Backstage Haiku: Vijay Iyer
Musicians rehearse.
Excited for live music,
Mike mixes Vijay
Bill T. Jones, Gay Marriage and the Public Imagination
Bill T. Jones Photo: Cameron Wittig, Walker Art Center
In April 2011, Bill T. Jones made a video for the Human Rights Campaign’s New Yorkers for Marriage Equality Initiative. The HRC’s campaign found success in New York, with same-sex marriage approved there in June and ratified in July. Gay marriage currently finds itself in a peculiar position in Minnesota, with a proposed constitutional amendment banning it before voters this November. The provision (explained excellently by Minnesota Public Radio in this recent primer piece) will ask Minnesotans whether they want to vote to alter the state constitution to define marriage as “between one man, one woman.” But “even if voters don’t approve the constitutional amendment,” writes MPR’s Paul Tosto, “Minnesota’s legal ban on same-sex marriage doesn’t go away. Gay marriage will still be illegal here.” Thus the ballot measure seems particularly ugly for the empty gesture of its ideology; disconnected from any concrete course of action, the Republican-sponsored bill diverts funds and attention towards an unnecessary polling of the opinions of the state’s voters. How curious in this age of pressing issues that the state Republicans find the time for such gestures, hoping to lock a door that has already been slammed shut.
For his Human Rights Campaign video, Bill T. Jones said, “We all agree that marriage is a fundamental human right, and in our country—in our society—there are no second class citizens.” His language echoes the 1967 Supreme Court ruling of Loving v. Virginia, which overturned the federal ban on interracial marriage: “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.” Same-sex legislation often cites the precedent set by Loving v. Virginia, a case that seems to have particular relevance for aspects of Jones’ life. The public space Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane claimed for their same-sex interracial partnership, both onstage and off, seems possible in part because of Mildred and Richard Loving’s fight for recognition of their interracial marriage during the Civil Rights era. Mildred Loving likely would’ve understood Jones’ grief when he lost Arnie Zane during the first major onslaught of AIDS; she lost her husband, just as randomly, to a drunk driver.
“Part of Bill T. Jones’ advocacy has been the public nature of his relationships over the years,” say Philip Bither, the Walker’s senior curator for Performing Arts. Among Jones’ many accomplishments is the fearless transparency with which he has lived his life, “as openly, proudly gay in a way few in the highest levels of American performing arts world had been before him,” Bither adds. This public life is partly chronicled in his latest piece Story/Time, which he performs this week.
Indeed, Jones’ personal life sheds some light on the power of same-sex marriage as an issue: relationships with longevity and stability are understood as credible in the public imagination and should be recognized as such. In a January 2012 Out magazine feature about Jones and his partner of 20 years, Bjorn Amelan, Jones said, “If we get married, it’s for the legal reasons. I don’t feel a need for it emotionally. I love him with all of my heart. Marriage is a public acknowledgment. And doing this [article] is more a part of that. So, in a way, in this article, I guess we’re saying, ‘I do thee wed — in the public imagination.’”
As a gay man, I will be voting against the marriage amendment in November. What is less clear to me is the other ways I should engage with the public imagination. I have many friends who say that confining relationships in ways that the state might recognize prevents queer people from defining love on their own terms, with its various arrangements and genders that are not recognized by the state. At the center of the gay marriage debate in Minnesota is opposing views on the family, and most sacredly, fierce debate around the future of children. The conservative organization Minnesotans for Marriage has stated, “Protecting the interests of children is the primary reason that government regulates and licenses marriage in the first instance… [C]hildren do best when raised by their mother and father.” On the other side of the debate is Minnesotans United for All Families, which has stated, “We believe marriage and family are about love and commitment, working together, bettering the community, raising children, and growing old together. We believe in a Minnesota that values and supports strong families and creates a welcoming environment for all Minnesota families to thrive.”
