dreamy restless earth
why did I wake with a start
outside, a cold wind
07 April 2011
06 April 2011
05 April 2011
04 April 2011
the awesomeness of the Pavel Haas Quartet
How awesome was Sunday night’s local premiere of the Pavel Haas String Quartet? Dude: so fucking awesome!
Sorry, it must be the WonderCon in the air. But seriously: totally fucking awesome!
The young players are Veronika Jarůšková and Eva Karová on violin, Pavel Nikl on viola, and Peter Jarůšek on cello. This Czech quartet has received heady praise in its short existence, and to me its appearance jumped out as a highlight in the always-solid San Francisco Performances schedule. I was a little surprised that Herbst Theater wasn’t packed, but the audience’s enthusiasm made up for any empty seats. (I shouldn’t make the hall sound too empty; it was a respectable showing for the first pleasant day of spring, though I did expect this to be a big draw – I mean, this is the California Bay Area, and we get lots of pleasant days, but fewer concerts this thrilling.)
The quartet plays vigorously but without vulgarity, tempering its energy with finesse. And the program was intriguingly off the beaten path: Schulhoff's Quartet No. 1, Debussy's Quartet in G minor, Op. 10, and the eponymous Pavel Haas’s Quartet No. 2, Op. 7, "From the Monkey Mountains." Schulhoff, like Haas, was of the generation of composers killed by the Nazis. The program was, without being a morbid memorial, a reminder of how much vital music we lost.
The Schulhoff piece is wild and strong, sort of like taking central European folk music, a hoedown, and the wistful soundtrack of an arty black-and-white film showing the sun low on empty streets washed by rain and blending them all together with surprising harmony at high speed. And though I love the passing-clouds-reflected-on-the-still-surface-of-the-lake sound of most Debussy playing, it was refreshing and unusual to hear PHQ’s muscular account. The cellist rocked back and forth in one passage, his eyes frequently on the first violin.
After the intermission came the Pavel Haas. The third movement in particular, The Moon and I (largo e misterioso), reached for a deeper poignancy. You can hear the quartet playing the piece on one of their CDs, along with Janacek's "Intimate Letters" (and more Janacek is always a plus). But that’s not the same thing as hearing them live, and my description is inadequate: you just should have been there.
The encore was Britten’s Waltz (from Three Divertimenti for String Quartet), a short piece of heart-breaking charm.
Sorry, it must be the WonderCon in the air. But seriously: totally fucking awesome!
The young players are Veronika Jarůšková and Eva Karová on violin, Pavel Nikl on viola, and Peter Jarůšek on cello. This Czech quartet has received heady praise in its short existence, and to me its appearance jumped out as a highlight in the always-solid San Francisco Performances schedule. I was a little surprised that Herbst Theater wasn’t packed, but the audience’s enthusiasm made up for any empty seats. (I shouldn’t make the hall sound too empty; it was a respectable showing for the first pleasant day of spring, though I did expect this to be a big draw – I mean, this is the California Bay Area, and we get lots of pleasant days, but fewer concerts this thrilling.)
The quartet plays vigorously but without vulgarity, tempering its energy with finesse. And the program was intriguingly off the beaten path: Schulhoff's Quartet No. 1, Debussy's Quartet in G minor, Op. 10, and the eponymous Pavel Haas’s Quartet No. 2, Op. 7, "From the Monkey Mountains." Schulhoff, like Haas, was of the generation of composers killed by the Nazis. The program was, without being a morbid memorial, a reminder of how much vital music we lost.
The Schulhoff piece is wild and strong, sort of like taking central European folk music, a hoedown, and the wistful soundtrack of an arty black-and-white film showing the sun low on empty streets washed by rain and blending them all together with surprising harmony at high speed. And though I love the passing-clouds-reflected-on-the-still-surface-of-the-lake sound of most Debussy playing, it was refreshing and unusual to hear PHQ’s muscular account. The cellist rocked back and forth in one passage, his eyes frequently on the first violin.
After the intermission came the Pavel Haas. The third movement in particular, The Moon and I (largo e misterioso), reached for a deeper poignancy. You can hear the quartet playing the piece on one of their CDs, along with Janacek's "Intimate Letters" (and more Janacek is always a plus). But that’s not the same thing as hearing them live, and my description is inadequate: you just should have been there.
The encore was Britten’s Waltz (from Three Divertimenti for String Quartet), a short piece of heart-breaking charm.
