Dulce et Decorum; The Great War, Hotel Modern, Wexner Center, 01/21/10

“Someday they’ll probably
Make a movie out of all of this
There won’t even have to be a murder
Just a slow, dissolving kiss…”
-Elvis Costello, “Poor Napoleon”

No way I could literally describe this would make it sound as incredibly touching or awesome as it was, but I have to try or I’m going to hate myself. 

Dutch theater troupe Hotel Modern do a WWI movie in real time with scale sets and toy soldiers, including live music and classic Foley sound effects.  It opens with a map being unfolded and iconic steam engines and industrial buildings and ships and cigars and the Eiffel tower laid over it, with live narration that gives the impression of a winking parody of a BBC or Time Life movie about the beginnings of the war to end wars.

Then it zooms in and cuts to another “set” of miniature landscape, and the narration is the first of several letters from actual soldiers.  Black and white, what’s meant to be a trench, and you can see them manipulating the elements but in five minutes you don’t care more than you don’t notice.  And it goes from there in fragments, this transparency of process and storytelling and manipulation so you’re looking through what they’re doing but you’re emotionally engaged anyway.  You’re moved anyway.

Outing myself as even more of a geek – I know, I didn’t think that was possible either – a few years ago I helped playtest a White Wolf roleplaying game, Wraith: The Great War.  One of the most elegant mechanics I thought that had was “the fickle finger of fate” meant to model how much more likely you were to die from an errant shell or a landmine because of how closely packed together soldiers were.  The new mechanized nature of warfare made it feel more like fate, like some unseen force was plucking people out and killing/maiming them.  While I know the members of this troupe never played that game, they just as directly show this effect with, well, hands, as in one of the most searing images of the production,  in color, with clattering percussion conjuring (because nothing in this show just mimics) gunfire, toy soldiers are set up and then knocked over with a finger, a sparkler and a blowtorch backlighting them in flame,  again and again and again.

The other image that stuck with me and seemed to sum up the overall aesthetic of this was a very deliberate dirt, then water turning the dirt to mud, then “corpses” of toy soldiers placed face down in it – breaking from earlier when we always saw them die – then more, then more mud, then white powder for snow, then the snow washed off but no sign of the bodies, too many and too deep underground, then cutting away to another grey figure in a trench singing a folksong, slurring and through static.

Runs through tomorrow, you won’t regret going, I promise.

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So much to see and think and feel; Pride and Prejudice, Available Light Theater, 01/14/10

Playwright Daniel Elihu Kramer and director Eleni Papaleonardos do the damn near impossible with Available Light’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, they take it apart, put the pieces back together leaving some gaps so you lose your familiar footing only to find it again, while referencing the acclaimed movie adaptations and pointing out their slightly different takes which also sheds light on the play’s different take.  And in doing all of this, they fit in everything the audience loves about the book and they do it in less than two hours.
The performances are terrific, especially Michelle Schroeder [ed., incorrectly said Joanna at first, mea culpa] (so heartbreaking in God’s Ear and so hilarious here) as Jane, Lydia, Jane Austen and Darcy’s aunt, Acacia Duncan as Elizabeth, and Wolf Sherrill as Darcy and Mr. Collins and the entire cast as modern bloggers and students hashing out the questions behind the story. 
One of the feats of structure this pulls off effortlessly is shifting from the action (including actors speaking description such as “Darcy did not speak”) to modern  book club/blog/study group questions to Jane Austen’s own letters all through a trick of lighting – naturalistic (at least for whatever that means for the stage) in the narrative sections, harsh talk-show light for the modern and a soft spotlight on Schroder for the Austen letters. 
A had a concern that the second half dragged a little bit but honestly I felt that way about the book too, and once all the tools are set up in the first, the second flows naturally and doesn’t need to keep shocking you with another reference or another crack in the fourth wall.  The kind of play that’s wholly satisfying on every single level.
Playing in the Riffe Center until January 24.  http://bit.ly/4I9gHe

Technorati Tags: theater,Available Light

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Truth behind authenticity, heat behind metaphor, love behind motion; H3 by Grupo de Rua, Drake Union, 01/10/10

 

“You’ve faked so many feelings
in your time you wonder
if it could have been
the ghost of faked feelings
offering you an authentic sadness,
a gift.”
-Stephen Dunn, “The Song”

Before seeing this – and all thanks go to a friend for passing off the tickets she was too busy to use – I was only vaguely aware of choreographer Bruno Beltran and his Brazilian group Grupo de Rua.  And this show, on a miserable, bitterly cold Sunday affirmed so much of what I love about dance while still ducking the grasp of my conceptions, pre- and otherwise.