It is disheartening the ways that homosexuals are construed as villains time and again in the lives of children. I think about Sylvia Rivera, Latina trans activist, who died 10 years ago this Sunday, February 19. According to writer Benjamin Shepard, “Sylvia Rivera is credited with throwing the first brick during the Stonewall Riots” in 1969, and she founded, along with her life partner and Andy Warhol model Marsha P. Johnson, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in 1970, which created a homeless shelter for trans street youth: “children” who are rarely mentioned in the ongoing rhetoric about family and child. I am haunted by the image of Marsha P. Johnson’s body floating in the Hudson River (the suspicious circumstances surrounding her death 20 years ago were never investigated by the New York Police Department) and by the challenges people like her will continue to face, even when gay marriage is possible.
If Minnesotans defeat the marriage amendment this November, we will only have defeated a prohibition. Afterwards, we will still need to decide how hard we want to fight to make gay marriage a possibility. And we will need to consider the additional ways we can confront society’s entrenched homophobia and racism, issues that Bill T. Jones has fearlessly tackled throughout his life’s work.
Bunny-Hopping on Ice with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
The Art Shanty Projects — the Minnesota ritual that for eight winters has had artists reimagining ice-fishing shacks as tiny community art centers — is, for me, one of the most amazing features of the creative landscape here. Instead of merely enduring Minnesota’s inarguably harsh winters, participating ASP artists embrace it through wildly creative interventions on ice. Given its uniqueness — which attracted the attention of NPR yesterday — it’s no surprise that we bring artists out to Medicine Lake whenever we can. Here’s one example: When Belgian dancer/choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker was in town for the Walker’s 2008 performance of FASE: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, she found herself out on the ice with assistant Performing Arts curator Michèle Steinwald and the dance company’s director, Kees Eijrond. Why they were there, in Steinwald’s words: “so we could participate in trying to break the world record for the longest bunny hop on a frozen lake (formerly held by Minnesota before Wisconsin took it away). That is why Anne is making bunny ears with her hands. We were so cold!”
The 2012 edition of the Art Shanty Projects closes February 5.
Presenting History – A SpeakEasy for Rabih Mroué
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SpeakEasy: An informal audience discussion following Saturday evening performances. Throughout the Out There Series, conversations will be facilitated by members of SuperGroup paired with with Walker Art Center Tour Guides. This blog incorporates participants’ comments and questions, offering an opportunity to continue the discussion in an online forum.
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BREATH.
On a central television, a face fades in and out, barely discernible, barely there.
Neither absent nor present.
Introduce the narrator, a new face, clear on the screen.
To our upper right, we see his hands and the notebooks that cover his desk.
To our upper left, another pair of hands follow the story, creating a visual map of data.
The narrator begins sharing newspaper clippings of disappearances, but this weighty subject soon turns to humor and a story starts to unfold. The initial facts and visuals seem straightforward, but as the contradictory accounts mount, the screen becomes filled with overlapping lists, names, connections, financial reports, and dates. From a clear timeline, our reference points devolve into a mystery, telling a history to be deciphered, sorted, reinterpreted, and never fully known.
“Are you my friend Horatio?”
- Heiner Mueller, The Hamletmachine
As he lays dying, Hamlet asks Horatio to tell his story. But what story could he or would he tell? Lost to him are so many musings and monologues, personal confessions, motivations, and internal struggles. The historian is left to create order out of remnants – to establish a beginning, follow a progression, and explain the resolution. What Mroué reveals is the messiness of lived history, the scattered and unfinished nature of human experiences, and the absurdity that can occur when this confusion bumps up against official attempts at explanation.
In Looking for a Missing Employee, Mroué highlights the mediated nature of the consumption of history. Our charismatic narrator tells us of his work following newspaper articles; he has compiled the information for us, and kindly serves as our translator. Never looking directly into his eyes, but at his face on a screen, the gap between the audience and the person creating this story is brought to the fore. Questions arise – why these newspapers and not others, what is or is not translated, where is the line between occurrence and artistic fabrication? This is a theatre piece based on “true” events, yet throughout the evening, the veracity of the documentation presented is called into question. Was it foolish to place faith in these newspapers, to believe our historian-narrator?
