In step with Joséphine: Julia Bullock at The Met

Soprano Julia Bullock
(photo: Kevin Yatarola)

Julia Bullock
Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine
The Great Hall
Metropolitan Museum of Art
January 16-17

The two-page, finely-written program notes Julia Bullock contributed for her production, Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, performed on the stairs of the Metropolitan Museum's Great Hall, takes me back to a practice I abandoned a couple of years ago--saving programs from all the shows I see. I no longer save them much beyond the year of their season, but this one, this one, will live with me, just as the life, struggles and example of Joséphine Baker clearly live with Bullock, a Black opera singer of profound insight and commitment to social justice.

Bullock--the Met's 2018-2019 Artist in Residence--starts her notes by quoting famed New Yorker writer Janet Flanner whose references to Baker's "caramel-colored body" and "lovely animal visage," the "dawning intelligence" of her look, along with Baker's apparent failure to have "heard of Mozart" are like textbook examples of white supremacist arts criticism. Dropping this nightmare on the page, Bullock then proceeds to hail Baker for achieving superstar--and super-paid--status during Jim Crow when her level of success was unimaginable for any Black performer. Further, for anyone obsessed with the image of caramel-colored Baker dancing in a costume made of bananas, Bullock notes Baker's role in the French Resistance and our own Civil Rights movement, and even the way the entertainer turned her simplistically-eroticized image--her skin turned into a costume, as she says, her body a "shattered object" that wants a home, wants to be owned--into one of self-defined, self-determined Black power and woman power.

The essay--which goes on to detail a creative process encouraged by director Peter Sellars with a team of remarkable collaborators--ends in a proud, uncompromising affirmation of the complexity of human nature, Baker's and Bullock's as well. Both women aim to rip our stereotypes right out from under us.

Is it possible to not only save program notes forever but stand up and give them a rousing cheer?

Bullock's soprano has depth and edge; it draws you into a resonant cave. When she first comes into view, high on the Great Hall's grand staircase, she stands stockstill, an icon draped neck to toes in formal black, her hair a dark-russet 'fro which will eventually be lit to halo-ing effect. Remote and rigid, she seems an apparition from the grave, her face, seen from a distance below, a cloudy blur that does not resolve into recognizable features.

That will change. Bullock does descend, at times, to a mid-point landing to join the work's composer Tyshawn Sorey (percussion/piano) or to the lower steps where members of International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) craft a sinuous and textured sonic fabric for her plainspoken testimony as Baker, channeled by writer Claudia Rankine. "One day, I realized I was living in a country where I was afraid to be Black," Bullock says, as Baker. And she calls the US "barbarous."

It's haunting, confusing, disturbing when she reveals that her dancing was actually a form of running. Would that mean fearful escape? Or would it mean resistance? Or some combination? How are we to understand this Joséphine (or this Julia who identifies so closely with her)?

The long-ago familiar--a dancing of the Charleston, a warbling of "Bye Bye Blackbird"--are rendered with an insistent, high-strung dissonance. Bullock's training in dance becomes clear immediately, but the entirety of the performance rests on her skillful ability to move various energies of feeling through her body--from the initial, regal dignity to mischief to brooding quiet to unnerving thunderclaps of anger and power.

Creative team:

Julia Bullock, soprano
International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE):

• Alice Teyssier, flute
• Ryan Muncy, saxophone
• Rebekah Heller, bassoon
• Daniel Lippel, guitar
• Jennifer Curtis, violin 

Conceived by Peter Sellars
Tyshawn Sorey, composer, percussion, and piano
Zack Winokur, director
Claudia Rankine, text (featuring the words of Josephine Baker, adapted by Julia Bullock and Zack Winokur)
Michael Schumacher, choreographer
Mark Grey, sound design
John Torres, lighting design
Carlos Soto, clothing design

Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine concludes this evening with a performance at 8pm. Seating is very limited and likely sold out, but for information, click here.