Beltran’s eight dancers came out to no backing track in a well-lit section of the stage, a rectangle in front of the unfinished backstage you can see in the dark.  They break off into duets with no music at all, two move together,then one or both leave and others rotate in but it feels conversational, almost colloquial, it doesn’t feel staged, it’s so well-choreographed it doesn’t seem choreographed.  And this section – which continues with no music at all, already taking the audience out of their “hip-hop dance” comfort zone – starts out structured like a break dancing battle but the moves you’d expect breakers to come out of their two-step into are abbreviated, chopped up, the hit doesn’t come where you expect it to. 

As music starts to show up, it’s solo distorted drums, and they’re not directly following the beat.  Nothing new, but done as well as I’ve seen it done.  Through the sections the music turns to techno then back to silence then back to the solo drums until all the musical elements come together in the frenetic finale, the musical bed of hip-hop dance deconstructed and put back together with just enough pieces perfectly out of place to be interesting.

There’s also a sensuality that starts to creep in, an eroticism.  as the all-male dance troupe touch and immediately bounce off each other and their moves echo – but don’t directly mirror – each other.  Bodies in motion in a celestial sense – orbits, flares, the explosion of a supernova turning into a black hole – and in motion in the sense of just people relating to each other on a physical level and how that conceals or brings out the emotion maybe you don’t even have words to describe, or you’d be too embarrassed to say.

Part of what makes this so interesting is that the hour-long piece broken up into sections, is so cohesive that doesn’t come from  a narrative or recurring themes except in the broadest sense: space that hems us in and gets broken by sheer force of will, how we go past physicality and how it restricts us.  Basically, what all dance is about.   And if you try to read a story, read the dancers as characters, it’s going to shirk from that scrutiny, and if you’re looking for metaphor I won’t say you can’t find it because I don’t have a vocabulary in dance but it’s certainly not the more obvious metaphor of Twyla Tharp or William Forsythe . 

There’s a great joy to the dancing here and when they all move in concert, in looping, swinging motions or drifting offstage there’s some Jerome Robbins amongst the Jerome Bel, it’s theatrical and beautiful and hit every button I have.  Thanks to Emily for hooking A and I up with tickets, and to the Wexner Center for continuing to bring this kind of thing to town.

Technorati Tags: dance,Wexner Center,Grupo de Rua

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The Inbetweens – Quantum Cowboy; Scrambler Seequil – Secret Passageways

Going to try doing a couple of CD reviews at least once a month, and as Scott Miller sang, "We'll see how long I last."  Starting with a couple of CDs that showed up in my mailbox from Mike Gamble, who's been getting a lot of love lately and from the evidence of these it's easy to see why.

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Favorite Art Exhibits 2009

Every year I see quite a bit - for a dilettante - of visual art but I never think to post a roundup like I do for music most years and I've done for film a few years.  I didn't see enough movies this year but I definitely think I saw enough museum and gallery exhibits that made an impression on me to do this list.  Next year I'm going to keep better track of books and plays for possible similar lists because I probably read 50 books this year but my memory's so bad about what I read this year versus last year making that more trouble than it's worth.

And as with the music, these aren't the only ten things I saw. A number of shows made these a hard call to make, including C. Spencer Yeh, Marilyn Minter, and Anri Sala at the CAC in Cincinnati, Ryan McGinness at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Robin Rhode and William Forsythe at the Wexner Center, Shepard Fairey at the Warhol in Pittsburgh, Constellations at the MCA in Chicago, this year's New Photography at MoMA, Watteau at the Met, Tristan Perich at Issue Project Room, and on and on.

