The Meaning of Mozart

Dancer Pascal Rioult’s Great Mass in C Minor
by Mary Staub
Encore Magazine
http://encoremag.com/?q=article&id=418

In recent years the French-born choreographer Pascal Rioult has choreographed mainly early 20th-century composers like Ravel and Stravinsky. For his newest and first evening-length work, though, Rioult, a former Graham-dancer with his own now fifteen-year-old company, has tackled one of the great choral works, Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor. Rioult recently explained why working to Mozart is a return to his own roots, why Mozart represents hope for mankind, and what distinguished working with such a monumental composition.

What drew you to Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor?
I’ve been thinking about doing a mass for a long time. I’ve always been partial to choral music. My mother was a singer in a choir. From my most tender age I would go to bed and fall asleep with her singing in her beautiful soprano voice. Mozart has always been very important music to me because I always felt you go to him when you have a bit of a down; you put Mozart music on and most of his work just kind of cheers you up.

What is it like moving from more modern composers back to an 18th century work?
It’s true that in the past few years I’ve been working mainly with major pieces of classical music. Many from the early 20th century. One reason I’ve done that is not only because their music is great, but I wanted to learn my craft from their craft. You learn a lot by listening and working with their music. It really prepared me to go backwards. In a sense it’s back to the future. After learning so much from these 20th-century composers I’m prepared to tackle this kind of difficult and monumental piece.

What distinguished working on an evening-length work?
You need to have this sense of continuity in what you create from beginning to end. You want to keep the variety that’s in the music, but also have a strong sense of unity. You’re taking the audience on a journey and you have to make sure you don’t lose anyone along the way. On top of that, add that you want it to be a spiritual journey. If you have a story to tell it’s different than if you just want to touch people and think and feel things.

And what is this particular piece about for you?
It is a celebration of human nature and hope. There is something divine and glorious in all of us that we only touch once in a while. We all have that inside of us. That’s the only reason why there’s hope in humanity. And this piece shows that.

Rioult’s new work runs April 14th–19th at the Joyce Theater and will alternate with a program featuring older works of his to Bach, Stravinsky and Ravel.

Searching for Duende in New York

http://brooklynrail.org/2009/04/dance/in-search-of-duende-in-new-york
By Mary Staub


During ten days this February, flamenco artists born and bred in Andalusia, Spain, filled several concert halls throughout New York for the Ninth Annual Flamenco Festival. New Yorkers could once more get a taste of flamenco straight from the source, from the heart of its very existence, from where it continues to live, breathe and evolve on a daily basis.


Judging by the audience of the festival’s opening night performance, “Noche de Sevilla,” however, few non-Spaniards got to see it.


Not that opening night wasn’t well attended. On the contrary. New York University’s Skirball Center seemed filled to capacity. But, as acknowledged by the mayor of Seville before the show, flamenco was a foreign culture for only few audience members.


“I know all of you understand my language [meaning Spanish], but I want to say something in English, too: thank you all for coming,” he addressed the audience and exaggerated only slightly.
There was no doubt a sprinkling of flamenco devotees of non-Spanish origin who sat silently in the concert hall, but not enough to make a mark. Before the show, the lobby upstairs resounded with the soft sounds of Andalusian Spanish and it seemed like a Spanish homecoming of sorts. The city’s entire Andalusian community had come to replenish their souls with the living duende (or soul force) of flamenco.


Duende evades precise definition, but in the words of Federico García Lorca, who wrote a 100-page tract in search of duende, it “is a power and not a construct, it is a struggle and not a concept. That is to say, it is not a question of aptitude, but of a true and viable style—of blood, in other words; of what is oldest in culture: of creation made act.”


By all measures, “Noche de Sevilla” contained the duende New York is in dire need of. The cantaor (flamenco singer) Arcángel and his entourage of two palmeros (clappers), one tocaor (guitarist), a bailaora (dancer), a pianist and percussionist filled the room not only with heart-felt song, dance and music, but also with an infectiously spontaneous creative camaraderie. This was palpable especially between those representing the more traditional pillars of flamenco—cantaor, bailaora, tocaor, and palmeros.