As Mroué emphasized in an interview with Walker Senior Performing Arts Curator Philip Bither, he is “choosing and…editing all this material.” He states that “to edit – to cut and remove, to keep, or to use my voice in this way and not in the other way – all of this makes this pretension for being neutral impossible.” And yet as one audience member noted, there is perhaps a desire to empathize, to place trust in our narrator. “Truth” may be relative, a creation by accepted authorities drawing on established forms of evidence, yet the knowledge of the contingency of truth does not entirely efface the desire to seek the sense of stability or security that accompanies a resolved narrative. Mroué departs, yet his face lingers on the screen. Eventually, we clap, layering a clean ending onto an open-ended story.
This blog, too, falls prey to this tendency to organize disorder. The free associations, tangents, digressions, ponderous pauses, inconclusive phrasing, self-assessments, restatements, and verbal energy of animated discussions are herein ordered, themes are established, and paragraphs are formed. Assumptions of what a reader may want are intertwined with the author’s own interests, inclinations, and imperfect memories. What other form might the record of such a conversation take? What form would be most accurate? What form would be most useful?
“He cries and laughs, not from sadness or joy, like a lover who draws a line in air and then erases it”
– Al Akhtal Assaghir, quoted in Looking for a Missing Employee
Mroué differentiates art and activism, bringing forth questions of self-identification and the relative safety involved in deeming oneself artist, intellectual, or activist. While the reflective nature of art is distinct from active revolution, there are fluid borders between these roles and the selection of subject matter and the posing of questions bear a relationship to the political environment into which art is introduced. During the discussion that followed his afternoon presentation The Pixelated Revolution, Mroué spoke of being drawn to art that provokes, that shares questions rather than answers, that presents ideas that lead to conversations. This theme seems fitting for the Out There Series, for art that perhaps does not fit neatly into disciplines, art that perturbs, pushes boundaries, and ignites questioning that extends beyond an evening-length performance.
MORE:
SuperGroup – Erin Search-Wells’ opening night blog.
Walker Performing Arts – Jesse Leaneagh’s blog about Mroue’s work.
Pages Magazine – review of Looking for a Missing Employee.
In Focus - interview with Mroué.
FURTHER AFIELD – VISUALLY MAPPING HISTORY:
Mémoires by Guy Debord & Asger Jorn - essays on the book via wordpress and Vector.
Cataloguing performance: How to catch lightning in a bottle
Performance is by nature fleeting. It’s also an inherently interactive thing, both experiential and situational. The congeniality of the venue and its relation to the set design, the mood of the performers, the vibe and make-up of the audience, even the weather outside that day – all are variables which affect the tenor and character of a given show, rendering each iteration of a performance work as unique and ephemeral as a proverbial snowflake.
If you’re a museum which “collects” performing arts, where does this leave you?
One can capture something enduring, and representative about a performed work. There are the surrounding accoutrements, of course: set pieces and design elements, costumes, rehearsal and staging notes, musical scores, installation instructions, marketing and promotional materials, programs and playbills. And then you have documentary records: production photographs, video, and sometimes even extensive, interactive digital archives juxtaposing several re-creations of a given “piece” or a single artist’s body of work, evolving over time.
Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing Antic Meet (1958), with costumes and décor by Robert Rauschenberg Courtesy Cunningham Dance Foundation
In addition to these, there are critical and audience responses to the work – the public discourse performance generates, which makes its own, auxiliary and enduring cultural contribution. Those responses include the criticism published by traditional media outlets (e.g. magazines, newspapers, online arts magazines, and alt-weeklies), but also less formal but increasingly influential platforms – the sort of audience response one finds shared on blogs or among “friends” and “followers” in social media circles.
Up until now, it’s been that larger conversation about the transient experience that has given a performance work its own brand of cultural immortality, providing both context for and narrative about that shared moment in time which may linger long past a show’s run time. Those stories we tell each other about performed works, whatever newfangled media we use to do so, are how we’ve stored those passing experiences.
