Tag Archives: otb

Arts & Entertainment, Music, Theatre

At On the Boards, an Experiment in Opera (Review)

Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes’s El Gallo (Photo: Lorena Alcaraz Minor)

At turns whimsical, surreal, and yawn-provoking, El Gallo (at On the Boards through May 15, tickets), is the kind of show that I imagine “show people” are most likely to take to. The set-up is that a conductor/composer has two weeks to find and rehearse a quintet, and the show takes you through the esteem-testing of auditions and soul-cauldron of rehearsal, before the big night. At different times it plays like rehearsal reality TV, a winking farce, and performance art that dares you to fail to find it interesting.

Writes Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes director Claudio Valdés Kuri:

El Gallo is a tale of the confrontation of desires and aspirations. It talks about how when faced with the challenge of concrete objectives, we become oblivious to the richness and diversity of our current surroundings.

Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes’s El Gallo (Photo: Lorena Alcaraz Minor)

In real life, the performers (from Mexico, France, Japan and Iran) recapitulate the polyglot nature of the fictional troupe, though with the meta-comedy of Kuri and composer Paul Barker having created a nonsense language that everyone speaks and no one understands.

Here’s a taste of that, from the program note:

Paul showany Kalipadi Kalipadi la la la la. Claudio nemi napo, “een ai uwi wina yawi nayame wina yame.” Shinofwe – buzhni zheve zhave vu aiu wia – zhiblink chabe: Ernesto (Viptim), oodooumpapapri: niwe papapra eento puweklobongt: “Shvejishwgvnijmlagenschigcht!” Kaveh (Shaktas) Eduum Hajhne woro udoof Itzia (Shaptes); Edwin (Thiktum) woopi-waas Ernesto (Viptim), een oodooumvoschup eef oodooumvoschlow, wijhne-wojhne www eef mmm (scablickski, djheva!). Irene (Shaktom) eef Fabrina (Jogbos) beetchy-beetchy iwoz toodamkost: “nemi napo chiwa!” Nuwishni 6 showany, perobut 6 wwwmmm!

The sharp-eyed among you will see that performers are named in there — Itzia Zerón (Shaptes) Irene Akiko Iida (Shaktom) Fabrina Melón (Jogbos) Edwin Calderón (Thiktum) Guillermo Proal (Shaktas) Ernesto Gomez Santana (Viptim) — but I think that’s likely all you’re liable to get from it. Sung and spoken, it frequently sounds like Muppets.

There’s a very dry humor at work here, in that choral singing is frequently done exactly like this. Choral pieces are often in a different language than the singer knows, and so the words are sung phonetically. Are you expected to know this? I wonder.

Much of what’s amusing about the composer’s auditioning of his subjects is his on-the-nose physical reactions to them “getting it wrong” — I should mention that the singers audition with real-world opera standards like “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix,” “La donna è mobile,” and “Summertime.” (Yes, Porgy & Bess is an opera — Seattle Opera is doing it this summer.)

The pantomime of communication failure is always golden, but there is also subtly present (if you want to work it out for yourself) the analogy to the personal voice: the singers audition as how they’d like to be heard, not as they are, and variations on that theme.

Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes’s El Gallo (Photo: Lorena Alcaraz Minor)

Viptim the composer is unimpressed with any (he’s right to be, they vary as singers but they are not opera material), but you are unsure as to whether his “corrections” are all that apropos.

In any event, it seems the talent pool is not large because after a restless night, all singers reappear for the rehearsal. There they seek the composer’s approval, form cliques, backbite, and fight. They practice their parts, provide moral support, and struggle over a mop. Gradually, they begin to strip themselves down — how would you know it’s an OtB show without people in underwear? — and the piece begins to come together. They sing as a unit, finding rhythms and harmonies. The show pauses while a riser is assembled, and then the opening night comes, with its very different emphases — everyone in formal dress, posed in the spotlight, with the expectation of perfection. I don’t need to tell you that expectation is about to get violated.

Beneath all of this is composer Paul Barker’s music, performed by two string quartets conducted by Gamaliel Cano. If you go, you will probably end up wanting to hear more of Barker’s work. As the score to a dramatic work, it covers a lot of ground, from angular, incidental-music jabbings to stand-alone songs. It’s generally dark-hued, with the strings creating contrasts between melodic beauty and harsher, discordant outbreaks — unconsciously you begin to accord it an atmospheric status. It’s not commenting like movie music, but simply there like Xochitl Gonzalez’s expressive lighting, until it pulls focus for an extraordinary final quintet (or sextet, depending on whether you’re still “in” the show).

