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REVIEW: Our Carnal Hearts

Ella Larsen Leave a comment

**featured image from UMS.org

8:00pm • Friday, February 3, 2023 • Arthur Miller Theater

I feel that I did Our Carnal Hearts an injustice in my preview for the show by calling it a “comedy performance,” because it contained so much more. There were moments of humor, but it was the kind of humor that is a bit uncomfortable, the sort necessary to make a difficult reality easier to swallow. The show dealt with the un-picturesque reality of human jealousy and competitiveness in an age of both unprecedented wealth and heightening economic disparity, made starkly visible by a performative social media culture. Rachel Mars rendered envy both relatable and ridiculous, both a vindication of those with reason for envy and a criticism of an upper class with everything that still demands more.

Much of the performance conveyed a sense of frustration, maybe even righteous anger, that felt like a justification for jealousy. For example, Mars’ use of “Paper Planes” by M.I.A. with its repetitive “All I wanna do is… (gun shot, shot, shot, reload, cash register) and take your money” and the song’s connotations of barriers to immigration and work, advanced the social themes of the performance. In another scene, Mars repeated the mantra, “Congratulations, I’m so happy for you,” her throat constricting with pent-up anger until it was more of a forced wheeze than a well-wish.

One of my favorite elements of the performance drove home the point that envy can be gratifying, but in the end it is a two-way street. It began with an eerily mocking song from the three vocalists. Mars walked out into the audience and took a seat and, speaking to the guest next to her while the sound system broadcast their “conversation” to the rest of us, introduced the premise. A fairy has arrived at your doorstep, and told you that finally, out of everyone else in the world, you have been chosen to receive a wish–but there’s a catch. Whatever you wish for will be delivered to your neighbor twofold. Assuming the voice of our collective unconscious, Mars rallied off all the riches and glories we would like to receive–before doing a double-take, recalling the catch. At that point, her jealousy got the best of her and she scrapped all of those nice ideas–instead, Mars suggested, give her mild depression. Take away half her money. Cut out one of her legs, or better yet, one of her kidneys. We all laughed, but near the end of the performance, the lights lowered, and Mars began again. A fairy has arrived at your door, but this time, it says, “I’ve just come from your neighbor’s house…”

Our Carnal Hearts gave me a lot to think about in terms of the role of jealousy in my own life, how “envy” can be a misinterpreted reaction to injustice, and who is “permitted” to feel envious. Jealousy and revenge are eternally salient themes in the world of art, and I enjoyed Mars’ modern interpretation.

PREVIEW: Our Carnal Hearts

Ella Larsen Leave a comment

**featured image from the Our Carnal Hearts trailer on UMS.org

What: a comedy performance featuring Rachel Mars and four female singers honestly exploring envy across different areas of life

When: Friday, February 3, 8pm

Where: Arthur Miller Theater

Tickets: $12 for students, $25 for adults, available online or by phone at 734-764-2538

I don’t want to sound cheesy, but I really feel like laughter can be the best way to relax when I’m overwhelmed with the stress of everyday life. For that reason, I’m excited to attend Our Carnal Hearts this Friday night, what promises to be a hilarious and thought-provoking dive into the dark realities of human jealousy. The performance was created by British artist Rachel Mars, and based on the trailer I’m expecting music, comedy, and potential audience participation, all in the intimate setting of the Arthur Miller Theater. This is one of the final events in the University Musical Society’s No Safety Net Festival, and it is in conversation with Mars’ other performances and talks at the University this weekend, including Your Sexts Are Shit: Older Better Letters, another performance which will take place at the same place and same time on Saturday night. I look forward to sharing my notes on this show with you in the coming days.

REVIEW: Are we not drawn onward to new erA

Ella Larsen Leave a comment

**featured image from Ontroerend Goed

8:00pm • Saturday, January 20, 2023 • Power Center

Are we not drawn onward to new erA was a unique experience, although perhaps not one I would be interesting in reliving. The performance, by Belgian arts collective Ontroerend Goed, took place over the course of 75 minutes, with no intermission, and the pace was slow. The story began with a woman waking up, accompanied on the stage by a live tree, with a solitary apple glued to one branch. Soon she was joined by a man, who spoke the first word of the play. For context, the whole first half of the play was narrated in gibberish that was actually backwards-English. Despite this technical fact, the first word sounded like “Eros,” a reference I’m certain was intentional. The man plucked and offered the apple to the woman.

From there, the other four actors were gradually introduced and began to tear the tree limb from limb. I heard several sighs and groans rise from the audience-members around me. That destruction complete, the cast set about littering the stage with technicolor plastic bags, erecting a monumental bronze statue of a man, and pumping the set full of fog, at which point the curtains closed. Against the closed curtains, one of the cast members appeared, speaking backwards for interminable minutes, finally repeating, “?olleH” She imitated a rewinding recording until the syllables were ordered in a way we understood: “Hello?”

Speaking forwards, she gave the audience a speech about how the world has been littered and polluted by the actions of humans, and how it might be impossible to reverse the damage we have done… But then in a moment evoking The Lorax‘s famous “Unless,” the curtains opened again to a projection of the stage on a sheer screen. From there, the audience watched as, minute by painstaking minute, a video played the whole performance in reverse and the cast cleaned up the mess they had created. Literally and figuratively, they dismantled the statue/status of Man onstage.

I was surprised by the notes of Voluntary Human Extinction brought out in the ending of the play. At one point, the actors even pantomime holding guns to one another’s heads. Eventually, all of the actors disappear voluntarily into the darkness of the wings, leaving the woman who started the play to linger, alone, returning to sleep beside the tree to be absorbed as the stage lights lower. This felt meaningful, because her character was both the one who ate the apple in the first scene, symbolizing the “leap” humanity made towards corruption, and the one who advocated most fervently against cleaning up the stage or leaving Earth entirely. I feel that she strove to make the point that there is beauty in living, despite the harmful side-effects of human existence.

Overall, I would say that I enjoyed the performance, but it was so long. On the plus side, I had an extended built-in opportunity to ruminate on the meaning of the play’s palindrome structure. Is it realistic to compare the reversal of centuries worth of environmental degradation to a physics-defying rewinded video? Perhaps this was part of the goal of the work: to force the audience to take a break from their daily lives long enough to engage deeply with the climate crisis.

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!