Performing Arts

Martin Dosh, Andrew Bird and Jeremy Ylvisaker at the Wilco Loft in Chicago. Photographs by and courtesy of Jason Tobias.

From NYTimes online article “Cheap Thrills”

“Writing songs and performing live have with time become almost the same process for me. The improvisation and conversation with the audience from show to show keep the songs fluid and alive. On the other hand, making a record is like a show that gets drawn out over a year or more, but with no cathartic resolution. When I'm in the studio things can quickly unravel and that's not surprising. The audience has disappeared and you are given the attractive, but dangerous option to control everything. This is why I decided to start in Nashville with the basics - voice and guitar - because it's easy to lose your rudder in overdub realm. Knowing that the mostly unadorned Nashville songs sound great frees me up to indulge myself a bit. Sometimes you make the song better; more often than not things can get over-wrought.” - Andrew Bird
Click here to read more.

BOMB Magazine has posted a web-preview of Meg Stuart and Catharine Sullivan’s conversation which will be printed in full in their Summer ‘08 edition. I can’t wait to read it in its entirety - such a smart pairing of artists investigating cross-disciplinary art practices.

I love when Meg says “What about bodies in crisis? Bodies that are not in control? What about complex physical and emotional states? Is it possible to give these irrational bodies a platform to address contemporary issues while embracing a theatrical context?” It was clear that she was investigating these questions in her brown shag-carpet fantasy world of Forgeries, Love, and Other Matters (possibly my favorite show from the 05-06 season)

If you’re having a hard time remembering Forgeries, check out the Performing Arts department’s submission to the annual pumpkin carving contest.

Excerpt from Catherine Sullivan on Art21

Japanther had a show last night at Europa, a rock venue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn - a heavily Polish neighborhood reminiscent of Minneapolis’ Northeast (home to the ultimate Nye’s Polonaise). I’ve seen Japanther several times before, once at the Walker as they performed in Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty, a collaboration with Dan Graham and Tony Oursler. The performance was an interpretation of the cult-classic 1968 film Wild in the Streets, starring the late-great Shelley Winters. The puppet/rock show/installation/video piece was visually stunning, and a big to-do as Walker re-configured the Cinema to fit the needs of the Out There 18 performance.

Maybe it was the age-centric material I’ve previously seen them in, but last night all I could think was “Don’t Trust Anyone Under Twenty.” I stood in the back, occasionally sitting down (my back was hurting), I wore a bike helmet on my ride over, and I snickered to myself that the kids are still body-surfing. Long story short: I felt old and tired. And sadly, Japanther’s set kinda did too. This was the same show they’ve been playing for years. Loop a line from a vintage stoner-flick and mouth the words, sing distorted vocals into pay-phones receivers, have technical problems and stop mid-song. I’m all for a rough-and-tumble, but if Cat Power learned to pull herself together for a live show and I think it’s high time these guys do the same. It doesn’t take long for quirky to morph into gimicky.

I don’t want to be a total hater, though. There were shimmering moments that did remind me of the importance of releasing adult inhibitions. They opened the set by drumming along to Bel Biv Devoe’s Poison. The slam-dancers wearing gorilla and wrestling masks were going CRAZY. And the high-schooler yelling along to every word lost his mind, like, at least three times. All those crazy kids seemed like they were having a good time, even though it was past midnight on a school night. Inspired, I went helmet-less on the ride home - wild in the streets.

To launch 2008’s National Dance Week, an email to many in Minnesota’s dance community went out to invite all members to participate in a group photo shoot. The turn out was great! We luckily had a beautiful sunshine-filled afternoon as 24 people made it out to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

First annual Twin Cities National Dance Week photo includes:
Patrick Scully (artist), Judith Brin Ingber (dancer), Alanna Morris (dancer), Sarah LaRose-Holland (dancer), Bryan Gerber (dancer, teacher, choreographer), Chris Holman (dance enthusiast), Laurie Van Wieren (dance maker), Sher Demeter (dancer, acupuncturist), Paula Mann (choreographer), Matthew S. Smith (composer), Karen Sherman (dance artist), Sarah Petersen (artist), Chris Schlichting (dance artist), Morgan Thorson (choreographer), April Sellers (choreographer), John Munger (choreographer, teacher, researcher), Lisa Conlin (choreographer, dancer), Cathy Wright (choreographer), Christopher Watson (choreographer), Dylan Skybrook (choreographer), Jennifer Johanneson (dance enthusiast), Rebecca Frost (artist), Michèle Steinwald (arts manager), Philip Bither (curator), and behind the camera, Cameron Wittig (photographer). Also present in paper form on the grass: Megan Mayer (dance artist), and Anna Marie Shogren (dance maker).