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue (enter at 81st Street main entrance), Manhattan
(map/directions)

******

DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

******

Subscribe in a reader

Olly Wilson, 80

Olly Wilson, 80, Dies; Composer Meshed African and Western Music
by Richard Sandomir, The New York Times, March 23, 2018

Subscribe in a reader

Muhal Richard Abrams, 87

Muhal Richard Abrams, 87, Individualistic Pianist and Composer, Is Dead
by Howard Mandel, The New York Times, November 1, 2017

Subscribe in a reader

Kronos Quartet brings "My Lai" to BAM Next Wave

Tenor Rinde Eckert (left) as Hugh Thompson, Jr.
and musician Vân-Ánh Võ in My Lai
(photo: Richard Termine)

On the morning of March 16, 1968, U.S. army soldiers fired upon more than 500 unarmed civilians--elders, children, infants, women, some raped and mutilated--in the South Vietnamese hamlets of My Lai and My Khe. More innocents would have been slaughtered in this Vietnam War atrocity--since known as the My Lai Massacre--were it not for the witness and persistent intervention of a young American helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson, Jr. His three descents into the chaos, though futile as attempts to halt the killing, ultimately saved lives, including, on his final landing, a young boy rescued from his dead mother's arms.

For Thompson's courageous efforts and his official reports of the massacre, he at first became a pariah in Nixon's America, as much a non-surprise as it is heartbreaking. His story inspired a concise, deeply affecting opera, My Lai, now in its New York premiere run at BAM Harvey Theater for BAM Next Wave. It was composed by Jonathan Berger with a libretto by fiction writer Harriet Scott Chessman for Kronos Quartet, tenor Rinde Eckert and Vân-Ánh Võ, a master performer of traditional Vietnamese string and percussion instruments.

Running at 70 minutes, the work suggests the dissonance between cultures--the flare-ups and gusts of Western strings set against Vân-Ánh Võ's measured, airy and delicate tones. Sounds converge and diverge; their players become factions physically separated by Eckert and the set the way Thompson's chopper, on its second descent, kept murderous soldiers from reaching potential victims. The set at the center of it all depicts a sterile hospital room: ceiling-to-floor white curtains, a couple of chairs, a table covered in prescription bottles. The curtains serve as screens for the ghostly shadowplay of helicopter blades and the gleam of wind-blown grasses. Here Eckert gives voice to an aging Thompson consumed by ugly memories and dying of cancer. The heroic pilot died in 2006.

Once Eckert parts the curtain and emerges before us, haunted and restless, the work maintains tight focus on him; the singer maintains his own tight grip in a performance of exacting force and endurance. He is almost never not singing, compulsively remembering, compulsively reporting, dreaming, desiring escape from the body, desiring, ironically, to share with his remembered young son the beauty of flight. He hallucinates his testimony as a game show.

Once you land, there's no turning back.... You can't just hover.

At one point, the bewildered Thompson asks, "How has this happened?" It's a question with no one good answer--or far too many. It resonates and disturbs as much today, in the Age of Trump, as then, in the Age of Nixon.

Kronos Quartet:
David Harrington (violin), John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola) and Sunny Yang (cello)

Direction, set design: Mark DeChiazza and Rinde Eckert
Video projection design: Mark DeChiazza
Lighting design: Brian H. Scott

My Lai has one final performance, tonight at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here. For information on other BAM Next Wave events, click here.

BAM Harvey
651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Subscribe in a reader

Anahid Ajemian, 92

Anahid Ajemian, Violinist and New-Music Champion, Dies at 92
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, June 30, 2016

Isao Tomita, 84

Isao Tomita, Widely Considered the Father of Japanese Electronic Music, Dies at 84
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, May 11, 2016

Ursula Mamlok, 93

Ursula Mamlok, Avant-Garde Composer, Dies at 93
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, May 6, 2016

Striking sound: Dance meets percussion at Japan Society

Choreographer Luca Veggetti and musician Kuniko Kato
collaborated with dancer Megumi Nakamura
on a multimedia work inspired by the music and theatrical ideas of Iannis Xenakis.

Project IX--Pleiades, a work by Italian choreographer Luca Veggetti to percussion music of Iannis Xenakis, received its North American premiere last evening at Japan Society. A duet for percussionist Kuniko Kato and dancer Megumi Nakamura, it was first shown, last month, in Yokohama, Japan.

The duet, initiating in Xenakis's Pléïades (1978), announces itself in a flare of sound that drops away before returning in a bright progression of chimes like sonic droplets sprinkling around you. The almost-physical presence of music here is key.

