Month: October 2012

Rebecca Seidel ’15 interviews Lana Wilson ’05, curator of the “Performance Now” Film Series (Oct. 25 & Nov. 15)

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Rebecca Seidel ’15 sits down with Lana Wilson ’05, curator of the “Performance Now” film series, presented in conjunction with the Zilkha Gallery exhibition focusing on performance art (on display through December 9, 2012).

The Performance Now exhibition at the Zilkha Gallery merits multiple visits – there’s just so much to experience and absorb.  Performance art naturally exists only in the moment it is created, but this exhibit does an excellent job of immortalizing the performances it displays.   Curated by Roselee Goldberg, Performance Now will be on view until December 9, so you still have time to head over and browse the exhibit yourself.

Meryl Streep in Laurie Simmons’s “The Music of Regret” (2005)

To further enhance your appreciation of performance art, the exhibition extends into a three-part film series at the Powell Family Cinema.  The first set of films – two films featuring French conceptual dance – were screened on September 20.  The next set, featuring films by Danish artist Jesper Just, will be screened this Thursday, October 25.  The final group of films, showcasing recent works by Daria Martin and Laurie Simmons, will air on November 15.  Admission to these films is free.

I got a chance to interview Lana Wilson, the curator of this film series, about what viewers should expect from the screenings.  Lana, a 2005 Wesleyan graduate, had a lot to say about her film selections for Performance Now. She gives some helpful context for the French films that aired in September – films that offered quite a memorable experience for viewers, as you know if you were there. Above all, Lana is excited to air the remaining installments of the series.  She will be at the cinema to introduce the Jesper Just films this Thursday. You can read our discussion below:

Why did you select the films that you did?  What about them made them especially relevant to the Performance Now exhibition?

I selected these films to accompany the Performance Now exhibition because I think they represent a very small sample of some of the most exciting performance films made by artists in the last decade. These screenings include both filmed documentation of performances, and films that have a lot to do with live performance, but are specifically made for the camera, because I think that both types of work are important. It’s a film series, but it’s about live performance, so I wanted to include samples of different places in the spectrum between the two.

All of the work being shown is also by artists who have been a part of the Performa biennials, including the first-ever Performa Commission (Jesper Just’s True Love Is Yet to Come, from 2005). But the artists themselves all come out of slightly different contexts – Jerome Bel and Boris Charmatz are choreographers, for example, while Laurie Simmons is a photographer and visual artist.

What kind of viewing experience should we expect from the upcoming two screenings? Anything to look out for in particular?

I was so thrilled to have the chance to program films for the one of the beautiful screens in Wesleyan’s Center for Film Studies. I wanted to take advantage of that opportunity by showcasing works that are visually gorgeous, and made at a scale that would make sense to show in a large cinema, rather than on small monitors in a gallery. I also wanted the programs to be made for the audience to sit through from start to finish, with their attention fully engaged. So none of these screenings are dry conceptual events – each program is visually lush and – at least in my opinion! – will be very exciting to watch on a big screen.

The two French films screened on September 20 differed aesthetically in some pretty stark ways.  Do you think there are any common threads between them?

It’s true – both of those films are very different aesthetically. But they are both made by choreographers who come–in very different ways – out of traditions of the Judson Dance Theater, and both artists are now seen as key figures in the wave of “conceptual choreography” that emerged in France in the 1990s.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, the Judson Dance Theater was a loose coalition of artists, choreographers, and musicians who had a series of performances at New York’s Judson Church in the early 1960s that radically broke with the conventions of concert dance. The dances created by this group, which would later be called “post-modern,” reduced the medium to its most essential elements, discarding drama and expressionism in favor of pedestrian movement, repetitive structures, and improvisation, and rejecting the notion of the artist or performer as virtuoso in favor of what they thought of as more “democratic” dance.