Next year, we hope to double the turn out and for even more the following years until EVERYONE is represented! Stay in touch with next year’s schedule and photo shoot date online at mnartists.org/danceweek.

As the 2008 NDW wraps up and after participating in a full week plus of activities, I find myself still running around the cities and seeing local dance performances almost every night. It is proof that we have a vibrant, lively, and rich dance community in Minnesota!

See you at the shows!

“The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928)” at New York Theater Workshop features, in foreground, Susie Sokol and Vin Knight. Photo by: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

I was so pleased to wake up this morning and read Chief New York Times Theater Critic Ben Brantley's rave review of our friends Elevator Repair Service's production of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (April 7, 1928). The Walker has long been in ERS's corner, ever since I first saw their deliciously ridiculous Cab Legs at PS122 in 1998. On their first Minneapolis visit, we presented their odd-ball, ecstatic Total Fictional Lie as part of Walker’s 2000 Out There series. They returned with Room Tone (2003 Out There) and, most recently, we co-commissioned their audacious, every-word-of-the-novel marathon production of The Great Gatsby (GATZ) ,which received its U.S. debut here in September 2006.

Rights issues with the Fitzgerald estate have tragically not allowed the brilliant GATZ to yet be seen in New York City, but a year after the Walker introduced the work to the U.S., it did successfully tour to cities like Portland OR (at PICA's TBA Festival), Philadelphia (at the Philly Live Art Fest.) and Seattle (On The Boards). So, it's a bit irritating that both Brantley and Justin Bergman (who wrote an ERS preview last Sunday in the Times) seem oblivious to the fact that GATZ ever came to the U.S. at all ("the famously venturesome Elevator Repair Service" wrote Brantley "...toured Europe with a seven-hour rendering of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby" ...).

While Brantley and Bergman maintained the Times' long-standing New York parochialism (assuming nothing of cultural interest takes place West of the Hudson), Brantley did do a nice job of articulating the steep challenge that director John Collins and ERS set up for themselves in taking on the notoriously dense and, at first read, confusing, first section of The Sound and Fury, which is told from the point of view Benjy Compson, a 33-year old mentally disabled man. "Trying to translate this perspective from the page to the stage would seem to be an act of folly and hubris," wrote Brantley... "Benjy's nonlinear, noninterpretive point of view has been the bane of uninitiated English students for decades. But reading this account of a Mississippi family's decline is like looking at an impressionistic painting that at first seems to lack discernible forms, but stare long enough, and details emerge so precisely that it's finally sharper than any photograph....". In the end, the company's rigor and ingenuity wins over Brantley completely - "(ERS) brings a sanity, humility and theatrical ingenuity to their interpretation that, like the novel, illuminates the clarity within apparent chaos."

Congratulations again to director John Collins all our friends at ERS. I can't wait to catch up with the production (and all of our ERS pals) on my next trip to New York in mid-May.

Click here for the NY Times article on ERS Faulkner's Haunted Family, Moving in and Out of Time April 30, 2008.

Electronic one-man band Martin Dosh steps out of the background and into the spotlight

In a booth at a neighborhood pub in south Minneapolis, a slumped and bearded Martin Dosh is staring into his beer, tapping his fingers on the table, and talking about a coming performance at the Walker Art Center. It’s an evening devoted entirely to his music. The May 3 event has a title, “The World of Dosh,” and he’s effectively been asked by the museum to curate a tribute to himself, with special appearances by past and current collaborators like whistling indie-rock song-master Andrew Bird and underground hip-hop phenomenon Jel.

“He’s been this enigmatic, brilliant figure in the background,” says Philip Bither, curator for performing arts at the Walker. “He’s somewhere between the worlds of experimental music and pop.” Bither lists the genres Dosh’s music and collaborations have inhabited: contemporary classical, electronic, improvisational jazz, hip hop, and rock. “He’s somebody who can find links between all of those styles and do something fresh and intelligent,” says Bither, “and that’s rare.” Read more here.
- Jeff Severns Guntzel.

The World of Dosh at Walker Art Center
Saturday, May 3 at 8pm & 11pm
click here for tickets or Have a listen!

You may remember New York-based artist Mika Tajima and her noise-band moniker The New Humans from their performance at the Walker Grand Re-Opening party. They performed their piece Grass Grows Forever in Every Possible Direction in the space age Skyline Room (the eyeball of the Ice Cube Monster). Blessed be an installation that results in leftover beers. We had Budweiser for weeks.

