Professional Development: Field Trips: Lincoln Center Festival 2006

Wednesday, July 12 through Saturday, July 15, 2006

PMP’s annual large-scale professional development trip took about twenty leaders from the area’s music and arts community to New York from July 12 to 16, 2006 for a whirlwind trip including four performances, four related panel discussions, and a tour of public art on Coney Island. Three of the performances and two of the discussions were produced by this year’s Lincoln Center Festival. As ever, trip participants debated the merits of each event and found much commend or contest. Members of the group, which this year included representatives from the dance and visual arts sectors, made several promising connections and took advantage of the opportunity to reflect on their fields on both local and national levels.

The first event of the trip, on Wednesday, July 12th, was a roundtable discussion with the creative team behind the new opera Grendel. Moderated by Lincoln Center Festival director Nigel Redden, the panel included Grendel director Julie Taymor, composer Elliot Goldenthal, and co-librettist J.D. McClatchy. Though the opera was receiving its premiere performance in the summer festival, Taymor and Goldenthal had been working on the project for thirty years. Based on the 1971 novel by John Gardner that reinterprets the story of Beowulf from the perspective of the monster Grendel, the opera developed through decades of planning, revision, and fundraising. Redden commented that Lincoln Center had been interested in the opera from its inception. Goldenthal and Taymor remembered the various concepts they toyed with: a rock opera, opera on ice, whether Grendel’s part should be sung or spoken, and in what language.

Taymor admitted that it had been a test to keep interest in the project for so long, though she found its content “more potent than twenty years.” She went on to suggest that the significance of the opera had changed; recently, she has seen its political implications in the myth of heroism and the creation of enemies. When asked by Redden about choosing to frame the project as an opera, rather than as the potentially less intensive musical theater, Goldenthal replied that the form stuck from the mid-1990s, when he brought some of the music he had composed to conductor Seiji Ozawa. “Ozawa was adamant,” he said, that it be kept an opera.

From there, the conversation turned to the character of Grendel himself. In the opera’s final version, Grendel’s role is sung in modern English; the chorus performs in Old English. The team made this decision, Taymor said, because they wanted the audience to be able to identify with him. As in the novel, Grendel transforms from a brute monster into a sympathetic figure, more philosophical than vicious. “The monster is really man, of course,” said Taymor. Goldenthal said he composed music that was semi-traditional in order to bring the audience close to the human elements of the story. “Unfortunately for Grendel,” she added, “he was born with an intellect.”

Goldenthal spoke about how he composed music for the climax of the opera. He wanted Grendel’s thoughts to approach the listener like telepathy, and so had them sung, rather than by the soloist, by the chorus. “Opera does two things at once,” he observed. “It encapsulates, and it stretches.” He slowed the quarter note to a beat per second, hoping to achieve the expansive effect of the seminal moments in one’s life. Beowulf, played by a dancer, moves triple time to this slow music. Grendel is in the “process of coming to understand what has been ordained by fate,” said the composer. The opera itself faced a bittersweet end — three decades in the making, their production was over in four performances. However, Goldenthal took an optimistic stance: “Humans wait seventy years for one decent kiss, so four performances is not bad.”

The group rushed from the Grendel discussion to STREB vs. GRAVITY, a “POPACTION” performance choreographed by Elizabeth Streb. Streb developed POPACTION from dance, and chose the term to bring attention to her high energy, intensely athletic choreographic style. Sharing as much with gymnastics as dance, her performers leap, fall, collide, dive, and run through precisely timed routines that pit them against swinging cinder blocks, tightropes, and a human-sized hamster wheel. For STREB vs. GRAVITY, her performers wore tight, bold suits that accentuated their action-figure parallel. They lunged and caught each other with speed, confidence, and also humor. Streb spliced the routines with video segments that explicitly tied her work to considerations of space and time, and she paired her choreography with pulsing dance music that shook the theater. The kids loved it.

