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“Let’s Rip It Up!”: Tony Allen at the Cedar

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Rob Simonds, the Cedar Cultural Center’s Executive Director, opened the second of Tony Allen’s two sets last night with this demand of the normally placid Minnesota audience. By the end of the night, most everybody in the house was doing some form of dancing, yet Allen and his 9-piece band more than made up for [...]

Rob Simonds, the Cedar Cultural Center’s Executive Director, opened the second of Tony Allen’s two sets last night with this demand of the normally placid Minnesota audience. By the end of the night, most everybody in the house was doing some form of dancing, yet Allen and his 9-piece band more than made up for any lack of movement in the crowd.

Perhaps most famously labeled as “Fela Kuti’s drummer,” last night I really got a sense of just how much more Allen is. The style of Afrobeat he helped create with Fela was fully on display: the interlocking guitars, horn lines, and quickly-clipped clave pairs formed the bedrock of the night’s music. These songs were also infused much more with soul, jazz, and funk elements, including a wider-ranging harmonic palette and more intricate horn lines.

I was lucky enough to be close to really watch Allen’s drumming. It wasn’t like his hands were a blur, full of virtuosic pyrotechnics, ala Neal Peart. In fact, it’s the complete opposite: it almost seems like he’s not working while he’s playing. Polyrhythms and syncopations abounded, fills blended effortlessly into his time-keeping patterns (if one would even call them that), and isolating one element of his set (a hi-hat, kick, or snare) made it even more incomprehensible as to how those two hands and feet could lay down such a tight, infectious groove yet seem so disparate.

And then, of course, Allen sings on top of all this. His lyrics were few and far between, and most took on the character of proverbs, such as the song “Kindness” with its chorus of “Don’t take my kindness for weakness.” His raspy, growling baritone certainly reminded me of Fela, one example of how Fela’s presence is never that far away from his music. (He politely, yet directly declined when an audience member asked him to play Fela’s “Water Get No Enemy,” but later, his scruffy, trickerstery guitarist briefly quoted his “Sorrow, Tears, and Blood.”) Amp Fiddler, who played keyboard and keytar, took a turn singing lead on one song. This was the most explicitly political song, though it still came across as a lukewarm anti-war song, quoting  both “War” and “A Love Supreme.” In the end, it was his incredible voice that was more powerful than any words he sang.

The group’s performance at the Cedar last night was last stop of their US tour, their tightness and musical camaraderie display on every song. It was Allen, though, who everybody paid to see. People of all different walks of life took this rare opportunity to see Allen: hippies, yuppies, world music fans, Afrobeat connoisseurs, hipsters, and more than a few diasporic Africans who now call Minnesota home filled the Cedar to capacity. Halfway through the first set, a father put his son on his shoulders so he could a better view, while a few feet away, a grandma danced liked no one was watching, a testament not only to Allen’s acclaim, but also the Cedar’s incredible development of a diverse audience base.

During the second song of the band’s encore, a reprise of “Kindness,” I saw Simonds boppin’ through the crowd with a starry-eyed grin on his face. I’m sure many people in the audience felt the same way, and it was an incredible end to another year of great music from the Walker.

 

Tony Allen Tomorrow at the Cedar

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  In a July 1999 article, Wire magazine called Tony Allen “the Human Loop,” and wrote  “Allen spins his polyrhythms into hypnotic swirls of Tantric proportions that recall both the infinity of the SP1200 and the long-lost skills of the Meters’ Ziggy Modeliste.” Allen himself has said that “when I play it’s like an orchestra [...]

photo Bernard Benant

 

In a July 1999 article, Wire magazine called Tony Allen “the Human Loop,” and wrote  “Allen spins his polyrhythms into hypnotic swirls of Tantric proportions that recall both the infinity of the SP1200 and the long-lost skills of the Meters’ Ziggy Modeliste.” Allen himself has said that “when I play it’s like an orchestra in itself.”

 

Allen was the rhythmic force of Fela Kuti’s music from 1964-1980, and legend has it that four drummers were required to replace Allen in live shows after he left the band.

