When I met Walter Kitundu, shortly after I started working at the Walker in 1998, he was making music. And musical instruments. And intricate dollar-bill drawings. And god knows what else. Now, as of Monday, he’s a MacArthur Fellow, honored with a $500,000 grant to continue his inventions — and all of us at the Walker wish him warm congratulations.
A quick scan of Kintundu’s website offers ample evidence of the 35-year-old San Francisco resident’s catholic creative impulses: from sometimes sharply political dollar drawings to remarkable nature photography (a raccoon testing the buoyancy of a river log, for instance, shot during his ongoing residency at Headlands Center for the Arts) to musical compositions to visual art. But what he is perhaps best known for is inventing and building instruments, most notably the phonoharp, a hybrid of turntable and stringed instrument. Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as looking “like something John Sebastian might sample on a reunion tour of the Lovin’ Spoonful,” the instrument “creates a sound that combines the gentleness of the plucked strings with an LP spun on the turntable.” That sound captured the attention of the members of Kronos Quartet, who each wanted one. They hired him on as Kronos Instrument Builder in residence, and he ended up writing a composition for phonoharp specifically for the group; it was performed at last year’s San Francisco Jazz Festival, with Kitundu accompanying on clarinet (he’s reportedly building four “trumpet violins” for the quartet as well).
A native of Rochester, Minn., Kitundu has a long history with the Walker. Performing Arts Residency Coordinator at the turn of the millennium, he also co-wrote a commissioned piece, entitled simply 8, for the opening of the Walker’s 1999 exhibition of Robert Gober’s art. And last year, he opened up a concert by So Percussion and Matmos in the McGuire Theater. Living in San Francisco for the past decade, Kitundu is employed as a MultiMedia artist at the Exploratorium and is currently the Wornick Distinguished Visiting Professor of Wood Arts at the California College of the Arts, in addition to his work for Kronos.
“We’re thrilled for Walter. We had the pleasure of working with him at WAC in his formative days,” says Doug Benidt, associate curator of performing arts. “His omnivorous curiosity, unfailing grace, and ease of medium manipulation was evident early on. It’s a remarkable statement of achievement and a proper cosmic turn for the better. His career is shaping into an exceptional compound… instrument builder, bird photographer, composer, designer, musician, woodsmith, (what’s next?)… Walter is a true artist who now has the luxury of dollar-drenched research limited only by his preferences.”
While searching for links to go along with last week’s Behind the 8-Ball Q&A with Emily Johnson, curator of this weekend’s successful Choreographers’ Evening, I noticed that her Walker/Jerome-commissioned work Heat & Life is on a 50-state tour. And given the performance’s theme — climate change and its implications on how we live — the company is buying carbon offsets to help reduce its carbon footprint.
I emailed Johnson to hear what it means to be “carbon neutral.” In her reply she said that oft-used buzzword is too forgiving. “To be truly carbon neutral” — that is to add no carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in the course of touring — “we’d be walking to our performance cities and venues and performing in the dark,” she wrote.
Still, from paying for tree planting to doing roadside theater to raise awareness of the issue, Johson’s company Catalyst is truly putting its money where its moves are.
More from her email:
Sincere congratulations to puppetmaker and artist Michael Sommers who was named this week as a 2007 United States Artists Fellow. The $50,000 no-strings-attached gift recognizes 50 artists who’ve achieved “master status.” Sommers and his wife and business partner Sue Haas received news of the fellowship the day they opened their new Open Eye Figure Theatre in South Minneapolis. The theater’s inaugural show was a remounting a Walker commission, Sommers’ A Prelude to Faust, which was performed in the same venue in 1998 when it was Patrick’s Cabaret. (Sommers and Haas also had a visual arts exhibition of their work at the Walker in the early ’90s.)
Sommers is in good company. Walker artists-in-residence Bill T. Jones, Rennie Harris, Joanna Haigood, Ann Hamilton, and Jason Moran were also named. The 2007 fellows will meet for a party at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles this weekend.
With the Walker’s October 2 concert by Deerhoof nearly sold out, you might need another way of hearing the Bay Area avant-rock trio (and kids’ ballet inspiration). According to Spacelab.tv, the band has just released a free mp3 album of live performances, covers, remixes and other bits of weirdness.
Even without Deerhoof’s quirky, experimental music, the lyrics to the band’s 2004 song “Milk Man,” hardly seem like perfect kids’ fare:
Milk Man sleeps on the roof in the noon
Bana-na-na stabbed to the arms, weird man
Milk Man sneaks in the house under moon
Miracle words come to a mouth you may hear
Peek-a-boo
…Milk Man smiles to you “Hi” in a nude
This banana stuck in my arms, oh my love
Stabbed to the arms, ooh-la-la
Yellow one
But as an elementary school drama and music teacher told “Weekend America,” when she heard the song “Milkman” she had to use it for a project at North Haven Community School in Maine. Courtney Nalibof saw the connection immediately: both the band and her kids are extremely experimental with music. “When you listen to Deerhoof’s music and you teach an elementary music class, you hear a lot of the same things,” she said. “You hear a lot of really creative imagery. You hear a lot of non-sequiturs. And you hear a lot of sounds being made in ways you didn’t know they could be made. I think there’s a lot of crossover there.”