Although Arcángel was rightly billed as the show’s star, (I’m sure many have swooned over a man with such vocal emotional dexterity), no one artist took the lead. At one point it was the two palmeros who clapped with such unpredictably varying textures that they seemed to reroute a song’s course. The rest of the entourage spontaneously cheered and followed suit. At another point the tocaor pushed his own limits in an exploration of just how dexterously a guitar can be strummed, fingered, and knocked. Again, the others nodded heads appreciatively. The bailaora, Rosario Toledo, too, seemed to taunt her male colleagues into varying emotional qualities of music–she tempted, seduced, discarded, loved, and yearned. Toledo subtly snaked her way through the semi-circle of surrounding men, surprising the tocaor with an explosion of rhythmic taconeos (stomps) to his left, stunning Arcángel with sweeping arms and contorted body to his right.


These artists exuded remarkable spontaneity and delight throughout the whole proscenium theater. It is one thing to indulge in artistic whims and flourishes in a backroom bar. It is an entirely different matter to carry the delight of letting these whims take their course into a traditional concert hall. To do so, I would argue, requires duende. And here it was present.


This duende, however, did not transcend some of the ensemble’s more “Western” flourishes. For example, the pianist, Dorantes, had less of a collaborative role. Piano, not traditionally part of flamenco’s musical base, is harder to integrate, even logistically speaking. Collaborations between Dorantes and Toledo were less of a dialogue and more like two monologues. Here Toledo again and again left behind the fierceness of flamenco—aggressive taconeos, clearly carving arms—to indulge in softer, more fluid, “generic” turns and sways. When Toledo broke the rhythm of her stomps and interrupted the viscous flow of passion visible in her body, her energy and expressivity sunk at once and her previously weighted presence became elusive.


Although these adornments sometimes diminished the overall force of “Noche de Sevilla,” they did shed a welcome light on what some of Spain’s more innovative artists are doing today. Diversity in style, it seems, is part of what living, breathing flamenco has produced. Even odder, then, that “Noche de Sevilla” didn’t attract a more diverse audience.


But New Yorkers will soon have another opportunity to search for duende in Spanish flamenco when Soledad Barrio comes to the New Victory Theatre with Noche Flamenca later this month (April 24 - May 3). Based on Ms. Barrio’s previous New York appearances, the audience should expect to be engulfed by the raw soul force that is the bedrock of flamenco, but that not all artists possess. The program includes existing repertory pieces and the world premiere of Camino, a work inspired by stories and poems written by United Nations refugees, souls whose spirits overcome hardship on a daily basis. Their vigor, in addition to Ms. Barrio’s and Noche Flamenca’s, will surely nourish the souls of those who are there.

Savion Glover’s Solo in Time

Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk star in new season at the Joyce
by Mary Staub
Encore Magazine
http://www.encoremag.com/?q=article&id=394

Savion Glover is perhaps best known for his tap work on Broadway. After all, he made his Broadway debut at age ten, in The Tap Dance Kid, and won two Obie Awards for his Broadway show Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk about a decade later.

But Savion Glover’s dedication to tap reaches far beyond the flashiness of Broadway shows. It began when he was just seven years old and would take weekend trips to New York City for tap lessons. Around that same time, Glover caught glimpses of such legendary tappers as Chuck Green and was immediately taken. It was the notion of tap as music, more so than dance, that captivated and continues to fascinate Glover. And it is this, the sound of tap, rather than only its look, that he’s most passionate about.

“I was introduced to tap as its being music,” Glover says in a phone interview. “People like Chuck Green and Jimmy Slyde were great musicians because of their approach to tap. In the style of tap I do, tap is the leading instrument and I like to make audiences aware of that.”

This is the central theme of Glover’s multi-week season at the Joyce Theater this month. Although tap is usually associated with jazz or Broadway music, Glover decided many years ago that tap can flavor any musical style. For his current production, Savion Glover’s Solo in Time, tap and flamenco will come together.

“The connection of what I do to flamenco lies in the whole lament, whole cry, whole pouring back into the earth and giving energy back to the earth,” says Glover. “It’s a cry and a celebration. That’s what music, sound, vibration should do. It should spark energy in someone.”

For audiences wanting a narrative performance with the glitz and glamour of a Broadway show, Glover’s Joyce production may not be the ticket. Just like in most Joyce shows, in Savion Glover’s Solo in Time, narration is clearly beside the point. It’s a concert; not purely or primarily a dance concert, but a concert of sound and rhythm.

“One of the great things about a concert-style project is that it’s not Broadway and there isn’t a thematic thread throughout the evening,” says Glover. “The only story here is tap. Tap is music. Tap is song. It’s free expression, emotional expression, and I hope it allows the audience to be moved by what is on stage.”

Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company

GaGa technique of strength and restraint featured in BAM run
Encore Magazine
http://www.encoremag.com/?q=article&id=396
by Mary Staub

Countless methodologies maintain they will bring on a healthier, more natural, effortless way of moving. The Feldenkrais Method, Alexander Technique, Body-Mind Centering, and Ideokinesis are just a few that come to mind. Most of these encourage practitioners to become aware of their own existent movement patterns by focusing on the minutiae: the muscle used to curl a finger, whether one breathes in or out when raising an arm.

Once awareness of these details has been gained, patterns can be broken and new, more natural pathways can be nurtured by professionals—i.e., dancers, actors—and amateurs alike. However, in order for these methods to have significant effect, the miniscule must first be translated into the grand. This is no easy feat, and changes in posture and movement are often unrecognizable to the untrained eye.

One methodology whose effects are easily recognizable is GaGa. The technique was developed more than twenty years ago by Ohad Naharin, the artistic director of Israel’s powerful Batsheva Dance Company, which is revisiting the Brooklyn Academy of Music this month. Naharin developed GaGa after he was forced to find new ways of movement for himself due to a back injury.

GaGa has more to do with discovering a certain quality, texture, and intention of movement than a specific technique. “The first thing we do is cover the mirrors and we try to get the dancers to really start sensing their bodies,” Naharin told me on a past visit to New York. “So many dancers dance with just one idea; their school’s idea, a strength idea, an idea of line, or form, or drama.

But there’s always more than just one idea that you can work with.”
The outcome, among Naharin’s dancers at least, is a captivating mix of seemingly conflicting expressive qualities. Batsheva dancers exhibit an extraordinary combination of power and softness, energy and suppleness.

These textures will no doubt be on view in the company’s New York City premiere of Naharin’s Max at BAM. In Max, Naharin plays with extreme notions of pain and happiness, solitude and sharing, individuality and community. Batsheva dancers, with their seemingly innate command of the soft and stark, powerful and meek, are expertly equipped to deal with these inherently interlinked polar opposites.

2009 Flamenco Festival

Encore Magazine
http://encoremag.com/?q=article&id=378
Rhythm, passion and dexterity at City Center, Skirball Center and Carnegie Hall
by Mary Staub

Flamenco is best experienced in intimate surroundings, in dimly lit Andalusian bodegas with wood tables and chairs, hidden away in narrow side streets, tapas and red wine flowing until morning. Here, the duende (soul force) of flamenco is inescapable and permeates an audience fully. Here, the rhythm of the bailaores (flamenco dancers) sends your heart racing, the passion of the cantaores (singers) takes your breath away, the dexterity of the tocaores (flamenco guitarists) sends chills down your spine.

But not everyone can go to Spain.

Thus the Flamenco Festival is bringing Andalusian artists to large-scale New York theaters, including to City Center and NYU’s Skirball Center, for the ninth year in a row this February. Although flamenco often appears more distant, deliberate and orderly in the proscenium theater, this year’s artists—who hail from rich flamenco backgrounds and include the flamenco dynasty of
Los Farruco—promise to transcend the barrier the stage setting often creates.

Antonio Montoya Flores (El Farruco), the patriarch of Los Farruco until his death, came from a traditional Spanish gypsy background and began performing gypsy dances at markets as a child.
Later, when performing flamenco from his gypsy tradition in more typical theater settings, he was disinterested in ostentatious showmanship, and together with his family focused fully on embodying the passion the art form demands. Farruquito, El Farruco’s grandson, conceived and directed this year’s program, which features multiple family members who are well-known in their own right.

Antonio Gades, also from a flamenco family, is a flamenco legend of a different sort. He created and brought popular shows to major theaters worldwide, and is said to have made flamenco palatable to a wider audience. His “Carmen,” which began as Carlos Saura’s award-winning film by the same name (in which Gades collaborated and starred), is here being re-staged by the Antonio Gades Company, a company established shortly after Gades’s death to continue his legacy.

Smaller festival productions include “La Puerta Abierta,” in which dancer Isabel Bayón, born in Seville, Spain, responds to the cantaor Terremoto. And in the concert “Noche de Sevilla” the cantaor Arcángel represents a new generation of flamenco masters and incorporates jazz and international elements in his music. He’s appearing alongside the dancer Rosario Toledo and pianist Dorantes.

For each of these artists, flamenco is a deep-seated family tradition, and what they bring to the stage is nourished by those who came before them. And, as with most family traditions, flamenco takes on a unique flavor—and duende—dependent upon what lineage an artist is from. Enjoy sampling them all this month!