 

Many writers on Afrobeat attribute the sound in part to the funk of James Brown, but Allen will tell anyone that the influence ran the other way around. When James Brown played Nigeria in 1970, his arranger came to a Fela show and attempted to transcribe Allen’s foot patterns.

 

Tony Allen has lived in Paris with his family since 1985. A complete biography can be read here.

 

His show tomorrow is a co-present with the Cedar Cultural Center, he will be joined by nine other musicians, playing a mix of classic Afrobeat jams and tracks off his newest release, Secret Agent.


Doors are at 7 pm, show is at 8. Tickets here.

 

Missy Mazzoli Kicks off String Theory Fest

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When Kronos Quartet came to the Walker in February, they performed Missy Mazzoli’s composition “Harp and Altar.” Tomorrow, Missy Mazzoli herself will be playing alongside esteemed violist Nadia Sirota in Walker Gallery 2. This is a Sound Horizon event, where musicians install themselves in the Event Horizon exhibition, and the event kicks off the String [...]

When Kronos Quartet came to the Walker in February, they performed Missy Mazzoli’s composition “Harp and Altar.” Tomorrow, Missy Mazzoli herself will be playing alongside esteemed violist Nadia Sirota in Walker Gallery 2. This is a Sound Horizon event, where musicians install themselves in the Event Horizon exhibition, and the event kicks off the String Theory Music Festival. Time Out New York called Missy Mazzoli “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart,” and you can preview some of the beautiful work she does with her ensemble, Victoire, in the video above. Missy Mazzoli will also be performing Sunday with Victoire & JACK Quartet as part of the String Theory Music Festival, click here for further details.

 

Exquisite Geometry – A Speakeasy for Lucinda Childs

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“Dance” presents the elegance of geometry – simple, clean, and clear.   Performers trace crisp patterns in space, executing phrases repeated with unfailing precision.  Constructed through a mathematical layering of movement and music, the geometry of “Dance” and its repetition linger.  Echoing afterwards as audience members pick their way through seats and steps, this repetition presses [...]

“Dance” presents the elegance of geometry – simple, clean, and clear.   Performers trace crisp patterns in space, executing phrases repeated with unfailing precision.  Constructed through a mathematical layering of movement and music, the geometry of “Dance” and its repetition linger.  Echoing afterwards as audience members pick their way through seats and steps, this repetition presses on the mind.  For some of us, the momentum propels our bodies as we steer through crowds to gather in the Walker’s balcony bar for a post-performance discussion.  This blog highlights themes from that conversation, the last of this season’s SpeakEasy series.

The performance begins confronting the audience with the paradox of abstract dance.  An art form of the body – with all the connotations of biography, narrative, specificity, and imperfect humanness associated with the body – is deployed in a context and fashion stripped of these elements.  Through passes too brief to allow the eye to rest on one performer, unisex costumes that reject the specificity of character, and the cool, focused countenance of the performers, “Dance” opens with a wash of movement that disperses the gaze of the audience.  Rather than elevating the performer as individual, the soloist commanding attention as the body pours forth, elaborates, and variously articulates its physical monologue, Lucinda Childs places her emphasis on the ensemble as it draws phrases in time and space.  Initially figures of anonymity, however, Childs’ dancers become familiar as they rotate through their passes.  Glimpsed for a moment, it is through the very repetition that may at first seem to set them at a distance that they become recognizable.  A smile curves, a step springs, and out of the abstract emerges the human.  This development reaches its apex at the shift to the second piece.  The music rolls in continual waves, yet a tension is established through the contrast of this musical momentum and the image of a lone Lucinda Childs anchoring the moment and gazing calmly forward.

Throughout the evening, patterns in film layer upon patterns on-stage as the dancers skip, glissade and pivot through Philip Glass’ “sea of sound” and Sol LeWitt’s hazy film.  LeWitt is known for his combinations and variations of the white, open-sided cube as well as his wall drawings, sets of instructions for elaborate designs conceived by the artist and executed by teams of museum workers.  In both his direction of bodies that produce wall drawings and his addition of a set of filmed performers in “Dance,” the visual artist becomes choreographer.  This contribution to “Dance” builds to a sequence near the end of the evening where the film is projected in equal scale over the dancers, partnering each performer with a filmic ghost.  The past chases the present, the present follows the past and the chasm of time is collapsed as in this brief moment history takes its place alongside the present that is its progeny.

