So it’s the day of the election, which means that I’m going to be spending a long night staring at my computer screen refreshing Huffington Post and probably spending too much money on comfort foods and possibly ordering pizza house. But y’know. That’s pretty much every Tuesday night for me, except for that election part.
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The one thing that really makes me feel so strange about the election is how ridiculously unifying it is. I mean, to be totally fair it’s not unifying at all, but consider for a second that most everyone in the country has something to say about two men. There are two men out there right now that are being talked about more than anything else. You say the word “Romney” or “Obama” and it feels like you are speaking a raindrop that has traveled halfway across the world to fall upon your tongue. You know these men. You probably don’t know them, but you do. You have judgements on their character, on their opinions, and probably know at least something about their respective dogs.
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It strikes me sometimes that the world is global and that the butterfly effect is real. It strikes me sometimes that I am a person within an ecosystem within an ecosystem within a way of life within the world and I have a part in this reality. It’s a tremendous honor to be a human being and be where I am now, but it is a tremendous responsibility. It’s in many ways the honor I feel as an artist. I’m called to be something that is hugely important, to be a person that expresses and comments and keeps check on and celebrates and frightens and learns and cries. It’s an incredible responsibility. It’s an incredible task.
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I hope the election goes the way I want it to, but if it doesn’t, the world will keep flying through space and turning and turning and turning. Four years will pass and I will experience this strange awareness again, this odd overwhelming mix of duty, awe, and being totally overwhelmed. I’m proud to have taken part in America’s democratic process and I think that’s a pretty incredible feeling. I also think it’s worth taking note of the huge sphere of influence this election has over our lives. Not in the policy that comes from it, but from the social influence of campaigns and partisanship. I don’t know if I like that influence but I don’t really know if I like the influence that my stress eating habits have over my life, either. But so it goes. Another day, more food, more music, more life.
So a hurricane approached the east coast last night and I really have no concept of what that means. I don’t know how I feel about that. I’ve been in Michigan my whole life and occasionally I’ve known how it feels to fear weather. I’ve known how it feels to be in a basement with a flashlight and a radio and I’ve known how to listen like my life is in danger. But it never was actually in danger. Really, I’ve only rehearsed the idea. And so I don’t know what to think.
I’ve seen the pictures from last night and they frighten me but they fascinate me. Seeing a place like New York, an infallible, imaginary city to me, fall victim to something as universal and equalizing as the weather, it’s scary. And it’s engrossing. And it’s confusing. But I feel scared for everyone out there and I feel like Michigan is a pretty great and safe place to be and it’s weird to know that just a bit farther east the world is different and that cold rain falling on their face in the morning is the least of their concerns. But I suppose that is always true, hurricane or not.
All of this hurricane talk reminds me of Hurricane Katrina, for some reason. I distinctly remember standing in the remnants of the hurricane in front of my house in a small town in southeast Michigan and thinking how strange it is that this same storm was just destroying a part of the country and now it is politely raining and helping my flowers grow. It was a weird feeling, like being numb and knowing that something hurts, but not actually being able to feel that hurt.
But Hurricane Katrina reminds me of songs. And specifically it reminds me of a composer who’s name is Ted Hearne and wrote a song cycle about the hurricane called Katrina Ballads (You can stream the whole thing here). He used a text entirely comprised of primary sources from the reaction around the event (Including George Bush’s famous, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” and Kanye West’s “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”).
It’s an incredible piece of music and theatre and it is a fantastic look into raw human reaction. Sometimes all we can do to make sense of things is just to say what’s on our mind. And hope it makes something clear.
I love the morning. I don’t love getting up in the morning, but I really love the morning. The air is different in the morning. It is dense with possibilities. Maybe I’m a gushing romantic, but the air makes getting up a whole lot easier.
This past Friday I took a bus up to North Campus, my lukewarm tea in hand, and walked to the Walgreen Drama Center. It was rainy, but not yet miserable yet. Only a sprinkle. Inside of the Arthur Miller Theatre, there was a large projection screen with the image of a man walking back and forth projected on to it. On the left of the stage was an intricate set up of electronics, to the right, a few miscellaneous items strewn about the floor in a line. I noticed two balls, roughly the size of a bowling ball. One was a globe, and the other was just black.
The Argentinian Dance Company, Grupo Krapp, has been in residence for the past couple weeks. I’ve been sick and busy (for a number of reasons) and couldn’t make the various workshops and talks they had around campus. But this Friday show was my final shot to see them. And so I did.
Grupo Krapp is named after a Samuel Beckett play, Krapp’s Last Tape. This particular play happens to be one of the two Beckett plays I’ve ever seen, which means I was able to brag about this to my girlfriend and pretend that I know more about theatre than her (I don’t). Krapp’s Last Tape is a one man show, a piece about an old man looking back at his life through a serious of tape recordings. The main character, Krapp, makes one recording a year on his birthday, chronicling the events of his life. Before he makes his tape for his 69th birthday, he listens to one from his 39th birthday. It’s a really remarkable and emotional play. Samuel Beckett never struck me as the most inviting or emotional playwright, but in Krapp’s Last Tape, Beckett takes a firm look at life, laughs at its inconsistencies, and cries at its tragedies. I think Grupo Krapp tries to do the same thing.
