Performing Arts

Hugh Hughes in Story of a Rabbit

Hoipolloi Theatre Feeling Connected

Raise a glass to celebrate the final event of the UK Performance Now! series and the Walker’s performing arts season. Arrive early for cheap drinks ($3 beer/$5 wine/$2 sodas) and stay late to celebrate with Hugh Hughes from Story of a Rabbit.

Be there: Walker’s McGuire Theater, 4th Floor, 7 pm (before the show)

Stay late: bar service after the show too

Let’s celebrate!

Photo by Paula Court

Don’t be shy. If you haven’t seen Accidental Nostalgia or Must Don’t Whip ‘Um, the first two parts of Cynthia Hopkin’s Accidental Trilogy, you can catch up in a giffy!

First there was the earthy, Southern-gothic road tale Accidental Nostalgia in 2005, whose narrator steals an identity and revisits her small-town past in an attempt to unravel a childhood murder mystery. Two years later its prequel, Must Don’t Whip ’Um, featured a 1970s American rocker (the one whose identity is later stolen) who renounces her career to join a Sufi brotherhood in Morocco, thus making a leap both geographically and thematically from Western pop culture to Eastern spiritual mysticism . . . even as it turned out to be a daughter’s story about her search for a mother she never knew.

The first two productions were, in Cynthia’s words “tapestries of fiction woven from strands of truth… With this new work, I’m attempting to extract the fiction from the truth and to create two Acts which are polar opposites from each other. I conceive of the trilogy as concentric circles: Part I (nostalgia) being a little circle of neurology and personal memory loss; Part II being the next circle outward from oneself, oneself in relation to father and mother and society; and Part III is the biggest circle, oneself in relation to the universe at large. Part I is the brain, Part II the heart, and Part III the spirit of the Trilogy.”

See Part III this weekend to find out what happens!

Earlier this afternoon I sat in on a sliver of the rehearsals by the Accinosco company for The Success of Failure (or, The Failure of Success), which premieres at the McGuire Theater this Thursday. (Click here for tickets – there’s a special discount for the opening night.) Cynthia Hopkins and fellow company members Jeff Sugg and Jim Findlay, along with director DJ Mendel, production coordinator Anthony, and several other crew members are working pretty much from “10am to 10pm, when it’s not 9 to 11,” says Jeff to finalize the details of this “ancient epic folktale.”

Not only do they need to tailor it for the Walker’s stage, but since it’s a world premiere, those final details are innumerable: Does Cynthia throw the record here? Are the slides in the right order? Can the mike stand be steady? Not to mention other, bigger questions.

Fans know Cynthia Hopkins to be quite the spinner of tall tales – but people who haven’t seen the trilogy’s first two installments will get all the back story they need in the second part of the show, which Cynthia and crew were running through here. This final installment promises to bring an extra dimension to the trilogy – not just with all of the intergalactic space travel (yes, there is flying), but with Hopkins laying bare her own true (we presume) story. As she says as one point, it’s all part of “an elaborate plan.”

Above are views from the front and side of the stage. Those roughly door-sized panels are held up with long bungees, to define a smaller, intimate stage. During the first part of the show, they are dropped down,  creating a shiny black void for the outer-space setting.

Below is Jeff Sugg working backstage – sort of. He and Jim Findlay, the design/tech geniuses behind all of Cynthia’s shows, are actually visible for part of the show (when the panels up above are not raised), working their magic behind a shiny clear sheet of plastic. A transparent take on the Wizard of Oz, if you will. At certain junctures, they leave the computers and control boards and come forward as performers, to boot.

Below: This crazed craft project is one of the many ways that Findlay and Sugg mix high- and low-tech. It’s a tiny model of, as Jim says, “the earth 50 million years from now” (or maybe that’s billion), with some new and no doubt highly evolved improvements. Attached to that wood strip in the center is a mini-camera that can do tracking shots over the landscape, which are projected onto a really cool curved screen hanging high over the main stage. If you look for it, I think this might be visible during the show, in back with Jeff and Jim and all their gear.