In contrast, the performance documentation of Bel’s Veronique Doisneau, 2004, reduces aesthetic concerns to a bare minimum, instead throwing its concept into high relief. In September 2004, Paris Opera Ballet dancer Veronique Doisneau, age forty-one, is about to retire after over twenty years of dancing in the background as a member of the corps de ballet. On the final night of her career, she at long last appears alone on stage, in front of an enormous audience in the Paris Opera House. Dressed in rehearsal clothes, and wearing a headset microphone, Doisneau calmly tells the story of her life in dance—her low-ranking position in the hierarchy of the ballet company, the injury that almost ruined her career when she was twenty, even the amount of her monthly wages. She then performs excerpts from several pieces, including a variation from La Bayadere, with no music other than her own soft singing and counting; a segment from the lead role in Giselle, a part that Doisneau says she wishes she could have danced (earlier, she speculates, “I don’t think I was talented enough”); and a portion of the corps de ballet part from Swan Lake, in which Doisneau stands perfectly motionless in various poses while the stars dance in center stage. Watching Doisneau perform her life’s history as a dancer, with all its attendant joy and frustration, shows the audience things they had never noticed before. Like the work of the Judson artists, it reveals the assumptions underlying dance, bringing them into the open to re-construct them in an entirely new way. It is one of my favorite performances of all time.

Boris Charmatz & Dimitri Chamblas–“Les Disparates” (1994)

In France in the 1990s, a wave of new choreographers emerged that was both reacting to the highly theatrical French dance of the 1980s, and inspired by Judson. Les Disparates, from 1994, is a film directed by Cesar Vayssie that two young French choreographers, Boris Charmatz and Dimitri Chamblas, collaborated on right after becoming the teenage sensations of the French dance scene with A Bras le Corps (1993), a duet that has a real thrilling physicality to it. In Les Disparates, a man (Charmatz) dances in four different locations as the film jumps between them all, using his movement to explore the possibilities for fragmenting time and space through editing. Shot in the rainy landscape of Sienne, a city in the north of France, the film leaps from bar to boathouse and back again–it’s very much a dance made for the camera. The choreography suggests the influence of Judson member Steve Paxton’s weight and flow-based contact improvisation techniques, while the film’s crisp compositions and elegant visual motifs—highlighting patches of saturated red and blue within the industrial scenery, for example—resemble contemporary European art cinema.

Do you have a favorite film out of the entire series, and if so, what is it?

This is a tough one. Jesper Just’s It Will All End in Tears will be spectacular on the big screen – let’s just say that there are some amazing special effects. And for Meryl Streep fans, that actress is a star of Laurie Simmons’s The Music of Regret (2005), where she has an unforgettable turn singing a duet with a ventriloquist dummy. Too hard to choose!

The Films of Jesper Just

Thursday, October 25, 2012 at 7pm
Powell Family Cinema, Center for Film Studies
Introduced by Performa Film and Dance Curator
Lana Wilson ’05 with reception to follow.
FREE!

Other Worlds: Daria Martin and Laurie Simmons

Thursday, November 15, 2012 at 7pm
Powell Family Cinema, Center for Film Studies
FREE!

Michael Darer ’15 reviews “Voices of Afghanistan”

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Michael Darer ’15 takes on “Voices of Afghanistan,” a CFA concert hosted last Friday, September 28 in Crowell Concert Hall.

It’s very easy to take the power and ubiquity of Western music for granted. For many of us, it’s the only music we hear. When we turn on the radio, the television, when we go to the theater, the majority of the music we encounter stems from our corner of the world. Of course, this is an incredibly blinkered view and even those who find themselves beholden to it are often aware of its influence and limiting power. Even so and despite the vast opening of the world which the digital age promised to herald in, we still find ourselves immersed in the familiar.

I know that I myself am guilty of this in spades. Anyone who took an hour to explore my iPod or my computer’s music library would be hard pressed to find anything that couldn’t be, in some way, categorized as Western, European, Anglicized or something along those lines. Even the most “foreign” music that most of us encounter is filtered through a lens describable in the aforementioned terms. Hell, we’re at a place where Vampire Weekend’s use of “African” music in their own compositions is seen as groundbreaking, despite the distinctly westernized feel of the end result.

