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Vijay Iyer’s Venn Diagram: Community, Politics, and Activism

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In trying to get a clear picture of pianist Vijay Iyer, it’s hard to know which direction to look. His series at the Walker this Thursday and Friday, however, is a start. The two nights reveal a large part of the Venn diagram musical world he inhabits.

In trying to get a clear picture of pianist Vijay Iyer, it’s hard to know which direction to look. His series at the Walker this Thursday and Friday, however, is a start. The two nights reveal a large part of the Venn diagram musical world he inhabits.

Iyer came of age as a jazz musician in the Bay Area, playing with some first-wave avant-garde jazz musicians in the process. In a video for Alverno Presents last year, Iyer spoke about why he chose to be a jazz musician: “I had a lot of amazing experiences playing with elder musicians, in Oakland for example… people who had been part of the history of [jazz] music for decades already. To see the music in motion, to experience it as connected to a community, and also to feel welcome in that place, clinched it for me.”

Wadada Leo Smith, on the program Thursday night, is a professor at CalArts and very much a part of the Bay Area scene that is one part of Iyer’s musical provenance.

On the program Friday night is a duo with Parisian-based hip-hop/spoken word artist Mike Ladd, who Iyer collaborated with on the 2004 album In What Language? based on the airport detention of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi (whose smuggled-to-Cannes-on-a-USB-in-a-cake This is Not a Film was Walker film curator Sheryl Mousley’s vote for best film of 2011). Pitchfork wrote:

In April of 2001, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was merely passing through New York’s JFK International Airport, in transit from a film festival in Hong Kong to another in Buenos Aires, when he was detained by the INS for refusing to be fingerprinted, and kept in a crowded holding cell for ten hours. He was ultimately returned to Hong Kong in handcuffs, famously attempting to explain himself to his fellow passengers: “I’m not a thief! I’m not a murderer! I am just an Iranian, a filmmaker. But how could I tell this, in what language?”

The Iyer+Ladd album is a powerful statement, with continuing resonance for “imagining a new moment for community in the post-9/11 world of surveillance of people of color, which has created a force for us coming together,” as Iyer told the Star Tribune Saturday.

Iyer’s experience with and envisioning of community informs his musical work and vice versa. In an interview with Toronto blog The Ethnic Aisle, Iyer said that, “In the Bay Area I connected with Asian Improv Arts. They are community organizers as well as creative musicians, so they dealt with identity in this empowering way. It wasn’t just ornamental, they had this radical sensibility that connected music to activism, so working with elements of your identity or heritage in the music was part of the whole mission and ideology. That was really inspiring; it was a way for me to be myself in the music which I’d never really seen before, at that time.”

Friday night’s show at the Walker will conclude with a set by Tirtha (pronounced THEER-tha), another Iyer trio, featuring Nitin Mitta on table/percussion and Prasanna on guitar and vox. Iyer told the Star Tribune that, “Tirtha to me is a political project because it encourages shared creativity across the South Asian diaspora.” Musically, Tirtha merges Carnatic forms with jazz and “fuse their influences through many other catalysts, including Reichian minimalism and rock,” according to the Guardian.

There was “shared creativity across the South Asian diaspora” also on Vijay Iyer Trio’s 2009 album Historicity, in their cover of M.I.A.’s “Galang.” The Vijay Iyer Trio will presumably be playing many new cuts from their forthcoming album Accelerando (which is scheduled for release March 13) on Thursday night, but I hope they revive this cover for the set.

Iyer’s place in the indie/pop sphere is one aspect of the Venn diagram that won’t be covered in the Walker two-night program. Iyer has collaborated with hip-hop group Das Racist, producing their track “Free Jazzmatazz.” The Independent Film Channel reports that Iyer will also be co-starring in a short film Dosa Hunt, still to-be-released, in which “Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend), Vijay Iyer, Ashok Kondabolu (Das Racist), Alan Palomo (Neon Indian), Amrit Singh (Stereogum), Himanshu Suri (Das Racist), and Anand Wilder (Yeasayer)… pile into a van… looking for the best dosa in New York City.” Iyer also recently contributed a remix of Meredith Monk’s “Rain” for a Meredith Monk remix album produced by DJ Spooky, which also features remixes by Björk and Nico Muhly. Thus the indie/pop connections circle back to the realm of the avant-garde; Vijay Iyer’s musical world might be better described as a Möbius strip than a Venn diagram.