Despite the central role of filmed dancers from 1979, what remains is perhaps not the dominance of that performance, but rather its ephemerality.  Controversial in its day, audiences today cannot experience “Dance” as it was.  That moment, that time, and those performances have passed, just as this remount, too, will pass into memory.  Avoiding the forward thrust of linear narrative, the transience of “Dance” is heightened by its use of repetition, achieving momentum through a nuanced exploration of a continual present.  The repeated motions are ever-changing, each time renewed as they both press forward and cycle back, drawing our attention to each moment as it quickly flickers on-stage and fades into memory.

Since 1979, Philip Glass has risen to fame not only in music circles, but also among dance audiences familiar with his collaborations with choreographers like Twyla Tharp in the 1980s.  Sol LeWitt’s work appears in museums around the world, including an on-going retrospective at the Walker Art Center.  The pedestrian skips and pivots of Childs’ early work are today performed with balletic power and the Judson Dance Theater from which she emerged has achieved a place of significance in the annals of dance history.  As one audience member commented, part of the beauty of the filmed dancers is that they were unaware of what this piece would become to future audiences.  Part of the beauty of those performing the piece today is that they know.

Lucinda Childs’s DANCE

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You know that trick with the waterfall—the one where instead of watching the whole foaming collapse, you fix on a single crest as it arises, flies, and crashes? Quickly, the set-up of Dance: Lucinda Childs’s repetitive, patterning steps set against Philip Glass’s mesmeric music, with Sol LeWitt’s film of a 1979 performance cast in Herculean [...]

You know that trick with the waterfall—the one where instead of watching the whole foaming collapse, you fix on a single crest as it arises, flies, and crashes?

Quickly, the set-up of Dance: Lucinda Childs’s repetitive, patterning steps set against Philip Glass’s mesmeric music, with Sol LeWitt’s film of a 1979 performance cast in Herculean scale and a variety of angles on a scrim at the front of the stage. What it all amounts to is a radical distortion in what you see, particularly if you sit, as I did, right down front. If you attempt to follow either a live or a filmed dancer, narrative-style, you’ll run into problems: bright others flick across your vision while your original dances rapidly out the wings. You can’t pull back and watch the whole because part of it is two-dimensional and part three-dimensional; more than most dances, Dance explores its four-dimensional space in a way which makes such global viewing impossible.

What’s left, then? The eye alighting, choosing; a line collides with a line; dance is a movement, not necessarily by or attaching to anyone; I want to be in that space where everything happens; epic, glacial, avalanche, ghost, lightning, flank rising shimmering in deep sea, partial eclipse, total, solar, glancing; no one sees what I see.

Antonioni: the temps mort trick: leave the camera running after the actors think the scene is over, so they can fall apart a bit; leave the camera running on the door that closed, so it can settle into closure.
Watch the space someone has just left and you’ll see it gradually fade and flatten. Or reverse: watch a space and wait for it to brighten with life.

I’ve never seen a dance like this.

Sidebar: one of the strange discoveries of late is how close modern dance (to simplify the labels; in terms of what “modernism” generally means—emphasis on the thing itself—this is modern and not postmodern dance) is to ballet. In its original performances it must have been farther off. In fact, here, with the 1979 video projected, we can see this is true. But classic modern companies (and pick-up companies for classic modern pieces), no doubt spurred by today’s dizzying technique, have increasingly opted for ballet-trained marvels who never saw the step they couldn’t do—or undo; what sets these dancers apart from their fellows who stayed in ballet, what makes them “modern”, is their ability to strip flourish, romance, foolishness of all types from their dancing. The arms of the originals flap a bit; hardly anyone here flaps. Childs’s replacement in her solo, Caitlin Scranton, turns as smoothly as a dowel; her giant geometry fills the stage. For pure execution you probably couldn’t beat her. Childs doesn’t. But her performance is so different. She may wear a mask of defiant beauty, but she also wears sneakers and hoop earrings. She flails; she wills. Scranton skips as severely as a Greek column could. I don’t fault her, though; I fault this larger emphasis on platonic perfection and superhuman purity—and more than that, the sense one gets of the classic work being not so much danced as reenacted.
My favorite dancer was a white-blonde imp who smiled in every step: delight moving. It was all alive to her, and she made it alive to me.