03 April 2011
Paul Taylor at San Francisco Performances
Last night I saw the Paul Taylor Dance Company, presented as usual under San Francisco Performances, in Program C: Brief Encounters, Three Dubious Memories, and Brandenburgs.
Brief Encounters, first performed in 2009, is set to music by Debussy (all of the music was pre-recorded). Though it’s about (insofar as it’s about something besides movement) fleeting romance, it avoids the tragic and is fairly light-hearted, as indicated by the punning title: briefs are all the dancers wear. The men are in black briefs and the women are in black bikini briefs with a black bra-top. The costumes are by Santo Loquasto, who also did the set, which is a large sepia-toned drawing streaked with darker brown of a receding arched corridor, which looks both like a Renaissance architectural drawing and a modern drawing, which adds to the overall timeless dreaminess of the piece, as does the mostly dim and twilight lighting by James Ingalls as well as the shimmering music of Debussy.
There isn’t really a storyline to the dance but anytime you have beautiful almost-naked people in movement together emotional tanglements are going to suggest themselves. Dancers chase and are chased and switch partners. There are male-male couples as well as male-female ones. There are struggles and unhappy partings, but such moments are poignant rather than tragic, given how fleet and fluid the movements are. The dancers appear curiously light and weightless, even when they are slumped downward in a lumpy line. There is the occasional use of props – a woman with a mirror, and man with a knife that is quickly knocked out of his hand – but the props felt a bit gimmicky to me and the piece seemed stronger when it was just movement.
The dance seemed a distanced, wistful yet ironic look back on love. A piece like this always makes me think of Troilus at the end of Chaucer’s poem, looking down on earth in spirit and laughing at how much he suffered there.
The dancers are listed in the program and their bios are given, but since there are no pictures to go with the names I’m really not sure who is who. Some of them I can guess based on how they’re listed in the program – the guy listed first on his own line was probably the soloist, and the second piece has a few characters with names, so by process of elimination. . . . that’s a lot of unnecessary guesswork. I wonder why they didn’t just run their pictures.
After the intermission came Three Dubious Memories. I love that as a title for a dance, but felt a little mixed about the piece itself. This is its premiere season. There are four movements: As Remembered by the Man in Blue, As Remembered by the Man in Green, As Remembered by the Woman in Red, and Threnody, each set to contrasting music (all from Peter Elyakim Taussig’s Five Enigmas; Taylor uses movements 1, 3, 4, and 5). The first movement had a driving rock-like beat of the sort I dislike with the occasional country-western inflection, I don’t remember what the second piece sounded like, the third had a sort of boppy 1950s-style jazz inflection, and the fourth was elegiac strings. A love triangle among the woman in red and the men in blue and green is enacted from a different perspective in the first three movements, which sounds a little more interesting than it is since the three stories are fairly similar.
In one, Woman in Red is with Man in Blue; Man in Green enters, clearly feels betrayed, and there is a struggle. Then the Woman in Red is with the Man in Green; Man in Blue enters, clearly feels betrayed, etc. The fights between the men are broad and cartoony, with wide swings that clearly don’t make contact and kicks to the crotch, which makes it difficult to take seriously whatever affectionate but standard emotions the initial couple has evoked. The woman looks very unhappy in both scenarios, as well as in her own, in which she comes upon the two men, who after an initial brotherly struggle are now holding hands and walking together (a movement also used in Brief Encounters to indicate two men were a couple). This time she's the one feeling betrayed. There was quite a bit of knowing laughter from the audience at this scenario, though I don’t see why it’s inherently funnier than the other two: her pain and humiliation are just as real, or unreal, and the interrupted couple is just as connected as the earlier ones. But the audience, which was filled with male-male couples, seemed to find this particular episode naughty in some titillating way.
There is a brief pause after the first two sections but the fourth, Threnody, flows right into the third. This piece belongs to the Choirmaster, a man clad in light gray and accompanied by seven choristers, also in light gray. As the section title indicates, this was a more somber follow-up to the caricatures we had just seen, and the final tableau, with the Blue, Green, and Red characters piled up and entangled and the Chorister standing over them, evoked some real emotion for the first time in the dance. The idea of different perspectives of the same event is always fascinating, and so is an exploration of the dubious nature of memory (why can’t I remember what the second piece sounded like? It was just last night! Perhaps I will remember later, sitting somewhere else, thinking of something else, when I can’t correct what I wrote), but for me the piece by and large felt a little slick.