In the end, I don’t know how much I liked El Gallo. It’s funny — Muppet-talk! — but it also has those lengthy rehearsal development scenes that feature an unending stream of Muppet lyrics with no Swedish chef in sight; it challenges its performers to put their lives into the work, to interpret themselves, but that remains a technical (albeit emotional) feat; it’s insightful, but for all its theoretical riskiness and innovation — “Each project is approached considering specific risks and queries in an open debate” — seems to tell a fairly self-referential story about the genius of the Teatro process.

If the drama of creative self-expression resonates with you, El Gallo might feel like a masterclass. If not, I think you would have had more fun at Of Montreal’s show this week, which also featured music and wrestling.

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

Catherine Cabeen on the Yves of Creation (Review)

Catherine Cabeen (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

One of the great gifts an artist can give another is to inspire a work, and the reciprocal gesture (because art is fundamentally based in a gift economy) is to reawaken interest in someone whose work has been misunderstood, overlooked, or fallen out of fashion.

Catherine Cabeen’s Into the Void (at On the Boards through Saturday; tickets) doesn’t resurrect conceptual painter Yves Klein, who would have been 83 this year: It says “Thank you for your life’s work”–and “Bet you wish you’d thought of this.” It is sometimes joyful, sometimes embattled, frequently gorgeous, and always  in pursuit of the elevating moment, the one you suspect might flash across your mind’s eye in a dark time.

Cabeen explains in her lengthy post “Why Yves Klein” something of what you see–her suited up as Klein, the costumes tinged with gold, the people painted blue, the dancer who wears a judo outfit, even a swing dance interlude–but one test of an artwork is the way it creates itself for you, and it’s possible to see Into the Void knowing very little about Klein, the new realists, or the critical appraisals of his work, and still be struck almost dumb by the display.

(Luckily, On the Boards is participating in Low Lives 3 and streaming the Catherine Cabeen and Company production live on April 29 from 5 to 9 p.m., and also filming it–in HD! with five cameras!–which result they will make available on their site later. See for yourself what all the rapture is about.)

Cabeen, who has danced with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Martha Graham Dance Company, puts a lot into the hips in this work. “[I]n particular as a choreographer,” she writes, she was interested in “how the body can be used as an intersection for ideas,” contrasting her study of yoga with Klein’s Rosicrucian explorations of energy and matter. So here, for instance, you see sinuous hips and judo throws and falls. As Klein, Cabeen adopts, with glorious extensions, one-footed judo poses that evolve from forceful push to feline fall in a way that explodes the distinction.

She’s joined by dancers Germaul Barnes (in a floor-length, pleated, blue skirt) and Matthew Henley (in the judo outfit); and Karena Birk, Echo Gustafson, and Sarah Lustbader. Barnes has tremendous presence, an ability to dance while holding still, and dance floor moves (though, comically, he grabs his back at one point to show he’s human). These form a multitude of interactions with and without Cabeen/Klein; Henley’s brutish judo character challenges Cabeen, while Birk provides caresses and solace when Cabeen is thrown. I think this is Cabeen’s understanding of the way life’s energy feels personal, directed in aid of or against you.

The dancers also lift each other up, perch on shoulders, and the ensemble catches Cabeen and she leaps, again and again, into the “void”–the nothing that becomes something through the energies of art.

Throughout, a huge tri-panel backdrop displays close-up footage of the dancers and transmutes them into the purely visual realm, adding a digital layering to the scene in which Barnes and Lustbader, nude, paint themselves blue in a recapitulation of Klein’s Anthropométries. Tivon Rice’s projections constantly veer between an almost sculptural survey of the body and then break the images down in lava-lamp reds, showers of gold bytes.

Kane Mathis’s music is, if my memory serves, a through-composed evolutionary journey in itself, from trance-inducing guitar pickings to big band to electronic washes. The protean costumes from Michael Cepress, striking enough that they become the identification of the dancers, also can’t be pinned down to a style. The dancers step in and out of them, or reinterpret their use (a top becomes a short tunic, a train becomes a winding sheet and then a flower). Surprisingly, Susan Robb’s “Toobs” made an ominous, tentacular appearance. Connie Yun’s lighting travels an equally nuanced range, from effervescent golds to placid blue-toned whites.

It’s the sheer volume and variety of Cabeen’s points of contact with Klein’s life and works that sweep you away finally–there are bound to be moments that fall a little flat from person to person, but there’s no denying the depth of Cabeen’s engagement with Klein, and the beauty, ritual, and tenderness in this outpouring. Klein was one of those artists who would tell you that the painting was just what was left over after the moment of creation; as you watch Cabeen and her collaborators dematerializing the body and its adornments into light and motion, you understand exactly what he meant.