Tag: ums

REVIEW: Home

Joann Leave a comment

# Warning! Spoilers!

Welcome to the review of a performance that I think I will remember for the longest time. Was it the best play ever? I liked it, but I have yet many to come that I haven’t seen yet, so it’s hard to say – so how can I say that I will remember it the most? Because I’m pretty sure that there won’t be many plays where I’m invited to the stage!

The play started with the mimes of the actors where the construction workers were actually building a house. First, it was a steel frame that looked like more of an art exhibition than a house. Then, they started adding walls, doors, and other appliances and wow, it worked! Personally, I was impressed that they managed to make a working tab on stage – where would the water supply have come from? After the house was physically constructed, the actors started to make it a ‘home’ by acting out daily life situations on stage – showering, sleeping, and displaying different emotions. The actors had diverse ethnicity and age, and they acted out different family/friends relationships among them. After the house was mostly constructed, they moved in and out of view through all sorts of places, including the refrigerator and the closet in the wall! The stage design was so interesting to design the route of actors in such a way. There were also light and sound effects to make the construction really seem like home – my favorite was the one where they created night and day by moving a bright light source from the bottom to the top of the stage, hidden away from the audience’s view, to mimic sunlight. The light was a warm yellow-orange color just like the morning sun and it draw long shadows against the structure of the house. That shadow made the scene look so cozy and peaceful, representing the warmth of a home.

The play got more interesting when a young boy actor put on a mask and came down the stage to invite an audience to the stage. He suddenly became the host of the house and greeted every actor as they showed up with gifts to a party hosted in the house. I was wondering if he was an actor secretly in disguise as the audience because everything was so smooth, but my curiosity was solved soon after as I was invited to the stage as well! The boy showed up with a wine and asked me whether I like a party. I said yes and boom! I was wearing a Santa costume and dancing around the stage. The secret was that the actors were giving instructions to the audience on stage. More than 30 people came upstage throughout the show. I’ve never seen anything like it-it was really an innovative performance.

In all, I think the play nailed its proposal to show what a home is consisted of – physical structure, coziness, old personal items, people living and interacting in it with diverse emotions, stories, and memories. Each was explored without breaking up the flow of the performance and delivered vividly. They were emphasized in the last scene where they were gone and only a fan and ripped plastic cloths were flailing in the wind – the emptiness showed that they were what’s making a house a home. Even without the audience coming up stage, this performance was highly delightful to watch and wonder, yet coming up stage made the event more special. Don’t miss your chance if it hits Ann Arbor again. I HIGHLY recommend this performance.

P.S. This will be my last post writing as a Student Art reviewer for this blog. It was great to deliver the news and reviews about local art and performances around here. Keep your love for arts and go check out the local art scenes as much as possible! Go Blue!

PREVIEW: Home

Joann Leave a comment

Come see the interesting and ambitious idea to build a house on stage. The advertisement that this play will feature the making of a real house on stage was enough to make me get the ticket. However, there’s a deeper intention behind why this is being done: the play is supposed to be a question about what makes our home.
A home is an interesting place: it’s people’s most intimate place to rest, yet it doesn’t have to be a fixated area – remember the strange feeling you felt when you haven’t been to a place long but felt so relaxed and comfortable when you’re there. It’s also a reflection of taste-imagine the diversity of dorm rooms. Also, it can be threatened as well, because of social, political reasons, gentrification, or various reasons. Musing about the idea of home shows that it’s an interesting concept with lots of debates to be done on it- come see it done on the stage this Friday and Saturday(April 22th, 23th), at the Power center.

More information about the tickets can be found here.

REVIEW: Takács Quartet with Julien Labro

sophiascribbles Leave a comment

Coming to this performance has reminded me of how remarkably similar listening to new music is to meeting new people. If you come into the interaction without any background knowledge—their origin, their influences, their motive—you might spend the whole time confused, struggling to construct their story from whatever you see at face value, or simply uninterested. It’s the reason why program notes exist, and why I typically like to search for the pieces on Youtube before I hear the performance. Yet, with its mixture of world-premieres, uncommon instrumental combinations, and reimagined pieces, this program definitely challenged typical means of music consumption. 

I was immediately struck by how compact the bandoneon was and how it could achieve such crisp articulation and human-like phrasing. When Labro played, it felt like he was pumping his own breath and soul into the instrument. While the bandoneon is typically associated with tango, Labro also notified us that it was originally intended to play church music in small parishes in Germany. I didn’t quite believe him after he had performed Saluzzi’s Minguito, a groovy, pulsing Argentinian folk music-jazz hybrid incorporating percussive finger tapping against the sides of the instrument. However, his arrangement of Bach’s Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BMV 645 introduced an entirely new color and tone. In contrast to the previous push and pull of these tangled music lines, Labro’s Bach had a rich, organ-like sustain that put each voice in the four-part harmony on equal footing. 

I was also surprised by how naturally the bandoneon fit in with the quartet. In the first co-commission by UMS and Music Accord, Bryce Dessner’s Circles, the bandoneon set the stage with an oscillating rhythm for the strings to weave between. At some point, the pulsating melodies aligned and transitioned into an icy, polyphonic whistle-like section. Meanwhile, in Labro’s Meditation No. 1, the bandoneon reinforced the ensemble’s warm, syrupy chords and shined in a rich, cadenza-esque solo. In Clarice Assad’s Clash, the second UMS-Music Accord co-commission and concert finale, the bandoneon delivered punching dissonant chords and almost upsetting slides as the strings incorporated various frictional textures and sound effects.

