Monthly Archives: April 2014

Theatre

Myopia and Moral Neutrality in WET’s The Edge of Our Bodies

The 2011 one-woman play The Edge of Our Bodies made its regional premiere last weekend at Washington Ensemble Theatre.

Samie Spring Detzer plays Bernadette, the protagonist/anti-hero of her own story about a sixteen year old prep school student who skips class and takes a train to New York to find her to boyfriend and let him know she’s pregnant. She wants to surprise him with the news but he’s not at home, nor at the coffee shop where he works. As this is told from her point of view, Bernadette proves to be an unreliable narrator to her own story, or at least an inconsistent one.

At the beginning of the play, Bernadette is on the train and she strikes up conversations with strangers and begins lying a few questions in. Not that she necessarily owes strangers a full accounting of her life, but it also makes the audience wonder about her credibility as a narrator going forward. She’s an actress in school and says she wants to be a short story author throughout its 90 minutes. She narrates the story like she’s reading it directly from her moleskin diary.

The writing from Adam Rapp’s script is particularly good when Bernadette is narrating her story, but if we’re going to believe that she has promise as a storywriter, she’ll have to find better metaphors than describing a man’s face as being like lunchmeat.

Bernadette comes from enormous privilege and sometimes you feel like much of her education involves being conversant at cocktail parties, by name-checking Jean Genet and Jonathan Safran-Foer. At another point, she credits her boyfriend for turning her on to the Beatles, even though both living members are old enough to be her grandfather. Her precociousness is grating but I found my enjoyment of The Edge of Our Bodies increased because of my moral neutrality to the central character.

To say that I was morally neutral towards Bernadette doesn’t mean I didn’t care. This is a character who is multi-layered and complex, but not something that can be summed up as “likable.” Her young age leads to some naiveté and decisions most people wouldn’t make. With the story being her first-person account, it’s deliberately unclear just how accurate her accounts of her interactions are, particularly with her boyfriend’s father, a bartender/actress she meets, and a stranger she meets in a bar that she goes to a hotel room with.

The most obvious thing that stands out here is the terrific performance from Samie Spring Detzer, who found a vehicle with director Devin Bannon that conveys her skill and range as actor, and the prose from Rapp’s script. I imagine it was a very difficult performance to nail, but Detzer brings a lot of nuance and conflicting ideas to Bernadette and she handles it masterfully.

There’s one particular moment in the play that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s after Bernadette leaves the hotel room of the stranger she met in a bar. She notes her loneliness and says that at that moment there isn’t anyone worrying about her. It isn’t (too) self-pitying but revealing vulnerability that she works hard to keep invisible, including from herself.

When I saw The Edge of Our Bodies, it was on a Monday night. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I left the theater. It’s been a couple of days now, but I don’t expect that to change in the near future. It’s the type of play a writer could easily immerse themselves in.

{The Edge of Our Bodies plays at Washington Ensemble Theatre Thursdays through Mondays at 7:30pm, through April 14. Tickets can be obtained here.

Dance

Deborah Hay Solos May Not Be Cuddly But They’re Nothing To Fear

“People think that she does every day movement,” says Shannon Stewart (tEEth) of choreographer Deborah Hay’s reputation “…it’s a little bit more than that.” Stewart, along with fellow dancer, Mary Margaret Moore, will demonstrate exactly how much more this weekend at Washington Hall with an evening titled Who’s Afraid of Deborah Hay (April 5 & 6, two performances each night).

If you know postmodern dance you probably know the name Deborah Hay and you’re probably already planning on attending. If not then you may be wondering just what there is to fear about Deborah Hay. “It is hard work to cuddle up to,” Moore acknowledges “but there is something magnificent in it.”

A lack of traditional forms is certainly possible, if not likely, in Hay’s work though it isn’t totally open, free form, and purely improvised. The technique orients more toward a quality of performance through a given score rather than a form of any kind. Where dance improvisation may have dancers exploring an impulse, lingering in it and stretching it out to get the most out of it before moving on, Hay’s training asks performers to let go. It is a meditative approach in which distractions and impulses are released at every turn. This letting go is integral to Hay’s most recent work and the path she has taken to it.

As a dancer and choreographer, Hay is in the midst of a long journey. After spending her early professional years with Merce Cunningham she retreated from technique and even audience in the 70s before returning to audiences and trained performers in large group dances and, most recently, the Solo Performance Commissioning Project. Stewart and Moore are alumnae of that project.

The Solo Performance Commissioning Project covered a 14-year period beginning in 1998 on Whidbey Island and moving to Helsinki, briefly, in 2004 before settling in Findhorn, Scotland where it ended in 2012. The project centered on the process of disseminating and thereby releasing the work. This was accomplished by teaching the technique and the choreography (a loose, often highly metaphoric score rather than a precise series of steps) to a select group of dancers. Those dancers have been taking that work into the world and performing it, but they are more than simply the performers of a codified structure.