Memory and shared conversation – those have really been the tried and true ways to catch that lightning in a bottle.
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When we think about institutional collections, the very language of “acquisition” centers on the object – things you can tag, box up, and keep in storage until such time as they’re brought out and installed for display, good as new and virtually unchanged. But in the last 50 years, museums the world over have broadened their collections to include performance, numbering works by the likes of Tino Seghal, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Marina Abramovic, or Eiko & Koma among their acquisitions.
Eiko & Koma, "Studies for Naked ", 2010 Photo: Anna Lee Campbell. "Naked" is a Walker Art Center commission and was developed in part during a creative residency at the Park Avenue Armory in New York during the summer and fall of 2010.
Unlike the straightforward, transactional nature of object acquisition, when a museum commissions a performance work from an artist, “it’s more like seed money, an investment in an artist’s career; in exchange they promise that they’ll use those funds to make something” which the institution, upon the work’s completion, has an enduring stake in, says Michele Steinwald, assistant curator for performing arts at the Walker Art Center.
So, how might an institution like Walker Art Center catalogue and archive its performing arts acquisitions? What does it even mean to “catalogue performance”? What sort of information do you gather, how do you frame it, and in what format do you keep it? Who’s going to use it and for what purpose? Where does re-creation of performance fit into the discussion? To what extent is the artist brought in to determine the archive’s constituent or narrative elements? What sorts of tools and software might be helpful in creating such a thing?
For the institution grappling with these questions, it really boils down to a simple but thorny issue: If you’re in the business of acquiring performance work what, exactly, is being collected? What do you keep as its token, and to what end?
This week, the Walker is hosting a conference tackling just these questions: the center has invited twenty-some people in the field who are immediately invested in their resolution – archivists, curators, presenters, art historians – to spend the day ginning up some ideas together, both practical and philosophical, that might offer some new ways to think about “cataloguing” performance and other multidisciplinary, ephemeral works. Robin Dowden, Director of Mew Media Initiatives at the Walker and one of the organizers of the conference, says, “We really don’t know what all this means yet. We’re hoping to learn from the experts in the room and from the insights that emerge from their conversations in tomorrow’s workshop.”
Big Dance Theater, "Supernatural Wife", commissioned by the Walker Art Center. Photo by Mike Van Sleen
Sarah Schultz, from the Walker’s Education and Community Programs department, observes, “It comes down to a question of how to document and hold on to an inherently temporal event; it’s the difference between a collection of facts about a performance and the experience itself. You can’t collect an experience, but maybe with multiple sources and perspectives on it, you can document a performance thoroughly enough to offer a kind of approximation after the fact.”
The topic of “cataloguing performance” is especially timely for the Walker, given this year’s Merce Cunningham acquisition and opening of the related exhibition (a vast collection of sets, props, costumes, and selected documentation of the visionary choreographer, who was known for his collaborations with numerous leading visual and musical artists and designers of the past 60 years). In addition, as part of the Getty’s Online Scholarly Catalogue project, with a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, the Walker is working to develop and manage replicable catalogue software for its performing arts collection within CollectionSpace. The hope is that the observations and insights from the gathered, shared expertise offered by those participating in this week’s conference might help inform the museum’s efforts in those endeavors as well.
Check back here over the next few days — I’ll be reporting from the workshop Friday to share some of the big themes and nuts-and-bolts ideas alike that come out of the group’s sessions throughout the day. Then afterward, I’ll do my best to synthesize what I’ve learned from them, and distill any big-picture themes one could take away from the day’s confab.
Art’s a slippery thing — increasingly interdisciplinary and collaborative, rich with experience-based cross-pollinations. The issues of cataloguing performance and other ephemeral art aren’t going away any time soon. And these questions aren’t just pertinent for museum professionals. With the move to digitize museum collections and archives, to make them universally accessible, what was once the privileged and insular domain of specialists, curators, and presenters is becoming ever more democratic. Soon enough, we’ll all have access to much of the information in these records. So, the priorities and boundary lines set by institutions about, say, performance — the definitions of terms and the narratives that will give museums a way to classify performing arts, as their shared institutional taxonomy toolkits are developed — will surely become the intellectual seeds that grow to shape the way we think and talk about such work in the larger cultural conversation, too.