This past Friday, the Wesleyan CFA made an attempt to expand our musical horizons, as Crowell Concert Hall paid host to a magnificent performance dubbed, Voices of Afghanistan.

Voices graced its audience with a twelve song set by some of the most renowned Afghan musicians in the country, including vocalist Ustad Farida Mahwash, of whom the New York Times wrote: “[her] beautifully expressive voice retains remarkable range, flexibility, and soul-searing intensity. And her spirit continues to soar.” Accompanying Mahwash were Homayoun Sakhi, a critically acclaimed rubab (a lute-like string instrument and the national instrument of Afghanistan) player and the Sakhi ensemble. Together, the group lit up the evening with an ethereal and potent set of intricately woven songs, which both entranced and educated listeners.

When I entered Crowell that evening, I had absolutely no background on Afghan music, whatsoever. In the past, I’d heard bits and pieces of different music from the general region but I’d never been given much information on those snippets and certainly didn’t have the chance to sit down and analyze any of them.

According to the group’s website, which has been incredibly helpful in giving me background on their stylistic rooting, much Afghan music is based on a dialogue of questions and answers, known as sawol-jawab. Though not limited to music, the concept has found itself deeply ingrained in much of the work that the Voices ensemble does.  Suggesting that only the most thoughtful questions can truly find answers, sawol-jawab, creates an incredibly complex lyrical and thematic foundation within many pieces of Afghan music.

The result, as displayed on Friday, is nothing short of breathtaking. Each of the pieces played possessed a unique rhythm and texture, a wholly distinct relationship between the instruments and vocals, as well as an individualized relationship between the instruments themselves.

Many, if not most, of the songs rested on Homayoun Sakhi’s rubab, which provided the pieces with a galloping energy, its twang both earthy and electric. Throughout each and every piece Sakhi displayed an incredible sensibility for the passions of his fellow musicians, surging and backing off in volume at various points so that the sounds of other instruments might poke through to deepen and expand the disposition of the music.

The most arresting feature of the music, however, came from the vocals as provided by Mahwash. Whereas a great deal of music tends to segregate vocals from instruments, this was not the case with Voices. Mahwash’s crisp lyrical voice swooped and dove alongside the cascading strings, weaving amongst the different sounds until it seemed like just another instrument. Despite my inability to understand the language, Mahwash pulled me in like few singers I’ve witnessed. Her voice itself seemed to be the meaning of the lyrics, a visceral poetry that transcended whatever literal meaning her words conveyed.  As it wound its way around the jack-rabbiting melodies, I felt as though I was within the music, surrounded by the labyrinthine compositions, as they exploded outwards from the instruments.

The group’s website explains to readers that Afghanistan “is home to a stunning array of musical genres. Each is distinct, yet they all share a vibrancy and depth indicative of their importance in the larger fabric of society.” Over the years, the site reveals, these various genres have intermixed, classical pooling into folk song, and traded an increasing number of motifs and techniques. When listening to Voices, this is not hard to believe. The beauty of the music filling Crowell that night was not simply it’s overarching sound, but rather, the underpinnings beneath each grand note, the feeling that below every superficial sonic gesture were thousands upon thousands of cogs in one great musical machine, that as the compositions pushed forward they did so naturally, hundreds of symphonic organs pulsing and prodding, each an individual contributing to the showcase on display.

The true wonder of the music that I heard on Friday was that each piece existed simultaneously as one solid experience and as the sum of many smaller movements, sounds, and sensations, working together. While seeming deceptively simple, each song seemed to cover immense ground and touch on more than seemed possible given only six musicians.