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Shows of the Year, 2009 (Draft)

This was a year of seeing some fine, fine music.  Last year A. and I decided we’d missed more shows than we saw and this year we set about correcting that imbalance.  Mission accomplished. 

Big thing to bring up is my New Orleans trip which I took out of contention for this list both because it’s forever tied in my brain to my stroke and because it was so awesome it overpowers everything else.  Tony Barba playing at Dragon’s Inn, the Condo Fucks and Redondo Beat at One Eyed Jacks, everything at Ponderosa Stomp especially Otis Clay and the Hi Rhythm Section, reunited Flamin Groovies backed by the A-Bones, Dennis Coffey. I mean damn.  And the New Orleans Jazz fest with my favorite single moment, after seeing half of Emmylou Harris’ powerful set especially “Return of the Grievous Angel” and “Red Dirt Girl” then walking over to see Solomon Burke open with “Just Out of Reach of my Two Empty Arms” and going into “That’s How I Got to Memphis”.  And all the food?  My god.

A lot of stuff that was good didn’t make this list – The Supersuckers at Ravari, Leonard Cohen in Detroit, Jack Oblivian (twice), Bonnie “Prince” Billy (twice), Box Elders at Bobo, Wooden Wand at Rumba, Scott Miller at Southgate House, O’ Death at the Southgate House, The Cynics, King Khan and BBQ and Those Darlins (two diff shows) at the Northside in Cincinnati, Garotas Suecas at Rumba, Vandermark 5 at the Wexner Center, the list goes on. 

Next year the plan is to reconnect with local music and find a few bands to love that don’t have my friends in them or haven’t been playing for 10 years, only Nick Tolford really blew me away and made me go see him several times this year.

Other trend I’d note that didn’t seem to fit the list proper, this was the year I reconnected with how much I like to go out and dance.  My thanks to Funkdefy locally, Windy City Soul Club and Peruvian band Novalima DJ’ing at the much-missed Sonotheque in Chicago, Mr. Finewine and Jonathan Toubin at many locations but together in a huge unmarked space in Brooklyn; all were some of the most fun nights I had this year, where you come out sweaty and sore and horny and feeling very, very good.

1.  Numero Eccentric Soul Revue, Lincoln Theater – You want to know how to perfectly recreate a classic music event of years gone by, you should call the Numero people.  First, mention has to be made that JC Brooks and the Uptown sound were the consummate backing band with a damn fine singer who had enough presence to command the stage, enough ebullience to be a perfect hype man, and enough humility to just stand aside and sing backup when needed.  And what made this great was that Numero is all about not just the eccentric, lost sounds, but they’re about local scenes, so tribute was paid to Marion Black through Brooks doing one of his songs and the Four Mints did a couple of songs including the gorgeous “Gently Down Your Stream”.  Renaldo Domino killed on “Too Cool to Cry”, one of the most beautiful songs of the ‘70s (I said most beautiful at the time, and A. put me in my place with “More beautiful than ‘La La Means I Love You’?”).  And Syl Johnson set the mother on fire, with his golden suit and raging versions of his hits including “Take Me to the River”, and while I would have liked another few songs (no “Dresses Too Short”?), the final encore of all the acts doing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” nearly brought me to tears.  So joyous a night in Columbus you won’t likely see again for a while.

2.  Gories/Oblivians, Majestic Theater, Detroit - Two bands I never got to see in their hey day, playing one of two shows in the US, and leaving everybody drenched and talking funny. Oblivians closing their set with "Never Change" with Greg beating the drums like he was Buddy Rich at the end of a long, drunken night, lurching through the biggest gospel rhythm you've ever heard. Mick Collins taking a solo so righteous on “Ghostrider” that he rocked his glasses off.