And speaking of Möbius strips, Iyer could tell us a lot about them. He recently led a talk on “Music and Math” at Duke University that featured “a timbre experiment…called ‘a Möbius strip of pitch.’” Iyer completed undergraduate studies at Yale in Math and Physics, and finished his PhD in Technology and the Arts at UC-Berkeley. Thus his choice to play jazz seems significant for what he has left behind, or rather, left on the side. His many musical projects show the potential that music holds for building community and opening up a dialogue about political engagement and activism.

He has said, “Trying to do the impossible is what jazz is to me.”

chelfitsch: Mumblechoreography

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chelfitsch will return to the Walker three years after their January 2009 presentation of Five Days in March, which was a piece about twenty-somethings shacking up at love hotels at the beginning of the Iraq War. Their work coming to the Walker January 19-21, 2012, is Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and The Farewell Speech; originally [...]


chelfitsch will return to the Walker three years after their January 2009 presentation of Five Days in March, which was a piece about twenty-somethings shacking up at love hotels at the beginning of the Iraq War. Their work coming to the Walker January 19-21, 2012, is Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and The Farewell Speech; originally three separate pieces, chelfitsch director Toshiki Okada combined them into a magnum opus of sorts.

chelfitsch’s singular anti-choreograpy emphasizes the ways we are stuck in our bodies, employing a dance vocabulary of formalized awkwardness and hunched postures that registers its relevance in terms of a contemporary experience of youth. If Robert Longo ever choreographed a piece about twenty-somethings stuck in a Japanese temp agency, it would look something like this.

The characters speak in fragmentary sentences and their movement could be called hyper-pedestrian in the ways ordinariness is magnified and repeated until it becomes its own vernacular. chelfitsch’s parallels with the American film sub-genre/phenomenon of Mumblecore seem striking, as relationships and conversations take precedence over narrative cues.  More literally, the company’s name comes from a mumbled, disarticulation of the English word “selfish.”

You can watch snippets of each piece in the video below, made by the Japan Society, with Japan Society Director Yoko Shioya providing some contextualization.

Acclaimed playwright/director of chelfitsch Toshiki Okada will lead an Inside Out There workshop Saturday, January 21 at 11 am. Participants will explore the nature of unconscious physical movements in creating choreography. Open to all levels of movers.

 

Photos by Toru Yokota

Oscillating Absurdities: Beirut’s Rabih Mroue responds to a “traumatized society”

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Rabih Mroué— Lebanese visual and performance artist, actor, director, and playwright—is performing Looking for a Missing Employee during the second week of next month’s Out There 2012: Global Visionaries festival. In Looking for a Missing Employee, Mroué performs the role of a multimedia detective mining the fate of one of the tens of thousands of [...]

Rabih Mroué— Lebanese visual and performance artist, actor, director, and playwright—is performing Looking for a Missing Employee during the second week of next month’s Out There 2012: Global Visionaries festival. In Looking for a Missing Employee, Mroué performs the role of a multimedia detective mining the fate of one of the tens of thousands of Lebanese people who went missing during the Lebanese Civil War.

Mroué has said, “How can one establish dialogue in a traumatized society, aware of this reality but not falling into the trap of disconsolate mourning, as the politics of memory is often seen today?” He answers partly through the use of absurdity in his work.

 

"Make Me Stop Smoking" 2006, video stills courtesy Rabih Mroué

 

In Mroué’s work Make Me Stop Smoking, he re-casts Freud as a member of Hezbollah, and in I, the Undersigned he “addresses the lack of accountability of those responsible for the Lebanese Civil War by offering his own striking apology.”