Overall, there’s an intriguing mix in this show between homespun design and expansive elegance. I’m eager to see how it all comes together on Thursday night.

In the run-up to the April 16 world premiere of The Success of Failure (or, The Failure of Success), Cynthia Hopkins and her team have posted some great videos on YouTube. First, there’s the delightfully corny trailer with its old-fashioned anxiety-provoking lead-in: “The Sun is burning out! The Earth is under attack! And only one suicidally depressed alcoholic can save the Druoc race!”

And on a more serious note, Hopkins sits down to discuss just what she’s after with the latest of her “multimedia music performance extravaganzas” – The Success of Failure is the final piece in her Accidential Nostalgia trilogy. One reference point for the title, she says, is the miracle of human life as being the result of a “vast number of catastrophic failures” that came before in the history of the planet and even the universe.

Hopkins et al arrive in Minneapolis today to work out the last elements of the piece on the McGuire stage; we hope to post some snapshots and notes on their rehearsals here in the coming days.

While running around the city yesterday to prepare for APE’s three venue tour, Gary Stevens took a moment and sat down to chat about his performance with Euan Kerr from MPR.

APE

Take a lunch break and be a part of a video shoot for Donna Uchizono Company

Help us fill our seats and be part of an upcoming performance at Walker!

Friday, March 27, 12:30pm in the Walker’s McGuire Theater

The Walker Art Center is hosting the New York-based Donna Uchizono Company for a one-week residency and three performances of Thin Air on April 2-4. In one section of the dance, there is a video image of audience members sitting in the seats of the McGuire Theater projected onto the back wall of the theater. You will be filmed as if you are watching the performance, and will appear as a mirror image of the audience who will be there on the actual performance evenings. 

We need people in the seats, so we hope you can join us. Also please pass along this invite to others that may want to participate. For your participation, we will provide lunch (pizza and salad) after the shoot on the stage of the McGuire Theater and a reduced price $10 ticket to come and see any of the Donna Uchizono Company dance performances!

Video Shoot Schedule:

Friday, March 27 12:30pm: participants arrive at the Walker’s McGuire Theater (Please use the main entrance of the theater; and if you’d like, bring along your coats in order to best mimic a real audience)12:45- 1pm: video shoot

Please email or call Nicole Lahoz-Arne before Wednesday, March 25, if you can participate. And please let us know if you’d like to have pizza with us after the shoot.

Nicole Lahoz-Arne:  nicole.lahoz-arne@walkerart.org or 612-375-7695.

More information about the company’s performance:

Donna Uchizono Dance Company Thin Air

Thursday – Saturday, April 2-5, 8pm Thursday, $18 ($15 Walker members); Friday-Saturday, $25 ($21) McGuire Theater

Click here to see a video of the performance

“The haunting quality of Uchizono’s work shone through-a blend of small but gem-like virtuosic moments, rich metaphors, and unforgettable visual panache.” -Dance Magazine

Award-winning New York choreographer Donna Uchizono draws from the Buddhist tenet on emptiness to create a stunning new trio that combines iconic art-rock guitarist /composer Fred Frith’s densely intriguing score, the visceral power of her own unique movement vocabulary, and Michael Casselli’s ghostlike video imagery. Thin Air is a hypnotic experience that beautifully utilizes sound, simple yet brilliant scenic elements, and finely detailed movement that flows from the deliberate to the frenetic.  For tickets and information, go to walkerart.org.

“Church”, written and directed by experimental playwright Young Jean Lee, is flying to Minneapolis on the wings of a flurry of positive press for its creator. Lee has received a great amount of press in recent weeks, including an article in the New Yorker, a front page review in the New York Times for “The Shipment”, as well as a write up in the Village Voice, Time Out, and two New York Times articles for “Church”. Lee was voted best New York provocative playwright in 2007 according to the Village Voice.Church is being performed this week only Thursday through Saturday at 8pm at The Walker Art Center’s McGuire Theater. Click here for tickets.