It’s difficult to call what Grupo Krapp does dance. There was a lot of acting, a lot of feats of physical strength, a lot of multimedia components, but never so much dancing in a traditional sense. In one awkward scene, titled “Duet A,†two dancers paced around stage replicating the first experience they had dancing. Their shoulders were raised, their movements sharp and stiff. It was a peculiar kind of dancing, but after some observation, really quite beautiful. These performers were replicating a beautiful point in life, a point of no expectation and only passion. Or maybe lust. Or maybe boredom. I’m not quite sure. Either way, it was beautiful.
The piece they performed was called “Adonde van los muertos (Lado B).†The performers told us it was about death, but only a in few scenes did the show actually simulate death. The rest of the show was…well, it was incapable of description. It involved a game of soccer played onstage (an audience volunteer joined the cast, as they were down a member). It involved two performers below a large cloth and replicating (to an unsettlingly successful degree) the movements of a horse. It involved a performer simulating the motions of a robot, complete with sound effects. The dialogue was sparse, but biting and confounding. It reminded me very much of the twists of Beckett’s language in “Waiting for Godot†(the other Beckett play that I’ve seen). The piece opened with a projection of a short film, where several people were interviewed about their thoughts concerning death. They asked these interviewees what they imagined death would look like, should it be captured in a physical object. One person said death couldn’t be an object, that death was the opposite of an object. Another paused, perplexed by the question. He quietly answered that death looks like a black ball.
The question of meaning always comes up when I see a production like this. I don’t think I understood a lot of what Grupo Krapp put on stage. I only remarked in the beauty of it, in the entertainment of it, and in the absurdity of it. But when the production finished and all of the cast members had left the stage, I noticed that the black ball that was lying there since the very beginning was still there. They hadn’t oddslot touched it during the whole production. It was subtle. It was small. And it was terrifying. But it made sense. There was indeed a logic to this performance – that was the black ball of death that the young man in the opening sequence had mentioned. The performance didn’t have to mean anything specific. But it meant something. The fact that the work had an internal logic was the important part.
I thought a lot about Grupo Krapp this morning. How they are pushing the boundary of what dance is and what art is and what a performance is. How I would have loved to play soccer with them put probably would have done so horribly that they would have picked someone else instead and started the show over. How they are so incredibly deliciously esoteric and I love it. How the air in that theatre was dense with sunrise and dense with possibility. Maybe I’m a gushing romantic, but the air makes getting up and going off and doing work that much more inspiring and exciting.
I’ve been thinking a lot about performance art lately. This may or may not be related to the fact that I just recently performed in a piece that might be called performance art, but I don’t know for sure. Its a topic that has fascinated me for a long time. In case you don’t know what “performance art” is, here’s how wikipedia defines it:
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or via media; the performer can be present or absent. It can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the performer’s body, or presence in a medium, and a relationship between performer and audience. Performance art can happen anywhere, in any venue or setting and for any length of time. The actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work.
That might be the least helpful definition ever. But it’s ambiguity is central to what makes performance art just so interesting and engaging. It can be anything. There are no rules. Just make some art. And that makes performance art awesome!
And performance art is, like, Yoko Ono's thing. And who doesn't like Yoko Ono?
Perhaps the most well-known of the performance artists (that I’m familiar with) is Laurie Anderson, a wonderful musician/spoken word artist/visual artist/performance artist. She plays the violin, but only sometimes. She also plays the electronics…pretty much all the time.
So is this video performance art? Maybe. You are the audience. You are watching it. But it certainly is recorded and doesn’t exist in space so much. But that distintion really doesn’t matter, I suppose. This song(?) is Anderson’s biggest hit, her breakthrough single. It’s a pretty solid representation of the kind of work she does.
But this is all around the central point which is that I love this. There is so much humanity in it all-it’s just this woman telling a story. But she’s not even telling a linear story, she’s a mother calling for her daughter and then she’s not anymore and superman and wars and what? It’s beautiful though. The music. The words. The vocoder that makes her seem like a human but also not a human and is technology the distance between us or the rope connecting us? It all raises a lot of questions, but questions that don’t necessarily have answer or want to be answered.
Anderson came to the Power Center last year and stupefied me through her piece “Delusion.” It was one of those experiences that I couldn’t quite shake off. I loved the newness of it all, but also the power of it all. She told stories with musica accompaniment for the duration of the entire show. Some were connected, others weren’t. But it created a plot. Not a narrative, but  a sense of emotional journey during the show. I can’t remember the details anymore of it all, but I do remember the feeling after seeing it. Like I found something amazing and whole and unique. Like I witnessed an art form that has never been seen before.
And I suppose that’s what performance art makes me feel like. Each piece is it’s own little world and has it’s own little rules. But it is beautiful. Or at least it is to me.
