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 manMilk 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 beWhat 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.
“South Africa is an extraordinary country in so many ways,” wrote director Yael Farber at Broadway.com. “Indeed, the relatively peaceful transition from almost half a century of brutal oppression to democracy was nothing short of miraculous. Yet beneath the hype of a country reborn lies the dark current of consequence... The flexibility with which the survivors of these years have had to rise to embrace the ‘new’ South Africa inspired the world, but left little time for looking back to reclaim the emotional shrapnel left from those dark years. Amajuba is our attempt to do just that”
After a multi-year tour to sell-out crowds at international venues, The Farber Foundry’s Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise, a stirring theatrical performance based on the experiences of its cast, makes its final stop at the Walker February 22-25, and to mark its conclusion, Farber visits Minneapolis to oversee this historic run. For a great primer on Farber and Amajuba, listen to this excellent NPR piece from July.
Special offer: Ticket prices for Friday night’s show have been reduced. Call the box office at 612.375.7600 to get tickets to Thursday and Friday shows for $18 ($15 Walker members). Tickets to Saturday and Sunday shows are available online.
Despite plugging our May performance by found-sound electronic duo Matmos (here), I’m not all that familiar with the group. But this new interview by the Daily Californian offers a fascinating primer on their thinking and music. Known for creating soundscapes using found objects (a taxidermied deer head, the pages of a bible), animals (rats scurrying in a cage), and actions (liposuction surgery), the pair’s conversation ranged from Drew Daniel’s love of American punk (he tells how the Germs’ drummer agreed to burn Daniel’s skin with a cigarette “and we recorded the sound of my cry of pain and the sizzling sound, and then manipulated that into a piece”) to the dematerialization of music (”instead of buying records and looking at the art, people are getting music that streams into their hard drive, they have it for a few months, and then throw it away”).
An excerpt of the interview with Daniel, Martin Schmidt, and the DC’s Michael Harkin:
DC: What initiated your mutual interest in found sound amd field recordings?
DD: When I was a kid, I had a mono jambox, a little tape recorder, and the mic inside it was broken. When I recorded my own voice, it was so distorted--it changed me from a little child into a scary monster. I liked that you could use recording to change your identity--it's the musique concrete equivalent of feeling like Sauron when you're playing heavy metal.
DC: With Matmos, the principle of composition is of the utmost importance. What sets you apart from other artists in the electronic or sample-based realm?
MS: We're strangely driven by conceptual restriction. We started doing it for fun--we were into this idea of "try to make a song where you don't use the normal things that you would use to make songs."
DD: It's a "MacGyver"-like situation where you see what you can make out of what's on hand. At that time in sampling culture, people were pigging out on James Brown breaks, and we started with something that wasn't musically promising--a latex t-shirt, for instance.
MS: At this point, we've been doing this for so many years that it affects other parts of my life: "Can I clean the kitchen only using vinegar?" I think to myself, "Okay, I don't have to wear all yellow all the time." Actually, I've never worn all yellow in my life before.
DC: How do you decide that the more found-sound aspects of the music should be accompanied by more traditional instrumentation?
DD: It depends on the song: there are certain pieces where we decide, "Okay, let's make this out of just one object." As we've gotten older, we've gotten proggier and more pretentious. In the case of the new album, when you want to depict someone like Joe Meek, you want to use some of the kinds of instruments and playing that were important to him--that meant having a particular guitar tone. Other times, we're pursuing an object as intensely as we can. In the case of making a song out of the skin of a rabbit, I tried to make 90% of the piece using just that rabbit, and then we brought in some environmental field recordings to put the rabbit in a space sonically.
Matmos performs May 19 at the Walker with Brooklyn’s So Percussion and artist, instrument maker, composer (and former Walker staffer) Kitundu.
Update: While I’m at it, here are a few (of the many) YouTube entries for Matmos, including their twisted take on “Stars & Stripes Forever” and a live performance of “Tract for Valerie Solanas” recorded in New York last October:
Every year, top music critics compile a massive poll on the best music from the previous year. This year’s Village Voice Pazz and Jop Poll tallies votes from 494 music writers to come up with a list of the best albums and singles of 2006. From the involvement of local writers Chris Riemenschneider and Jon Bream (both from the Star Tribune) to Minnesota-born Bob Dylan taking top album honors for Modern Times, our fair state gets its due.