"I, the Undersigned" 2007, video stills courtesy Rabih Mroué

 

About his work How Nancy Wished That Everything Was An April Fool’s Joke, the New York Times wrote:

The four characters tell stories of contradiction that ricochet off one another. They will adhere to an ideological position and then change it. They pledge loyalty to a political leader and then betray him. They make allies and then forsake them. They switch sides and get lost. In each story they tell they are killed in battle, only to come back to life again in the next round, like irrepressible players of video games.

With similar irrepressibility, his work Old House (2006) oscillates visually between destruction and composure while Mroué at the same time narrates his own process of “remembering and forgetting.” And in Noiseless (2008) he presents a concocted newspaper article about his own disappearance with an image of himself that eventually blends into the notices of other missing persons until his image evaporates and becomes a void.

 

Born in 1967, Rabih Mroué began his work in plays, performance, and video in 1990, also the year the Lebanese Civil War ended. His emergence marks the aftereffects of a chronically “traumatized society,” one in which absurdity becomes the commensurate accuracy with which to express the loss of a quarter million people, and the tens of thousands disappeared.

Mroué’s investigation of the disappeared of his home country recalls, for me, the desaperacidos of another place, same time (roughly). Pinochet’s regime in Chile began before the Lebanese Civil War and continued over the same time period, with the disappeared in Chile numbering over 3,000. Most of all I am reminded of Roberto Bolaño’s novel Distant Star, which similarly mines the absurdity of (Chile’s) “traumatized society.” Distant Star tells the life story of Lorenzo—an HIV-positive gay artist with no arms who was born into poverty and became an adult at the height of Pinochet’s reign—who commits suicide by jumping into the ocean but who changes his mind at the last minute and swims to the surface using only his torso and legs:  “In the current socio-political climate…committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.”

Continually plagued by censorship at home, Mroué has freely performed his theater work and exhibited his visual art abroad, including the Istanbul Bienniale (2009), Prefix Institute for Contemporary Art in Toronto, and recently at the Rivington Gallery in London. As part of a U.S. performance debut tour, his engagement at the Walker is from January 12-14 2012 and includes an Inside Out There workshop January 14 , 11 am, where Mroué will present The Pixelated Revolution, a lecture-performance about the impact of mobile phones and social media in the recent Syrian uprising.

 

This week: don’t miss “African punk rock”

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This Thursday is an especially rich Target Free Thursday Night for Performing Arts, with a free poetic/performative lecture-demonstration at 6:00 pm by Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula and guitarist Flamme Kapaya that precedes their two-night run of more more more…future at the Walker Friday and Saturday. The Artist Talk will be followed by a short Q&A, [...]

photo by Agathe Poupeney

This Thursday is an especially rich Target Free Thursday Night for Performing Arts, with a free poetic/performative lecture-demonstration at 6:00 pm by Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula and guitarist Flamme Kapaya that precedes their two-night run of more more more…future at the Walker Friday and Saturday. The Artist Talk will be followed by a short Q&A, and then I recommend that you head over to the Walker Cinema for a free screening of the Staff Benda Bilili documentary at 7:30. Since Staff Benda Bilili were forced to cancel their entire American tour, including their show planned for the Cedar next week, this film is the closest glimpse of the band the Twin Cities will get for now.

Friday and Saturday, Faustin Linyekula’s evening-length dance & music performance will have its U.S. debut tour opening in the McGuire Theater. The title of the performance, more more more…future, is a positive inversion of punk rock’s slogan of no future (think the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”), and guitar god Flamme Kapaya filters the Congolese music of ndombolo through the sounds of punk rock. The piece is equal parts music and dance, as Flamme Kapaya leads a live band onstage and focus shifts between them and the movers.

In talking about the piece, Mr. Linyekula has referenced Antonio Gramsci’s idea of “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” (head about 2:20 into this video) and more more more…future seems to find idealism and hope in the same places as punk’s anarchy and rage.

