Tag: Marcel Duchamp

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I Eat Your Country (With Relish): In honor of the Sydney International Food Festival last fall, participating countries contributed flags made from the respective countries’ best-known foods. It’s simple but it’s nifty. Depending on which flag you like, I guarantee you’ll get hungry just looking. I especially like the French one myself. No prizes for guessing what constitutes its tricolour. Nationalism has never been so delicious.

Sweet… Song: Jonas Kaufmann is an opera singer. A really good one. Writer Olivia Giovetti describes his voice as “dark chocolate.” Mmmm. Also, he’s gorgeous. Mmmm. He has two new CDs out this week, and he’s set to perform as Don Jose in Carmen this spring at The Met. Aside from being keen to get down to New York, I want to see this production (easily the 30-something-ish production of Carmen I will have sat through), to stare at his pleasing Teutonic mug, sigh over Bizet’s beautiful score, and think of… chocolate.

Easel Ladies: Together with Virginia’s springtime celebration of women in the arts (called Minds Wide Open) comes Women of the Chrysler: A 400-Year Celebration of the Arts, which the Chrysler Museum has curated from their permanent collection. Featuring artists as wide afield as Harriet Cany Peale, Mary Cassatt, Käthe Kollwitz, and Dorothea Lange, to Diane Arbus, Louise Nevelson, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Cappy Thompson, this is one exhibit that is part history lesson, part celebration, all artistry.

I Love This Band: Preachers Son is a Dublin-based trio with a grit-glam sound channeling equal parts David Bowie (especially in his Berlin phase), Nick Cave, Johnny Cash, and the Legendary Shack-Shakers. They’ve created a unique, hard-rock sound that positively drips with drama and raw musicality. I can’t stop playing them. Fingers crossed they’ll be here for North by Northeast.

Viva La Eno: In this interview from March 2009, the artist/producer/all-around genius expounds on his processes of composition, production, and collaboration. He offers some fantastic insights into his past with Roxy Music as well as his present, working with bands like U2 and Coldplay. He also discusses the beauty of simplicity, citing an early viewing of a Mondrian painting as a formative moment in his creative development. Oh, and he has this to say about fans of bands:

I don’t like fans very much to be honest. Of course I like people enjoying my music and I quite like being admired for having some good ideas, but the anorak-y type of fan is a rather frightening object of humanity, because you think, “Please get a life; don’t have mine.”

Collaborawesome: David Byrne and Fatboy Slim have come together to produce an album chalk-full of deep grooves and original sounds. Here Lies Love features the vocal talents of Tori Amos, Martha Wainwright, Alice Russell Sia, Natalie Merchant, Cyndi Lauper, and many more. Beautiful.

Fountain of Woot: Marcel Duchampe’s 1917 exhibition called “Fountain” made a splash upon its exhibition, but a surfeit of duplicates threaten to tinkle all over the famed artist’s legacy… or possibly enhance it. As More Intelligent Life notes, Duchamp was one “who had painted moustaches on postcards of the Mona Lisa” and he “understood the power of reproductions to render a work iconic and consolidate an artist’s international reputation.” In this high-tech remix era where questions of originality are both critical and codswallop, and borrowing/stealing for recreation is plus normale, the issues Duchamp raised nearly a century ago have particular currency and potency.

Welcome to Detroit: Photographer Andrew Hinderaker went to Detroit -and took a lot of pictures. His work is a document of an area hit hard by the recession; empty, yawning streets, skeletal buildings, hard lights dominate many shots, but interesting, he also finds the beauty in the desolation, turning his subject (a microcosm of America itself) into a kind of victory over dark days and damning forces.

Tune in Friday: I’m going back to radio broadcasting starting April 9th, 9:30amET. Whether you’re an A&E afficionado, or just plain want to hear what my voice sounds like, tune in. Please?

One Great Runaway

 

I’m in the midst of putting together a piece about the National Film Board‘s animated selections at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, which opens January 21st in Park City, Utah. I always associate the wintery film festival with intellectual independent features but it’s warming to see a loopy animated short like Runaway be featured there as well. The Cordell Barker work is one of the three animated shorts being shown at this year’s festival, the other two being Vive La Rose
and Rains.

Runaway had its world premiere last May at the Cannes Film Festival, and was also shown at the Toronto International Film Festival this past September. Watching it, I was taken back to my youth, when I saw Barker’s first animated short, The Cat Came Back. With its zany animation and insanely catchy theme song, the short remains a personal favourite of mine. What’s so neat about Barker’s works is that he blends social commentary in with the crazy narratives and colourful characters. So Runaway is about much more than a train; it’s a not-so-subtle metaphor on class distinctions, consumerism, environmentalism, economics and social responsibility. It’s also fabulously entertaining, with a lively score by Ben Charest (the man behind the Oscar-nominated The Triplets of Belleville) and Barker’s kooky, charming animation.

