I've been so overwhelmed with other commitments that blogging has had to be temporarily moved down a few notches on the priority list. As I've been back in SF for nearly two weeks already, I was going to abandon these New York reminiscences and move on with my SF life, but I decided they're too noteworthy not to mention:
- Start looking out for Meredith Monk's next major piece, The Impermanence Project, which I understand will be at BAM's 2006 Next Wave Festival. She and her Vocal Ensemble presented several short snippets of this work-in-progress in a dance studio while I was in town. Even excerpted, and with zero lighting design, and lacking the large-scale visual elements, I was genuinely affected by these intimately personal portraits of loving, losing, celebrating, living, and grieving. Here's some background on the Project, taken from this interview with Meredith from last year, prior to the work-in-progress's premiere in London in July 2004:
A group called Rosetta Life, which sends artists out to hospices in England, came to talk to me in February 2003. I lost my partner of 22 years in November 2002, so I was really in my grieving process—I still am—but I was thinking of nothing but impermanence then.
This organization sends artists to hospices and they work with people who would like to create something of their own, artwork of some kind—it could be photographs, it could be videos, about the dying process. ... And it's people from all different classes, even people that are not literate, old, young, all kinds of people in this program.
They were doing a festival in London and they wanted me to contribute something. They said my music could express the voice of the dying. ... They said, "We'd like the hospice people to recognize themselves in your piece." ... So I went last October. We had a group of six people the first day and six people the second day. The foundation had gotten participants to come to an arts center in London from different hospices. ...
My partner sometimes liked to go into the studio and improvise voice things just for fun. When I returned from England I transcribed one of her melodies, and had some of the hospice participants sing it, because they said they liked to sing. Their singing is very raw, but I’m going to use it for the final work.
The first half will be a music concert with the Ensemble. After intermission with the house lights up you will hear the hospice patients singing my partner's melody one by one. Then the house lights go down and the piece begins with a video of extreme close-ups of their faces just looking out, being. There will be very slow dissolves between their faces. Then John Hollenbeck, who’s a wonderful percussionist, will intermittently and softly play the spokes of a bicycle wheel. It's unbelievable, the sound of the spokes going around and around. Then at the end of the piece, we sing the melody again, but I've added harmony and counterpoint to it, and you hear my partner's voice on tape singing over the voices of the Ensemble at the very end. So, it comes full circle. Within the piece I also sing a solo called "Last Song" with words by James Hillman. The words are a list of phrases using the word "last" in ways that we take for granted—some of them are ironic and some of them are very profound. They are recognizable as words but then they become more and more abstract, dissolving into pure sound.
I'm sure that some of the hospice participants will be in the audience. One of them has already died. And, you know, all of us have impermanence in common. It's something that all human beings share. We don't know when, but we do know that we'll die. So my big aspiration is that whatever we do in July, it will honor these particular people as well as acknowledge that we are all part of the same process of living and dying.
In one of my favorite quotes of hers, she described the voice as having articulation of movement, like a hand. For me, this is the crux of what makes her work wonderful: that the singing in her pieces is never just about the sound; rather, the voices are making physical movements that manifest in sound. Singing is one facet of movement for her, but it's also the most expressive and flexible movement we have as human beings. What I witnessed that day in a crowded, fluorescently lit dance studio was truly beautiful, loving and honest expression through the movement of her ensemble's bodies and voices. Please see this when it comes your way.
- To celebrate my last night in New York, I headed up to Zankel to hear Dawn Upshaw sing Kurtag's Kafka Fragments. I left feeling like I had been shot with a fucking psychological Taser. Even though I had heard Dawn and Peter Sellars speak about the production the day before, I was utterly unprepared for just how gut-wrenching, shattering, disturbing, devastating, mesmerizing (the adjectives keep coming) an experience it would be.
For background on the piece and the production, I'll refer you to the professionals: you can read these two NYTimes pieces by Jeremy Eichler and Anthony Tommasini, plus the program notes by Paul Griffiths. (Mark Swed wrote a nice piece too, but how dare the LA Times make us pay for content?! The nerve!) For my part, I'll just say that Kurtag's settings of these tiny pieces of text are shockingly powerful, and both Kurtag's and Kafka's writings were made flesh though Dawn and Geoff Nuttall's awe-inspiring performances. Among the countless memorable things Peter Sellars said the day before (which, in my weak paraphrasing, will lose all of that special sauce that only Peter can add) was his observation that we need artists to show us what is possible at the extremes of human existence. In case you had any doubt before, Dawn certainly proved herself to be an artist in this. Mark Swed suggests that this production will undoubtedly have a touring life; I can only hope that all of the performing arts pooh-bahs who were in attendance that night make that a reality. Brava, Dawn, and wow.
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