Above: Kato (l) with Megumi Nakamura
in Project IX--Pleiades
Below: Kato in action
(photos by Julie Lemberger)

When the piece opens, we first see Kato's instruments before we see the performers. Various drums, a marimba, xylophone and more span the theater's wide stage along with a scrim suspended along a diagonal. When the women finally arrive onstage, Nakamura assists Kato in moving all of her instruments to one corner of the stage in a long, serene passage, ceremonial in tone. But it would be a mistake to think that the dance begins only when every instrument is carefully situated. In a real way, the women have been dancing all along and now continue to do so.

Nakamura, recipient of numerous awards for interpreting modern and contemporary dance masters, brings attentiveness to Veggetti's ultimately cautious, if visceral, dissonance. Kato, though, commands attention, whether it be with her videotaped image multiplied and stretched across the scrim or her flesh-and-blood performance on the array of instruments--big, big, powerful moves into the surrounding space that throw off rhythmic slashes and shockwaves. She is solar.

All artists involved in this project are here to serve the music, but it is Kato who brings it. Last evening, the audience's fondness for her was completely clear and completely justified.

With sound design by Yuji Sagae, lighting design by Takeaki Iwashina and videography by Hiroyoshi Takishima

For tickets to the final performance of Project IX--Pleiades this evening at 7:30pm, click here.

For information on Japan Society programs, click here.

Japan Society
333 East 47th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Fred Ho, 56

Fred Ho, Saxophonist, Composer and Radical Activist, Dies at 56
by Ben Ratliff, The New York Times, April 12, 2014

Dancing, dancing machines: "Twinned" at the Metropolitan Museum

As specific sites for site-specific dances go, you can't get much classier than the Metropolitan Museum of Art after dark--site-specifically, The Charles Engelhard Court with its surround of sparkling, glassed-in balconies. Last evening, in this dramatic setting, contemporary music ensemble Alarm Will Sound (directed by Alan Pierson) and Heginbotham Dance (directed by John Heginbotham) premiered Twinned, their collaboration to compositions by Edgard Varèse, Aphex Twin and Tyondai Braxton with charming transitions between sections by Raymond Scott.

Each set of performers engaged--a little--in the other's art form. At times, musicians could be found standing solemnly or lying supine beside or beneath their instruments or scampering about as if their instruments, or music itself, were forms of contraband or weaponry; a dancer might stand behind a music stand, waiting for his moment to strike a gong or noisily crumple sheets of clear, glinting plastic. This whimsical overlapping of roles, at best, suited the playfulness of the electronic scores; at its less than best, it seemed tame and a bit silly. But it did help de-stuffy-fy an event that--at $60 a ticket, certainly--could have come off as stuffy but did not.

The Varèse Intégrales opened on a rising woodwind note; a percussive flourish of drums, bells, chains, tambourine, clackers; a shock of brass, with musicians alerting us to their presence all around the court. The space was seized, the capture announced to all.

Past the Varèse, light projections of chains of 1s and 0s splashed the container of the court. Musicians beat a temporary retreat to their separate half of the performance space, and two dancers, dressed in black-and-white Op Art leotards, stepped forward. Peppy movements carried the jagged, electric look of their costumes's prints. They trotted, flapped and twisted their limbs, and rigidly twerked like mechanical targets or clockwork figures, joined by two other dancers and finally by the wonderful John Eirich, luminous and airy in a long, cream-colored skirt. Under dramatic lighting by Nicole Pearce, the dancing looked well-placed among the court's sculpture and architecture.

In Twinned's conclusion, the new Fly By Wire, set to a Tyondai Braxton first presented by Alarm Will Sound in 2012, the dreamy/ borderline nightmarish undertone of previous sections broke into a clever, full-on horse race with dancers jockeying for position. Dancers certainly can make music, if they choose. But the skill of the Heginbotham dancers made me glad that, most of the time, they stuck to their own side of the fence.

