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.”

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:

It doesn’t make sense to me to tour a performance piece about the detrimental effects of living in a world affected by global warming and add tons and tons of carbon into the air while doing it, so with each tour I calculate the amount of carbon we produce via our flights, driving miles (we have to drive a mini van to haul all of the props and gear), and electricity during the run and donate to Go-Carbon-Zero.org to “off-set” the carbon we produce. Go-Carbon-Zero.org uses the money to plant the amount of trees needed to offset the carbon emissions. Every once and a while I get an update on how the trees are doing… That’s pretty cool.

I also try to organize our tour schedule to limit our impact. My initial goal was to perform Heat and Life, or a version of it, in all 50 states of this country — and to perform it until our environmental policies changed enough to make a difference or until awareness was at an acute level (we might have reached this point, at least). Since my idea was to put the energy and intention of the performance in each state, it didn’t matter if there was always a stage or an audience even. This has led us to perform in theaters (DTW, Links Hall), in

makeshift performance spaces (Soap Factory, Gallery Lombardi, Que-Ana Bar), in public spaces (Living Green Expo, roadside rest stops), and in natural settings (a mountaintop in Alaska, on the banks of the Missouri River…). On our drive to Nebraska (where we did a 4 day residency and performance on a family farm), for example we stopped in South Dakota and performed outdoors — just picked a beautiful area and sung a song from the piece and danced certain sections. No one saw us but the landscape. Then, on the way home we pulled over off 35 somewhere in Iowa and each company member performed a solo from the piece — an improvised version — and I don’t know, cars were blaring by, honking, maybe 2,000 people saw us that time.

And, you’ve reminded me: I need to make another donation.

Read more on green art museums and environmentally sensitive theater.

Photo from a Heat & Life performance by Chris McKinley.

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.

Get tickets here.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.Listen to Weekend America’s report on The Deerhoof Ballet (RealAudio).

But tickets to the Walker’s October 2 concert by Deerhoof.

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]

“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.

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.

PB: It sounds in some ways like it’s the defining element of a performer’s courage. Is it as terrifying as it sounds?

LS: It is sort of terrifying. We divest ourselves of not just a script, but we also try to divest ourselves of improvisational tricks. We try to make ourselves more naked than an improviser. So we try to lose structures or shapes or routines. The whole point of Animo is that it should look like it grows from nothing–or from what’s happening inside.

PB: When you see improvisation in the states, sometimes you feel like it’s all being spontaneously created but there are these tricks or strategies that make you think, “ I haven’t seen this exact stuff, but I know where it’s going.” Animo doesn’t really have that feeling.

LS: That’s absolutely true. We’re not in any way disassociating ourselves with that. That’s how I make my living–I’m a professional comedy improviser, and I love that stuff–but you also have to recognize that there is another approach that is as much about waiting and taking your time and silences and space and what comes out of that as what comes out of “ risking.” It’s about putting vulnerability on stage in a way that it’s possible to watch it. Obviously you don’t want to see people on stage being vulnerable, having a breakdown, bursting into tears and having a horrible time. So is it possible to be on stage, to be vulnerable, to hear what’s happening inside yourself, notice the little things that are happening with your friends on stage, and grow something out of that like a little culture in a Petri dish, and then build and grow that in what feels like an organic and natural way into something that’s very theatrical?

PB: What would you say is your bargain with the audience?

LS: I guess it’s just: come along with us please. Take an evening off, in a way. Sit in the theater. And we’re going to take an evening off from being clever and being prepared and if you guys can take an evening off as well, we maybe can go together on an unusual journey–a journey that you might not normally get to go on. And just wait with us in the space. Give yourself over to it to some degree. There is a kind of complicity between the performers and the audience, because in a sense we’re all in it together. I guess we ask them to trust us. I think the most painful thing for a theater audience is when something is happening on stage and it’s not working, but nobody can admit it’s not working. That’s really sort of painful. Like in a big opening night and there’s a lot riding on it. But the great thing about Animo is that we can confess. If a performer goes on stage and starts something and the audience is thinking, “ Oh my God, what’s he doing?”, another performer is allowed to go on and say to him “ Oh my God, what’re you doing?!” It’s not an embarrassing thing to do.

PB: It’s actually probably empowering.

LS: And the audience is going “ Ah, thank God. That’s what I wanted to say.” And we can deal with it, and we can say look, I think we should change directions. The thing about theater that’s created on the spot is that it’s redeemable at any moment.

PB: It seems like there’s such a level of trust. In Minneapolis you’ll be collaborating with some artists who live here, some great puppeteers and performers. Is it a scary proposition that you’ll only have two weeks to build up that trust, rather than the 10 years Improbable has been together?

LS: Introducing people who have never met before is very exciting because it helps to achieve that thing that Animo is there for–to keep us off balance. Animo is there to keep us out of a comfort zone, and what new people bring is fresh new energies, fresh new propositions that knock you off balance and wake you up. It’s a bucket of ice-cold water over you, and can stop you from being complacent.

PB: One of the things that might also give more grounding is the really great relationship you’ve had with this community. You’ve come back every couple of years with very different kinds of works, sometime in residencies, sometimes presenting new works in various theaters around town. This is the first time, actually, that you’ll be at the Walker. Can you talk about your experiences here?

