Cedar Lake: Stunning, Post-Modern Choreography Hits Spoleto U.S.A. -- A Guest Blog by Tracie Broom

Twenty seconds into Cedar Lake’s first piece, “Violet Kid,” at their June 2, 2012 performance at Gaillard Auditorium during Spoleto U.S.A. in Charleston, SC, tears were pouring down my face. The choreography, full of licks descended from the hallowed ground of high-end, post-modern release technique – blisteringly physical and intellectual – was so unbelievably GOOD.

Maybe you’ve seen the 2011 Matt Damon movie, The Adjustment Bureau? Damon’s love interest, played by Emily Blunt, leads a dance company in NYC called Cedar Lake, and he spends half the film shouting, “Where is Cedar Lake!” in an effort to find her while eluding guys in fedoras. Well, he finds her, spending a quiet moment marveling as the Cedar Lake dance company performs. This performance is so very, very good that I found myself marveling, too. It was like nothing I’d seen in a “non-dance” movie since a few snippets in the 1996 Bertolucci film Stealing Beauty. (Remember that?)

When my Spoleto 2012 program arrived in the mail, mere days after my catching The Adjustment Bureau on cable, how stoked was I that Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet was coming to SC? Pretty stoked. Bought tickets immediately. (Talk about effective brand placement in a film, no?)

Led by Artistic Director Benoit-Swan Pouffer and based in New York City, Cedar Lake’s mission is “to provide choreographers a comprehensive environment for creation and presentation.” Noted by Kinsey Gidick, reporting for Charleston City Paper from the after party the night of June 2 at the College of Charleston President’s House, “The beauty of Cedar Lake is that Walmart heiress and founder, Nancy Walton Laurie, has been insistent that her performers be able to do contemporary ballet as a full-time job, which is to say the cast members live in New York City and don't have to have second and third jobs to survive.”

Guest choreographer Hofesh Schecter, who designed or collaborated on every aspect of “Violet Kid” including the stark, cinematic lighting, edgy music, and everyday costumes, somehow managed to fit all of the absolutely coolest, best parts of post-modern technique and composition into one great, glorious 33-minute piece for 14 dancers. Virtuosic athleticism. Focused, unemotional execution. Intricate, pedestrian movement vocabulary, manipulated into dozens of phrases which were then deconstructed and reassembled into even more variations. Each piece was revisited and made large, small, narrowing, expanding, rising, sinking, slow, fast, impossibly fast, and every other Laban Movement Analysis term I can remember from my dance degree studies at Wesleyan University. This piece used every compositional tool in the box, and thoroughly. What a pleasure to watch.

A consistent return to familiar movements took dancers through every sort of level change, plane (sagittal, horizontal, vertical), and group permutation from solo to duet, trio, quartet, on up to the entire cast thundering across the floor in multiple traveling sequences that, paired with Schecter’s musical composition, gave one goosebumps. (At our beach house that night after the show, inspired, we implemented a rule that you had to “travel” across the floor at least once a day for the remainder of the trip.)

Canon and unison came and went, with A groups, B groups, C groups, D groups and even E groups roiling about, as bits and pieces of traditional Jewish dances made their way into the work, altered and compressed with bits of hip-hop, classical ballet, and contact improvisation until they were barely recognizable.

This, all happening in the middle of downtown Charleston, South Carolina on a Saturday afternoon.

Movement-wise, release technique greats were called to mind: Jose Limon, Bill T. Jones, Ralph Lemon, Trisha Brown, Stephen Petronio, etc. but I noticed subtle nods to the strict, modern traditions of Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, too. The technique also reminded me fondly of my favorite release teacher back in San Francisco, ODC’s Kathleen Hermesdorf. Reading the program after the performance, I was delighted to read that the U.K-based Schecter has worked with legendary post-modern choreographers like Wim Vandekeybus, who was one of our idols in college for his uncommon, hyper-athletic work.

