it seemed as if her viewpoint and approach could be adapted to almost any urban (or for that matter, non-urban) context. And certainly she has not hesitated to recruit choreographers from across the pond.
We’re far more familiar with Yuval Sharon here—from his work with The Industry, from Crescent City to Invisible Cities—a company that has embraced a ‘think global, act local’ modus operandi in the most concrete and visionary way possible. If we can accept that everyone comes to the city ready to seize the opportunities its dynamic environment affords, Sharon’s path leading up to The Industry was nevertheless both more conventional (he had previously held a post at the New York City Opera) and deliberative: he brought his own ideas about the evolving definition of opera in the 21st century, the intersections of arts, media and culture, and the “next generation of ideas”; and clearly welcomed the opportunity to collaborate with the city’s rich pool of visual artists. (You could almost consider the sprawling Crescent City surround/sound/stage/environmental staging as a parallel/prototype for Alice Könitz’s L.A. Museum of Art Not so coincidentally, both Könitz and Olga Koumoundouros constructed set/sculptures for the production.)
If Sharon and The Industry have been sharply influenced by L.A.’s concentration of visual fine arts production, though, one gets the impression that his real model for The Industry’s approach is something closer to L.A.’s echt legacy ‘industry’—more specifically independent film production. Sharon doesn’t need to worry about being dubbed an “impresario” (though there’s no stigma to the term). What his role comes closer to is that of the independent film producer—the producer (sometimes a writer, sometimes a financier, etc.) who, with one or more (and ultimately many) partners, develops, packages, finances, executive/produces and finally arranges for distribution of a film. The Industry is slowly growing, but still an indie-prod house in size (three full-time and two part-time employees, including himself) and spirit.
Yet there’s also something here that both craves the studio system and wants to be, as Sharon might put it, ‘nimbly’ responsive to the moment. What I suggested to Sharon that night was that what he (and the other artists on the panel) might be reaching for was something on the order of the fashion ‘atelier.’ That may be a stretch at the moment; but assuming the company moves forward to full maturity, some semblance of it is bound to manifest (e.g., archives, properties and props, scenic/costuming elements, etc.). The problem is keeping it nimble, dynamic—as much a roving caravan as a brick-and-mortar studio. (I’m reminded of Rick Owens’ comment to The Independent’s Alexander Fury about not feeling weighed down or constrained by his own Paris-based atelier, “I could burn this whole fucking house down.”)
wild Up at REDCAT, 2013 If there was one person on the panel who appeared capable of ‘burning down the house’ (and conceivably raising a new one on the same day), it was Christopher Rountree, the conductor/band-leader/prime provocateur behind wild Up, the all-but-unclassifiable ensemble (I want to say, ‘musical force field’) of eight or nine (though I think there were at least 15 when I saw them)—let’s just say, as we do in the art world, ‘dimensions vary’—musicians (several of them gifted composer/improvisers/soloists in their own right). Their website describes them as an “experimental classical ensemble,” but this seems less than adequate to me. Their ‘mission statement’ comes closer:
“wild Up is a modern music collective – a group of Los Angeles-based musicians committed to creating visceral, thought-provoking happenings. Our programs are eclectic studies of people, places, and ideas that we find interesting. The group believes that music is a catalyst for shared experiences, and that the concert venue is a place for challenging, exciting, and igniting the community around us.”
Rountree seems intent not on ‘burning down’ the concert hall, but certainly exploding it, giving full voice to its most incendiary aspects. There is a fascination with the experience of place and all its vibratile elements that wild Up clearly taps into—and this is clearly not limited to the ‘high culture’ venues where they’ve played. (E.g., museums, chamber music/recital halls; I saw them at the Hammer Museum.) Although they’re well acquainted with the traditional orchestral canon (and like Sharon, Rountree has also apprenticed with more tradition-bound institutions—as a conductor at the Brooklyn Philharmonic, amongst other institutions), Rountree is dismissive of musical hierarchies. It’s as if, having dissected the music (pop, jazz, classical, experimental—it doesn’t really matter what exactly) down to its essential ideas and intentions, he’d like to re-configure, re-construct it for the time and place it’s inhabiting in the moment of execution. Rountree and wild Up want to privilege place and moment alongside the music itself.
While there was some discussion of the developmental and narrative arc envisioned for each of these ambitious enterprises, what was left unfinished was their connection with a larger urban narrative. The commitment to site and moment have an inherent appeal: making a ‘moveable feast’ of the work and the city itself. (I mean—do we really need another ‘institution’ when all we’re looking for a fresh conversation?) But the nexus with the urban organism itself, its imbrication into that cultural fabric, is incomplete. These are companies still negotiating their way through the warp and woof—and perhaps spinning webs that will carry them far beyond Los Angeles itself. Like any comparable arts organizations, their scope is international. BodyTraffic seems to have operated internationally since inception; wild Up already has international commissions and pending partnerships; and—opera has always been international—can The Industry be far behind? It’s encouraging to see young companies that treat their respective endeavours as emerging art forms. In 21st century cities—where so many of us essentially feel and live like refugees with fixed addresses—this may be one way to hold on to the moment as we navigate our way through them.