Bands with Minnesota connections getting top album votes include: The Hold Steady at number four (featuring members of the former TC band Lifter Puller) for Boys and Girls in America; at 137, Tapes ‘n Tapes for their breakthrough album The Loon; and, fresh off his Super Bowl rockfest, Minneapolis’ finest, Prince at #142 for 3121.
Other locally affiliated vote-getters for best album:
154. Golden Smog, featuring members of Soul Asylum and The Jayhawks, for Another Fine Day
161. P.O.S., a Rhymesayers up-and-comer, for Audition
399. (TIE) Soul Asylum, The Silver Lining
530. (TIE) Paul Westerberg, Music for Open Season; and Alan Sparhawk of Low for Solo Guitar
720. (TIE) Zebulon Pike, Zebulon Pike II: The Deafening Twilight
756. (TIE) Jessy Greene, A Demon and Her Lovers; and STNNNG, who played at the Walker’s Summer Music & Movies in ‘06, for Fake Fake
Plenty of others making the Pazz and Jop list have been to the Walker recently or--in the case of Matmos, at #107, who play the McGuire stage with So Percussion and Kitundu May 19--will be here soon:
12. Sonic Youth (who played Rock the Garden 200o and dropped by for a gallery visit last summer) for Rather Ripped
21. Ornette Coleman (who played his 75th-birthday concert here in 2005) for Sound Grammar
59. Tom Zé (who collaborated with Tortoise back in ‘99) for Estudando o Pagode
76. Boris, Pink (see #373)
107. Matmos, The Rose has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast
111. Melvins (who scored Cameron Jamie’s three films, shown here in fall 2006) for A Senile Animal
135. Juana Molina (she sang here in fall 2005), Son
373. (TIE) Sunn0)) and Boris, who played a concert at the Walker in fall 2006, Altar
391. Carla Bozulich (she performed here in March ‘06) for Evangelista
530. (TIE) Stereolab (Rock the Garden 2000) for Fab Four Suture
• Hopkins hailed: The Walker-commissioned Must Don’t Whip ‘Um, Cynthia Hopkin’s newest performance piece and a highlight of this year’s Out There festival, opened at St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York to acclaim. The New York Times, describing Hopkins’ voice as “delicate and emotionally forceful -- part Natalie Merchant, part Madeline Peyroux,” hails the music-theater work as “a triumph of disciplined thinking, narrative fluidity and musical accomplishment.” (After the Walker show, Variety took a stab at describing Hopkins’ pipes: “Hopkins is gifted with an instrument of uncanny tone, almost angelic, and her phrasing at times clips her lyrics with acidic tinges that bring to mind Billie Holiday’s combination of aching passion and brains.”) See MDWU at St. Ann’s through Februrary 4.
• Attacking the bearded lady: The Riot Group, from San Francisco, is racking up praise for this year’s final Out There piece, Pugilist Specialist (tonight and Saturday night only) which follows US military specialists as they plan an assassination attempt on an Arab despot referred to only as the “bearded lady.” Psychologically gripping yet hilarious, this piece, well-timed for an age of Abu Ghraib and the Global War on Terror, is “visceral and thoroughly engaging, even as it raises disturbing questions” (Star Tribune).
• Free culture: For you, an mp3 of Seu Jorge performing “Rebel Rebel” and others at the sleepwalkers opening at MoMA, plus I Met the Walrus, a very short film animating a 1969 interview on war and peace conducted by 14-year-old Jerry Levitan. For more free mp3s and news on independent music, visit Spacelab.
Welcome to our first edition of Backstage, a periodic offering of sneak peeks, news and notes on music, theater, and performance contributed by members of the Walker Performing Arts department.
• About that subtitle: If the traditional-sounding title throws you, let this review of this weekend’s performances at the Walker of Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragon Flying to Heaven (”a show about white people in love”) be your guide. Ranked #10 on New York magazine’s “Best in Theater 2006,” the blurb reads: “Considering it begins with a close-up video of the playwright being slapped in the face--repeatedly, for several minutes, hard enough to draw tears--it says something for Young Jean Lee that she still manages to save her play's weirdest, funniest stroke for near the end. In unison, four Asian-American actresses deliver a speech in the author's voice that rampages through race and gender sensitivities, mocking patriarchal white men, hypocritical white women, angry minorities, and Lee herself. ‘People think of me as this empowered Asian female, but really I'm just a fucking white guy,’ they announce.”