Dancing by Winston Dynamite Brown, John Eirich, Lindsey Jones, Courtney Lopes, Weaver Rhodes, Sarah Stanley and Andrea Weber

Alarm Will Sound: Erin Lesser (flutes), Alexandra Sopp (piccolo), Christa Robinson (oboe, English horn), Campbell MacDonald (clarinet, saxophone), Elisabeth Stimpert (clarinet, bass clarinet), Michael Harley (bassoon, contrabassoon, voice), Matt Marks (horn), Jason Price (trumpet), Mike Gurfield (trumpet), Michael Clayville (trombone), Timothy Albright (bass trombone), Joe Barati (bass trombone), John Orfe (piano, keyboard), Chris Thompson (percussion), Luke Rinderknecht (percussion), Yuri Yamashita (percussion, keyboard), Mellissa Hughes (voice), Courtney Orlando (violin, voice), Caleb Burhans (violin, electric guitar), Nadia Sirota (viola), Brian Snow (cello), Miles Brown (bass)

Nigel Maister (staging direction for Intégrales)
Maile Okamura (costumes)

Alarm Will Sound in a performance of Cliffs by Aphex Twin

Bowling Green State University, March 28, 2012 

arranged by Caleb Burhans

staging by Nigel Maister

For more information on special events at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, click here.

A celebration of contemporary Black composers

Raising Voices and Awareness for Overlooked Works
Da Capo Chamber Players at Merkin Concert Hall
by Steve Smith, The New York Times, February 3, 2013

Butch Morris, 65

Butch Morris Dies at 65; Creator of ‘Conduction’
by Ben Ratliff, The New York Times, January 29, 2013

Holiday dancing at WFC

arts>World Financial Center dance events for Holiday 2009

New York Theatre Ballet in The Nutcracker
Tuesday, December 1 (12:30pm and 6pm)

Hour-long version. The 6pm show will be preceded by the annual Winter Garden lighting celebration.

ETHEL and Annie-B Parson: Wait for Green
Friday, December 18 (12:30pm and 7pm)

Choreographer/director Parson once again joins forces with postclassical string quartet ETHEL, restaging their 2008 collaboration, Wait for Green.

Ase Dance Theatre Collective
Monday, December 28 (12:30pm)
Dance and song in celebration of Kwanzaa

All events take place in WFC's Winter Garden and are free; no tickets required.

Map and directions

For a complete schedule and information on all Holiday 2009 events in the arts>World Financial Center series, click here.

Thorson: Taken to "Heaven"

Heaven--the lacerating ensemble piece by Minnesota's Morgan Thorson, presented at P.S. 122--was just the thing for a chilly night and a cold, frostily-lit performance space. Not that Heaven managed to heat things up, not even when pushing dancers' ecstatic rituals to manic extremes.

With its white and shiny decor, its hive-mind drone and eerily-beautiful slowcore score, played live by Low's Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, Heaven delivered a sense of driven longing for a place and state of being way, way north of here, something as close to austere, rigorous purity and perfection as humans can manage. The work is inhabited by several dancers who, initially, keep their eyes lowered and huddle together while slowly trodding a repetitive path with simple steps. They're a repressed--and self-repressed--community.

They're not only dressed in white, they are themselves all white--at least, I'm assuming by appearance alone. Whether or not this apparent racial purity was intentional--and it might well have been--it proved to be a fascinating theatrical element and one perhaps fully justified by the cultural specificity of the work's electrifying conclusion. Transformative religious practices of varying kinds can come from a similar place of searing extremes--and here, I'm thinking of the role of possession in African and Afro-Atlantic spiritual culture--but they ultimately produce different phenomena.

Thorson grips us in that place of extremes where beauty and madness overlap. I'm intrigued by one of Thorson's statements about the work's relationship to "our love for the theater and its parallels to worship."  This puts me in mind of the ancient origins of theater, very much connected to that place of wild extremes meant to shock the viewer out of his or her habitual condition.

While watching Heaven, though, I never felt totally sure that the perfection sought is ultimately worth the repression and pain. Thorson, I think, lands on the fence and perches there. But the performers make a vivid, unforgettable experiment of it. They are the aforementioned Sparhawk and Parker, Karen Sherman, Justin Jones, Jessica Cressey, Elliott Lynch, Max Wirsing, Chris Schlichting, Hannah Kramer and Renee Copeland--all sometimes scary and always scarily good.

Heaven closed last evening but deserves an encore. Let us pray...

Classical TV interviews Meredith Monk

Interview with Meredith Monk
ClassicalTV: The greatest performing arts online

Posted via email from Eva Yaa Asantewaa's posterous

Cheam Shapiro and Zorn at the Guggenheim

Sophiline Cheam Shapiro and John Zorn Find Common Ground
by Steve Smith, The New York Times, November 26, 2008