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Related link: For a thoughtful perspective on the issue, and a window into the day-to-day practice and decision-making involved in such cataloguing work, read Brooke Kellaway’s recent interview on the Walker Blogs with Coventry University professor Sarah Whatley, about the development of the digital dance archive Siobhan Davies Replay.
Susannah Schouweiler serves as editor for the weekly updated arts writing and criticism published on mnartists.org, as well as the site’s twice-monthly e-mag access+ENGAGE. She has also written for a number of outlets, including Ruminator magazine, MinnPost.com, City Pages, The Rake, Minneapolis Observer, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts blog.
Walker Performing Arts gets props from METRO, Dark Dark Dark
Why, thank you! The Walker’s Performing Arts department — which programs everything from contemporary dance and theater to concerts like Rock the Garden and Summer Music & Movies — makes METRO Magazine’s 2011 METRO 100, a list of “the people, places and things that appear on this list enrich our community in a unique way.”
Here’s the listing, which appears at number two in the magazine’s October issue:
2. Walker Art Center’s dance programming
Lucy Guerin’s Structure and Sadness, Morgan Thorson and Alan Sparhawk’s Making Music Series collaboration and Despair Be Damned, a showcase of music and dance from the Democratic Republic of Congo, are just three recent reasons we like the Walker Art Center’s dance programming—which now rivals the breadth of its already-diverse visual-arts collection. The recent (and gigantic) Merce Cunningham Dance Company visual-arts acquisition coupled with the company’s farewell performance … sees the Walker pushing the envelope even further. walkerart.org
Minnesota’s Dark Dark Dark has high praise for the Walker as well. The chamber-folk sextet, which was commissioned to create a live score for Fritz Lang’s Spies at Summer Music & Movies last summer, included the center in its list of “All-Time Top Five Favorite Museums To Visit While Touring The World” in the Dallas Observer. At number five, the group says the Walker “was on the forefront of ‘contemporary art center re-designs.’ It looks great, and has amazing performance programming. A great collection, too, as well as an exciting layout that’s fun to navigate.” Dark Dark Dark’s favorite museum: MASSMoCA.
Performing Arts season fires up with a free preview this Thursday
Congolese singers on customized motorcycles playing invented instruments. An all-nude examination of feminism and gender. A spoken word/hip-hop artist takes on environmental justice. How do these three performances — all coming up at the Walker — reflect global trends and ideas in new performance? Find out this Thursday night at 7pm as Senior Performing Arts curator Philip Bither shares his stories and insights, why he chooses these unique performances from around the world, how they get discovered on his travels, and what makes each of the performances tick — this is your chance to dive in.
As multimedia meets storytelling gathering you will hear from the artists directly via video, some which they recorded on their laptops – at 3am from Paris! As a kind of primer for contemporary performing arts, it opens a window into the minds of some amazing artists, as well as global trends and diversity of these new performance works.
Stick around after the presentation and join the entire performing arts team – Philip, Julie, Doug, Michèle, and Emily for an onstage toast to a bold new season. Check out the McGuire Theater’s backstage areas, including the green room where artists like to leave their signatures on the wall, and migrate up to the Balcony Bar. We’ll be there available for chatting, question-answering, and sharing behind-the-scenes tales. We can even help you pick which performances you should see, and where you should eat before or after the show. What can we say? We are foodies in addition to loving performance. Come introduce yourself – we’ll be wearing our Walker I.D. lanyards.
I hope you will be able to visit us again this year to enjoy some of the outstanding performance we have lined up for this season!
For the entire calendar of events, click here.
I look forward to seeing you here on September 15!
Read more about the event here >>
A Target Free Thursday night event
Puppets Instead of Peas
It’s raining puppets. Hallelujah.
