The Scandal of Content: The Cutting Ball Theater’s ‘Tontlawald’
From left, Madeline H.D. Brown, Rebecca Frank, Liz Wand, Cindy Im, and Marilet Martinez in "Tontlawald" (photo by Annie Paladino)
In devised theater, rather than starting with an already written script and finished production design as you would in traditional theater, the company creates text, music, movement, and design elements together as they go through the rehearsal process. Though there’s no devised aesthetic that defines it like a genre, devised work tends to be more physical, to make more use of every skill each actor possesses (singing, dancing, playing musical instruments). There’s also a strong preference for adapted material among companies that make devised work—maybe because this kind of experimental collaboration is easier if you at least know the outlines of the story you’re trying to tell.
The inspiration for Cutting Ball’s first devised work, Tontlawald, is an Estonian fairy tale in which a girl runs away from her abusive stepmother to live in the Tontlawald, the forbidden ghost-forest. The inhabitants of the Tontlawald fashion a doll out of clay to take the girl’s place, and inside the doll they place a black snake. The doll goes back to the village and endures the stepmother’s cruel treatment, while the girl lives happily in the Tontlawald. One day when the stepmother goes too far, the black snake darts out of the doll’s mouth and bites her tongue, killing her instantly. The girl grows up, and in the course of things must leave the Tontlawald. She turns into a bird and flies away.
Posted in Theater Reviews
Tagged Cutting Ball Theater, devised theater, San Francico, Tontlawald
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Juxtaposing California: Caroline Baudinet’s ‘Feelings’ at ArtAbout Davis
Poster for Caroline Baudinet's exhibition "Feelings"
Homeland Security has a hard time buying Caroline Baudinet’s love for the West Coast. Arriving in San Francisco last week, the French artist said she was interrogated about her repeated visits to California. In her jeans, black work boots, and black leather jacket, Baudinet reenacts the scene with the humorless officials at SFO: Where are you going? Who are you staying with? How do you know these people? We are browsing at Riki Design in downtown Davis, where her photographs will be part of the Davis ArtAbout, and I’m noticing how customers stop to listen to her cut-gravel French accent. It’s hard to imagine the outspoken Baudinet playing the part of the obeisant tourist, but she assures me she kept her tongue in check so that she wouldn’t miss the opening of “Feelings,” her California debut.
The love affair with America started when Caroline was a teenager, and her father’s role in the Orchestre National de France provided her with several opportunities to visit the States. On her first trip to New York City, Baudinet insisted the family explore Harlem and the Bronx, as well as the usual tourist traps. She describes how her uncle locked the doors of the car when she tried to photograph black men rapping on the streets.
Studies in Sinister Toys and Figurines: Q&A With Michael Brennan
Michael Brennan's "Patty-Cake," oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches
If you’ve dined at any number of swanky Bay Area establishments, you might have unwittingly enjoyed your meal in a restaurant designed by one of the few people who is as well known and well respected for his fine art as for his commercial work. Michael Brennan has designed the interiors of such San Francisco hotspots as Farallon, Zero Zero, Fleur de Lys, and Bruno’s, and Alameda’s Miss Pearl’s Jam House, as well as Revival in Berkeley. He’s painted murals for many more places, too, including the Cliff House (also in San Francisco).
ZYZZYVA’s Winter ’11 issue features images of some of Brennan’s smaller-scale works. For these paintings, he often chooses as his subject small figurines and children’s toys. Brennan magnifies them in both scale and import, revealing affection for the mementos of childhood, but without sentimentalizing them or glossing over the sometimes-sinister tone these objects assume when considered out of context. Coating them in oil to add sheen, Brennan casts these toys and figures against abstract or ambiguous backgrounds, rendering them in near photographic realism. The results can alternate between the playful and the nightmarish, and recall the feeling of certainty nearly every child has that his toys “come to life” when no one’s looking. We talked with him about his work at his SOMA studio in San Francisco.