The triumph of the evening was the third piece, 1988’s Brandenburgs (set to movements 1 and 2 of the Brandenburg #6 as well as Brandenburg #3). It opens with one man surrounded by three women on the right side of the stage, and five other men arrayed on the left (and it closes in the same tableau). The costumes are both stripped-down and modern and rich-looking and evocative of the past: the five men to the left are in deep forest green sleeveless unitards that stop at their knees, with the shoulder straps elaborately embroidered in gold; the three women are in flowing moss-green sleeveless dresses that also extend to their knees, with the gold embroidery as a thin belt (and I think also as trim in the bodice); and the solo male was bare-chested, with his lower half covered by lighter pea-green tights and a wide belt of the gold embroidery. The dancers are barefoot, which adds to the spring-like atmosphere evoked by all the green and by the elegant, burbling music.
There are virtuosic spins, and cheerfully flowing patterns; here the quick contacts between dancers are joyful rather than poignant. There are many exuberant leaps, and at the end of some movements the exiting dancer gets in a few more quick tiny leaps before disappearing behind the curtain, as if the sheer joy of leaping compelled him to cram in as many as possible while he can. Several times after a dazzling spin one of the women, a dark-haired beauty, would extend her arms to us as if asking us to join her in wondering at and delighting in what she had just done, and she would grin endearingly at us, and it was impossible not to smile back at what we had all come to see: all the beautiful young dancers fleeting by in joyful precision.
02 April 2011
Will Eno plays at the Cutting Ball
My earlier plans to see the Will Eno trilogy at The Cutting Ball had been derailed by sickness, so I finally got there last night. I had seen their earlier production of Thom Pain (based on nothing) and enjoyed it, though looking back at what I wrote about it I was apparently less convinced at the time. I think it was the comparison to Beckett that I found a bit off, though oddly I was reminded of Beckett last night, particularly during Lady Grey (in ever lower light) the first of the evening’s three short plays. I was also reminded of Thom Pain, and thought maybe the pieces were a bit too similar in mode, mood, and method, but apparently that was the author’s intention (see here for Marissabidilla’s reaction to an earlier performance and for her report of the talk-back with Eno in which he mentions this). In any case the other two plays (Intermission and Mr Theatre Comes Home Different) were different enough so that I could see he had more than one way of playing.
These plays are all about theater (or performance) in various ways, so the whole evening takes on a meta-theatrical cast that makes it difficult to tell sometimes if something is just happening or scripted to happen: when actor David Sinaiko introduced himself right before the show to audience members on the left, and then started introducing them to each other, was that part of the performance or not? It was pretty funny – “Hey, Chris! Look, here’s another Chris!” I was on the right so he did not speak to me. I did not feel excluded by this.
The first play starts with an empty chair in a bright pool of light, situated off-center, to the right (from the audience’s perspective). Lady Grey is the only character. She enters in darkness and when the lights go up she is off to the left; the chair remains empty until towards the end of the piece. Her monologue, like Thom Pain’s, jumps back and forth in time, returning to a traumatic childhood incident, to periods of severe but strange illness, to nature, and always to the awareness of being observed, to the nature of observation, and to the slippery nature of the words we use to define the things we try to say. Her story involves a school show-and-tell from her childhood, during which she stripped naked.
I’m assuming this is how she felt – naked, exposed, sort of baffled and humiliated. Perhaps I’m being too literal here but I can’t imagine a girl stripping for show-and-tell and not being stopped by the teacher well before she exposes her genitals (about which the boys ask her questions), even in the 1970s. It’s always interested me how people need to retain certain elements of reality in order to sustain a fantasy, and this particular incident (for me; others might feel differently) crossed over into the territory of the unreal, so I had to read it as emotional.
There is a hint that the girl had been sexually abused, but I find child sexual abuse as a plot device sort of hacky (overused and oversimplified), so I was glad it was only a hint. Danielle O’Hare was Lady Grey. It was an interesting performance; I often felt she was reciting (rather than embodying the character and saying things because that’s what Lady Grey would say) but that may have been a deliberate choice, heightening one’s awareness Brecht-style of the performance as a performance, which would fit with the play’s own refracted perspectives on performance.
