Neha Srinivasan – Page 5

Review: Women’s Glee Club Concert

November 22, 2016November 22, 2016 Neha Srinivasan Leave a comment

This concert was a lovely way to spend a Saturday evening. I enjoyed the range of songs the two choirs chose. The guest choir, a barbershop a cappella group named Voices in Harmony, mostly performed very percussive songs with plenty of the rich lower notes, while the Women’s Glee Club performed more serene songs with higher melodies and not as much of the alto section. This difference added a good variety to the concert. I only wish the theme, Journey On, had fit the subjects of the songs better.

I was, as always, impressed with the entrance of the Women’s Glee Club. They always file onto the risers, stand in straight lines, and then shift as one so that they are arrayed in window formation. I think my favorite song was “Down to the River to Pray,” because at the beginning most of the women were lined along either side of the main floor, so when they started singing it gave the sound a very universal quality and filled the space beautifully. The solos (in “Down to the River to Pray” and “Kyrie”) were all really well done. Midnight Blue, the Women’s Glee Club a cappella group, also performed three numbers. I like that in the songs Midnight Blue performs most everybody gets a solo, which allows a listener to distinguish the different voice timbres that make up the group.

Voices in Harmony was fantastic. I loved the sparkly black tops they all wore, and their enthusiasm was contagious. They began singing while one of their members was introducing them, which I thought was a very nice touch. There was plenty of choreography, making the songs really dynamic, and even when there wasn’t the women were all moving to the beat. My favorite song was “Bottom of the River”: they produced a beautiful beat by slapping the floor, clinking chains, and clapping their hands in something that reminded me of the hand jive from Grease, and they moved around throughout the song. The low notes in that piece, as well as all the others, really stood out to me, and added gravity to the performance.

These two groups each presented a unified front, enhancing the listeners’ experience. They both choreographed their songs, and they blended very well, using the same articulations (for example, in “Jubilate Deo,” sung by the Women’s Glee Club, they had beautiful staccato notes). When they joined to sing “You’re My Best Friend,” the two groups interspersed themselves among each other: I had been expecting them to stand in blocks, and the fact that they didn’t was refreshing and added meaning to the song as well. It was a wonderful performance, and I’m very glad I was able to go.

Preview: Women’s Glee Club

November 18, 2016November 18, 2016 Neha Srinivasan Leave a comment

The Women’s Glee Club Concert is tomorrow! This will be the second time I’ve been to a concert of theirs, and I’m really looking forward to it. The last time I went, I didn’t know what to expect, since I don’t attend choral concerts often, and I enjoyed myself very much. I have a few friends in the club, and I know they do really good work, so I can’t wait to see what they sing tomorrow. I’m also excited to hear the other choir they will be singing with, since I believe logistical issues prevented that from happening the last time.

The concert is Saturday, November 19, at 8pm in Hill Auditorium. Tickets are $5 for students and can be purchased at the door.

Review: Shiva Shakti

November 8, 2016November 8, 2016 Neha Srinivasan 1 Comment

This concert, held on November 5, was organized by SPIC MACAY (Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music And Culture Amongst Youth). While I love seeing student performances, I like that SPIC MACAY brings professional performers to campus because it is also really interesting to compare student work and professional work. This concert was an evening of Odissi dance, which is a classical dance form that originated in the Indian state of Odisha, and featured performances by two Odissi dancers, Dr. Ileana Citaristi and Sreyashi Dey. Interestingly enough, one of the performers, Dr. Citaristi, is of Italian extraction, which is, I think, the first time I’ve encountered a performer of classical Indian arts who is not Indian. Indian classical dance is, more often than not, very heavily based on Hindu mythology, and it was interesting to think about how she would have had to really immerse herself in the religion to gain the understanding of the mythology that an Indian by heritage might have ingrained.

The difference in the two ladies’ styles was another interesting aspect of the performances. Ms. Dey had much more resounding footsteps – it was the first thing I noticed about her technique – and in a dance where one of the main features is the sound of the dancer’s feet on the ground, this was very effective. Dr. Citaristi didn’t step as loudly, and this makes me wonder if, perhaps, the loudness of the footsteps is a personal choice, or something that varies according to the mood of the dance.