Bending Time and Music: Celebrating ‘Masters of Venice’ at the De Young Museum
Photo by Larissa Archer
Gerhard Richter’s enormous mural Strontium glowered over Wilsey Court. The mural, made from a collection of blurred photographs representing the atomic structure of strontium titanate (a substance used to make artificial diamonds), might have been interpreted as a bit of a symbolic downer on the festivities, which celebrated both the high and the low fruits of early-Renaissance wealth. Projected on an adjacent wall was the flashier and less demanding 1964 Vincent Price horror flick, Masque of the Red Death. Downstairs, the lauded exhibition, “Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power” was open to any partygoer who wanted to view it, and at any other time that might have been more tempting, especially considering these were its last days in San Francisco. After all, how often can one see Titians, Tintorettos, Giorgiones, and Veroneses in this hemisphere? But the people who came out for the masked ball at the De Young that night seemed reluctant to defer to any artwork other than that which they had made of themselves. People concocted different “fancy dress” iterations of the past 400 years, and wore or even painted on elaborate carnival masks, a combination that evoked the formal glamour of opening night at the opera with the DIY exuberance of Halloween. There were tables holding different kinds of brie and bars serving pink and orange drinks with edible flowers and blood orange slices. Caterers with trays of mini tiramisus dodged patrons whose peripheral vision was mask-obscured; there was a lot of “Pardon me,” “oops, so sorry,” and “oh dear, can I get you another one of those?” that night.
The crowd was young—most looked to be in their 20s and early 30s—and though DJ David Carvahlo seemed to have tailored his repertoire based on the assumption that his audience had a short-term memory for pop music, the floor was packed throughout most of the night. (I attribute this in part to some guys being more willing to dance, and being much better dancers, if their faces are concealed. Likewise, women last longer on the dance floor if their dates aren’t visibly perishing from awkwardness.) Patrons not only danced but sang along to Gaga, Beyonce, and RiRi, and didn’t even object when the music occasionally degenerated into dubstep. There were very few nods to music from further back than five minutes ago. But when older tunes did play, they were either unflatteringly remixed, as in the case with Prince’s When Doves Cry (rendered near-unrecognizable via a monotonous techno beat and superfluous synth), or expertly transmogrified into songs one would have thought them to be insurmountably incongruous with, in terms of melody, tone, and even rhythm. How did Don’t Stop Believin’ slowly turn into Billie Jean? And why did it seem so natural? Many of the more recent songs were simply compounded to mystifying effect. Having told most of the popular music of the past 150 years to get off my lawn, perhaps I am less informed than most, but I was unsure whether these were arrangements Carvahlo created himself. Or is there some factory in China that produces forced and unholy (but admittedly brilliant, doubly-danceable, and ideologically confounding) mashups like All the Single Ladies/Back That Ass Up?
Few partygoers were curmudgeonly enough to resist the pull of the dance floor, and as the night progressed so grew the collection of kicked-off platform stilettos at the foot of Strontium. In one of those occurrences that are not rare but nevertheless always surprising, there was a spontaneous moment of poignancy, as if leaked in from another world: Whitney Houston had died that afternoon; most of the maskers had probably heard the news while dressing for the ball. What better tribute to the lost diva than a floor full of revelers dancing (and singing) with the abandon of the unwatched to I Wanna Dance with Somebody?
Read more from Larissa Archer at her blog, larissaarcher.com.
Posted in Art Reviews
Tagged De Young Musuem, DJ David Carvahlo, Gerhard Richter, Masters of Venice, Whitney Houston
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The Great (and Good) Cross-Pollination of American Literature
It was the first day of my first Advanced Fiction workshop. Everyone was fiddling with their pens and eyeing each other across the long oak table. As she handed out syllabi, our professor extolled the virtues of experimentation and articulated a staunchly ecumenical approach to writing. With one exception, of course. If any of us were interested in writing science fiction, fantasy, or mystery, she would be happy to introduce us to her dear friend over at MIT, who knew everything there was to know about genre fiction. The implication was loud and clear: some of her best friends wrote genre fiction, but such work was not welcome in this Advanced Fiction workshop. At that point, my own writing was about as far from genre as one could imagine. Still, the comment struck me as unnecessarily discriminatory, particularly in a creative writing department that so prided itself on experimentation. I’m still not entirely sure why the professor felt compelled to articulate this bias (especially after hand-picking the class), though I imagine it had something to do with strengthening the bulwarks between high and low culture.
