Category: Arts

REVIEW: Complete Solo Violin Sonatas of Eugene Ysaÿe Presented by SMTD Violinists

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To celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Ysaÿe’s Six Sonatas for the violin, 13 students studying under Professors Danielle Belen, Aaron Berofsky, David Halen, and Fabiola Kim gave an outstanding performance of the complete set on Monday, November 20th in the Stamps Auditorium on North Campus.

The violin is most commonly seen in an orchestra or accompanied by a pianist. Ysaÿe’s sonatas, however, only showcase the violin. His work highlights the raw beauty and power a talented musician can bring out of such a small instrument. The music made full use of what the violin has to offer through double stops, chords, harmonics, and more, all techniques difficult to master because the slightest tilt of the bow or millimeter difference between the fingers can taint the sound. When Professor Belen and Professor Kim opened the event, they said this was a rare performance only made possible because of the talent that SMTD has.

It was my first time listening to Ysaÿe’s sonatas except for a brief video clip I saw of Maxim Vengerov playing a passage in Sonata No. 3 in D minor, “Ballade,” op.27. It’s a gorgeous movement that has a consistent melodic theme with different variations, but unlike Vengerov’s fierce interpretation, the student soloist Yuchen Cao had a much more gentle and relaxed approach, almost as if he were stroking the strings with his bow.

Sonata No. 2 in A minor, op. 27 had a few elements that pleasantly surprised me. In the II movement, Malinconia, the soloist uses a mute, a tool that string players put on the bridge of their instrument to create a fuzzier sound. Similarly, the III movement, Danse des Ombres, began with pizzicato, a technique where the player strums the strings with their fingers. Both were fun and interesting additions that contrasted the heavier or brighter music that violinists tend to emphasize in solo works.

The last act performed by Tianyu Lin simply blew me away. His technique, the vibrato, the intonation, and the tone, were perfect, making his double stops and chords beautifully ring and synchronize. The precision he had when scaling the fingerboard from its lowest to the highest range was flawless. I honestly feel like I was more enamored by his skill and talent than the music.

Symphonies and concertos are all lovely, but it was a nice change of pace to listen to a collection of Sonatas live. I’ve always been aware that the music department at UofM is top-tier, but this event let the individuals who make up the department shine.

REVIEW: Digital Engrams by Gabriela Ruiz

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L.A. artist Gabriela Ruiz is a self-taught multimedia artist whose sculptural pieces blur the line between the virtual and the real. I watched Gabriela talk at the Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series earlier this month and I was immediately captivated by her distinctly Gen Z artistic voice. Ruiz is unafraid to confront questions that are still emerging in our culture, such as: what does identity look like for digital natives? Decorated in vibrant colors, lush textures, and a tangle of animated pixels, her art captures the experience of being online, particularly the struggle of navigating memories and identity amidst virtual chaos.

An engram is a trace of memory; a digital engram, then, is a memory stored in an artificial code. Digital Engrams is an exhibition tucked into the Institute for the Humanities Gallery, occupying one beautiful room. Red walls drench the space in color, contrasting against the bright greens and psychedelic lights of Ruiz’ geometric sculptures. Built into and around the sculptures are swirls, soft grassy forms, collages of screens, and interactive audio-visual tools, forming an immersive experience that teeters between the natural and unnatural. Not only is her work multimedia, but it is multidimensional— it is in two, three, and four dimensions, containing everything from time-based media to stationery sculptures. It’s a satisfying installation because of the sheer variety of forms Gabriela Ruiz incorporates into the space.

 

As I walked around the space, watching the screens’ surreal montages and cryptic messages, I felt immersed in the hypnotism and strangeness of Ruiz’ digital world. The colors, textures, and sounds were overstimulating in a way that was familiar, echoing the feeling of everything happening all at once in digital space. The decontextualized montages and projections lend the exhibition a feeling of absurdity and disorientation. Still, these feelings are overwhelmed by fascination; I resonate with the organic, grassy forms lying near the digital structures because I am always trying to reconcile my “organic” identity with my digital identity; I resonate with the confused chaos and ephemerality of the mosaics of screens, representing moments passed and immediately forgotten but always preserved in a web of data; really, I resonate with Ruiz’ ever-changing sense of belonging in a world of overstimulation and non-stop movement.

My only complaint about this exhibition is that it isn’t bigger— I would have loved to explore an even larger room, a maze full of abstract structures and glitchy footage, as if exploring the depths of Gabriela Ruiz’ mind. I personally believe it is hard to make art about the digital world without the vastness and clutter of it drowning out the meaning; Gabriela Ruiz, on the other hand, approaches the subject beautifully. Her art is abstracted enough to be open-ended, simple enough to be digestible, and just colorful enough to be entrancing without being nauseating. She finds the balance between the tangible and the digital, creating a physical map of a futuristic generational struggle.

Digital Engrams by Gabriela Ruiz is a free exhibition at the Institute for the Humanities Gallery at 202 S. Thayer. It can be seen through December 8th and is open 9-5 on weekdays.