The result was Milk Man — “part ballet, part surreal performance art, and part rock show” — performed to sold-out crowds at the school in October 2006. (According to the project’s website, Deerhoof’s members made it to North Haven to offer pointers at rehearsals and see the shows: “They loved it!“)
But isn’t the story of a masked milkman who kidnaps kids and hides them in a clouds — and has bananas sticking out of his armpits — a bit… weird?
“They’re a little creepy, Naliboff admits, but adds, “Maurice Sendak books are pretty creepy too, but kids like those too.”
Here’s a videoclip from the North Haven school’s production, followed by a look at “Milk Man” performed by Deerhoof, who visit the Walker October 2 for a concert.
Listen to Weekend America’s report on The Deerhoof Ballet (RealAudio).
Reveille sounds: The Twin Cities newspaper scene has taken a series of body blows of late, with buyouts and layoffs at the dailies, the shuttering of the altweekly Pulse of the Twin Cities, and what seems to be a mass exodus of writers from the remaining weekly City Pages. So the birth of Reveille, where many of the departed from other publications have ended up, is welcome news. The online music magazine includes staffers like Jim Walsh (formerly of City Pages); Steve McPherson, Tom Hallet, and Rob van Alstyne (Pulse); current HowWasTheShow.com editor Andrea Myers, and Kyle Matteson, who runs ArcadeFire.net, the Wilco fansite Via Chicago, and MoreCowbell.net.
Metronomy meets Mario: Metronomy, playing Summer Music & Movies in Loring Park on August 6, just played the G! Festival in the Faroe Islands. The review? “[T]hey impress brilliantly. Combining an esoteric, Super Mario-influenced blend of dance, techno and electro with choreographed stage moves, shirts with light bulbs on them and keyboards a plenty, the band recreates a sweaty club atmosphere despite the sun shining as brightly at nine in the evening as it was five hours earlier.” Perfect for the park…
Blue Note bonanza: Cribbed, co-opted, and celebrated, the graphic design of Blue Note Records album covers from the ’50s and ’60s remains, in my mind, some of the best design around. The Japanese site Vintage Vanguard chronicles hundreds of examples of famous and rare jazz covers from the era, including Donald Byrd Free Form, the un-PC Lou Donaldson album “Good Gracious,” The Three Sounds’ It Just Got to Be (pictured above), and the classic color scheme of for Andrew Hill’s 1964 release Judgment!
As we reported earlier, poet, activist, and educator Sekou Sundiata died last Wednesday at age 58. In the last two years of his life, he spent a lot of time in Minneapolis. He was in residence at the Walker developing and performing the 51st dream state in Spring 2006, and this June he gave the keynote address at the Pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed conference held in the Twin Cities. (Prior to that, he’d visited for performances three times: The Circle Unbroken is a Hard Bop and Udu, both copresented with Penumbra Theater, and 2004’s blessing the boats.)
Commemorating a writer in words can be a daunting task; luckily, Sekou left a rich body of work, in both text and — the best way to experience his work — audio and video formats. The Walker Channel now features the full video of the 51st dream state, as well as his audience Q&A. And KFAI’s Janis Lane-Ewart rebroadcast a May 31 interview with Sundiata, and includes a spoken-word/music piece by Sundiata that commemorates the birthday of Nelson Mandela. Listen here (starts at 36:10).
[photo]
In an interview with Performing Arts Curator Philip Bither last spring, Sekou Sundiata spoke about the “special agency” of art:
“When we encounter a work of art, things are not only unfolding before us. They are happening to us. When the hero falls, we fall. When the hero triumphs, we triumph.”
In his work blessing the boats, audiences shared in Sundiata’s personal terror and triumph over kidney disease and an organ transplant. But today we share in sadness: Sundiata died yesterday of heart failure. He was 58.
A writer, spoken-word artist, and educator, Sundiata has presented his work at the Walker four times; most recently, he visited in early 2006 to develop his latest work, the 51st dream state, a personal search for “what it means to be an American” in a post-9/11 age. “I have never been interested in patriotism,” he told Bither. “I am interested in a citizenship of conscience and in critical citizenship. These ideas emphasize a moral, ethical, and critical relationship to the state above a prideful and supportive one. The first proposes a kind of uncritical blindness; the other proposes a look at America that does not flinch or blink.”