In the previous SPIC MACAY-hosted performance I attended, the dancer took time before each dance she did to explain the story she would be illustrating and gestures she would be using to do so. This was done here as well, but not, I think, to the extent of the other performance. This kind of explanation greatly helps an audience, since many are not intimately acquainted with the art form, and allows the audience to spend less time wondering about what is happening, and more time appreciating the dancer’s technique. I also liked that there was a Q&A session with Dr. Citaristi and Sreyashi Dey afterward: I think that is very helpful in gaining a deeper understanding of the art form and the way in which the dancers approach their art.

Review: The Importance of Being Earnest

November 8, 2016November 8, 2016 Neha Srinivasan Leave a comment

I’d never seen any of Oscar Wilde’s work before I went to see The Importance of Being Earnest on Friday, so I didn’t know what to expect. I expected something similar to Wodehouse’s work: In print it has just never produced much amusement for me, but I find the series starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry absolutely hilarious. Something about their acting brings the writing to life. The same happened when I went to see this play, performed by the Rude Mechanicals. First of all, their seven-women-and-one-drag-queen cast was a refreshing take on traditional gender roles. I especially liked one of the first scenes, in which Algernon entered dressed in women’s clothing and then proceeded to change into men’s attire. It’s amazing that such a small thing could be so thought-provoking. I wish there had been more bits like that, because it was hard for me to distinguish what aspects of the play took on a different meaning when the cast was deliberately female than if it had just happened to be women playing men’s roles, which isn’t uncommon.

In terms of the performance itself, the cast did a beautiful job. Their facial expressions, for one, were priceless, as was their timing. Lane’s slight pause before addressing Algernon as “sir,” for example, added humor and some thought on gender roles. Small actions like Merriman and Cecily’s fangirling (as I believe it’s called) over “Ernest’s” arrival added a modern element to the play. Algernon and Jack’s way of stuffing food into their mouths so quickly that they could barely speak was beautifully done. The characters’ absolute bewilderment at the situations they all got themselves into was perfect, and reminded me of Hugh Laurie in the Jeeves and Wooster series. These little things added vivacity to the production, and brightened up dialogue that in print might have come across as dry. Overall, it was a marvelous production, and I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to the work of Oscar Wilde.

Review: Nrityopahara

February 17, 2016February 17, 2016 Neha Srinivasan Leave a comment

On Tuesday at UMMA’s Helmut Stern Auditorium, Dr. Ananda Shankar Jayant performed three pieces of Indian classical dance. The first piece, performed in the bharatanatyam style of dance, was an interpretation of a segment of the life of Rama, an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. The second piece, performed in the kuchipudi style of dance, was a scene from the life of Krishna, another incarnation of Vishnu. The third piece, a bharatanatyam performance with influences from other classical dance styles, was a portrayal of nine different emotions: anger, fear, wonder, disgust, fear, compassion, valor, love, and peace. All three dances were set to music incorporating traditional Indian elements, including flute, violin, drums, cymbals, and vocals (in the first two dances, the vocals were prayers or stories corresponding to the dance, and in the third it was simply syllables, analogous to the Western do-re-mi).

Her performance was the first professional Indian classical dance performance I have seen before, and it was simply spectacular. There were two elements in particular that mesmerized me most: her impeccably timed choreography, and her beautiful facial expressions and body language. Her movements coincided precisely with the music: for example, at one point she portrayed a bow being strung and subsequently breaking. To convey this, she stamped her feet four times, corresponding with four percussive beats in the music, perfectly evoking the sound of snapping wood. I have never noticed that kind of parallelism in the bharatanatyam performances I have seen before, and experiencing that connection between the dance and the music brought another dimension to the performance.