One of my mantras for 2010 is “less head, more heart.” To borrow a line from Rumi, I’m attempting to stop the forward-pressure of the mind, at least sometimes, and blend it with Duchamp‘s idea that “the desire to understand everything fills me with horror” -so why try? It feels like such a ciphoning of energy to try to rationalize and square out the details of every little thing, all the time; it feels like an egotistical attempt at control that isn’t there in the first place. Head just can’t replace heart, and at its essence, this is what good animation (and all visual art, in fact) provides me: a portal into a world where logic doesn’t always rule, control is illusory, and possibility is endless. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be challenging or difficult, or contain social commentary and exploration, but I think it’s possible to marry the yin and yang together, through skill, and of course, passion. The best animation, for me, goes straight for child-like wonder, universal feeling, and a sparkling joy that is sometimes intertwined with social commentary. The NFB brings all of that wonder, feeling, and joy to Utah this year, in zany colours and deft pencil strokes. Looking at their works, it makes sense the word “art” is contained in “heart.” As it should be.

The Nightingale: Fluttering Simplicity

Igor Stravinsky has never endeared those who crave traditional melodic lines. His music is raucous, rough, and challenging –not the kind of thing you can hum or whistle to.

So it was with a mix of trepidation and curiosity that I took my traditional-opera-loving mum to see the new production of his 1908 opera The Nightingale, an adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fable. She’s always thought of Stravinsky as “weird” (you might too, if your favourite music is grand Italian opera) and I know she was never a fan of the Russian’s challenging, difficult, definitely non-hummable music. His infamous statement, that “music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all,” has been assessed and analyzed, criticized and derided, and yet I suspect he may’ve been onto the same kinds of thing as Marcel Duchamp, or even later, Brian Eno. Stravinsky’s work isn’t about making you feel comfortable, and indeed, that isn’t the point of what I’d consider good art. Spoon-feeding is atrocious; it takes a keen director, respectful of the material but strong in their own sense of individualism and craft to bring a vision that might express something through the myriad of sounds and effects Stravinsky laid throughout his scores.

Enter Robert Lepage. The Nightingale marks his return to the Canadian Opera Company after a sixteen-year absence. Just as he brought a bold, striking vision to the 1993 production of Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung so he brings a playful, if equally visionary sense to this latest work. Stravinsky was the musical revolutionary of his time; LePage is his contemporary theatrical equivalent. Neither artist has ever taken the safe road with regards to their respective arts, so it came as no surprise when it was announced last year that the Quebec born, multi-award-winning theatre director would be filling the orchestra pit of The Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts with 67,000 litres of water as part of his vision for the piece. That’s a whole lotta water, and people like my mother (a longtime COC subscriber) wondered if it was also a whole lotta waste-of-time.

But the idea -in its audacity, grandeur, and sheer weirdness -intrigued her, and I would imagine, many of those in attendance at Saturday’s opening. Opera is meant to be big and bold and ballsy; there’s no such thing as subtle opera in the larger scheme of things. The adjective “grand” is attached to opera (or at least some styles) for a reason, and it’s always this sense of “the big” that pervades popular notions around the artform. I’ve sat through more than one production of Aida that featured live animals, including elephants, horses, and even -once -a zebra. So why not fill up the orchestra pit? Why not have puppets? Why not embrace the grand-opera mystique and majesty?

But even majesty is best used when it’s done with simplicity, class, and most of all, awareness. To be big just for the sake of it smacks of narcissism; to go large without an overriding artistic idea feels simplistic. And the line between “simple” and “simplistic” is fine but it’s important. Too often in the arts world -of high culture and low culture equally -the “large” aspect is blindly presented and unquestioningly embraced. Lepage doesn’t offer any solutions for this modern artistic conundrum but he does have the visionary mindset to look behind and around him for clues as to how to solve it. In the program notes, he offers his theory theatre’s origins: “Man was sitting around a bonfire in a cave telling stories and one day he stood up and used his shadow to illustrate his tale. Theatre was born using nothing more than light and imagination.” It’s this sense of childlike play that the director transfers onto the complex musicality of Stravinsky, making for a unique opera-going experience that both pays homage to the roots (or suspected roots) of theatrical performance, and opens the door to a new way of seeing an old, frequently-stodgy artform. In other words, he reinvents the way we perceive opera and its relevance to theatre, performance, and music itself. he also make it personal, by injecting elements many of us recognize from childhood. They’re simple elements, but not simplistic. Lepage trusts and respects his audience -their capacity for creation, imagination, comprehension and invention -and this abiding love of humanity shines through every aspect of the production. Clever, creative use of light, shadow, water, and the human form tease out the the complexities of Stravinsky’s work, revealing its inherent playfulness and its gentle parody of the foibles and follies of human nature.