How Do You Dance ‘Honor’?: SF Ballet’s ‘Onegin’ by John Cranko
Vitor Luiz and Maria Kochetkova in SF Ballet's production of Cranko's 'Onegin.' (photo © Erik Tomasson)
Often, the thing we love about the work of a great author is the ability to describe a moment, an emotion, some nuance of experience, in such a way that it is immediately recognizable to us, however foreign to our experience it actually is. We feel they somehow rummaged around in our mind and conveyed our lives back to us with different plots and more elegant language. The months after I graduated from college and was struggling to find work, feeling like I was both fabulous and doomed to uselessness, was probably the worst time to read The House of Mirth. And who would not recognize his own moments of mortified infatuation in Tolstoy’s description of Levin: “He avoided long looks at her as one avoids long looks at the sun; but he saw her, as one sees the sun, without looking.”
Ballet can elicit the same recognition: it doesn’t matter that most of us are too stiff, short-limbed, paunchy, or weak to even think without strain of the movements we see performed. Though we speak a different language, we can “read” dance and transcribe its expressions as our own. In Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet,” when Romeo has left Juliet’s bedroom and fled the city, she pulls the window curtain aside, arches her back, thrusting her chest toward the dawn light streaming into her room. Somehow, we know she is asking the gods to assist her in her helpless, entirely vulnerable state, that this is the physical manifestation of heartfelt entreaty. Though dancers portray human experience in a way that most people couldn’t and wouldn’t do themselves, they are able to evoke sympathetic experiences through their movements; we (ballet lovers, at least) watch and think, “Yes, this is what love/lust/fear/jealousy/etc. looks like,” and momentarily, feel it along with them.
But there are limitations. A story like Romeo and Juliet’s is ideal for translation through movement; the emotions are extreme, the characters’ actions are driven by those emotions rather than by complicated intellectual calculations, and the plot, is easy to follow.
A Kind of Portraiture: ‘Threshold Songs’ by Peter Gizzi
In Peter Gizzi’s fifth and newest poetry collection, Threshold Songs (Wesleyan University Press, 108 pages), the poem serves as a place where Gizzi can “talk / to myself through you.” He asks, “what does it mean / to be tough / or to write a poem / I mean the whole / vortex of home / buckling inside.” The collection is a place where Gizzi can articulate the “aboutness” of language, the interval between discursive sounds. This place both urges speech and thwarts the compulsion; it’s the gap where poetry is invented internally and is exonerated externally.
Beyond Life’s Slow Drizzle: ‘Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty’ by Diane Williams
There are 51 stories in Diane Williams’s new book of short stories, Vicky Swanky is a Beauty (McSweeney’s Books, 118 pages), and not one of them is longer than a page, front and back. I read the collection in a night, and spent a week and a half (with pleasure) working the text over again. Is this flash fiction? It is, except when there isn’t really a narrative. Then the pieces are prose poems. Williams uses a lot of devices consistent with prose poems – the second-person voice, the posing of questions. But whether her book can be classified as one thing or another ultimately doesn’t matter (beyond figuring out if it belongs in the “to read” or “to read, again” pile).