While maintaining nuanced degrees of inviolability in each solo, the dancers were given a high degree of ownership over their pieces. Most notably they paid for the training and choreography, but they didn’t buy it with their own money, they paid for it by winning commissions.

So, whereas the relationship between funding and dance often goes from granting organization to choreographer with the dancer as a servant to their agreement, Hay placed the dancer at the center. Stewart and Moore’s commissioning funders were a crowd of more than 500 donors. Their presentation is sponsored by Washington Hall, Velocity Dance Center, and Studio Current where they did much of the daily solo practice over a combined year, as required by the terms of the project.

There are limits to that ownership. The solo does not belong to one dancer but to a whole class of dancers—from a dozen in the early years to a score in the final year. That shared ownership and the looseness of the score makes for endless variations on each piece. In the four performances presented this weekend Seattle audiences will have a chance to see some of this variation as Stewart performs Dynamic!, which she received from Hay in the project’s final year. Moore will perform At Once from 2009.

Far from finding anything to fear in Hay’s work there will be opportunity for a more thorough understanding of it. Each evening will also feature non-panel presentations by local experts on Hay’s work including Peggy Piacenza, who goes back to Hay’s Whidbey Island days, along with Amelia Reeber and Kris Wheeerl, who go back to Hay’s Whidbey Island days.

So what is it we’re going to see this weekend? Stewart observes that there is “…art that makes you want to see and consume more art and art that makes you want to see more life. I think this work makes you want to see more life.”

Moore concurs: “Dancers are by-large known for their never-ending sacrifice and work-ethic, which can be life squandering. It is no wonder that these things find their way into the work, and that we train our audiences to see that and want more of that: an “art needs art” kind of paradigm. I hope that this work is a “life needs art needs life” kind of thing.”

“The practice of non-judgement, and “what if where I am is what I need?” can be such a relief for a dancer.” Moore says, “In our first hours together at Findhorn, Deborah said something like, ‘I’m not saying this because I’m nice. I’m saying it because it enlarges my dancing.’”

With any luck Who’s Afraid of Deborah Hay will be a relief for its audiences and will enlarge our lives leaving us eager to consume more life.

{Who’s Afraid of Deborah Hay can be seen at Washington Hall on May 5 and 6, more information and tickets can be found here.}

Music

“SKATERS makes you believe in rock ‘n’ roll again”

I’ve seen SKATERS twice now, once in Seattle and most recently in Portland at Mississippi Studios. And after both of those shows, lead singer MIC (Michael Ian Cummings) has told me the exact same thing.

“So, what did you think of the show?”

And just as before, he answers with a half-smile and says, “It was weird.”

Well, he was kind of right. It was weird. Mississippi Studios was less than one third of the way full, and me – a blonde chick in 4-inch heels – was dancing harder than anyone else there. Why is it that still, even after Warner Bros. got their hands on them and they’ve recorded in the legendary Electric Lady Studios, do they struggle to bring out that West Coast punk love? It exists, I’ve seen it. But not here.

This isn’t to discredit the talent of SKATERS. They are as musically gifted as any band I’ve seen live. Since the release of their LP Manhattan, Michael’s voice has become more demanding and refined. Drummer Noah Rubin’s tenacity is icon-worthy. And bassist Dan Burke is solid tight.

Manhattan’s analogue is about life in New York through the lens of millennial generation 20-somethings. There’s a reason why people call us the worst, most entitled, most spoiled generation. (Hey, I’m one of them so….) Generation Y has been stereotyped into being completely self-serving, and songs like “To Be Young in NYC” don’t help with those sentiments.

On Friday night, March 21, SKATERS opened with “Fun and Games” followed by “Symptomatic” and “Dead Bolt” – all of which have the rawness that early fans love. You’ll also notice a new face on stage – Miles, a talented guitarist who hails from Florida of all places.

The Jamaican reggae elements on songs like “Band Breaker” shows the guys have done their homework. When SKATERS rebels in different directions, they produce a good racket reminiscent of their early garage-punk forerunners.

As my friend that night said, “It’s the Strokes 10 years ago.” While they don’t have a “classic” album on their hands, SKATERS makes you believe in rock ‘n’ roll again.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Seattle Symphony Cellist Efe Baltacıgil Delights With Dvořák

Ludovic Morlot at Opening Night at Seattle Symphony, 2011 (Photo: Ben VanHouten)

Seattle Symphony showcased the talents of one of their own this past weekend, featuring principal cellist Efe Baltacıgil in a performance of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B Minor. A bustling Thursday night crowd at Benaroya Hall greeted the charismatic cellist, who has won many fans among Seattle audiences since his arrival in 2011. Though the Dvořák concerto seemed to be the highlight of the evening for many symphony-goers, the March 27 concert included two 20th century gems: Claude Debussy’s La Mer (“The Sea”) and Edgard Varèse’s Déserts.