To the extent that my thought sinks in technique, though, my imagination flags. Keep moving, keep seeking new ways to look; refuse to look like the person you were an hour ago. Find a novel horizon—make deliberate fragments of the dance, each as precious as a bit of antique statuary—watch the way a kitten would, avidly.
Watch the curve of a back as it moves about the stage, a lit parenthesis in the dark, flexible bow arching and rebounding.
To say nothing of the absolute symmetries that flare up—

After, a friend and I agreed we were happy to have been there. We expect people to expend energy on their children, their jobs, homes, themselves; but when someone pours energy into a nothing like the blank of a theater until that “point that has been fed over years becomes a little bit alive” (Anne Carson), that is a beautiful gift. Nothing can repay that—except an answering enlivening of the void.

Watch the space where nothing is; something is there.

The Majesty of Minimal

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Sadly, I am unable to see the upcoming remount of the landmark Dance, the three-part 1979 collaboration between choreographer Lucinda Childs, composer Philip Glass and visual artist Sol LeWitt. (On view April 7 – 9 at the McGuire Theater) What I am doing here instead is blogging about the sole related event I could attend, [...]

Sadly, I am unable to see the upcoming remount of the landmark Dance, the three-part 1979 collaboration between choreographer Lucinda Childs, composer Philip Glass and visual artist Sol LeWitt. (On view April 7 – 9 at the McGuire Theater) What I am doing here instead is blogging about the sole related event I could attend, yesterday’s workshop “Controversy to Cannon: Watching Lucinda Childs’ Dance.”
 

Led by Walker tour guide Jessica Fiala and offered through EXCO (Experimental Community Education of the Twin Cities), this comprehensive 3-hour intensive was a lesson in Art Through the Ages. From Marie Taglioni’s first ventures onto pointe to the current production of Dance, we traced how minimalist dance work grew out of a response against Ballet, passing through Duncan, Graham and Cunningham in the process. In the 1960’s New York’s Judson Dance Theater took all that formalized training and stripped it. New modern dance works (postmodern) became elemental and the body became democratic. Enter Lucinda Childs.
 

In the workshop we watched a filmed excerpt of Dance. This, combined with other of her works that I’ve seen live and on video, makes me feel as though she straddles aesthetic worlds. Her work has a pedestrian physicality whose virtuosity is in the relentless repetitions and accumulations that is a trademark of Minimalism, AND her musicality is strictly structured; her dances are the music, a Classical virtue.
 

Sometimes her work lathers to a boiling point like in Concerto. At others there is no arc, and we are left to add up the sum of the parts on our own. My guess is that the later is the case in Dance. I say this in part because of the score by Philip Glass whose music propels forward ad infinitum, the pace and dynamic tone unchanging. Its trajectory is different than what we are used to hearing in western music.
 

Add to this the film by Sol LeWitt that plays on a scrim in front of the performing space, simultaneous to the live action. The film is of the original cast, executing the dance on a surface of white squares, thus identifying it as LeWitt conceived. (Sol LeWitt: 2D+3D is on view through April 24. Go see it. See the shadows. See the shapes. See the maps on the wall and the executions of his directives. See the windows into his mind and open yours.)
 

I wish I could see Dance live. I wish I could see the enormous and perhaps overpowering filmed dancers layered over the live ones. I wish I could see and in the seeing see both past and present. I wish I could see the new cast performing with the old, thus prolonging this work of art’s live life. I wish I could see time measured through this piece, comparing not dancer to dancer, but era to era. I wish I could see.
 

It is ironic that I attended a workshop about how to watch a dance that I can’t actually see. And yet I had one of the richest dance experiences I’ve had in a long time. What I saw instead is all the stuff around the dance: the timeline, its context, the blueprint and its shadows.