Posted in Book Reviews
Tagged Diane Williams, flash fiction, prose poems, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty
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The Staying Power of Joan Baez: Marianne Aya Omac at Yoshi’s in San Francisco
Marianne Aya Omac (right), Joan Baez, and Gabriel Harris (Baez's son) at Yoshi's (photo by Jamie Soja)
As diverse as the music performed in concerts is, so are the appearances of the audiences. James Mollison documented a spectrum of what he calls the “tribes” of attendees in his photography project and book The Disciples, a rough census of personae that converge around the archetypes represented by the musical acts Mollison followed. The grouped images of said disciples invite one to guess, before reading the captions, which performers each had come out for. It’s not hard: men in trucker hats and denim overalls, Merle Haggard. Men holding up sagging jeans by the crotch and women whose skirts barely reached their own, P Diddy. Union Jack mini-dresses, leopard print and afros? Spice Girls. Cinched lumberjack shirts, curly blonde wigs and feathery cowboy hats? Dolly Parton, obviously. Kiss makeup? You got it.
Recently at Yoshi’s in San Francisco, Joan Baez performed as a guest rather than as the main act, but the audience distinctly appeared to be of the Baez tribe. The restaurant side of Yoshi’s seemed to be patronized by slick young things coifed, Spanxed, and pressed into coy “my-eyes-are-up-here-jerk” cocktail attire. But inside the jazz club, the tone was far less bothered. The patrons were older, their dress casual and accented by the occasional ethnic jewelry piece. The shoes were decidedly comfort-oriented, the hair natural in color and texture, the makeup minimal on gracefully senescent faces. Sure, they could have been there for the comparatively unknown headliner from Montpellier, France, Marianne Aya Omac, but it seemed more likely that these were the people (or a small portion of them) who for the past five decades have been following Baez, rapt by her ever-burnishing voice, loving the ground whereon she stands.
Doing the Right Thing: ‘Body Awareness’ at the Aurora Theatre
Howard Swain (left), Jeri Lynn Cohen, Amy Resnick, and Patrick Russell in "Body Awareness"
As befits the first play by a young, promising playwright, Annie Baker’s Body Awareness, performing at the Aurora Theatre, is ambitious, spry, inquisitive, and restless. Before launching Baker’s award-studded career, Body Awareness appeared in the 2007 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, which showcased two playwrights who would go on to win Obies: Baker and Samuel D. Hunter. Five years later, the play returns under the direction of Joy Carlin, who balances the script’s constant intellectual and physical dynamism by keeping it zipping about, like a juggler circling on a unicycle.
The play, set on the campus of a Vermont small college, has two plots. The first deals with a lesbian couple—Phyllis (Amy Resnick), a feminist professor, and her partner, Joyce (Jeri Lynn Cohen)—struggling with their marriage and Jared (Patrick Russell), Joyce’s adult son who has Asperger’s Syndrome. And the second stems from the couple’s hosting a male photographer (Howard Swain) who specializes in nude photos of women. Out of this situation, great philosophical questions clash: feminism versus patriarchal ownership, rationalism versus semi-mystic spiritualist hedonism, and the body versus the mind.
Baker’s characters tend to fall neatly along a spectrum, spending most scenes conscripting grand ideas into their personal quarrels. They all seem obsessed with who is “right” or what is “the right thing to do.” But the play’s purpose seems to be in humorously displaying the curious juxtapositions of contemporary life, and not trying to fix them. At one point, a character exclaims in disbelief, “A goy teaching a Jew how to Shabbas. On a Tuesday.” The audience laughs.
The performance and design of the play is solid. Cohen, Resnick, Russell, and Swain deserve praise for eschewing caricature while flirting with strong and comic physical characterizations. Kent Dorsey’s set successfully distinguishes, within a small stage and without moving much furniture, the plays’ five different settings. (But why does the bedroom have no pillows?)
Carlin puts the play’s script at the fore. She keeps the tempo high, conscripting all other production elements to maintaining a clip. The play’s classical wordiness (major actions are described, occurring offstage; characters frequently explain ambiguous stage activities instead of letting them stand for themselves) encourages this directorial choice, but that doesn’t ameliorate the chaos and the restlessness sparked by the script’s numerous philosophical contests. Carlin makes no choice to highlight one thought or through-line over another, leaving them all to compete with each other, creating an aura of both breathlessness and immobility, and deflating the ultimate resolution.