Then there was a fairly useless intermission. The intermission was followed by Intermission, in which two couples during the intermission of a play called The Mayor, about a mayor dying in a hospital, end up in conversation. Danielle O’Hare returned as Jill, the younger woman, with her partner Jack (Galen Murphy-Hoffman). David Sinaiko and Gwyneth Richards play Mr and Mrs Smith, the older couple. It was a quartet of fine performances.
Sinaiko has been with the Cutting Ball from the early days (as have I, on the other side of the non-existent proscenium) and for a long time I felt his performances relied too much on sheer manic energy. But around the time they did Endgame (which was, honestly, one of the few times I have ever left a theater thinking, “that was perfect”) he started giving much more modulated, subtler performances. So it’s not meant as a criticism of him when I say I thought there was too much of Mr Smith.
Mr Smith is a somewhat cranky and condescending man, who lectures the younger couple on the moments that make up life and so forth. “How many intermissions will you sit through” was a line that struck home with me. His lengthy story about having his dog put to sleep did not. Friends and family members of mine have had this experience recently, and I know it’s very painful, and I am very sympathetic, but I am sympathizing with a friend’s pain rather than connecting with the particular situation, if you see what I mean. This might be clearer if I discussed my general feeling about dogs, but I think I’ll avoid that digression and just return to the play by saying I wanted more of the other characters, particularly the young couple.
I was very amused that Jack took his cell phone out several times, because of course that had just happened in our actual intermission – it had only been about thirty minutes since the cell phone reminder, people are sitting there with friends and partners, and yet they immediately pull out their phones to check messages. Is everyone waiting for a kidney or something?
But maybe I was just having a weird connection with the cell phone thing, the way I did with the dog thing. I couldn’t quite tell if we were meant to find Jack callow, and it was perhaps Murphy-Hoffman’s charm that made him otherwise – the amount of time given to Mr Smith lecturing him makes me think maybe we were meant to find Jack unsympathetic, but honestly I would have been rolling my eyes long before he did. I would have liked more about Jack, and also would have liked more from Jill, who clearly had powerful emotional reactions to the theater that she couldn’t or wouldn’t quite articulate.
There are poignant indications that the older couple has settled into the sort of semi-bickery comfortable familiarity in which they stop thinking about what the other one feels. The lines we hear from the play are hilarious parodies of an earnest drama about “issues.” I wanted more of all that and less of Mr Smith’s patronizing speeches about life and its representation, speeches which are true and beautiful (and therefore worth saying) but, frankly, not all that original or striking (and therefore not worth saying at such length).
Mr Theatre Comes Home Different, the final piece, was a scene for Mr Theater (David Sinaiko) who, in the space of about ten minutes, both conjures up and parodies the magic of theater – the creation of a whole outdoor setting just by speaking a few words about a forest, the attempted recreation of the outdoors by having stagehands toss fake snow from the rafters, the real creation of a Lear-like storm just by speech, the concentrated emotional intensity spun out of nothing but speech and belief. We go from farce to tragedy to love story to death scene in no time. It was a dazzling tour de force for Eno and Sinaiko.
The show runs for a couple more weeks and I’d recommend catching it if you can (check the Cutting Ball website for information). I do have to say that if the three plays were done without an intermission (which I would prefer) the performance would be slightly over an hour. It’s not that I felt I didn’t get my money’s worth (and besides, with their season membership I could go several times and get a reserved seat, so it’s a bargain). It’s that I get off work at 5:00 and the show doesn’t start until a bit after 8:00, so I had to kill slightly over three hours for a show that lasted only a third of that time. I find the Union Square area, a visitor-packed shopping district, fairly unpleasant to walk around in. And my one sure-fire refuge there is going; I realized last night that it’s not only the Borders in the Westfield Mall that’s closing, it’s the big store right off Union Square as well. It was, at least, a fairly congenial place to waste time before the theater opens. Oh, I bought some heavily discounted books (some plays by Aristophanes in a translation I didn’t have and Berryman’s Dream Songs, because I really need more books to read) but increasingly I wonder whether it’s really a good idea for me to squander that much time. Maybe if they’re not going to start earlier I will switch to Saturday shows; even getting to the theater insanely early will waste less time than wandering unproductively. I would do that for Cutting Ball shows, but I’m just less inclined these days to fit my schedule and preferences around theaters that don’t have their track record. This is all part of the meta-theatrical theme perhaps.
01 April 2011
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