Who: The Steel Wheels (http://www.thesteelwheels.com/home)
What: Concert
Where: The Ark
When: Friday, Feb. 14, 2014. Show starts at 8pm, doors open at 7:30pm.
After enthralling audiences across the country with their original Bluegrass/Newgrass music, it is no surprise that The Steel Wheels have sold out the Ark for their Valentines Day show. Combining old Bluegrass tradition with their unique innovative sound, The Steel Wheels join Meenonite 4 part harmonies with fiddle, bass, mandolin and tenor resulting in a original take on Americana music. Maverick Magazine says “Passionate music like this cannot be ignored….it demands to be embraced” and clearly it has, as The Steel Wheels have been selling out venues around the country as they promote their new CD No More Rain.
Seeing Coriolanus at the Michigan Theater was definitely a good decision. The acting was spectacular, of course. A cast of greats including Tom Hiddleston and Mark Gatiss left the little Donmar Warehouse with queues of people camping out overnight to buy tickets to the show. The audience in the screening of this production probably mirrored the Donmar’s usual audience for the show: half an older crowd who enjoy Shakespeare, and the other half a crowd of young women who enjoy Tom Hiddleston (I would like to include myself in both of these categories). Hiddleston’s portrayal of Caius Martius Coriolanus left nothing to be desired as his acting ran the spectrum of emotions: a ruthless soldier who would like nothing more than to add one more man’s blood to his sword, to a son pleading for comfort and compassion from his mother. He carried the show, and wasn’t afraid to get dirty.
The Donmar is a great example of the kinds of theaters in which I prefer to see Shakespeare performed. It is a thrust stage (the audience sits on three sides), and a small space with limited seating. Shakespeare, to me, is best seen and understood in an intimate setting, and I believe this held true for Coriolanus. For most people the language takes a little getting used to, but this was achieved quickly with a close-up view of the actors. The smaller stage is also able to take more risks. The set was minimal: the concrete brick wall of the theater painted red and black and littered with graffiti, a ladder permanently fixed on the stage reaching higher than the audience could see, chairs for the actors to sit in while not in the scene, and a red square painted freshly on the stage floor during every performance.
Red was the color of the show. It first appears as it’s being painted on the stage, and next when Martius returns from slaughtering hoards of Rome’s enemies. He’s covered in blood to the point of excess in my eyes, and to the point that he can barely speak or see because so much fake blood has been poured on his head and is dripping in Tom Hiddleston’s eyes. Naturally, to get that blood off of him, water falls from the ceiling onto the stage in a stream steady enough to clean him up so that his face is visible.
Photo via mail.com
This is the kind of risk a smaller theater can take that will pay off, and it is executed brilliantly. It has a strong impact, but also doesn’t require a big scene change to accomplish. Sure, the stage gets wet, but they can get some actors with squeegee-like mops to clean it off while another scene is taking place. The stage floor became a set piece in this production, constantly being redecorated with different red objects from flower petals to blood.
I was very unfamiliar with the story of the play upon arrival but the minimal set, the careful portrayals from the actors, and the close proximity of the action allowed me to come away from Coriolanus quite moved. It was an excellent production, and I’m glad that National Theatre Live was able to provide me and many others the opportunity to see it.
These animated films featured a mixed bag in terms of origin, tone, genre, and visual quality.
One film was in a post-industrial style, using currently- common animation style (similar to Pixar, at least to my eye), and depicted robots as humane beings and animals. This film was about the everlasting friendship between a robotman and a robotdog, and the loyalty binding them. Another was more pencil-sketched, all in black and white, and quite dark in tone, about a feral child who, after being taken and sent to school by a hunter, escapes a civilized life through a mystical, transcendental dissolution of his material body. As the feral boy dissolves, he morphs through several configurations as various wild animals, finally becoming rain for the forest and creatures.
One film is about a squirrel searching for a scarf, encountering a handful of forest creatures during his search, and aiding them through philosophical conversations, offering his counsel. Finally the squirrel realizes the world will end eventually and that his scarf doesn’t matter, and is soon killed in a freak accident. This film expresses a combination of darkness and playfulness uncommon in popular animation. I loved the wisdom of the moral, that one may spend their lives philosophizing, but in the end, life is precious and fragile. Another film is a meditation on Japanese folklore. In Japan, a caption says, unused or misused objects carry trapped spirits. During the film, a man is stranded in a hut in the jungle and cannot escape until he puts a handful of neglected materials to use. These objects are personified throughout the film, and mutual gratitude is expressed at the end. Finally, in a British film, a witch and her cat travel around, showing compassion toward various forest creatures, and inviting them to ride on the witch’s broom, although there is not ample space. A dragon tries to eat the witch and the forest creatures band together to scare off the dragon and save the witch.