Even for those who may not have been as wildly enthusiastic as I was about the show, I would posit that something, even if it was just one thing, of interest poked it’s head out of that music to grab the attention of each listener. I would guess that each and every audience member found something in that music that they hadn’t seen or heard or felt before, didn’t have access to in their familiar musical repertoire. And if I’m right about that, even if I’m wrong about everything else I felt about this music, then I think Voices of Afghanistan can be called a resounding success.

Katherine Clifford ’14 previews “visible” (Saturday, October 6)

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Katherine Clifford ’14 provides us with a preview of “visible,” a dance piece presented this Saturday, October 6, 2012 at 8pm in the CFA Theater.

Jawole Wllla Jo Zillar and Nora Chipaumire’s piece “visible” will be performed at Wesleyan this Saturday, at 8pm in the CFA Theater. The two choreographers were on campus on Monday, October 1st to speak to a group of students and dance and arts faculty to preview their work over a lunch and discussion. During this talk, the artists spoke about their backgrounds in dance, their collaboration, and what “visible” is about. The conversation illuminated several important themes central to their work, sparking excitement to see the creative outcome and movement behind their ideas and stories.

Both Jawole and Nora were attracted to the idea of “advocacy through dance.” Nora, from Zimbabwe, a graduate of University of Zimbabwe’s School of Law as well as of Mills College (in CA) where she studied dance, drew a parallel between dance and the law. She spoke about how through dance, one can get “immediate advocacy,” whereas in the legal world, “it takes longer to get immediate impact.” This immediate impact is due to the physicality of dance; Nora remarked, “The power of dance is that we’re physically doing it. It has a way of changing the person who connects to it.” It is also a way to change oneself. She discussed how she “felt compelled to explore her inner landscape:” her roots in Zimbabwe, during her time at Mills College, which she described as “amazing dance, but so American.”

Jawole founded the company Urban Bush Women in 1984, under the theme of using “cultural expression as a catalyst for social change.” She spoke of the influence of the Black Arts Movement during her college years, which she said was instrumental in “dismantling the hierarchy of what dance form was supposed to be.” She was thus interested in the idea of advocating for a dance based on personal experience, a dance that dealt with “pedestrian movement,” and one that was truer to her African American identity.

Thus, both Jawole and Nora were interested in making a distinction between white, “American” dance and a dance influenced by their own cultures and identities. This translates to the central theme behind “visible” of the idea of migration and how that relates to identity and visibility. Both artists spoke of the idea of romanticizing a place and how that can be problematic. Nora discussed her story of immigrating to America from Zimbabwe and her imagined future based on the myths of America as a land of “milk and honey” and as a place of true democracy. In the U.S., Nora struggled with the idea of how she could be visible in this new place, and the difference between an identity as African versus as African American.

Jawole discussed the influence of jazz on her work, where everyone can have a distinct voice. This translated into an attempt to “bring in the mother tongue of all the dancers [in her company] and to learn to communicate in order to find each other.” In fact, the cast performing on Saturday is very international, with artists from Burkina Faso, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Holand, Japan, and Washington D.C. Most of the dancers thus have different migration experiences to New York. These dancers are united by the idea of shifting identity upon entering a new place, and by their different experiences as compared to romanticized myths. The combining of these migration stories and experiences of identity and visibility of the dancers and choreographers combine to form the piece “visible,” the exploration of these experiences through dance. As Nora elegantly said, “It isn’t possible to separate who you are from what you dance.”

Don’t miss this provoking and culturally rich performance this Saturday, October 6th.

Michael Darer ’15 attends R. Stevie Moore at Eclectic

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Michael Darer ’15 reflects on his experiences at an Eclectic concert presented by R. Stevie Moore, on Saturday, September 22.

I couldn’t help but feel out of place, walking up the steps to Eclectic that Saturday night, the only one of my friends unversed in just who or what R. Stevie Moore, actually was. When I had prodded them around the table during dinner at Usdan, they had urged me to just wait, that they wouldn’t be able to explain. Occasionally, someone would throw out a generalized description, usually orbiting around some variation of “father of lo-fi music” but on the whole, my inquiries did me no good. We can’t explain him, they told me, sharing smiles almost conspiratorially between assurances that I would in fact enjoy myself.