Mika Tajima/New Humans are featured artists in this year’s Whitney Biennial. Beyond the Whitney, Tajima is currently exhibiting in tandem at The Kitchen (NYC) and COMA (Berlin). I recently had the pleasure of meeting with the artist at her performance/installation The Double at The Kitchen.

The piece explores multiplicity, boundaries, translations. As viewers enter the gallery, they are confronted with a partition running the diagonal-length of the room, built from panels inspired by Herman Miller’s cubicle-zygote Action Office invented by Robert Probst. Along the panels are Xeroxed images of an artist painting landscapes on the Iraq wall, Tajima’s own extrapolations on Action Office designs, gigantic mirrors, comically poetic press releases filled with the Utopian dreams that inspired Action Office, and promo posters from the Mick Jaggar cult film Performance.

Peeking through the perforations of angled panels, you sense the other side is operating with a similar vocabulary. Turning the bend, the audience sees that Tajima has crafted each panel as a double-sided artwork. With this system, the artist cleverly criticizes Probst’s design: a Cubicle Problem that due to over-privatization, people often create double-work. But this obstruction is more than a comment on office workers making the same PowerPoint - Tajima intends this incision into the space to highlight how “an architecture of isolation is a violent gesture”.

Just past the wall, a swinging lampshade casts dramatic light beams on two mirrors… another homage to Performance (as evidenced by the film’s trailer).

On my initial walk-thru of the installation, I thought, “How am I gonna make this relevant to the Performing Arts blog?” At first glance, Tajima is blending elements of interior design, film history, installation, architecture, screenprinting, sculpture… kinda a little bit of everything except performance. This is a calculated move by Tajima, who continually agitates expectations, employing a widely varied methodology which she calls her “rubric of practice.” Whether opening up for Motorhead in Norway, or exhibiting at the premier American biennial, Tajima instigates audiences to question what they plan on experiencing.

She is well aware of audience expectations of a performative artist having a show at The Kitchen, a vanguard of New York’s performance scene. As we walked around the installation, she’d highlight different components of the installation (the lampshade, the poster, the rotating panels) and define each one as a performance. In an effort to combat the notion that performance should entertain or even that something should “happen”, she creates a space that hints that something could happen, or did happen. As we spent more time in the gallery, more of these moments of performance began to emerge. A large stage-like space framed by the wall and the lampshade, myself posing in the mirror, sneaking into a nook between the gallery wall and a panel to look at an image. Tajima says she’s exploring the Artaud-ian notion of audience as performer, wherein viewers experience the artwork around them.

Tajima also disrupts expectations at a macro level, in that her projects often stretch beyond traditional modes of duration or location. This desire to create a “continual monument” - a concept inspired by the radical Italian 60’s design collective Superstudio - manifests throughout her body of work. For instance The Double is one project occurring in both NYC and Berlin concurrently, assembled by similar components with slight variations. Also, the video piece in the Biennial extends from Disassociated, her installation/performance at Elizabeth Dee Gallery.

Tajima’s goals and tactics are reminiscent of recent Walker artists Jerome Bel or Tino Sehgal. What I love about this work is how it forces organizations and audiences to ask core questions - Why have we divided artwork into defined genres? Why do people pay for a cultural experience, and how/why do we market these experiences? How have our expectations for aesthetic experiences been shaped and manipulated?

Long story short - the next time Motorhead comes to town, be sure to check them out. Their opening band is full of surprises.

all images are courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York.

Howdy y’all,

It’s little old me, Jeff Hnilicka. You may remember me from such favorites as “Press 4 to be connected to the box office”, “You are caller number 5″, or my personal favorite, “Tickets to the British Television Advertising Awards are SOLD OUT”. That’s right, I’ve dutifully served as the Voice of the Walker on the phone recording and worked in Visitor Services for the past five years, but have since re-located to New York. Miss my cheery disposition and boyish charm at the front desk since my departure (see below)? No worries. With my virtual voice, I’ll be blogging with updates on new projects from performing artists featured at the Walker and other exciting work I see in New York.

A bit of the biographical info: Born ‘n’ raised in Milwaukee, before coming to the U of M where I earned my BA in Theater Arts. I worked in Visitor Services at Walker for 5 wonderful years, with a brief stint at MASS MoCA. Helped start the radical political action/art collective/party planner organization The Revolting Queers. I have also worked with Minnesota Public Radio, Soo Visual Arts Center, and mnartists.org I currently work as Company Manager for J Mandle Performance and reside in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Miss you much.

jeffy

This Wednesday, April 23rd Trisha Brown an icon of contemporary dance will be on Midmorning with Kerri Miller.
Tune in to 91.1 at 9 AM or Click here to listen.