LS: We’ve always found that when we come to Minneapolis and to the Walker, there’s a sense of nurturing and excitement and interest in the work. The risks we take seem to be embraced. We’ve always felt a very warm response to things that sometimes would get raised eyebrows elsewhere. I think that’s why we’re always keen to return. And I also think that atmosphere has actually helped the shows we’ve brought there. The shows we’ve brought to you have grown. I think we’ve found more about what they’re about by being in that atmosphere.

PB: Yeah, I remember with Spirit (at right, from Out There 2001), that was really a turning point for the work. It seemed to hit its stride when we were at the Southern Theater for that week and each show just got better and better.

LS: That’s exactly right. There’s a relationship there. I’m sort of struggling to talk about it. It’s on a kind of “ feeling” level. It sounds weird, but it’s sort of about being taken seriously; which sounds like we want to be revered or respected, but we don’t. We don’t take ourselves seriously, and we encourage people NOT to take us seriously, but at the same time, it’s not dismissed. In Minneapolis, the way we approach work is not seen as slightly second class–a second-class citizen in the arts world because we devise or improvise. When we come to the city there’s a real excitement and a real interest in seeing, not just the end product, but the development that goes toward that. The journey, and the starting points and the gloop–the kind of primeval gloop–of our shows emerge. And Animo is very much a primeval–if any show is a primeval gloop, it’s Animo.

PB: I recently read an article by a theater artist who defined the difference between “ performance art,” which is a much contested term–in the UK it’s referred to more as “ live art”–and theater. Performance is work that isn’t repeated over and over in an attempt to duplicate the same thing on stage night after night, if not year after year. In some ways you could define Animo as really more in the performance realm than the theater realm. My associated question is: do you think that the 21st century and younger audiences are more attuned to a kind of theater that isn’t as script-dependent–isn’t as much about chiseling over months, if not years, this finely honed script that is then performed over and over in this particular kind of way? How do you see your work being in tune with what’s happening culturally right now compared to the more “literary” theater world?

LS: That’s an interesting definition between performance art, or live art, and theater. By that definition I would say there’s a lot of companies striving to occupy the space between performance and theater. I think we’re definitely one of those companies, because there is a kind of performance art element to the work, and most definitely, obviously with Animo or even with the scripted stuff, a sense that it’s happening tonight, and tonight should be unique.

As theater gets squeezed, and it keeps getting squeezed, it has to look to what it does best, and to look to what it is in its most fundamental form. In its most fundamental form, it’s a room with a lot of people in it, and some people are watching other people do something. What’s unique about that is that the people who are doing the thing that people are watching, are there–they’re live human beings, and they’re awake, and they’re conscious. So the communication, as opposed to television or film, is two-way. It goes from the stage to the audience, of course, but it goes from the audience to the stage. It’s an event, and it’s an event that is shaped by the negotiation between the people on stage and the people in the audience. Now, you either let that negotiation in, or you deny it. We always aim to, at the very least, let it in. So in something like Shockheaded Peter or The Hanging Man, it’s allowed in, and it can affect what’s happening. With something like Animo, that’s the whole show. The content emerges from that negotiation. It’s a challenge, but of course it should be. Otherwise, why bother? Economically, theater is a very inefficient way to present art because the number of people that can see it in a quality way is very small.

“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.”

PB: Last question: I know, from working with theater artists, when the budget is enormous, the content is wide open, and there are no limitations whatsoever, it can be overwhelming. Sometimes when there are real restrictions placed on things–you have to create a five-minute work on a table and a chair or something–suddenly the creative juices start sparking. Is that the case with Animo?

LS: Absolutely. Limitations release you. When you have the possibility of working on a bigger and bigger and bigger scale with bigger and bigger and bigger budgets, why put yourself in the position of being embarrassed on stage acting like an idiot with a load of stuff that you’ve found and a few bits of foam rubber and stuff? The trick is: how do you keep creating work that as interesting to you, and hopefully, as interesting to the audience as the very first work that you created? It’s the same thing for a rock band. How do the Rolling Stones make an album as interesting as the first one they made? Unfortunately, the answer we’ve found is that you have to make yourself as vulnerable as you were when you first started out. You have to make yourself as innocent, as nave–

PB: –as unsuccessful–

LS: Yeah! You know when you’re 19 and you have success and failure, and you make some huge mistakes, but somehow there’s something brilliant and vital about what you do. It’s possible to learn to avoid the mistakes, but somehow that can start to drain the very lifeblood out of the work. You can also learn to avoid pain and the struggle.

PB: The human tendency, in all endeavors, seems to be to get more secure and to feel less vulnerable and to be less scared. So you’ve created a situation where you’re NOT in that secure place.

LS: And I don’t like it. God, I wish it were possible to do it–

PB: –in an easier way–

LS: –and still produce vital, electrifying work, but it doesn’t seem to happen that way. You face a choice as an artist. Are going to go back into the fire and cook yourself a little bit more, or are you just going to sit by the fire and keep yourself warm?

Buy tickets to Animo here. (Note: The April 21 performance at 2 pm is a special version of Animo for families)