Thursday, July 13th began with introductions and discussion among the participants in the trip. Attendees mentioned the current central concerns of their organizations, which ranged from audience expansion to re-articulating their mission, and from site-specific practice to listener education. The morning continued with a panel discussion featuring three prominent music curators in New York: Ara Guzelimian, former Senior Director at Carnegie Hall, Ethel Raim, Artistic Director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, and Bill Bragin, Director of Joe’s Pub. John Schaefer, host of WNYC’s “New Sounds” and “Soundcheck,” moderated the discussion.

The curators spoke about their work as forming differing links in the vast musical web in the city and beyond. Raim emphasized how embedded her work is in community, and excitedly described the validation that her Center’s programming offered to immigrant artists. Bragin spoke about his work in terms of making intimate concerts with established artists available, as well as offering opportunities to emerging artists. He sees Joe’s Pub as a place for “hyphenated,” or cross-genre music. Guzelimian began by pointing out the healthy contradiction of Carnegie Hall: it represents the high classical tradition, but it is also a very democratic institution. He offered by way of example a 1912 “Concert of Negro Music.” Together, they discussed the pleasure of, in Guzelimian’s words, “the risk well-taken,” such as when a complicated artist brings together different audiences for a very live concert.

The concert Thursday evening was indeed live. Goran Bregovic’s Wedding and Funeral Orchestra, an enormous ensemble with a brass band, a male chorus, a string section, and two female soloists, all driven by a singing percussionist with a bass drum and Bregovic himself outfitted like a rock star with a white suit and cobalt blue electric guitar, were welcomed with Beatles-esque cheers by their audience. Bregovic is a household name in the Balkans; he has composed for the likes of Cesaria Evora and Iggy Pop. This was his group’s first appearance in New York. Indeed, the concert felt like a sort of comfortable rock show, with young women shouting, getting up to dance, and leading a parade of revelers around the concert hall as the band toured through their two albums. Most of the force of the music flowed from the indefatigable drummer and the burly brass band. They blasted away while Bregovic sang or shimmied his shoulders. He played a gracious encore and roped the audience into yelling “Charge!” infantry-style, on his count.

Friday morning, PMP’s group piled into a bus and headed to Coney Island. On the boardwalk, Maureen Sullivan, Director of External Affairs at Creative Time, gave a personal tour of “The Dreamland Artist Club.” Creative Time is a non-profit organization that supports public art. Their Dreamland Artist Club brought together a wealth of emerging painters, mostly from New York, to paint new handmade signs for the carnival games and vendors. The hand-painted sign, she told the group, are a long-standing tradition at Coney Island. In addition to the signs, Creative Time commissioned an enormous mural from Os Gemeos, twin brothers from Brazil, who executed a whimsical dreamscape in finely detailed spray paint. After such edification, the tour headed for a walk down the beach and a trip to both Coney Island Museum and famed freak show.

The evening continued at The Stone, a bare-bones concert venue founded by John Zorn where 100% of ticket revenue goes to the musicians. The concert featured bassist Devin Hoff and guests, a young group of experimental musicians including Ches Smith on drums, Andrea Parkins on accordion, piano, and electronics, and Jessica Pavone on viola. Dissonant and cerebral, the music made quite a counterpoint to the afternoon. They played well together, bringing an air of explorative focus to the room.

Saturday, July 15th, the final full day of the trip, was packed with speakers and concluded with the dramatic Grendel. In the morning, representatives of the French and Dutch consulates’ gave informative presentations on what kinds of artistic activities and collaborations they support, and how. Cees de Bever, Director for Performing Arts for the Consulate General of the Netherlands, and Emmanuel Morlet, who serves as both Director of Music at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Program Officer at the French-American Fund for Contemporary Music, described their work in supporting programming that highlights their nations’ artists. Following their presentations, culture staff from The Pew Charitable Trusts gave a brief news update on their projects, especially those of the Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage. New forms of support are on offer through small interdisciplinary professional development grants, and both a marketing initiative and software-training program through the Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative.