This Friday’s Dance Performance by Trisha Brown’s Dance Company will include music/score by John Cage and Laurie Anderson.
click here for tickets

Marc Bamuthi Joseph is an artist whose medium is his entire self.

And the side of himself he presents in the break/s is hip-hop. His body is hip-hop. His brain is hip-hop. His words are hip-hop. He is hip-hop from the heals of his feet to the top of his head.

Legend has it that hip-hop was born at a house party in the Bronx in the 1970s. Cindy Campbell wasn't thinking about starting a social movement, inventing a new genre of music or way of life, she was looking for a way to make a little extra money for back to school clothes. So she rented the rec room in her apartment, procured party supplies and charged a quarter or two for each guest.

It happened that her brother Clive, known to the neighborhood as DJ Herc, set up the perfect sound-system. Noticing that the dance floor really moved during the drum breaks, DJ Herc started mixing soul and funk records so that the music moved from drum break to drum break. And so another element of hip hop was born: break dancing. After a while emcees started rhyming over the freshly mixed music. And before long, graffiti artists started creating images as the music played. Thus there are four elements of hip-hop: deejaying, emceeing, break dancing and graffiti.

During a decade when the south Bronx was nearly abandoned; (the region lost nearly half it's population and arson and neglect left nearly half the buildings in the area empty), one of the most powerful social movements was begun. Hip-hop became a place where people could come together, it became a venue for social critique, it gave rise to other art forms and, for some, became a way of life. For me, hip-hop is connected to history and hope.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph is an intentional artist and educator, the powerful history of hip-hop as a cultural force feels present in his work.

the break/s is a play on words that brings the breaks that are the heart of hip hop music to mind, but also links to a more personal story of a break. This fits perfectly as the title to the performance piece in which Bamuthi shares stories of his life and work using spoken word, dance, projection and sometimes by conversationally addressing the audience over beats and breaks created by Tommy Shepard and DJ Excess. He moves and speaks with incredible charisma, artistry, sincerity and generosity. With stories of his travel, Bamuthi takes the audience to faraway places across both the Atlantic and Pacific but more importantly geography is a backdrop for stories that begin conversations about race, identity, relationships, hip hop, art and much more. I would tell you all about it, but Bamuthi does a much better job than I could begin to do.

In fact, every single cell in his body is engaged the story telling he does to a degree that I can't describe, please just go see it for yourself. You will be awed and inspired. I promise.

Andrew Bird, the headliner of this years Rock the Garden, blogs on the New York Times music opinion page.

How to write a song and other mysteries: Words Will Tell

“In about a week I will load up my car with amplifiers and guitars and drive to Nashville to begin recording my next record. I don't drive much anymore and I'm glad for that except that I used to write a lot while on the road. Solitude, boredom, and the desperate need to entertain oneself are ideal stimuli for songwriting.

I'll spend days at my farm creating loops with my violin where I record a phrase and layer on top of it, often starting with pizzicato followed by multiple string lines. This is a handy compositional tool I also use in performance. I can follow any whim and instantly hear how it works in counterpoint with other ideas. It's perfect for someone who plays by ear and improvises as I do and who is too impatient for notation. This helps keep ideas fluid and ephemeral but with an instant gratification playback option. I've found that I can be completely satisfied for weeks by the simplest four-bar phrase repeating over and over again. It's a fragile thing where your perception of it can change it completely. You can reconstruct all the elements the following day, note for note and go by physical memory but the feel can be elusive.” - Andrew Bird Click here to read more.

Have a Listen on his website’s A/V page or myspace.

Rock the Garden!
Featuring : Andrew Bird, The New Pornographers, Cloud Cult, and Bon Iver
Walker Art Center/Minneapolis Sculpture Garden
Saturday, June 21, 2008 | 4:00 pm to 11:00 pm
For more information / tickets click here

Andrew Bird, playing in Austin 2007 | Photo by Gary Miller

David Torn performing his new album at Joe’s Pub.

A night of chaos and coalescence

(At the Regattabar jazz club in Cambridge) On Thursday night, all hell broke loose. David Torn, a ridiculously adventurous electric guitarist who sculpts his sound with electronics, brought his quartet Prezens to the club, and a heavy metal concert nearly happened. It was loud and crazy. To compare these musicians to a rock band, however, is to do them a disservice. They play a brand of free jazz that’s primal and sophisticated.