These synopses depict a clear theme in this year’s animated shorts : a celebration of the individual nature, and a prioritization of one’s material and spiritual freedom and present-mindedness. As I had anticipated, the general tone was brighter than non-animated shorts, but I was pleasantly surprised and impressed by the depth and dynamic of moral and emotional material. A few of these films are unapologetically inspired by classic folklore (the British and the Japanese especially), and most involved mystical elements. These animated films used technology and gorgeous artwork to bring sequences of images into the mind’s eye, otherwise impossible for the viewer to experience. These images enabled emotional and moral experiences, equally unique and rare.
This collection of foreign shorts is an intense experience. The primary characters in each, respectively . A dying child wants to know his fate in the afterlife, and a hospital janitor risks his job to save his soul with a fable. A man in a straightjacket proves to a skeptical psychiatrist that he is God. A woman and her children are frightened for their lives as they attempt to flee from an abusive father. A husband and wife are doctors in a war-ravaged country and become subject to terrible violence and assault, ultimately choosing the path of compassion. Lastly, a much-appreciated comedy about a wife’s struggles to manage her family’s preparation and arrival for a friend’s birthday party.
Perhaps the theme of this year’s foreign Oscar shorts is domestic issues and death — that was my impression, at least, on a more shallow level. But on a deeper level, perhaps this year’s foreign shorts are inspired by questions of empathy for the “Other.” In most of these stories, a failure to act with empathy toward an adversary or companion resulted in a regrettable situation. In multiple stories, a protagonist risks everything in the attempt to avoid such a regret. The subject matters of these stories — sexual and physical violence, domestic struggles, family, sickness, death, war, hierarchal and institutionally-driven repression — these are some of the most prominent themes I gathered from the films. The overarching expression through these short films, however, is a striding yearning toward compassion and peace.
These films are unapologetic in their rawness, vividness, and depth. I cried once, and grimaced a good amount, and held my date’s hand a little too hard through some tense passages. The general level of intensity remained consistent, excepting brief moments. These films were made by risk-takers with large moral and expressive aspirations, and so it makes sense they are critically celebrated.
This Sunday, February 9 at 7:00PM the Donmar Warehouse’s production of Coriolanus will be shown at the Michigan Theater.
Broadcast by National Theatre Live, this Shakespeare play stars Tom Hiddleston (probably best known for his role of Loki in the Marvel franchise) as the title character who must defend the people of his city from imminent attack while also addressing their call for political change. This production is sure to be an intense spectacle not to be missed.
Tickets to see the recorded stage production at the Michigan Theater are still available and can be found through the University Musical Society here.
Today was a fitting day for Sharon Krebs to give her lecture on Singing Like a Nightingale. Today the Moore Building was abuzz with 315 perspective students and their families waiting to audition for the School of Music, Theatre and Dance. As the perspectives lined the halls and filled the practice rooms, current students did their best to hide the stolen bagels from the auditionee welcome table and their displeasure with the newly claustrophobic halls. It was after pushing my way through the clumps of auditionees lining the main hallway that I entered Moore Rm. 2038, the room in which the talk was to take place.
I say it was fitting day for the lecture because of the path that Sharon Krebs took with her research of the nightingale metaphor. Being a prolific metaphor within musical and Germanic literature it was interesting that Krebs focused her research on the concept of art as artificial in comparison to the concept of the nightingale as the pinnacle of all that is natural.
Kreb’s began her lecture by informing the audience that she began her research while she was in Germany observing masterclasses. In one of these masterclasses a young Mezzo Soprano came under criticism for her technique, and after taking the advice of the teacher she sang beautifully but exclaimed, “I feel like a robot!” Further, Kreb was exploring a German archive and discovered a number of reverent letters to famous opera singers of the 19th century which praised their ability to communicate with the audience, and then bestowed the highest compliment on the singer: that of comparing them to a nightingale.
During her lecture, Kreb’s noted that in modern literature there is only one singer who has been called a nightingale, soprano Jessye Norman. However, this praise came from a fellow musician and not a reviewer. Modern reviewers have tended to shy away from critique of the existential moments within a performance, focusing their praise (or dissatisfaction) around the vocal aesthetic and technique of the singer. It is in that focus in which the nightingale is lost to modern music, because the nightingale is that of the existential, providing musical moments in which the vocalist becomes the mouthpiece for thoughts in the hearts of the audience.
The idea of the singer as the mouthpiece of the audiences’ inner thoughts and desires revisits the old thought which much of mainstream music has abandoned ;the idea that a performance is not about musical aesthetic but the communication with the audience. This communication allows the performer to rise above its class, becoming exceptional by becoming different. It is in this difference in which existential musical moments occur and a performer loses the artificiality that is inherently attached with art (most people don’t sing an Italian aria to convince their father to let them marry), and becomes a nightingale.