In retrospect, they were right to announce their inability to make sense of what we would be seeing and hearing later that night. Any description they would have given would probably have seemed wholly incongruent with the end product and any accurate rendering of the man or his music would have ended with only deeper confusion on my part. In some ways, this is all very unfortunate, considering that I now find myself here in a similar position, self-tasked with painting a picture of an experience so weird and transcendent and disconcertingly beautiful that to actually present it accurately would entail a neutering and a draining of those in-the-moment energies that made the affair so, if you’ll pardon the seeming hyperbole, magical.

As one totally uneducated about R. Stevie Moore until very recently, I would feel awkward lecturing about the man’s background or oeuvre with any sort of expert’s confidence. In truth, all one really needs to know is that Moore is known both for how prolific he is (having released numerous albums through labels in addition to over 400 cassettes and CD-R albums independently) and how genre spanning his music tends to be. He’s dabbled in lo-fi and punk, power pop and spoken word, jazz, new wave, experimental rock. In many ways, it would appear that Moore’s music defies the concept of genre, that any successful attempts to pinpoint the trappings of a specific musical culture within his output are purely incidental.

When I got to Eclectic that Saturday night (late enough to miss the opener, early enough to still get soaked by rain on the trip over), the atmosphere into which I entered was absolutely otherworldly. The entire house, including those areas not in use, was permeated by an oddly charged calm, like a coiled spring was nestled beneath each and every molecule of air. Weaving throughout the space were trills of guitar, which seemed to move between the audience members. On the stage stood the man himself, clad in pajamas and looking like Santa Claus after a particularly rough weekend. Oddly enough, the first thing that came to my mind was Ethan Hawke’s description of Walt Whitman in ‘Dead Poets Society’: “a sweaty toothed madman with a stare that pounds my brain”.

On either side of Moore were two other musicians, whose clothes would be incrementally shed throughout the remainder of the performance. The trio seemed weirdly distant from one another and somewhat detached from the world beyond their small stage.

The music that they made over the next few hours was some of the strangest and most wonderful that I’ve heard in a long time, ricocheting back and forth between ethereal and prayerful strands of melody that hung out in the air like newborn birds, vulnerable, petite, in danger of being swallowed up by the stirring vigor of the sweaty crowd and raging forests of sonic bedlam, where individual notes dissolved in a hungry aural clamor which tore around the room in bouncing, clawing strides.

Every so often Moore would interrupt himself to say something, most of which was indecipherable. At one point he seemed to complain about the quality of the house’s PA system (confirmed by the Wesleying blog article on the event) before praising the crowd. While to the musicians these may have seemed like digressions, for me, they were no different than any other portion of the performance, bits of coarse sonic expression spit out for the audience to absorb into our own mass of noise. Every bit of sound that left that plinth on which the band stood seemed so indisputably organic, so fundamental and essential to myself and every other person standing near me, that even when I had no idea what was being sang, said or done (which was often, considering the bustle), I felt like I had known it would happen before it did, as though it were just some magnificently externalized somatic process, splayed out in exquisitely tinted tones for my befuddled enjoyment.

And Moore must have felt something like this as well, for it was not long before any trappings of a standard show were abolished. R. Stevie at one point found himself wandering over to play the Eclectic piano and, right before the show was broken up by Public Safety officers, stumbled out into the crowd for no apparent reason.

Leaving with the rest of the crowd, I felt as though I was taking a bit of the performance with me back to my dorm, while, at the same time, I was struck by the realization that what I had experience could only ever exist in a place and moment that had since dissolved. Certainly, the most meaningful things, especially those rooted in art embody similar qualities: an ephemeral truth that somehow strives to survive beyond the boundaries of its prescribed universe. For as long as I can, I intend to nurse this experience as best I can, even though I know it will eventually fade away. In life and in music, I can’t think of a better thing to feel.