Torn, alto saxophonist Tim Berne, keyboard player Craig Taborn, and drummer Tom Rainey engaged in extended improvisations that developed without predetermined structures or song titles. Their atonal, polyrhythmic jams reeked of chaos, and yet there was, in fact, structure beneath all the madness. Rainey bashed out irregular rock beats. Taborn stabbed the keys of his Fender Rhodes, eliciting blurts and beeps. Berne blew furiously, sometimes in circular patterns, sometimes randomly. Torn - wearing a Russian fur hat - did everything to his guitar short of ripping off the strings. When he ran out of phrases, he dragged the pick up and down the neck, manipulating the noise by twiddling the knobs on the bank of equipment that separated him from the audience.

It was the kind of music that could make a laid-back jazz aficionado go out and break stuff.
- The Boston Globe

read the complete article here or have a listen.

Performance Information
Prezens Quartet (David Torn/Tim Berne/Craig Taborn/Tom Rainey)
and Drew Gress’ 7 Black Butterflies featuring Ralph Alessi
Date: Friday, March 28
Time: 8:00 pm
Place: McGuire Theater
Click here for tickets and more show information.

Due to circumstances beyond our control, the entire US tour by Lenine, including the May 1 performance at Cedar Cultural Center, has been canceled. We sincerely regret any inconvenience this may have caused. For a refund, please call 612.253.3556.

William Yang’s US tour is well under way and with the recent news coming from Australia, Shadows is now even more relevant. Here are some articles to add to your experience of William’s performance at the Walker:

From May 2000 after the march in Sydney which William refers to in Shadows, Australians March in Support of Aborigines
And from the front page of the Times on February 13, 2008, Australia Says 'Sorry' to Aborigines for Mistreatment .

For more insight into William’s relationship to Shadows please see his photo essay from MCA in Chicago.

And finally in closing, a note from our former Performing Arts curator, John Killacky, who originally brought William Yang to the Walker:

“I loved William and his tender fierce intensity, his work resonated in my psyche for years afterward. I am thrilled the Walker Art Center community will once again have a chance to encounter this very special artist.”

I will see you at the show,
Michele

No one coughed, no candy wrappers were opened, and nary a cell phone disturbed Romeo Castellucci and Societas Raffaello Sanzio's Hey Girl! on the McGuire Stage at the Walker Art Center last night.

The nearly full house was engrossed in the many enigmatic images that passed before our eyes through the course of the performance; a female body slowly emerged from primordial goo; words flashed across a screen so swiftly they could just barely be perceived; a pack of men inflicted an aggressive beating on our anonymous heroine that could be seen only in strangely beautiful bursts of flashing florescent light; the white heroine whose story was on display sold the black heroine who joined her onstage into chains; the skin of the black heroine was painted silver as she stood brandishing a mirror and sword over a stage covered in broken glass.

4-D art is work created in any media that incorporates time. Hey Girl! is one of the loveliest works of post-modern performance art that I have ever seen and an exquisite example of a truly multi-dimensional work of art. In addition to playing through time Hey Girl! also plays with the notion that there are multiple 'truths' in history. Nothing felt fixed or absolute in this piece. Movements and images were presented and then repeated in new contexts where meanings were revised.

The piece quotes elements of classical and modern performance. For example, text from the balcony scene in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was projected above the parts of the performance and the white heroine looked like a re-invented Joan of Arc while draped in a flag and brandishing a sword. There were certainly strains of narrative, I watched a white woman be 'born' and make her way through this strange, surreal world. I watched black woman appear on the scene in this world, be stripped to her skin and chained. But this show was not like a tragedy of star-crossed lovers in which I could find catharsis or even a beginning, middle or end. Identities shifted, power was revealed and reassigned.

While watching the piece, I felt the 'girl' in the piece was not a universal representation of every human. As soon as I saw her be complicit in the oppression of a woman of another race, I realized she was a person with a class that was complex and sometimes changing. The two virtuosic female performers, Silvia Cost and Sonia Beltran Napoles, were more like modernist symbolic figures than characters. Castellucci took many familiar elements and ideas, like words, bodies, mirrors, swords, etc.out of familiar contexts and repositioned them in a new, brutally poetic combination.

Toward the end of the piece, a sharp, pencil thin point of light shone on the head one of the two women in the show like a laser beam. Hey Girl! hit my brain in a similar way. I was completely enthralled, I watched the piece with razor sharp focus while it played before me and thought of nothing else. And, since walking out of the theater, my brain has been wrestling and processing the content of the show and trying to figure out what it means to me. I've been thinking about men and women, history, slavery, loneliness, connection, violence and art. In short, the performance passed what a friend of mine calls 'the butt test' and 'the brain test' with flying colors; meaning I sat in rapt attention through the piece (my but was still) and after it finished my brain recalled the intriguing images clearly and I wanted to re/examine what I saw voraciously.