Hand puppets, shadow puppets, talking heads, rod-puppets, masks worn on the back of the head, real sardines, snowsuits that run, objects that come to life. The depth and breadth of materials that can be animated have been brought to life as part of the Walker’s Adventures in New Puppetry Series. And there is still more to come . . .
I was delighted to gobble up short puppet plays featuring mostly small-scale puppets at Open Eye Figure Theater last weekend for the Toy Theater Festival. So. Delicious.
The fare this evening was an entire play, George Buchner’s Woyzeck, reconfigured in South Africa as Woyzeck on the Highveld presented as a collaboration between Handspring Puppet Company and visual artist William Kentridge. And it is a visual and poetic feast.
A cast of five puppeteers moved gorgeous wooden puppets with grace and steady focus that managed to draw my eye without stopping me from engaging with the story told by the figures they operated. The puppets were sometimes so life-like they almost appeared to blink, in one scene a puppet breathed as it slept. The subtle, delicate moves of the puppets were matched by an appropriately melodramatic style of vocal delivery that kept me from melting in the beauty so much that I stopped thinking.
The world that the puppets inhabit in this production is equally absurd and crazy-making as the one Buchner envisioned in 1836, but it is not exactly same.
Woyzeck v.s. Woyzeck
It’s not necessary to know Buchner’s original work in order to digest this production. And because there were many additions, I was still left to wonder if the action would proceed in the way I expected, so if you do know the text, you still haven’t seen it all.
But here’s a bit-size bit of history about the play, just for fun:
Buchner was a talented and very young German playwright. He was only 25 when he died and at that time the script for Woyzeck was in fragments; it has been suggested that he intended to finish the play with a third act including a trial.
Though Buchner lived and died before existential writers like Albert Camus put pen to paper, the world Buchner invented has veins of similar absurdity. Like Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill over and over, in the play, Woyzeck must eat a plate of green peas day after day after day. Buchner wanted to show how external forces act on the working-class protagonist to drive him insane.
Woyzeck at the Walker
Handspring and Kentridge have made changes to the script and moved the story to 1992 in South Africa. Words and relationships take on a different currency in the final year Apartheid was officially enforced. In this version, Woyzeck is a black servant to a white captain who still calls him ‘immoral’ though Woyzeck has done nothing wrong. His belongings include his South African ID card, Maria’s lover is now a miner.
The peas are mentioned, but are not a key part of Handspring’s production. Instead, Woyzeck’s madness is illustrated by Kentridge’s captivating, hand-drawn, shadowy animations along with sound effects that play as he is ‘studied’ and driven mad by a white doctor.
In Buchner’s Woyzeck, the characters visit a circus, in Handspring’s, a carnival barker steps out of his role as puppeteer to speak directly to the audience, reminding us of our spectatorship. Circus animals like horses and monkeys are replaced by an interlude with a stunning rhinoceros puppet who, like Handspring’s Woyzeck, appears to feel patronized by the tasks it must perform.
Untitled (Rhino) by William Kentridge
I am curious about reactions to the production. How do spectators feel about the only prominent female character Maria and her role? How does the end affect people? Why puppets? Do they help communicate Woyzeck’s alienation? Does watching puppets help the audience react to the story intellectually rather than react emotionally? Like Bucher’s original, the Handspring adaptation tells a tragic tale. How have stories of resistance and transformation from the same period in South Africa been theatricalized?
Your thoughts, please. . .
Mapping out Ralph Lemon’s new performance project
How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? continues a relationship between Ralph Lemon and the Walker that dates back more than 15 years. In 1995, Lemon dissolved his successful dance company, abandoning the familiarity of New York and his own creative process to embark on open-ended research that has taken him around the globe. Since then, he has evolved into a kind of modern-day choreographic contemplative, merging text, media, sound, and visual art with dance. The Walker supported Lemon’s Geography Trilogy, a 10-year project that merged research and performance in exploring race, history, and memory, first in Africa (Geography, 1997); then Asia, tracing the Buddha’s migration through India, Indonesia, China, and Japan (Tree, 2000); and finally the southern United States (Come home Charley Patton, 2004).