In so doing, the composer’s seemingly-barren, cold modern music is infused with a new richness. In The Fox, a Russian folk tale based on Russian Folk Tales by the writer Aleksandr Afanasyev, he creates a world where we see folk tales being literally shared -told, re-told, re-interpreted and recycled -with choruses of singers dressed in traditional Russian garb standing on side platforms. Fables about wily foxes, proud roosters, crying babies, and curious cats are shared, expressed, and laughed over. Another layer of theatre is literally grafted on top of this via a large, cinematically-shaped screen running the length of the stage, over top of the orchestra. Using shadows made by hands and later bodies (thanks to puppeteers), we see a cat’s tail swishing about, a rabbit’s eyes dancing to and fro, a rooster guarding his hens; each movement matches and accentuates elements in Stravinsky’s score. Here is a whole new way of experiencing the Russian composer -as well as the operatic form itself : as mischievous, theatrical, imaginative, perhaps even fun. Opera? Fun? Hell yeah. Even my mother said as much at intermission.

For The Nightingale, Lepage has taken Andersen’s fable about the golden-throated bird and the Chinese Emperor who covets her and turned it into a magical metaphor about the relationship of man and nature. As the singers control their puppets, with the aid of five talented puppeteers, I couldn’t help but notice the near-identical dress between the performers and their doll-like counterparts. Puppet designer Michael Curry has fashioned a series of creations that gorgeously complement their human counterparts in both appearance, and, thanks to choreographer Martin Genest, movement. Each puppet is like a child, with a larger grown-up version of itself controlling, manipulating, sounding, and speaking for it. It reminded me a bit of when my own mother would take me to the opera when I was very young, in fact. There was something sentimental and touching about the way each singer cradled and carefully controlled their smaller, ornately-dressed selves.

With lights from the orchestra musician’s music stands reflected in the water, I found myself musing, amidst the swirling raucousness of the music: art is reflected in nature; nature shows art what is truly is; nature reflects but has its own qualities one can’t totally control -and that is a good way of approaching (if not describing) the best sort of art. All this, from filling up an orchestra pit, though the genius was in the design. The reflections (intensified at the opera’s end by Diwali-eque floating candles) were not incidental; Etienne Boucher‘s specific, focused lighting strongly recalled the work of Bill Viola, with all of its spiritual, simple-meets-challenging aspects, encompassed within a live performance presentation.

The Nightingale involves so much more than mere, simplistic effect; it is a wonderous, child-like vision of an eternal dance between the natural world and the constructed one. Via the shadowplay of the first half, and the waterplay/puppeteering of the second, we’re reminded again and again to re-connect with our own playful instincts –ones, it must be said, that are as ancient as those first stories he refers to in the notes. Sometimes it’s via the most unexpected and challenging means that we come to find our own common humanity, and come to recognize our own nightingale, singing, flying, just waiting to be heard.

As to my mum? She’s still not a Stravinsky fan. But she adores Lepage. Bien sur.

Lovely Peggy

Amidst a day filled with news of job loss, bombings, and gloomy predictions, I found myself meditating over the final scene in Radio Play. Dancer Peggy Baker and actor Michael Healey sit together, on a raised table, their faces nearly touching, their hands joined. It’s the end of a beautiful, poetic journey, and a powerful symbol of connection.

Though I’m not well-versed in modern dance, I found myself entirely entranced with the movement-meets-theatre piece. It asks nothing more than turning off that part of your brain that constantly seeks to understand, to make sense of, to explain. As Marcel Duchamp said, “This desire to understand everything fills me with horror.” Like art, there’s something resoundingly primal about dance -particularly modern dance. One either reacts by shutting down at its confounding nature, or opens up entirely to its instinctual roots. I found myself willingly knocking down my walls of intense rationalism watching Radio Play, frequently relating to the trials and frustrations faced by Marnie (played by Peggy Baker); the changing nature of her relationship with Angus (played by Healey) was equally compelling, and was expressed with brushes of subtlety and grace.

I also found myself connecting some of the issues Radio Play raises -namely the idea around how artists make a living -with yesterday’s layoff of the members of the B.C. Ballet. There is still a predominant attitude, at least in certain circles, that working as an artist doesn’t constitute “real art.” I’d argue that a dancer is every bit as vital to the economy as a Magna employee. And after seeing a piece like Radio Play, I’m more convinced than ever of the importance and vitality of culture in harsh times. It’s only by turning that needling, analytical voice off, and allowing a few subconscious realizations, that one finds any sense of clarity. If you’re in or around Toronto, run -there are only three more performances.

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