“It’s an unorthodox contemporary worship service, complete with sermon, praise dancing and a gospel choir… Her slyly subversive drama ambushes its audience with an earnest and surprisingly moving Christian church service that might be the most unlikely provocation produced in years.” Click here to read the complete New York Times Review of Church.

Even as Church’s charismatic and left-leaning central preacher defies traditionally held Christian assumptions, he conveys a passionate message about religion having the power to transform lives, backed up by three female ministers. Hear the word and feel the power as the preaching, dance, and a full gospel choir deliver “a work so enjoyable, so intricate, and so thought-provoking [that] it’s only appropriate to give thanks and praise” (New York Sun).

Young Jean Lee on writing “Church”: ” The premise that all of my shows begin with is, I ask myself the question, “What is the last show in the world that you would ever want to make?” Then I force myself to make that show. My whole aesthetic is about fighting complacency. So if I make a show that goes against my instincts of what I want to do, that creates a very tense and complicated dynamic. For “Church” the last show in the world I would ever want to do was an evangelical Christian service that’s sincerely trying to convert the audience to Christianity, and that’s not ironic or a joke or making fun of Christianity at all. That just seemed like a real nightmare and a challenge for me, and it has been.”
Click to read more of “Faith Confronted, and Defended, Downtown” an interview with director Young Jean Lee and Lear deBessonet in The New York Times.

On Young Jean Lee’s new work “The Shipment”:
“Critics have lavished praise on “The Shipment,” which Ms. Lee also directed and whose run has been extended until Saturday in New York. In his review in The New York Times, Charles Isherwood called the play “a subversive, seriously funny new theater piece.” The New Yorker also gave “The Shipment” a warm and lengthy review — an unusual laurel for a young, relatively unknown writer. ” (New York Times)

This quirky and darkly humorous work Five Days in March by director Toshiki Okada recounts the daily lives of four adolescents in Tokyo’s trendy suburbs of Shibuya and Roppongi during the first five days of the U.S.-Iraq war in 2003.

About the performance: A couple of drifting kids stay for five days in a love hotel worrying about their futures, while outside in the “real” world, war changes everything. The precarious balance of Five Days in March juxtaposes the grand sweep of history and the insignificant patterns of real daily life. And the insecurity held by urban Japanese youth of the “N” generation (no job, no income) takes form in this startling and indelible performance.

About the director: Toshiki Okada is a playwright and director who has gained international acclaim for his plays, called “super-real” for the way the characters speak in broken sentences, like fragments from private conversations.

About the company: The company’s name, “chelfitsch,” is Okada’s coinage. It represents the baby-like disarticulation of the English word “selfish.” It is meant to evoke the social and cultural characteristics of today’s Japan, not least of Tokyo.

Click here for more information and tickets for this performance beginning Thursday at Walker on January 15-17th at 8pm.
Join us for a post-show reception in the Warhol lounge by 20.21 for discounted drinks and conversation. Opening night the artists will be joining the party.

National Theater of the United States of America has arrived and is loading up their show Chautauqua! as the opener of this year’s Out There festival of new performance works. In celebration, and honoring the spirit of NTUSA productions and MN state fairs, Summit has provided beer for the very first beer garden inside the McGuire theater.

Arrive early to the theater (doors at 7:15 pm) with your performance ticket and enjoy more than just a night at the theater. There is more to Out There every year! For more festival perks, check out the activities on the Walker calendar.

Thanks Summit!

See you there!

It has to be hard for anybody to fashion a narrative for a 100-minute opera from Gertrude Stein’s famously difficult, many believe unreadable 900+ page novel, The Making of Americans. Jay Scheib’s re-imagining, which surely achieves more through its use of multimedia than any other attempt to bring the novel to the stage, highlights key moments not only in the lives of the families that are the subject of Stein’s novel, but perhaps much of humanity itself. The creators of the opera seemed to strike a balance between a narrative involving marriage, broken relationships, and death and the images that make the work resonant far beyond these individual characters and families.