REVIEW: Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra’s Music from Video Games

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On Saturday, November 17th at the Michigan Theater, the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra held a concert called Music from Video Games, which was the opening night of their 2023-2024 Pops season of performances. They played various arrangements and medleys of the original soundtracks of Super Mario Bros., Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, Halo: Reach, and more. I love playing video games and I’ve always enjoyed concerts more when I was familiar with the music, but even for the music from games I haven’t played before like Metroid or Mega Man, I still had a good time. 

In addition to having music unique to each specific game, video game franchises such as Pokémon, Mario, Zelda, etc. all have iconic tunes for various occasions: healing, leveling up, losing a life, opening a chest, and many more. It’s similar to how McDonald’s has their famous jingle “I’m Lovin’ It”. The music is a core part of the game; listening to it is enough to embody the experience of playing it. The arrangements and medleys created a fun blend of familiarity and anticipation that made it super exciting whenever my favorite melodies came up.

The best part of the night for me was the concertmaster’s solo which was a bittersweet rendition of The Legend of Zelda’s main theme. The entire medley included OSTs from some throwback games like Spirit Tracks (2009) to the more recent Breath of the Wild (2017). It took me a bit to even realize the music was from Spirit Tracks until I heard the percussion using instruments to replicate the sounds of a train traveling on railroad tracks. My only wish is that there was a bigger feature of Zelda’s theme, perhaps with another violin solo or even better, a harp solo.

Music truly has such a big impact on the gaming experience and is actually something I listen to in my free time. For people who don’t have much experience with video games, it may seem bizarre, but I highly recommend listening to some tunes from Zelda as a start. It was genuinely a great event and I’d love to come back again next year.

 

REVIEW: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

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7:30pm • Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2023 • Arthur Miller Theater

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, a multimedia, experimental theater performance which I experienced last Wednesday, told the true story of iconic Iranian pop star Fereydoun Farrokhzad’s unsolved murder. At the same time, many stories collided to provide context for and complicate the idea of “solving” a murder mystery. The performance challenged the idea of “knowing” itself, contending with the maxim: “The more you know, the more you understand.” 

This performance was the third in a trilogy written by the Javaad Alipoor Company, named for the show’s co-writer and artistic director (as well as performer), Javaad Alipoor, a British-Iranian artist. At the beginning of the performance, Alipoor spoke to the audience and described himself as a bridge between the audience and the reality of the Iranian diaspora, one which would help us better “understand” a reality potentially foreign to ourselves. Alipoor wove his story and his heritage into the fabric of the performance, winding it around that of Farrokhzad. He also brought in another thread through his collaboration with Raam Emami, better known as King Raam, an Iranian/Canadian musician whose podcast, Masty o Rasty, has a cult following among Persian-speakers and has been streamed more than 20 million times. The show used a combination of media, including spoken word, video, and true-crime podcast to bring the three men’s stories together. 

As I referenced earlier, Alipoor prefaced the show by speaking on our constant desire to know things, in order to understand the world better, and how modern technologies like Wikipedia can serve that desire. For a moment of audience participation, Alipoor asked us all to get out our phones and use Wikipedia to look up a word shouted out by the audience: “cuscus,” a kind of Australian possum. He had us skim the page and click on the first link that looked interesting, and continue doing so, for a minute. He then used this activity to challenge the idea that reading anything on the Internet, or gaining any kind of knowledge, will necessarily allow us to understand another reality. By framing the performance in this way, Alipoor challenged the proposition that by watching a multimedia performance about the murder of Fereydoun Farrokhzad, we would somehow “understand” his murder, or the broader set of stories which form the Iranian diaspora. 

I found this performance completely fascinating, and it made me think more deeply about how I consume and use information in my daily life. For me, it highlighted the importance of cultural humility: a balance between awareness and appreciation of other ways of being, and the knowledge that we can never truly understand another’s experiences. In the absence of understanding, empathy is essential. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World pointed out that even in our highly digital, information-saturated lives, there are some who have been made invisible to us, and it is our obligation to be aware of (and assist in) their struggles.

REVIEW: The Inspired Show

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Every fall semester, Kappa Phi Lambda Sorority, Inc. hosts the Inspired Show; this year it was on Saturday, November 11th from 4-6 PM at the Ross Robertson Auditorium. On Instagram (@umichkpl), the sorority said this event “seeks to showcase a variety of cultural performances, mixing modern and traditional elements to bring Michigan exposure to various Asian performing arts,” which it certainly did.

There were 8 performances. In order they were:

Female Gayo (@femalegayo)

Photonix (@umphotonix)

Kappa Phi Lambda Sorority, Inc. (@umichkpl)

DB3 (@db3_umich)

Seoul Juice (@seouljuice.umich)

VeryUs (@veryus.umich)

Revolution (@revolutionyoyo)

Moli (@moli.umich)

K-Motion (@kmotion)

I’ve watched and reviewed the majority of these groups before, many of which performed at Celebrasia. However, although the Inspired Show was only a week later, Female Gayo had a completely new set that ended with an original choreography they made to the song Money by Lisa from Blackpink and had the fun addition of shooting dollar bills into the air at the end.