The distinctive costumes for the piece were designed by Malian/Parisian-based fashion designer Xuly Bët, whose Funkin’ Fashion Factory atelier has been open in Paris since 1989. Xuly Bët has been named a New York Times Creator of the Year in the past, and has used tags on the outside of his clothing as part of the overall look of his designs (another punk gesture?)

more more more…future promises to be a raucous opening to the Performing Arts season. I would like to say that this is a performance that will appeal to world music-types, dance-lovers, the fashion-curious, people who love guitar music, dancers/choreographers, punk/noise/jazz-heads, the fashion-inspired, people who read the New York Times, people who are interested in communism, other subsets, and the unaffiliated.

Check back on the blogs later this week to read the interview with Faustin Linyekula and Performing Arts Senior Curator Philip Bither.

The Heartbreaking Rumba of Staff Benda Bilili

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Staff Benda Bilili are a group of musicians whose home base was originally the Kinshasa zoo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They even rehearsed on the grounds of the zoo, until they were discovered by a Belgian record producer who got them a record deal. Their first album (Tres Tres Fort or “Very [...]

Staff Benda Bilili are a group of musicians whose home base was originally the Kinshasa zoo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They even rehearsed on the grounds of the zoo, until they were discovered by a Belgian record producer who got them a record deal. Their first album (Tres Tres Fort or “Very Very Strong”) was mostly recorded at the Kinshasa zoo as well. A documentary about the band—Benda Bilili!—premiered to standing ovations at Cannes last year (and is screening at the Walker September 22 at 7:30 pm, as part of Target Free Thursday Night), one of many recent success stories for the group, who play festivals and arenas now.

photo by Hank Leukart

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We might wish success for Staff Benda for another reason: four members of the band are paraplegic from polio bouts when they were younger, and they play their instruments from customized vehicles that look like tuk-tuks (wrong continent, I know) with vintage Harley handles. In other words, Staff Benda Bilili are some B.A. dudes.

courtesy the artists

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While affiliated with the Konono Nº1 crew, whose album Congotronics blew up in 2004, Staff Benda Bilili sound less like Konono’s junk-metal clang & roll and more like the warmer acoustic sounds of Buena Vista Social Club across the Atlantic. The Congo-Cuba connection has been widely explored in contemporary world music– Papa Noel (Congolese) and Papi Oviedo’s (Cuban) album Bana Congo one illustration of the fertile grounds for cross-pollination that exist–and we can hear these echoes in the music of Staff Benda Bilili.

Staff Benda believe that “the only real handicaps are not in the body but in the mind.” Their deft songwriting on “Polio”—with the lyrics “Parents, please go to the vaccination center/Get your babies vaccinated against polio/Please save them from that curse”—wrap politics in a tenderness uncommon for musicians anywhere. Staff Benda consider themselves “journalists,”  tapped into the events of everyday life. Their song “Let’s Go and Vote” was played repeatedly in the run-up to the 2006 DRC polls on radio and television stations; it was reported to be responsible for a 70% increase in voter turnout.

“Benda Bilili” means “look beyond appearances” – literally: “put forward what is hidden.” Their show at the Cedar in September is sure to be raucous, heartfelt, and virtuosic.  Like Buena Vista Social Club, Staff Benda are a class act.

Berlin’s Bonanza Re:View-Overnight Observations

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Bonanza—A Documentary for Five Screens by Berlin is five films side by side underneath a miniature replica of the town Bonanza. The model includes the five houses of the seven permanent inhabitants, the line of mailboxes in the center of the town and the old fire house now used for monthly town meetings. The topographical ground [...]

Bonanza—A Documentary for Five Screens by Berlin is five films side by side underneath a miniature replica of the town Bonanza. The model includes the five houses of the seven permanent inhabitants, the line of mailboxes in the center of the town and the old fire house now used for monthly town meetings. The topographical ground is metal, reflecting the stage lights that shift with the seasons. It’s metallic nature is not merely a lovely reflective, changing surface, it is also metaphor: Bonanza was once a silver mining town.