3.  Extra Golden, Rumba – Best drummer I saw all year, propelling a band through the best melodies I heard all year.  They played like they threw diamonds up into a starry sky with flames in the background and took long-exposure photograph, all deliciously blurred shapes and acid-trail lines.  Anyone who wasn’t dancing was nodding along from their seat.  Anyone who wasn’t at least nodding, or who was outside smoking, is automatically suspect.

4.  Faust, Wexner Center – Most of the time, you see one of those bands you thought you’d never see and they don’t live up to the expectations you built up.  But once in a while it’s better than you would have let yourself hope.  This year that happened to me at least twice, with the Gories and with Faust.  Regardless of who the lineup was, original members or no, they showed up with a concrete mixer on the rider which they mic’ed and deferred to like a background singer.  A long kosmischemusik jam followed by introducing the next song with “This is about the ambiguity between men and women” and then one of the prettiest acoustic-guitar-led pop songs I heard all year.  I walked out of this and floated all the way home, wanting to grab people by the shoulders and make sure they know just how awesome what I saw was.

5.  Antony and the Johnsons, Southern Theatre  -Reams have been written on the angelic properties of Antony’s voice but until you see him live you may not realize how much of a classic soul man he is.  The same intensity and humor and joy I saw last year from Jimmy Scott singing from a wheelchair at the Iridium, or Meredith Monk at the Wexner Center or at BAM, or Otis Clay, Solomon Burke and Allen Toussaint in  New Orleans this year, he has those qualities in spades.  A tight seven piece band that can go from chamber music/art-song settings to ‘50s gutbucket cal and response and Antony at the piano at all times in control, from the rousing “Shake that Devil” and “Fistful of Love” though the heartrending “For Today I am a Boy” and “Kiss My Name” on through the perfect, finding-the-sadness-and-obsessive-qualities cover of “Crazy in Love”. they created a continuum of music that used clichés and tropes but never descended into just cliché.

6.  Rafael Toral Trio, OSU Urban Arts Space – Not the first show I saw after getting out of the hospital (that was Leonard Cohen in Detroit) but close, and certainly the first show I took a notebook to and tried to write about, though I don’t think I did anything with it.  Before this show I only knew Toral from the record he did accompanying David Toop and his appearance on Sonic Youth’s NYC Ghosts and Flowers.  Here he appeared with C. Spencer Yeh of Burning Star Core, Trevor Tremaine from Hair Police for the first set of a single 20-25 minute improvisation that coiled and glittered, then adding Columbusites Ryan Jewell and Mike Shiflet to make it a quintet that opened the canvas up to different brushstrokes and colors.  As hard as the music was to describe – is it noise? is it free improv?  is it at times eai? – it was even harder to get out of my head later that night.

7.  Eric Taylor, Red Door Tavern - “Just like high school.”  That was the oft-repeated refrain Taylor would use in his long, partly-improvised, snaking spoken word interludes between those beautiful songs, both were riveting.  A story of his friend drawing wax-crayon hearts on a shopping bag and throwing knives at them starts hilarious and ends ineffably sad and then turns into one of my favorite of his songs, “All So Much Like Me”.  For those two sets there was nowhere I Wanted to be and I even regretted leaving before the encores to go see Moto at Bourbon Street (who rocked, of course).

8.  Jack Rose, Hideout, Chicago, and Sarah Borges, Fitzgerald’s, Chicago – I wrote these two shows up together in this blog and they’re inextricably linked in my mind, I’m not sure what to say about one without the other, but it was the best Jack Rose show I ever saw and I thought that before it turned out to be the last Jack Rose show I’ll ever see.  He’ll be missed but I don’t need to tell you that.  And Sarah Borges was perfect in a completely different way, distilling all sorts of roots music (soul, ‘50s R&B, country, whatever the hell NRBQ is) down to catchy hooks and tight playing and a sense of epic fun.  A great first couple of nights before the wedding of one of my best friends, which was the best thing we did all weekend.

9.  Larkin Grimm, Cafe Bourbon Street - Four of us there in one of the worst-promoted shows in history. Grimm playing most of her excellent Parplar (came out in 2008 but I wasn't hip to it until the beginning of this year) backed by guitar, harmonium, percussion and guzheng with these songs that build their own internally consistent world and at the same time feel wholly other and resonate with your own life. Her voice is a bludgeon and a scalpel when she needs it.

10. Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, Roulette, NYC – This was the frosting on a great damn weekend of jazz in New York for me this year, from Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society at LPR to Harris Eisenstadt at Cornelia Street Cafe, but Threadgill was somebody I never thought I’d see live.  And the current lineup of Zooid is cracking.  Stomu Takeshi on bass, the guitarist and the tuba player are erecting these cracked sculptures of rhythm while still not letting the melody slip and Threadgill’s alto and bass almost recall Bach counterpoint at times,  with a terrific drummer.   I think Threadgill gets a lot of credit for arranging and putting together awesome bands but you don’t hear much about his compositions – or at least I don’t recall – but my god, these perfect byzantine structures but with gold rivers running through them, every piece held its own weight and could hold anything the players or audience could put into it.

11. Reigning Sound, The Summit – Nothing much to say about this, one of my favorite bands sounding better than I’d ever seen them and playing for an hour and a half to a pretty full crowd on a Tuesday night.  It’s hard to get me to stay out after midnight on a weeknight any more but I just didn’t want to leave.

12. Amir El-Saffar, Wexner Center – This and the aforementioned Harris Eistenstadt show fought in my memory for this list, both had excellent tunes and great playing, but I had to side with El-Saffar and not just for Nasheet Waits shit-hot-as-always drumming.  I walked out of this glad I was alive.  Right after I saw a very good ? and the Mysterians show but I don’t remember it anywhere near the detail I remember El-Saffar and not just because of the shots.

13. Davila 666, Ravari Room – Exactly what you want rock and roll to be, the stripped down-to-basics melodies of Johnny Thunders and the Ramones but also the wild dancing excess of the Fleshtones, with two people who are basically tambourine players and background singers. They got up in front of maybe 70 people on a Sunday night and left an ounce of sweat and plenty of spilled beer on the stage and sent everyone out into the night with a song in her heart.  And I’d be remiss to not mention the slinky grooves made up almost entirely of sharp edges that Mannequin Men opened with, and the perfect, raging set El Jesus played to start the night off.

14. Black Swans, Essie Jain, and Bird and Flower, Rumba Cafe, 11/06/09 – There’s an undeniable joy when you see a band develop into its own thing before your eyes, which I saw happen with Bird and Flower; they had one of the most enjoyable sets I’ve seen in a long time and have grown from a band I respected and dug to one I really look forward to seeing.  Essie Jain‘s lullaby should have shamed and quieted the barroom party crowd, and would have in a better day, but even in the face of an indifferent audience she brought some wistful beauty to a Friday night.  But the winner of the night, aside from the audience, was Black Swans.  As much as ever, they were a revelation, a band that references history but is not shackled to it, on the newer songs like “Joe Tex”, “Blue Bayou”, “Thinking of You”  and especially the perfect ballad “Don’t Blame the Stars” and the metallic mosaic-blues stomp “Sunshine Street”, they’ve cracked into a new world, one I can’t see enough of.

15. Erik Friedlander, Wexner Center – Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.  I’d seen Friedlander do songs from his solo record Block Ice and Propane in Chicago a few years ago in a space over a Chinese restaurant and that was great but the immaculate sound of the Wexner Center and his father’s photographs hammered this home and made it one of the most moving shows I saw all year.

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Favorite Records 2009

I tried keeping a running tally of any record that knocked me on my ass this year, and spent the last couple of weeks adding a couple new releases and separating it into the 20 records right now I can see still being awed by in 20 years and honorable mentions which I’m not quite so sure will make that list but still gave me a lot of pleasure and in some cases it was an incredibly close call between what made the list and what didn’t quite.  I’m a little disheartened to see my list is overwhelmingly white (15 out of 20) and male (11 out of 20), and not so disheartened or surprised to see that it’s less rock-heavy, it was one of those years, I think.
Anyone reading, feel free to argue with the choices in the comments and especially suggest things you think I might have missed.

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