The Takács Quartet was able to show off their refined musicianship in the hauntingly beautiful Ravel String Quartet in F Major. Melding elements of tension and dissonance, the piece had a shiny quality that fit really nicely with the rest of the program while still bringing a whole new flavor of sound. The complex layered plucking of the second movement was truly a marvel—the audience felt compelled to applaud afterward even though it was still between movements.

One of the most experimental pieces was Labro’s Astoración, performed as a solo with a pre-recorded backing track. Described as “an imagined duet and conversation with Nuevo Tango master Astor Piazzolla,” the piece tugged at single notes before expanding into big dissonant chords. Meanwhile, the backing track echoed spoken narrative phrases and introduced a second bandoneon that Labro riffed with. At some point, he also pulled out an accordina—a small, hand-held wind instrument with similar sound qualities to a harmonica— for an added layer on top of the rhythmical background.

All in all, I feel that I had witnessed something remarkable last Friday. My roommate who accompanied me enjoyed it as well, although she admitted that some parts were “a lot”. Such is contemporary music!

PREVIEW: Takács Quartet with Julien Labro

sophiascribbles Leave a comment

Having performed with UMS since 1984, the Takács Quartet returns once again with bandoneón virtuoso Julien Labro to bring sensational new sounds to Rackham Auditorium. The program is truly a culmination of musical experimentation and collaboration in the face of the pandemic, featuring world premieres of UMS-commissioned pieces through the Music Accord by Clarice Assad and Bryce Dessner, Ravel’s String Quartet, and a solo set by Labro. 

Violinist Harumi Rhodes shares in the UMS Connect video series: “I think it’s kind of cool how a program can have so many different sides to it, like a kaleidoscope. There’s so many twists and turns and beautiful gems in there, and it’s that kind of holistic approach that makes this kind of programming fun.”

Personally, I find the opportunity to witness the expansion of modern repertoire to be incredibly special一the world of music is an ever-changing environment that is very much alive and growing, despite the emphasis on older works. Additionally, I am very excited to see Labro as a soloist and how he merges with the ensemble. While I have listened to bandoneón recordings while studying works by Piazzolla (an iconic Argentine tango composer and bandoneón player) arranged for piano and violin, this will be my first time hearing the beautiful instrument live.

Come see the Takács Quartet with Julien Labro this Friday, December 3rd at 8 PM at the Rackham Auditorium!

REVIEW: Is This a Room

Angela Lin Leave a comment

It starts with a foggy, black stage and a spotlight on a woman. That woman is Reality Winner. You may not recognize her name, but you might’ve heard her story. She leaked a document about the 2016 election to The Intercept and was arrested and sentenced to 63 months. However, as she sits in prison, Half Straddle, a New York Based-company, has kept her story alive, and they brought it to Ann Arbor in their UMS debut. 

The premise of the concept itself made the theatrical piece intriguing. With nothing to go off of but an audio transcript and the reported aftermath, I felt like there wasn’t much to the story. 

But boy was I wrong.

The tone, the body language, and the pauses—all of which were purely imagined for the stage—dictated the play more than the verbatim words. Every cough was captured, As the actors walked around the small stage, it shifted from the driveway to the backyard to room to room. And you knew that with every step they took, they were getting closer to the gripping truth. However, due to the bare staging and the nature of the script, some parts of the play were confusing as scenes shifted or we heard simply one-sided conversations. Additionally, the sudden bursts of noise and flashes of lights were unexpected, and while some of them indicated parts of the transcript that were redacted, others were unexplained, leaving the audience wondering what was being left unsaid and why things were staged a sudden way. The disorienting sounds of a synth further enhanced the thrill.

The four actors of Half Saddle conveyed the tense situation and brought the transcript to life in their imagined enactment. Emily Davis captured the nervous chuckles and humor of Reality, trying to lighten up the conversation as Pete Simpson and TL Thompson played the two special agents who acted friendly through small talk but persisted in getting the truth. Becca Blackwell played an unknown male whose role was pretty nebulous, but they seemed to alleviate the tension with their body humor. Their combined presence on the stage—making it a total of three versus Reality—seemed to corner her intimidatingly. When you realize there were eleven agents interrogating Reality in reality, the nerves conveyed in the transcript seem completely reasonable. 

“Is This a Room” is a surreal interpretation of the events that went down on June 3, 2017. And it’s a reminder that the ramifications of that day remain today.

PREVIEW: As Far As My Fingertips Take Me

Emma Pinchak Leave a comment

Imagine what a lonely terror it is to lose your home to violence and instability, and then be cast into a stranger’s land. For most of us, this will never be our reality, but for the 70 million forcibly displaced peoples around the world, it is.

As Far As My Fingertips Take Me forces the subject to take on the identity of the refugee for a couple of minutes, reading the poignant writing on the wall and offering a nervous arm through to the unknown. This innovative one-on-one exhibit design incorporates the poetic and visual artworks of Basel Zaraa.

The work is the brain child of Tania El Khoury, a contemporary live artist known for her productions that illuminate issues that are of both the heart and political machine. This exhibit in particular has toured far and wide, gathering awed reviews from major publications like The Washington Post and The New York Times. 

The exhibit will be shown at the U-M Institute for the Humanities from January 24, 2020 – February 2, 2020, tickets: ums.org. Be sure to arrive 15 minutes ahead of your showtime as the schedule is extremely strict.