Premiered in 1896, Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B Minor remains a favorite among audiences for its memorable themes and wide range of musical colors. Like many of the composer’s other works, the piece draws inspiration from folk tunes of Dvořák’s native Bohemia (part of today’s Czech Republic). Full of appealing melodies and exciting exchanges between orchestra and soloist, the concerto has plenty to offer for new listeners and seasoned fans alike.

Cellist Efe Baltacıgil (Photo: Christian Steiner)

This interplay between cello and orchestra makes Dvořák’s concerto the perfect work for Baltacıgil. A skilled chamber musician, the cellist blended well with the orchestra on Thursday evening. At times, the performance felt like an intimate conversation between Baltacıgil, Morlot, and the symphony. I particularly enjoyed Baltacıgil’s numerous duets with flutist Christie Reside throughout the concerto’s three movements.

Baltacıgil also knows how to take a good melody and make it sing. His lyrical solo passages in the first movement oozed tenderness, while tumultuous sections of the third movement were full of passion. The piece’s second movement balanced between the two, equal parts sweet and stormy. Although he looked quite exhausted at times, Baltacıgil handled the quick transitions between emotions with finesse.

Any signs of tiredness disappeared at the start of the third movement, the most exciting and energetic of the three. Baltacıgil tucked in eagerly, like a schoolboy reaching for a second slice of cake. He kept the energy building all the way up to Dvorak’s deliciously drawn-out finale, bringing the audience to its feet as the last notes faded.

The second half of the program featured two 20th century pieces inspired by natural environments. Varèse’s Déserts was written after the composer visited New Mexico, while Debussy’s La Mer commemorates the composer’s love of the ocean. Speaking from the stage to introduce the two works, Morlot emphasized the power of both pieces to evoke the sensory of experience of these natural environments. “They were inspired by the same journey…by the memory of being in those landscapes.”

An innovator constantly in search of new musical timbres, Varèse was one of the first composers to experiment with electronic sounds. Déserts was one of the products of his tinkering. In its original form, the piece alternated between snippets of electronic tape and music performed by a chamber orchestra of percussion, piano, woodwinds, and brass. Though Thursday’s concert featured a later version without the tape, it’s easy to imagine the work’s jagged melodic snippets and clusters of percussion juxtaposed with early electronic sounds.

Though Déserts is abstract, lacking any suggestion of a melodic theme, it doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to envision the desert’s stark landscape in the piece’s collection of sounds. Percussion plays a primary role in the work, which requires a veritable army percussion instruments, from woodblocks and chimes to gongs, timpani, and a dozen drums of all sizes.

It was a treat to watch Seattle Symphony’s team of percussionists in action, briskly moving between instruments across Benaroya’s vast stage. A gigantic metal sheet made a shimmering sound when struck, evoking wavering mirages tucked in the desert’s heat waves. Snare drums positioned across the stage from each other traded volleys of taps and patters. Meanwhile, reedy woodwind notes wove between majestic columns of brass sound, which towered overhead like stone monoliths.

Like the ever-changing ocean it depicts, Debussy’s La Mer is restless, shifting through a spectrum of moods and vivid musical imagery. This is a piece that’s meant to be experienced live. Under Morlot’s baton, Debussy’s music leapt to life, full of joyous energy, with melodies and colors flowing across the stage and through the auditorium.

La Mer unfolds slowly with a first movement that evokes a morning on the open sea. Snippets of melodies are heard as the ocean awakens. Particularly tantalizing were brief solo passages by concertmaster Alexander Velinzon and English hornist Stefan Farkas. Morlot and the orchestra emphasized Debussy’s unusual rhythmic patterns, evoking frolicking waves illuminated by sunbeams peeking through the clouds.

Full of quicksilver scales and chromatic runs, the second movement showcased the Seattle Symphony’s string section. Emphatic harp plucks and swooping passages accompanied the swirling string melodies. The excitement reached its peak in the third movement, which depicts the clash of wind and water. Under Morlot’s direction, I could both see and hear Debussy’s waves rippling through the orchestra from section to section.

Seattle Symphony continues the concert season with Carl Orff’s 1936 masterpiece for orchestra and chorus, Carmina Burana. The work’s famous “O Fortuna” movement has been used in countless films and TV shows. The symphony presents three performances of Carmina Burana this week from April 3 – 6.