Lemon embarks on a new stage of his multifaceted career with How Can You Stay…?, another Walker commission and the central element in the diagram pictured below, which he made during his 2009 summer residency at the Walker. As a kind of “mental map,” it shows Lemon playing with the idea of where this piece fits into his creative life: “It’s trying to give structure to what was going on in my brain, what was generating this new work,” he says. The artist offers further thoughts in the annotations below the sketch.
Ralph Lemon "Mindmap" Courtesy the artist ©2008–2009 Ralph Lemon
How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?
This four-part multimedia performance includes original short films featuring Walter Carter, as well as passages for Lemon’s stunningly powerful ensemble of six African American and African performers, all but one of whom appeared in Come home Charley Patton. In a recent interview, Lemon called it “an attempt to share as much as I can about a very profound experience for me, an idea of love and loss and perhaps the offer of a component of grace. I’m asking, in a very severe way, where does this idea of the reality or the truth of something really engage the artificial? I’m trying to break down what I know of theater and dance, but to do it within those containers.”
At the same time, Lemon creates an undeniably intense, even visceral experience for the audience with a work that he views as a personal landmark. “It’s not dancing, not choreography,” he says. “At some point the audience stops seeing the form of it, or what they project they should be seeing, and they start to witness something else, which becomes very individual. The facade of the work is brutality, but the core is purifying.”
Mr. Walter Carter
A lifelong—and purportedly the oldest—resident of Little Yazoo, Mississippi, Walter Carter was born in 1907 and spent his working life as a sharecropper, carpenter, and gardener. Lemon developed a creative relationship with him and his wife, Edna, after they met in 2002.
Besides being part of the inspiration for How Can You Stay…? and other works, Carter was the focus of a host of mixedmedia elements in (the efflorescence of ) Walter, an installation presented at the Walker in 2006. (Read more about Walter and Little Yazoo in a blog post by Walker photographer Cameron Wittig, who worked in Mississippi with Lemon on How Can You Stay…?.)
Walter/Edna film
Lemon’s work with Carter in Mississippi often included shooting video footage of him and his wife, Edna. The pair appear in the film that opens How Can You Stay…?, a backdrop to Lemon’s narration about, as he says, “the themes and preoccupations of the last five years and how they may, or may not, be reflected in the performance.”
In some passages, Walter and Edna “remake” passages from two landmark art films in which the protagonist undertakes a daunting mission in outer space: Andrei Tarkovsky’s poetic masterpiece Solaris and Jean-Luc Godard’s irreverent Alphaville.
Drunk Dances
After attempting to spark in his performers “extremes of emotionality” during the development of How Can You Stay…?, Lemon devised an exercise with them involving intentional, ritualized inebriation. He called the experience “interesting … I wasn’t sure how useful it was afterward. Still, it was a nice mark in breaking down the idea of what we know physically and what I know compositionally, as a director and choreographer.”
Some of the choreography in How Can You Stay…?, he notes, is “like being drunk but it’s generated by will, with my directorial pushing, to go beyond what my performers would comfortably do. It’s the experience of being out of control, consciously.”
Lyon Opera Ballet/Rescuing the Princess
The French ballet company noted for its experimental repertoire commissioned Rescuing the Princess from Lemon in 2009, during the development of How Can You Stay…?. Both works include similar “recycled” or retooled elements, including passages inspired by the “Drunk Dances” experiment.
My Memorial
Refers to a single performance by Lemon and Okwui Okpokwasili in 2008. How Can You Stay…? includes “the residue” from that duet, Lemon says, whose origins are only “hinted at.”
Come home Charley Patton(remember?)
Lemon’s research on lynching sites for Come home Charley Patton took him to rural Mississippi, where he met Walter Carter. The artist notes that How Can You Stay…? is a continuation of the final moments of this 2004 work, whose themes based around memory—its simultaneous power and unreliability—also carry over.
Sliver
A reference to a large-scale light installation derived from the mise-en-scène for the Lyon Opera Ballet work. Now titled Meditation, it’s an epilogue to How Can You Stay…?, distilling the motions of that work through a mesmerizing play of projected light and shadow that transforms the McGuire Theater into a gallery.