Despite this, the play is clever, nuanced, and intriguing. Body Awareness swims along, bringing plenty of comedy (and entertainment) to each scene. Though Baker excels at constructing humorous pairings of people and philosophy, her point isn’t the comedy of those arrangements. Instead, she is about the unity of opposites, the OK-ness in their existing together. Baker, in her typically neat way, sums up these thoughts in the play’s final scene, when one character reads from a book about how the body and mind are one, how we must expand our sense of the mind to include the body. Baker’s graceful implication is that such awareness creates true unity.
Body Awareness runs through March 11 at the Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley.
‘A Theory of Small Earthquakes’: Q&A With Meredith Maran
Meredith Maran (Lisa Keating Photography)
A Theory of Small Earthquakes (Soft Skull Press; 352 pages) is the first novel by award-winning author Meredith Maran. Known for her several nonfiction books, including My Lie: A True Story of False Memory (2010), Dirty: A Search for Answers Inside America’s Teenage Drug Epidemic (2003) and Class Dismissed: A Year in the Life of an American High School, a Glimpse Into the Heart of a Nation (2000), Maran worked on her story of love, friendship and family for eight years (“from start to publication”).
Humorous and heartfelt, and breezy yet serious, her story of the long and evolving relationship between two young women – bisexual Alison Rose and gay Zoe — serves as the book’s anchor, to which Maran tethers such themes as the politics of the lesbian community, the long road to becoming a working writer or artist, and the trials of trying to get pregnant, among other things. Told through Alison’s eyes, A Theory of Small Earthquakes is also an honest account of a young woman heeding her instincts about who she is and what she wants out of life. Doing so takes Alison and the reader to unexpected places, making Maran’s protagonist appealingly complex. Sometimes she acts like a heel; sometimes she’s noble. But she is, like all of us, trying to figure things out as best she can.
The novel deftly evokes, too, a particular time and place: the Bay Area from the ‘80s through 2005, with the focus on the East Bay and a community of progressive people – some of whom we now would call “creatives” – unafraid to redefine what’s possible: namely, a society that allows for same sex parents and expands upon the concept of what a loving family looks like.
We talked over email with Maran, who lives in North Oakland with her wife, about her new book.
ZYZZYVA: When we meet Alison and Zoe, they’re both undergraduates, and that allows you to have some fun depicting political correctness on college campuses in the early ‘80s. But you do so with some tenderness. Can you tell me what you found insufferable about that mind set as well as what you found reaffirming?
Meredith Maran: Oh, the hours of our lives we’ll never get back, sitting in all those meetings and doing all that “criticism/self-criticism” and examining each other’s cervices and voting on which sexual orientation to adopt. Recently, while shopping at Berkeley Bowl, I ran into one of my Berkeley Women’s Health Collective “sisters” who went lesbian in the 1980s. As she introduced me to her husband, it gave me a little frisson to realize there are at least 20 women in Berkeley, including me, who are undoubtedly better acquainted with her cervix than he is.
But you’re right; I have affectionate memories of those times. Smashing monogamy and growing out my armpit hair was, um, liberating while it lasted. And I don’t find the self-righteousness of that era any more insufferable than the passion and dogmatism of any other. One possible exception is the Occupy movement, which I adore for its insistence on refusing authority, which goes beyond questioning it.
Posted in Interviews
Tagged A Theory of Small Earthquakes, Bay Area, bisexual, gay, Meredith Maran
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Self Portrait as Wikipedia Entry
Dean Rader is a professor in the English department at the University of San Francisco and author of Works & Days (Truman State University Press), which won the 2010 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. His forthcoming book is Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to NMAI (University of Texas Press).
“Self Portrait as Wikipedia Entry” is one of his two poems in ZYZZYVA‘s Winter issue. The piece, in print, appears with sections of underlined words, denoting what would be a hyperlink if read on a screen. We reproduce the poem here with the actual links.
Rader will be reading tomorrow night at 7 p.m. with Herbert Gold, another Winter issue contributor, at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, as part of a ZYZZYVA/Granta event.