Unobtrusive costuming consisted of cargo pants and casual shirts in varying shades of khaki, gray, and coral. The music, a lengthy, contemporary classical/modern electronic piece composed by Schecter, featured a live double bass string trio performing in 1800s drab dresses atop a raised platform on stage. The work called up a cross between the most melancholic bits of the Tristan und Isolde prelude by Wagner, the post-mod noise you might enjoy at Conundrum Music Hall, and the deep, sliding strings of the Balanescu Quartet. It was perfect.

Two other pieces comprised the two-hour program. “Annonciation,” was a contemplative, idiosyncratic duet choreographed by post-modern ballet legend Angelin Preljocaj. The third piece, “Grace Engine,” was devised for 15 dancers by Crystal Pite, who has choreographed for phenomenal Spoleto U.S.A. alum Nederlands Dans Theater. While both pieces were extraordinary, neither could quite match the fullness and scope of the opener, and “Grace Engine” was a little too emotionally overwrought for my taste. Overall, however, the program was one for the books. To say that Hofesh Schecter is a genius is a blithering, silly understatement, and I’m honored to have seen this remarkable dance company perform his work.

To view videos of Cedar Lake in performance, start here: http://cedarlakedance.com/repertoire

- Tracie Broom

 Tracie Broom is a post-modern dance snob who likes nothing more than to be put in her place by brilliant work. She lives and works in Columbia, SC.

A night of new music -- Spoleto Review

For a long time if you wanted new music at the Spoleto Festival, you had to go to a small hall for the late afternoon Music in Time series. During the past few years, new music keeps getting bigger and bigger stages. Part of this is due to Music in Time founder John Kennedy’s more prominent role with the festival as resident conductor and some of it is the result of the rising tide of interest in contemporary music. Evidence could be found Sunday with the Orchestra Uncaged concert in Sottile Theater. The concert juxtaposed works by one of the pioneers of modern music – John Cage - with that of a relative newcomer – Jonny Greenwood (best known as guitarist for Radiohead.)

Cage isn’t someone who shows up at the festival often and Greenwood’s work has never been played at the festival.

The concert offered a grouping of three Cage works written the year before his death in 1992. The three pieces Twenty-six, Twenty-eight and Twenty Nine are named both for the duration of each and the number of instruments required for each. Unlike some of Cage’s works these do not call for extended instrumental techniques or alterations of instruments by doing things like jamming the strings with chopsticks.

Seems simple enough, but not so fast.

For this concert the three works were all performed at the same time, the shorter works nesting inside the larger ones and the various ensembles filling the stage with about 60 musicians. This doesn’t mean it sounded like three different works being played because the pieces are written in a way that they can be played one at a time, two at a time, or all at once.

Within a larger overall sound, various musicians engaged in “sound events” and they get to decide, within certain time constraints, when they are going to make said sounds. This technique, dubbed “time brackets,” doesn’t change much for the listener. What we still get is an ongoing wash of sound with little change tempo or volume interrupted just momentarily by the occasional “sound event.” These events are often just one quick note played at the same volume as the rest of the orchestra. It’s often difficult to ascertain exactly where the sound is coming from or what instrument is making it. It was fun to search the packed stage for tell-tale signs of movement. In one case the tip of a rapidly-moving violin bow – the only thing visible at the back of the stage  – was the giveaway.

At times the piece(s) reminded one of a gentle summer night sounds – the wind in the trees, crickets chirping, the a/c fan -  and the sudden arrival and departure of a bullfrog croak, a distant train whistle, an owl’s hoot and a motorcycle a couple of blocks over.

These are the only three of Cage’s large body of work that have not previously been performed in the United States. The festival deserves our thanks for finally premiering them and doing them so well.

The festival has never before performed works by Greenwood and the concert included his two biggest and most recent classical pieces.

48 Responses to Polymorphia is Greenwood’s string orchestra tribute to Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki’s 1961 composition Polymorphia. The Penderecki work ended on a C major chord and Greenwood picks that, and various distortions, as his building block.  48 Responses uses large tone clusters and between shivers and screeches, snippets of tunes disintegrate. Like the Cage, 48 Responses was largely one big sound. During the final section of the work, the string players set down their bows and picked up huge seedpods which they used both to bow and as percussion instruments. It seemed gimmicky, but sounded great.