John Schaefer then moderated another panel, this time with soprano Harolyn Blackwell, saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, and guitarist Bryce Dessner. Each musician, to some degree, blurs the boundaries of his or her primary genre. Blackwell, who has sung with the Metropolitan Opera, noted that she started in musical theater and conceives of herself under a more general heading. “I’m a performer,” she said. Mahanthappa, who is usually branded a jazz performer, feels that the genre connotes a lot of things that don’t fit with his musical interests. More significant to his identity as a musician, he said, is as a first-generation American. Dessner plays guitar in both the indie rock band The National and in a classically-trained group called Clogs. The National, he said, can fill a thousand seats. This is not the case with Clogs, but in the concert halls where that ensemble performs, they’re able to explore more conceptually.

The musicians considered an array of examples of crossover artists, shows, and projects. Dessner mentioned Sufjan Stevens, a friend and indie musician who’s being appreciated as a composer. Likewise, Mahanthappa’s best friend Vijay Iyer is known as a boundary-blurring jazz pianist and multimedia aficionado. Harolyn recalled her experience learning the musical Sweeney Todd and her surprise at the real difficulty of the music. Schaefer pointed out that a rock musician plays the leading role in the current production. Mahanthappa described his recent collaboration with an Indian classical saxophonist named Kadri Gopalnath in an expanded ensemble with drumset, electric guitar, and mrigindgam. Each musician shared excerpts of her or his work: Mahanthappa played from a live recording of the Gopalnath collaboration; Blackwell played a gorgeous excerpt of her singing “Summertime,” and Dessner played tracks of both of his bands. In the afternoon, the group attended a panel discussion on STREB vs. GRAVITY with Streb; choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer; Jennifer Tipton, lighting designer and Professor at the Yale University School of Drama, and a friend of Streb’s named Gordon. Streb made several observations about working with and against traditions in the performing arts. “I pretend that I have more control over you in a darkened space,” she said. She said she deliberately turns up the volume on the music because she wants young people in the house. “More is more,” she affirmed. “Here in New York, I figured, what the hell. I wouldn’t be that careful with the audience.”

Throughout the discussion, Streb displayed a simultaneously irreverent and dedicated attitude, tossing off lines like, “I do anything I want for as long as it interests me,” while meaning it in earnest, and going on to add, “My job as an artist is to stay on the subject that most fascinates me.” For one, she is interested in physics and “inherent timing that tells the truth.” These classics of movement, including velocity, momentum, and acceleration, form the foundation of her creative process. At the same time, she hopes to make a certain homage to the factory worker in the danger and precision of her style of choreography.

The final event of the PMP professional development trip was a visit to the opera. Grendel featured a masterful performance by Eric Owens in the title role, a cameo appearance by Denyce Graves as a nonplussed dragon, an equally brief but stunning appearance by the dancer Desmond Richardson as Beowulf, and fine performances by tenors Richard Croft and Jay Hunter Morris, as well as soprano Laura Claycomb. The opera begins late in Grendel’s life, though it flashes back to traumas of childhood and the rampages of his earlier adult life. Grendel’s fellow creatures, whom he abandons, including his mother, were particularly moving, sad yet elegant hybrids of, perhaps, trees and gazelles. The existential villain blustered, railed, and moped his way through his rivalry with society and offered the audience a striking and sophisticated journey to his inevitable end.

PMP hosts an annual large-scale professional development trip to New York on an annual basis. Last year included Robert Wilson’s I La Galigo, Sunny Murray at the Village Vanguard, Merce Cunningham’s Ocean, and Basil Twist’s La bella dormente nel bosco. In 2004, participants saw the American Composers Orchestra with eighth blackbird, a jazz organ summit at the Iridium, a concert of traditional Mexican music at Town Hall, and Sweeney Todd at the New York City Opera.