Bonanza, circa 1900

The citizens of Bonanza keep to themselves. They all seem to be there to be alone and despite being able to see each other’s houses from their own windows, rarely interact face to face. Indeed, this is an oft tossed about complaint – the new neighbors on the hill (the snobs on the knob) never tried to get to know us, the doesn’t-live-here town mayor never stopped by to introduce herself. It is a tiny town and everyone collects their mail in the same place but they do not cross paths. Indeed, in a rather amazing moment the recently widowed Mary asks the unseen filmmaker to thank her next door neighbor for his note of condolence upon the death of her Roger. She wants him to know that it really meant a great deal to her.

With moments like this, I wonder if Berlin got to know the residents better than they do themselves. And I wonder how much things changed because the filmmakers were there.  And I wonder more about the subjects; it’s interesting that on the whole these self-made hermits seem uncommonly open and forthright, willing to talk and comfortable being filmed, but so unwilling to talk to each other.

They have quirks, quirks that are cultivated into something larger and more defining by isolation and time. They are disproportionately religious, artistic, and engaged with energy work. But these shared affiliations do not bind them. Indeed, as one resident suggests, they apparently function on different energetic frequencies.

I want to go back to the metallic topography used in the recreation of Bonanza. The film gives the feeling that nobody is really able to sink their roots down in the land there. All but one of the seven residents settled in Bonanza at some later point in life. There are no children and there will be no homegrown future. The mayor of the town who is, controversially, not from town, might have a longer history to that land and area than any of the inhabitants. And the inhabitants, they’re there, but not always willingly; Mary claims she wouldn’t live there if she had known what it would be. And they’re there, but not necessarily permanently. Mark is shown as most integrated with the land, we see him outside chopping wood, walking through the forest, sifting through abandoned junk, sitting on the top of mountain surrounded by shale and memory, but he will only stay as long as god wants him to be, and might leave as soon as tomorrow.

Berlin asks and tries to answer the question “why would you live here?”   It’s a question creates a uncomfortable otherizing that continues over the course of this work. Their answer seems to be “you gotta be crazy” and they slowly destablize our view of the inhabitants, showing them to be progressively dysfunctional, extreme and self-righteous.

The piece is a story of failed community in some ways. But maybe not appropriately. The residents of Bonanza don’t drink the water, the land is so poisoned it can’t be.  They don’t dig in deep, but there is nothing down there anyway.  So maybe they aren’t there to share in the bounty of the land – a bounty that if it existed was exhausted long ago. Maybe they aren’t looking for paradise or even community. Maybe they are really there to be alone, to get by, to pass the days the ways they choose.  Perhaps it is not so different from living in a city and the anonymity of urban life.  Why wouldn’t having the social space to be yourself and to isolate yourself be as appealing in the Rockies as it is in New York?

(From Monica, of Mad King Thomas)

This past October, Antonya Nelson wrote the essay Living in a Ghost Town for the New York Times. Wikipedia purports the unnamed town in it is actually Bonanza.

Berlin’s Veritable Bonanza: a Documentary for Five Screens

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Bonanza is the smallest official town in Colorado. Only five residents live there permanently, with another two residents cycling in and out, including a reputed witch, a mayor, a priest, “metaphysical coaches”, and a forest firefighter. Theater-film collective Berlin made their documentary about Bonanza as part of a larger project of documentaries, called the Holocene (the [...]

Bonanza is the smallest official town in Colorado. Only five residents live there permanently, with another two residents cycling in and out, including a reputed witch, a mayor, a priest, “metaphysical coaches”, and a forest firefighter. Theater-film collective Berlin made their documentary about Bonanza as part of a larger project of documentaries, called the Holocene (the geological epoch in which we live) series. They documented a different city, annually, for the past 4 years: Jerusalem,  Iqaluit (in Nunavat, Canada), Bonanza, and Moscow. Bonanza: A Documentary for Five Screens runs in the McGuire Theater from Thursday, January 20—Saturday, January 22: week 3 of the Out There Fest.

Presented in conjuncture with the Film/Video Department’s Expanding the Frame Series, Bonanza is a film for five screens; you can get an idea of how it will be projected here.