Doghouse is a much more accessible and traditional work scored for string trio and large orchestra. Greenwood has said that the work was inspired by imagining what sort of musical scores he might find in the archives of the BBC studio orchestra, which premiered the piece in 2010, especially if some of those scores were moth eaten. The piece nods to various musical styles one might associate with the BBC and its many projects. It also isn’t surprising to learn that selections from it were used as a film score. Doghouse is a much more dynamic work than 48 with snatches of dissonance throughout, the musical falling apart and coming together again.

Although some people still erroneously think of the festival as a place of fairly conservative musical offerings, it has become anything but with concerts like this and new operas (two this year.)  Because of the way the festival is set up, many people attend events they might not go to at home, but not all of them are completely happy about this. The audience at the Uncaged concert was quite diverse and certainly skewed younger than at most of the larger concerts. The house was nearly full. As might be expected, quite a few drifted away after the Cage and a few more as the night went on, but in the end there was still a good solid crowd that very much appreciated what it had just heard.

-          Jeffrey Day

The Animals and Children Took to the Streets - Spoleto Review

Jasper is back at Spoleto for a few days and we hit the ground running by catching the last performance of theatre company 1927's The Animals and Children Took to the Streets at noon on Sunday. This show represents some of the best of what arts festivals can bring -- risky, innovative, multidisciplinary performances that carve out new ways of looking at humanity. Granted, shows like this don't always work -- we remember with horror some Spoleto and Piccolo Spoleto bombs from the past that will go unnamed. But this time, all the quirkiness and uniqueness anda darkly Dickensian attributes of The Animals and Children Took to the Streets come together to form a creepily satisfying narrative that acknowledges both the best and the worst in all of us.  

Written and directed by Suzanne Andrade, who is one fourth of the company 1927 along with her partner, animator Paul Barritt, and actor Esme Appleton with Lillian Henley, who is a musician, Animals and Children brings music, animation, live action, and storytelling together. The stage is a combination screen and set in three parts with sparse moveable scenery carried on and off stage by the actors. There are three windows behind which typically sit the actors -- though, as mentioned, they are  mobile as well -- and from their various positions they sing in an almost madrigal manner at key points in the play. But, their primary job is interacting with the Edward Gorey-like animation projected onto the screen/set. The screen/set is identified as a tenement house called Bayou Mansion on Red Herring Street where nothing good ever happens. Full of an assorted cast of perverts ranging from a 21-year-old granny to an underwear thief to a guy who likes to sniff women's bicycle seats; one would think the adults would be to blame for all the bad things that happen on Red Herring Street. But no, when the sun goes down and the shades are drawn, residents lock their doors against the hordes of marauding children who wreak havoc on the community, usually en masse. But one day, a new pair arrive in the neighborhood in the form of a mother and daughter -- described as being "cleaner and prettier" than all the rest -- and they introduce a form of optimism into the atmosphere at the same time that all the children have been subdued via a giant drugged gumdrop. So the story is told of a pessimistic, and somewhat lovelorn, caretaker who is caught in the middle and, through a series of interactions with the audience, must choose either the path of idealism or the path of realism which will bring us to the end of the story.

Even though we caught the final performance of the play at Spoleto, we'll keep the ending to ourselves lest we spoil it for those of you lucky enough to catch this show in one of their next gigs. (The Charleston stop came between a shows in Dijon, France and an upcoming performance in DC.)

We loved the delightful creepiness of the show, the tongue-in-cheek manner in which it was presented, the underlying nastiness of the lines and lyrics -- who doesn’t like songs about living in a "shithole?" -- and the fact that, yet again, animation is proven to be a proper art form for exploring decidedly adult topics of social issues.

From Spoleto: Kepler opera -- great music with a murky narrative -- A Review

  For those who are fans of Phillip Glass, his newest opera Kepler provides two-hours packed with quite recognizable Glass music: swirling arpeggios, cyclically-repeated motifs, tuned percussion, passages deep in the bass, unexpected contrasts bursting though like an exploding star bursting through the dark and twinkling blanket of a night sky.