Her body language and facial expressions were similarly eye-opening. Bharatanatyam is a very abstract dance and uses hand gestures to symbolize nouns. Though Dr. Jayant explained the story of each piece and demonstrated some of the key hand gestures before she began, her facial expressions were instrumental in my ability to follow the storyline. For example, the first piece involved a scene in which Rama’s father was forced to send Rama and his brother to fight demons—her brokenhearted face was more touching than any other sorrowful scene I’ve ever seen enacted, and made me want to cry. Similarly, the first piece also included a marriage scene, during which she was portraying two characters at once: Rama and his wife Sita. She gracefully shifted from one persona to another, giving Sita demureness and rapture by keeping her eyes lowered and her head turned to one side, while giving Rama confidence and boldness by keeping her back erect and stance tall.

I could not believe how expressive the performance was. During the brief Q&A session after her performance, during which she talked about everything from the amount of time she spends practicing to her opinion on the role of politics in art, I asked her if she had choreographed all three pieces herself, and she told me she had. This explained the perfect alignment of the music and the choreography as well as the accessibility of her body language, and it only made me more awestruck at her thoughtfulness and thorough attention to detail. It was a fantastic performance, and I was simply bedazzled throughout.

Review: Women’s Glee Club Fall Concert

November 23, 2015November 23, 2015 Neha Srinivasan

That was the first choral concert I’ve ever been to, apart from the combined choir/strings/band concerts at my high school. The first thing I noticed was that they all wore the same outfit, a full-length navy dress with gauzy sleeves. Irrelevant as this may seem, I appreciated this choice greatly. At any performance where there are no costumes, there is almost always a dress code. However, no matter how rigorously everyone follows this dress code, there is always a difference in the end outfit. In a choral performance, where the important entity is the choir as a whole and not the individual singers, the use of a uniform outfit was a very professional choice to make.

The second thing that struck me was how strong the sound was. I’ve really only heard my high school choir before, and while they were musically sound, due to sparseness of numbers and unbalanced parts (two boys to at least seven girls) they often sounded wispy. Which was why I was wondering how substantial the sound of the Women’s Glee Club would be without any male parts to balance out the low range. It turns out they just don’t need any male parts. I’m not surprised, because I know how good their ensemble is, but it was enlightening to realize that even the top vocal range can sound substantial without an equally low range underlying it. This was, of course, due to the fantastic work of the alto section. I only wish they’d been louder or more dramatic so I could have distinguished their parts more precisely; sometimes the sopranos were overpowering, but as I listened I realized that the alto section was providing a beautiful base for the music. Still, the fact that the sopranos were louder was, for the first time, something that didn’t bother me at all—they were wonderful. The concert programme was unique in that it provided the year and majors of all the girls: almost none of the sopranos are music majors, and yet they had such powerful voices. To me didn’t just sound like they’d been training their voices for years (which is probably true), they sounded like they could even have been professional operatic singers.

Midnight Blue, the eight-member a cappella group within the Women’s Glee Club, also performed at the concert. Their segment brought variety to the concert, adding more liveliness to the music as they incorporated popular songs to the performance, and also eliciting laughter from the audience as they performed their parody of “Jessie’s Girl.”

Both groups also added simple choreography to some of their songs. This was the one portion of the concert I had mixed feelings about: it wasn’t always consistent. Given the uniformity of all other aesthetic aspects of the performance (like the dresses), the fact that not everyone was moving their hands in the same way bothered me a little. Of course, this doesn’t mean they were off time—quite the contrary. It was only the preparation for the clap that was different: some girls brought their hands down in between claps while others didn’t, and so on. However, I did ask myself after the performance whether I would have preferred it had they omitted choreography entirely, and I decided that wasn’t what I wanted either. I think the inclusion of the choreography definitely added spice to the concert. One of the songs also had clapping that was deliberately uneven: for the first half of the song, only some of the singers were clapping, and others added in at the end. This is one place where the choreography really worked well, as it did for Midnight Blue’s portion of the concert.

My overall impression was that the singing was reminiscent of a chorus of angels. Since this was solely female voices, and since those are the vocals used in soundtracks whenever sublime experiences need musical accompaniment, that’s the image the concert evoked in my mind. It was beautiful to sit there and listen to their songs charm the audience, especially on a winter day as pristine and sparkling as Saturday was. It was a wonderful way to welcome the first snowfall of the year.