State of Change

Encore Magazine
http://www.encoremag.com
New work from the prolific Paul Taylor Dance Co. at City Center
by Mary Staub

Since his company’s inception more than five decades ago, Paul Taylor has choreographed two new dance works almost every year—and 2008 was no exception. Starting February 25th, during a three-week City Center season, the Paul Taylor Dance Company will perform the New York premieres of Mr. Taylor’s two newest works, Changes and Beloved Renegade, both created in 2008. The works are Mr. Taylor’s 128th and 129th, respectively.

That’s a lot of dances.

The number of cities the company has appeared in is equally impressive: more than 520. The number of countries, too: 62. Paul Taylor has been honored as a leader of modern dance with awards including a MacArthur “Genius” Award and a National Medal of the Arts. Almost everything about this modern dance company hints at greatness, and one might assume that its course for continued creativity has been perfectly paved.

But in the world of modern dance obstacles always occur and force detours. Global success, artistically, doesn’t necessarily translate into success financially; especially when measured in terms of Manhattan money.

Because of rising rents in SoHo, the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation—comprised of the Taylor Company, Taylor 2, and Taylor School—is moving to new quarters on the Lower East Side this year after making the second floor of a SoHo building its home for more than two decades. The new 20-year lease will take effect on March 1st, during the company’s City Center season.
Despite this rerouting, though, Mr. Taylor has stuck to his long-standing schedule of creating two new dances per year.

For his latest works, Mr. Taylor has again collaborated with Jennifer Tipton for lighting (more than eighty collaborations to date) and Santo Loquasto for costumes (more than 35). In the first, Changes, Mr. Taylor revisits the 1960s and youth’s yearning. The second, Beloved Renegade, is inspired by the life and work of Walt Whitman and is set to Francis Poulenc’s Gloria.

The season’s repertoire includes Scudorama, which hasn’t come to City Center in forty years, De Sueños, De Sueños que se Repiten (both 2007), Promethean Fire (2002), Esplanade (1975), and many more.

Mr. Taylor has pointedly noted (in the words of French novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr), “The more things change the more they stay the same.”

It's Her Party: Four Decades of Meredith Monk

Encore Magazine
http://encoremag.com/?q=article&id=374
Underground music’s matriarch throws herself a live retrospective at the Whitney
by Mary Staub



Since early childhood, sound and movement have been interlinked for Meredith Monk. Coming from a tradition of singers—her mother sang in soap commercials in the 40s, her grandfather was a bass-baritone—song was first nature to Monk. Movement, on the other hand, came less naturally. As a child, Monk was physically uncoordinated due to an eye challenge and so, starting at age three, she took Dalcroze Eurythmics classes to learn to get in touch with movement through music.



Years later, in the mid-1960s, after studying both voice and movement at Sarah Lawrence College, and performing gesture-based works in New York City churches and galleries, it was Monk’s more arduously developed language, movement, that taught her something about her mother tongue, voice.






“In working with my physical limitations I was able to find a movement style that was very much my own,” says Monk. “I think coming from physical limitations is a blessing in disguise because it forces you to find a personal style. I applied the same working process to my voice, where I had a more virtuosic instrument from the start, and found I had a huge range to work with.”



Monk has since then developed an eerily unique voice vocabulary that works in rhythms and tonalities atypical of Western musical traditions, and which oftentimes cannot be reproduced by others.



“Some of the vocabulary you really have to have in your bones, intuitive details, that even my ensemble [doesn’t] replicate,” Monk says. “But I don’t try to make other people sound like me; I write music that tries to use their individual color and texture of voice or music.”



Monk’s resulting compositions are highly textured arrangements that convey different colors, genders, ages, characters, landscapes, realities. Furthermore, already from day one, much of Monk’s work has been site-specific, adding yet another dimension to her creations. Monk’s one-woman performances in galleries and churches from the 1960s have since evolved into richly layered spatial and musical compositions, sometimes involving more than 100 artists.



On February 1st, Monk’s voice, and many others, will resonate through the Whitney Museum of American Art in a celebration of Monk’s artistic work past, present and future. Probable participants include Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, which brings together artists whose backgrounds range from Chinese to Western opera, from Broadway to musical theater. Slated to join the Ensemble are The M6: Meredith Monk Music Third Generation, a newly formed ensemble dedicated to continuing Monk’s legacy with younger vocalists, Todd Reynolds’s String Quartet and the Claudia Quintet.