The Spoleto production of Kepler marks the American premiere of a full production of the opera, which was mounted in Europe several years ago and had a concert staging in New York. The orchestra, under the director of resident conductor John Kennedy, sounded solid in the Sottile Theatre, as did the seven soloists, and especially the 30 members of the Westminster Choir.

The subject is Johannes Kepler, a great scientist who lived from 1571 to 1630 and explored new ways of thinking about the universe and especially our place in it. He was often wrong, but opened the doors to those who came after him. His theories often bolster the idea of a geometry of God in which science and religion could peacefully co-exist. (We all know how that turned out.) He came up with ideas of how the various planets fit in relation to one another and theorized that the planets had elliptical orbits.

The opera isn’t so much about his life as his ideas, not unlike some of Glass's early “portrait operas” such as Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha. This may not sound like great material for opera from which we often expect love and love gone wrong, with a little murder thrown in. The life and work of Kepler may actually have made for a great and compelling opera, even without a lot of hot blood, but this version is so abstract, so lacking in action, and any sort of narrative it is both baffling and boring.

The libretto is based on Kepler’s own writings as well as those of a poet who was his contemporary. Maybe in the original German there was some grace to the words, but they mostly fall heavily to earth.

The “story,” such as it is, is nearly impossible to follow unless one has a decent knowledge of Kepler’s life and work. (The festival program book provides no program or director’s notes for the opera which would greatly help the audience and the opera.) It is a series of disjointed snippets, supposedly a look into Kepler’s mind. It is certainly the artist’s right to take this approach, but is better when it actually works.

Director Sam Helfrich does what he can moving around 40 people  who don’t have that much to do, often using the choir as a university classroom full of eager 16th century students. He and set designer Andrew Lieberman have devised some beautiful and compelling scenes. The set itself is a simple one of wood and some tables and chairs with most of the changes taking place through lighting effects on a huge screen. One of the high points is what we guess is a representation of the supernova of 1604 which was viewed with awe throughout Europe, including by Kepler. The orchestra builds as the exploding star rises on screen and then suddenly drops away washing through the hall like the light. Unfortunately later in the opera most of the choir starts bleeding through their white shirts which feels like a desperate grasp at adding some excitement.

Like the one-character opera Emilie staged at the festival last year, Kepler would really be more effective staged as a concert where its ideas and music would be unencumbered by attempts at dramatic flair.

Additional performances of Kepler take place May 28, 31 and June 2.

Spoleto presents "Leo" -- a Review

The physical theater production of "Leo," directed by Daniel Briere, conceived and performed by Tobias Wegner, is basically a gag carried out, step-by-step, to its logical and glorious conclusion. At the risk of sounding far too sappy for comfort, Leo is a joy to behold. The performance opens onto a simple set consisting of a large red and blue box -- large enough to hold a frolicking adult male (Wegner) -- but devoid of anything else except said male, a bare lightbulb, and a valise. Adjacent to the overly large box is a screen that depicts the innards of the box exactly with one small exception -- the screen turns the box on its side.

What happens over the next 70 minutes are the physical manipulations of Wegner in the right-side-up box and the projection of his manipulations on the sideways screen. For example, when Wegner is seated on top of the valise, stationed on the floor, it looks as if he is hanging off the right wall on the screen.

It's a simple concept -- the art is in the physicality of Wegner and his movements. The entertainment quotient comes from the fact that despite the audience's ability to see that at no time does Wegner actually hang from the ceiling or walk on the walls -- though he does do some mean hand and head-stands -- we watch his movements on the screen and guffaw at the illusionless illusion he creates.

Though the bit slows down some during the second half of the show -- Wegner lulls us into an unusually relaxed state with his saxophone (the valise is there for a purpose) -- it picks right back up again when animation is added to the screen. Our only other complaint is that, despite our perfectly fine seats, we were unable to get a good view of the inside of the box where Wegner frolicked -- and we were sure others saw less than us.

Overall though, Jasper gives Leo a strong 4 out of 5 stars. There are three more opportunities to see the performance -- Sunday at 8 pm, Monday at noon, and Tuesday at 7 pm.