Hometown new music-heroes Zeitgeist and the JACK Quartet from New York deftly performed Anthony Gatto’s score. Much of Gatto’s music was post-minimalist in character, appropriate for a work so dependent in form and content on repetition. At other points, though, passages sounded like an almost Bach-like chorale and, elsewhere, the rich, slow moving harmony of a Debussy piano etude; the joyous wedding music that opens the work was some of Gatto’s best. The singing was generally expressive, clear and, in-tune, though at times sounded a bit strained, perhaps explained by the fact that many of the characters were attempting to sing in extreme registers while in all sorts of positions.

The opera not only drew upon the content of Stein’s novel in its exploration of the Hersland and  Dehning families, but also its form. In addition to her almost tortuous repetition of precise grammatical structures, Stein foregrounds her own presence throughout the book, calling attention to the very processes of creation that are crystallized in the final work. The opera reflected and built upon these ideas: the musicians were on stage right, stage lights descended from the ceiling to the middle of the stage, and little effort was made to hide microphone battery packs. The aspect that best bridged the gap between form and content, though, was the projection of footage from the cameras inside Chris Larson’s house from Crush Collision were projected onto a screen suspended above the stage; their slightly grainy and delayed image gave the impression of YouTube voyeurism, a sense of looking in at this family, and being made slightly uncomfortable for our efforts.

Much of the work’s visual logic emanates from Scheib’s idea of “motion portraiture,” the slow moving development of moving images, both in terms of film as well as the developing images that make up the opera’s visual and sonic landscape. Despite the potential embedded in such a concept, Stein’s words were far more powerful than most many of the work’s images. (Many of them seemed predictable, with their emphases on roots and trees, both plant and familial.) The constant repetition with a crucial difference of words such as being, dead, history, and repeating opens up a window to the possibilities of reflection and imagination that language in Stein’s skilled, almost obsessive hand, affords us.

Through this language, Stein’s words extend far beyond two American families, which Scheib echoes in similarly universalizing tones in his Director’s Notes:

I hope that [The Making of Americans] will remind us of the perfect depiction of an event—a marriage, a funeral, a divorce—a motion portrait of ordinary lives. Something about becoming Americans, about doing the best we can with the time we have. And about it only mattering so much, since the next generation will do the same. And it just goes on like that.

I have to say, this statement left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. Such bald generalizations—are Americans the only people that do “the best we can with the time we have”?—seem out of a place within an artistic and philosophical environment of such detailed introspection about the nature of familial ties, be they part of one’s own family or a more utopian idea of a “human family.” There’s a history of white Americans believing the world revolves around them, and many histories have been written through this lens Americans alone, often with disastrous consequences.

And while all involved see the opera as possessing meaning for the contemporary world, it seems hesitant to ascribe any meanings that might be too specific, such as the wide-ranging and often inflammatory debates about immigrants as “becoming American.” By not really going down that path, the work in the end seems ambivalent about who actually fits into the category of “a real American,” a phrase repeated incessantly near the beginning of the opera.

Illustrating this was the fact that the actress Tanya Selvaratnam, who is of South Asian descent, was the only prominent person of color on the stage. Her performance as Mary Maxworthing that ended the opera, though, contained the most powerful moments of the entire evening. Numerous people in the audience were moved to tears as her character reflects on the fate that awaits us all.

There is, of course, so much in both versions of Making of Americans that you could most likely come up with an alternate interpretation to address whatever criticisms I may have. Yet the attempt to make the ordinary extraordinary, which Scheib and the rest of those who expertly brought forth this multi-faceted imagining of Stein’s novel, threatens to be hamstrung by all-too familiar ethnocentric conceptions that structure much of the world’s inequality today, inequality that all families, including those in America, must live under.