• The live arts: In an interview, Performing Arts curator Phillip Bither tells mnartists.org how Out There performers are selected each year and why Americans are so reluctant to produce experimental performance: “I think it has something to do with the fact that the live arts have always been tied to commercial interests in this country. There has been very little distinction between entertainment and live art or art that runs in real time. This is not to say that experimental theatre can't be entertaining or wildly inventive.”
• SXSW bands named: Austinist lists all 240 confirmed bands for this year’s South By Southwest festival, from AM to Zach Galifianakis. The amps turn on March 9.
• Jazz blues: The jazz world lost two greats recently: Alice Coltrane, who in the 40 years since her husband’s death has made music with his band, passed on. A child prodigy who trained in classical music, Coltrane was known for injecting Eastern sounds and harp music into jazz; listen to this amazing NPR story, rebroadcast on the occasion of her death last week at age 69. Jazz saxophonist Michael Brecker succumbed to leukemia brought on by myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a rare form of bone cancer that attacked his bone marrow. He played on more than 900 records and won 11 Grammys. Susan Brecker, who wrote an open letter before her husband’s death seeking bone marrow donors, asks friends to commemorate her husband by donating to The Marrow Foundation’s “Time is of the Essence” Fund or lobbying for stem-cell research. Brecker was 57. Our condolences to the Brecker and Coltrane families.
Michèle Steinwald has been living (and wearing, as you’ll read in a minute) multidisciplinary art since she was a kid. After a teenage role fronting for a spit-themed Canadian punk band, she went on to become a dancer, choreographer, and arts administrator. In Seattle, she worked at On the Boards as an artistic associate; helped start up the film distribution site IndieFlix; and, most recently, founded 44 Arts Productive, a service organization aiding dancers and choreographers. As the Walker’s new performing arts program manager, she’ll be involved with all aspects of producing performance works, including blogging. By way of introduction, here’s an interview we did this morning.
I understand you were in a punk band called “Hork P’tew” when you were 14. What was your role?
Yup! I was the singer. We never had a gig. I actually was asked to replace the original singer who was in jail. I was asked because I couldn't sing, and by the end of the summer the band split anyways, but not because of my singing. The guitar player, for those interested in 80's Canadian punk, was Warren Peace of Grave Concern. His brother Paul Ste-Marie was the drummer. Tension grew when the original drummer of Hork P'tew stayed in the band.
What were some of your songs?
My favorite was “Oatmeal Blues,” which Warren wrote, but we also did an apocalyptic version of “Fraggle Rock.”
Where has your performing arts career taken you since Hork P'tew?
I am a trained contemporary dancer, now retired, and have done some choreography over the years. My favorite choreographers are Deborah Hay and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (of Rosas), who performed last season at the Walker. I flew in from Seattle to see Anne Teresa perform a solo here and it was so great! I also danced for Simone Sandroni when I lived in Europe. Simone brought his new company Déjà Donné to the Walker last year, too. My favorite Canadian choreographer is Benoît Lachambre and he too was at the Walker with Meg Stuart last season. As you can see, I am a big fan of the Walker's performing arts programming.
Where are you from?
I was born in Elmira, New York which is the hill next to Ithaca in upstate NY but was raised in Eastern Canada. We moved around a lot and I have continued to travel because of my career. In all I have lived, in order since Elmira, in Springfield, VT; Peterborough, Ontario; Sydney River, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia; Burlington, Ontario; Ottawa, Ontario; Montréal, Québec; Arnhem, The Netherlands; Brussels; Prague; Tokyo; and then Seattle for the last 8 years (the longest I've lived anywhere). Now Minneapolis! I am really happy to be here. It feels like home already.
Tell me the story of how you’re related to a work in the Walker permanent collection.
As a young dancer of 17, I was asked to “perform” for a visual art installation at the National Gallery of Canada. The work called Remote Control II was by Czech/Canadian artist Jana Sterbak. I was suspended by the crotch in a large metal crinoline which had wheels and a remote control motor. The following year, the gallery called and asked if I could be a part of Jana's solo show and hang in the metal skirt again but also, model a “meat dress.” My dad thought this was very funny as I was vegetarian at the time. I agreed and was sewn into the steak garment for a photo shoot. The piece is named Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Anorectic Albino and the Walker has one in its permanent collection. The picture in the Walker archive is of the original model, although I am still surprised to find pictures of me used in publications.
You wore the dress in the controversial showing in 1991?
That’s me. It was a big scandal in Canada so my picture was in the newspapers and on the evening news for a day which was exciting at 18 years old.
Image: Michele performing in Remote Control II, from the exhibition catalogue
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