Future Stuff
“Going forward, I’m looking at the meaning of being an artist, and what might be my place in that.”
Walker Jazz Radio
Open Field radio photo by Scott Stulen
As mentioned in this blog, Open Field radio is in full bloom, and I’m happy to report that our first curated playlist for Jazz is ready for any greedy ears (like mine) that have been eagerly awaiting. Our first playlist is chosen by Jeremy Walker: Jazz musican, composer and writer (whose articles will soon be featured on mnartists.org).
Here’s the playlist:
“Portrait Of Louis Armstrong”/Duke Ellington, from New Orleans Suite 3:05
“Sunset and the Mocking Bird”/Duke Ellington from the Ellington Suites 3:48
“Remember”/Hank Mobley from Soul Station 5:42
“Something In B Flat”/Benny Golson from Benny Golson’s New York Scene 6:05
“Moanin’ Low”/Billie Holiday from the Quintessential Billie Holiday Volume IV 3:06
“Where Is The Sun?”/Billie Holiday from the Quintessential Billie Holiday Volume IV 2:48
“O Solitude”/Branford Marsalis Quartet, from Braggtown 7:48
“Jelly Roll”/Charles Mingus, from Mingus Ah Um 4:02
“Chi-Chi”/Charlie Parker, from Now’s The Time 2:45
“Confirmation”/Charlie Parker, from Now’s The Time 2:58
“Hi-Fly”/Jaki Byard, from Hi-Fly Jazz 3:58
“Don’t Get Scared”/Kurt Elling, from Live In Chicago 3:39
“Black and Blue”/Louis Armstrong, from Satch Plays Fats: The Music Of Fats Waller 4:39
“Thank You Billy Higgins”/Matt Wilson, from Humidity 6:15
“Congeniality”/Ornette Coleman, from the Shape Of Jazz To Come 6:48
“Two Bass Hit”/Sonny Clark Trio, from Sonny Clark Trio (The Rudy Van Gelder Edition) 3:45
“Darn That Dream (Take 1)”/Thelonious Monk, from Monk Alone: The Complete Columbia Solo Studio Recordings of Thelonious Monk- 1962-1968 3:44
“First Time”/Wynton Marsalis, from He and She 4:47
”Bye-Ya”/Thelonious Monk, from Monk’s Dream 6:03
“I’m An Old Cowhand”/Sonny Rollins, from Way Out West 5:42
So go check out a free radio and give these tracks a listen! And let us know what you think, i.e. about the songs, about Jazz on the Open Field radio, and also any requests for a future playlist. We’ll be changing this playlist in two weeks, so stay tuned for the next one. And if you’re playing for keeps, all these tracks can be found on Itunes, except for the Jaki Byard track, which can be found on Emusic. Also, stay listening after the Jazz playlist to hear Magic Chairs by Efterklang. Efterklang will be performing in the McGuire Theater Saturday September 11 at 8 pm, to kick off our Performing Arts season, with a party in the McGuire beforehand at 7 pm, and Magic Chairs is their newest album.
ENJOY!
Jeremy Walker is a pianist and composer with a commitment to jazz as a central part American culture. In 2003 he founded Brilliant Corners, an alcohol-free establishment, designed to attract all ages and showcase emerging talent. Since the club’s closing, Walker has gone on to found Jazz is NOW! and the NOWnet, a flexibly sized ensemble dedicated to performing original works. He serves as leader of the NOWnet and the Executive Artistic Director of Jazz is NOW. He has served as the music director for collaborative music and dance projects with Zenon Dance Company in 2005 and TU Dance in 2010. Walker created the ongoing late-night jazz performance series at the Dakota Jazz Club and Restaurant. Walker’s playing and composing have been praised by such notables as Wynton Marsalis, Matt Wilson, Anthony Cox, Ron Miles, Vincent Gardner, and Ted Nash. He splits time between New York and Minneapolis.