In developing the piece, Sundiata traveled the country in hopes of reconnecting with America — and “America.” He hosted citizenship dinners and communal singing events, recording the people he encountered for inclusion in the 51st dream state. Friends shocked and saddened by this news have been emailing around this excerpt from that project, a reminder of Sekou’s inimitable voice and spirit — and a reminder of questions we might all consider asking in this short life:
What if we were Life
Or Liberty
Or the Pursuit of something new?
Between the rocks below
and the stars above
What if we were composed by Love?
And what if we could show
that what we dream
is deeper than what we know?
Suppose if something does not live
in the world
that we long to see
then we make it ourselves
as we want it to be
What if we are Life
Or Liberty
and the Pursuit of something new?
And suppose the beautiful answer
asks the more beautiful question,
Why don’t we get our hopes up too high?
What don’t we get our hopes up to high?
High!
All of us at the Walker share in grief with Sundiata’s family, his wife, Maurine (Kazi) Knighton, daughter Myisha Gomez, stepdaughter Aida Riddle, grandson Amman and his mother Virginia Myrtle Feaster, brothers William and Ronald and all his nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles.
Donations can be made to the National Kidney Foundation at 30 E. 33rd Street, Suite 1100, New York NY 10016.
Rider Raves: Dutch theater collective Kassys, at the Walker for Out There 2006, has apparently honored us with a Dressing Room of the Year honor. A few salted nuts and bags of trail mix go a long way. In other news on backstage schwag, The Smoking Gun posts a hilarious, at times non sequitur, concert rider for Iggy & The Stooges. Among the requests, apparently penned by roadie Jos Grain: two heavy duty floor-mounted fans (”So that I can wear a scarf and pretend to be in a Bon Jovi video”) and two tom-toms “with mounting” (”And if you can’t bring the mounting to us, we’ll have to send a bloke called Mohammed to the mounting”). [Thanks, Emily.]
Summer Bands Announced: Alas, Iggy isn’t headlining the 31st annual Summer Music & Movies series, the Walker’s free gig in Loring Park, but the just-released lineup is pretty incredible. International bands are coming including, from Belize, Andy Palacio and the Garifuna Collective, and UK electropop phenom Metronomy. Locals include The Plastic Constellations, Black Blondie (”Picked to Click” by City Pages; pictured, top left), The Knotwells, and Rob Skoro. The films are a selection of director Douglas Sirk’s best; the fun starts July 16 and runs every Monday through August 20. (Palacio and Co. play June 28 at BAM in Brooklyn. The New York Times calls their music “danceable exhilaration… To an outsider [it] can sound like Andean music sent to the Caribbean seaside.”)
Praising Mekka: The Walker-commissioned Facing Mekka, Rennie Harris’ hip-hop theater piece and anchor performance at the 2003 Hip Hop Moves festival, just premiered in Harris’ hometown of Philadelphia. The Inquirer called the piece “an ambitious, abundantly alive production.” The rave goes on: “You can’t get bigger sound than Mekka’s mix of live voice, DJ, percussion and cello (perhaps too loud for some), more vital dancing than that of its cadre of phenomenal performers, or a more thought-provoking layering of image and action.” Not a bad homecoming present for Harris on the 15th anniversary of his company, Puremovement.
The UK’s Improbable Theatre has mounted some enormous — and enormously successful — productions in Minneapolis, from the extravagant Shockheaded Peter (2000) to the hilariously morbid The Hanging Man (2003). On their fifth Walker-sponsored visit, Improbable goes into more Spartan territory: a stage cleared of sets and costumes. There, armed only with a box of odds and ends (a bristle brush, a newspaper, a hand mixer) they’ll be performing live, improvising everything as they go. Improbable’s artistic codirector Lee Simpson likens this process–in which performers face an expectant audience with little more than their wits–to “ primeval gloop,” a powerful, mysterious state in which improviser and audience explore possibilities. Simpson and Walker performing arts curator Philip Bither recently discussed this promising, challenging, and terrifying place as a prelude to Improbable’s April 19–21 American premiere of ANIMO: UK/Minneapolis.
Philip Bither: Improbable Theatre has been together a little over ten years now and has gotten major recognition for large-scale shows such as Shockheaded Peter. Why do a project like Animo, an improvisational work like the pieces you did when you first started the company?
Lee Simpson: I think the answer is in the question, really. The fact is that this is at the very heart of what we do. It’s like a little reservoir of stuff that we go back to, a reservoir of experience where we can go to make ourselves scared and vulnerable and off balance again. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing it. It doesn’t matter how cool you think you are. It doesn’t matter how successful your last show was. When you step on stage in Animo, that’s it–you’re nothing. It wipes the slate clean. There’s nothing, and you face that nothingness and you find something out. And that’s the most scary and exciting thing. The reason why we do this, I think, is that it really gives us that kind of buzz.
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