I’m celebrating by working all day and eating my weight in chocolate, which I have found to always be a great decision regardless of what day it is. Today, I’m listening to music that either 1.Reminds me of bunnies or 2.Reminds me of the life of Jesus Christ. As it happens, there have been a number of Christian classical composers throughout the years (Handel’s wildly popular oratorio, The Messiah, does get played. EVERY. YEAR.) and they do, in fact, write pieces about the life of Christ. And if you really think about the story, there is a lot of dramatic stuff there (man gets crucified, etc…) that a composer can really play with to make this music really quite powerful. So what I’m saying here is that this ain’t your daddy’s contemporary christian rock record. This is music that (I feel) transcends it’s purely religious connotations, to the point where everyone can enjoy it as incredible music.
The other piece I’m looking at today is a piece by Arvo Part, one of the so called “holy minimalists†for his deep christian faith. The piece, Passio, is a setting of the Passion text, and is really quite stunning. He uses repetitive structures throughout the (again, quite long) piece, but this youtube video gives you a nice idea of what it is like. It’s super powerful. Scary at some points, strikingly beautiful at others, but on the whole-a haunting and incredible easter tune. Turn it up and rock out!
So that’s what’s on my playlist for today. Oh yeah. Also this bunny song, for good measure…
May y’all enjoy the weekend and make it through this next week and a half. ALMOST DONE!
There is a Fluxus exhibit up in the Art Museum! And to celebrate, the UMMA has been hosting a variety of Fluxus events in their wonderful space as a means of promoting and expanding the ideas of a very, very unique and wonderful artistic movement. I had the pleasure of attending the premier of Professor Steven Rush’s new opera, U.S. Grant: A Flux-kit Opera as well as a performance of UM-Grad Robert Ashley’s In Memoriam… Kit Carson. But before I get to explaining the greatness of all these operas, you might be wondering…what exactly is Fluxus? What are you talking about?!
I feel like the best answer to your question is just to show you…
Fluxus art is pretty well represented by a performance like this. It was all meant to make you question the boundaries of that which we call “art” and that which we call “life.” This youtube video is an example of a piece called an “event score.” These were “scores” (in the vein of a musical score) that indicated an action to be performed. It could be performed in front of an audience, alone, or not performed at all. It was all part of the art, all the point. Regardless of if you think this kind of thing is art or not (I’ll talk about that in a second…) you’ve gotta hand it to them for being innovative and very…different. And it really hasn’t died out at all-the movement started in the 60s and has continued to be doin’ it’s own experimental thing ever since.
So, these operas that I got to see. The first was the Robert Ashley, a “30 minute long decrescendo,” as Steve Rush described it. And gosh darn it, he was right. The piece itself was a group of 9+ participants sitting in a square around a central table. At prescribed times, they would act out certain actions (telling a story to another actor, putting on a record, clapping, etc…) but all at the same time. The result was a mass of sound-a blur of speech and other noises that started at a small roar and continued until its quiet end. It was fascinating to watch being performed. Downright hilarious at times, and at other points, really quite inviting and captivating. It really made me appreciate the subtleties of the human voice-and how easily speech gets dissolved into a cloud of nonsense. But as I was sitting there I couldn’t help but get incredibly excited by the prospect of this opera. If simply talking to another human being was art what did that mean about my life? What should I be doing differently? What should I be doing with more intent-artistic or otherwise? And that’s the thing I think that is so cool about this Fluxus thing-it asks serious personal questions and might just make you a better person.
But regardless, the Steve Rush opera is next on the queue. This thing was simply fantastic. Perhaps one of the most entertaining performances I’ve been to, ever. The opera itself was created through parameters set up by Rush-the parameters being a board game (“a cross between candyland and monopoly”) which generated all of the content for each of the scenes of the opera. From playing this board game, the performers in the opera (members of the School of Music’s Digital Music Ensemble) were given assignments of material to generate. For instance, a performer might be given a musical number to arrange-they would be given the music (one of 15 civil war songs) and the text (either a random passage from U.S. Grant’s memoirs OR a random passage from Gertrude Stein’s Four in America) and told to somehow combine the two in a unique arrangement. There were also readings of Grant’s personal letters, videos on Grant and his various attributes, and reenactments of important civil war battles/events. But oh, the reenactments. The performers urged the audience members on to join their ranks to create a battle on the stage. I fought for the confederacy and was shoved around by many  union solider. And alas, we lost the war. But such is, I suppose. Regardless it was FANTASTIC fun to join the performers in the opera. It seriously pushed the boundaries of art for me. How can audiences participate in artistic events? Can something be that much fun and still be considered art? Can I be dragged up in front of 50+ people and forced to awkwardly dance the polka and still consider myself an artist?
But all this gets at what I really took away from the evening-that the simple act of questioning is so enormously, vitally, INCREDIBLY important. And Fluxus, in my mind serves to do that. T force us to confront questions that we normally don’t think about. And if you end up on the side of the artist, your mind is expanded! And if you think that this isn’t art, I would urge you to think again, but at least you come out with a stronger resolve in what you believe in. I had a rollicking good time and send my warmest congratulations to Steve Rush, the Digital Music Ensemble, and the UMMA for daring to have such a program put on. To you, gentle reader, I urge you to go to the UMMA and check out this Fluxus exhibit. It’s incredible, inspiring, and beautiful. Go. Go and ask some questions.