Photonix is a crowd favorite and I wish I got to see more of them. They use glow-in-the-dark items to create rhythmic visual art by manipulating neon lights to music in pitch blackness. Much of the choreography involves teamwork, which is super impressive since the team must work together without being able to see. My favorite parts are when they hit the floor to change colors on a beat drop. Unfortunately, I couldn’t capture their performance well enough on camera, so take the chance to see them in person if you can!

I saw the sisters of Kappa Phi Lambda perform at the Yardshow, but they prepared two additional choreographies for their event: hip-hop and cultural. Their cultural dance is pictured above and it was the highlight of the show for me. Many groups use fans or umbrellas as props, but it was the first time I’ve seen the beautiful white and red long sleeves they wore. In addition, the music they used was purely instrumental, which was a nice contrast to the other music throughout the show. It truly felt like a cultural dance rather than a dance that just uses cultural props.

The Ross Robertson Auditorium is a nice venue; the only thing I wish is that the lighting had a spotlight on the stage to give it a more immersive atmosphere. Nevertheless, it was nice being in a new and comfortable environment.

Although there are a lot of parallels to Celebrasia, I recommend attending the Inspired Show. It’s a good opportunity to see different performers, such as Photonix and Moli, and new choreographies like Female Gayo’s. All proceeds are donated to the Ann Arbor Community Center, so you can make a difference and have fun at the same time.

REVIEW: The Silence of the Lambs

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Every so often, the Michigan or State Theater will screen a classic— last Thursday, it was The Silence of the Lambs, the quintessential 1991 psychological horror, directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. I went into the screening without any expectations, knowing only that the film involved a cannibalistic serial killer fittingly named Hannibal and I could probably expect gore. The horror was done incredibly well, but the genius of The Silence of the Lambs is that the gore and terror of murder were only a fraction of the film’s emotional appeal. Demme fills each scene with the psychological unease of reality as the story follows an FBI trainee, Clarice, who is constantly shown to be looked down upon or disrespected because she is a woman. The script declares this outright with creepy remarks from higher-ups and even from Hannibal himself, but this is also accomplished with careful framing: throughout the movie, close-ups force us to stare into the eyes of men as Clarice sees them, hauntingly blank or grotesquely hungry, eyes either pointing condescendingly down at the camera or unnervingly straight into our own. Clarice is often alone, often being hit on or disregarded by serial killers and FBI agents alike, and cannot avoid it despite her skillful maneuvering of misogynistic encounters. This inspires a very real fear rooted in our awareness of her vulnerability. We’re quick to doubt the intentions of the film’s men— which is where the character of Hannibal becomes complicated, who should be the easiest to distrust.

Clarice and Hannibal are expertly crafted, and their relationship keeps us on our toes. Close-ups of Hannibal, played perfectly by Anthony Hopkins, reveal his sunken features, his icy and unblinking stare, and the sense that every word is part of a secret, sinister plan; close-ups of Clarice reveal unwavering confidence and sly intelligence. The interrogation scenes between the two are laden with tension and electricity, the investigation unfolding to be double-sided as Hannibal and Clarice race to break each other down. As the film progresses, this relationship becomes tangled and unclear; despite being the most clearly deranged and untrustable character, Hannibal treats Clarice with more respect and curiosity than the rest of her peers. The psychological horror of the film lives largely in this relationship as we struggle to decode Hannibal’s intentions and predict his next move.

The Silence of the Lambs is evenly polished: the score is haunting but not overbearing, each scene is intentional, and moments of crude humor balance the gore. I can see how this film earned so many awards and became a classic— it has a cinematic simplicity familiar to the 90s, attaining the perfect balance of explaining some while leaving some to the imagination. Besides the more fast-paced third act, our fear relies on insinuations about what happened or what’s going to happen, close shots of corpses and bloody nail marks down a wall. The only point of the film that left a sour taste in my mouth was the film’s handling of Buffalo Bill, a serial killer who believes he is transgender and who multiple characters claim isn’t truly transgender, but rather psychologically confused and tormented on a more complex level. As much as Buffalo Bill is distanced from the transgender community, described as obsessed with transformation and envious destruction rather than conventions of gender, his portrayal aligns too closely with common stereotypes about transgender women being deceitful predators. The social commentary is fitting for the time of its release, and it is nuanced, but given this film’s insane popularity, it’s inevitable that some audiences would fit this portrayal into pre-existing biases and fail to critically analyze the character.

I loved the experience of watching this movie for the first time in a small theater; the audience was visibly excited, gasping at gory shots and laughing at absurd one-liners. The big screen amplified the intensity of close-ups and the architecture of the old theater amplified the nostalgia of the early 90s. Keep your eyes peeled for the next screening of a cult classic in downtown Ann Arbor, and keep a weekend night open so you can catch one; student tickets are only $8.50!