6.29.07: Emigrant Theater's Hunger at Mixed Blood

Who hasn’t wanted to occasionally drown their fears? In Hunger, a new play by Sheri Wilner and produced by Emigrant Theater, the lead character does it not with alcohol, but with the Atlantic Ocean.

Diana and Adam are newly engaged twentysomethings on vacation at Adam's parents’ beach house on Nantucket. The dilapidated bungalow is his “favorite place in the whole world,” and he wants to fix it up, even though it’s slowly falling into the sea. The sea pulls in Diana, too, and a witching-hour walk finds her alone on the dunes, filled with a primordial longing to become it. As often happens in plays in which all the characters are metaphors, an anthropomorphic character appears. He calls himself Seymour and moves with the grace and inevitability of high tide. Like the Snake offering Eve the apple, Seymour leaves Diana a pile of fresh oysters and promises to return after she’s “thought about” his offer to leave her body and become water; that is, to become nothing and everything at once. A ravenous Diana sucks them down. “When I look at the waves,” she says, “I know there's another world beneath the water.”

The rest of the play circulates around Diana’s to-be-or-not-to-be crisis. Angie Haigh as Diana (pictured above) returns to the stage after a brief baby-rearing hiatus, and manages to keep her head above water in a thinly written role. The other two actors—Sam Bardwell as Adam and Grant Chapman as Seymour (also pictured)—are both students in the University of Minnesota/Guthrie BFA Actor Training Program but are no worse than some of the more experienced actors in town.

The highlights of Hunger are the set and lighting, by Erica Zaffarano and Geoff Wold, respectively. Zaffarano has dressed the stage in beige tones, light blue satin, and a conch shell big enough to draw blood (but small enough to seem innocuous). Wold’s delicate lighting sets the mood for the interior and exterior action. The scenes when Diana and Seymour are underwater are some of the best in the play, and a fine example of how expert lighting and physical acting can be more than the sum of their parts. Suffice it to say, subtle technical accomplishments do not make a play more satisfying than what it is, just as a good wine can’t disguise mediocre cheese. Hunger’s main course is lacking.

Hunger runs through July 7 at Mixed Blood Theatre’s Alan Page Auditorium, 1501 S. 4th St., Mpls.

6.28.07: Such Sweet Thunder at Orchestra Hall

This weekend's lineup of Twin Cities Jazz Festival events got off to a rollicking start last night when, over the dinner hour, Chicago bluesman extraordinaire Big George Jackson and his band slung their gutbucket blues at a jovial crowd on Peavey Plaza. Later, inside Orchestra Hall, trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis presided over a spirited tribute to Duke Ellington called Such Sweet Thunder, featuring the luminous virtuosity of his much more famous older brother, Branford.

Delfeayo Marsalis is no musical slouch himself. For the evening’s festivities, Delfeayo reworked Such Sweet Thunder, Duke Ellington’s so-called Shakespeare Suite—a collection of twelve compositions inspired by various Shakespearean characters and sonnets—by distilling the arrangement down from a fifteen-piece band to an octet and reordering the original sequence of the pieces. According to Phil Schaap, jazz curator for New York’s Lincoln Center and emcee of the event, last night’s performance was the first time the Shakespeare Suite has been played in its entirety since the Duke did it back in 1956. So, in addition to the novelty of having two of the brothers Marsalis onstage at once, there was also some history being made.

The title Such Sweet Thunder is taken from a line by Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “I never heard so musical a discord, such sweet thunder.” The twelve compositions in the suite are what Ellington called “portrait pieces” or “tone parallels,” which use a particular person or thing as a launching point for the music. Emotionally, pieces in the suite run the gamut from a sad and soulful sigh for the plight of Romeo and Juliet, to the ragtime-flavored “Lady Mac,” to the (ego)maniacal frenzy of such pieces “Hank Cinq” (or “Hank Sank,”) inspired by Henry V, and “Sonnet for Caesar.” 

The relationship between the music and text in these pieces isn’t necessarily direct or obvious, but the pieces stand on their own and contain frequent echoes of Ellington’s more famous work. In its original form, the suite takes about forty-five minutes to play, but Delfeayo Marsalis added about an hour to the playing time by incorporating frequent solos, particularly by his older brother, who demonstrated several times why he is one of the reigning kings of contemporary jazz. Delfeayo even joked that some of the pieces weren’t too difficult to arrange because all he had to do was write, “Let Branford do what he does.” And what Branford does is play with such fluidity, grace, and speed—on both alto and soprano saxophone—that it often feels as if he’s compressing time and space, reaching back into history to grab the roots of jazz while simultaneously pulling various bizarre and exquisite sounds from the future. After one particularly audacious solo that went places Duke Ellington never dreamed of, Delfeayo, noting that Ellington was a big fan of improvisation, just shook his head and said, “The Duke would have been proud.”

If you missed last night’s show, you can catch Delfeayo again on August 5, when he closes out Sommerfest with A Tribute to Count Basie, featuring legendary sax-man James Moody.

6.28.07: 48HFP’s “Best of Minneapolis” at the Riverview

Is it possible to write, direct, and edit a great short film in forty-eight hours? What if you were required to use a genre, line of dialogue, character, and prop that were determined just before the clock started ticking? I’m skeptical that really great movies can be produced under these circumstances, but as I discovered at 48 Hour Film Project’s Best of Minneapolis screening last night at the Riverview Theater, even when the results aren’t spectacular, they’re quite entertaining.

48HFP is the most established of the timed film competitions that seem to be proliferating across the country faster than their TV kin, the ratings-troubled On the Lot with Minneapolis 48HFP alum Andrew Hunt, tanks in the ratings. The organization holds competitions in sixty-six cities, but Minneapolis draws the third largest number of participants (eighty-five teams this year), a nod to our sizable creative community and our hardy disregard for food, water, and sleep when something as essential as art is on the line. During the Minneapolis competition held in early June, filmmakers were challenged to make a four- to seven-minute film that incorporated a portable music player, a veterinarian named Jason or Jill Myers, and the line of dialogue “They will get them if we let them.” Last night the top twelve films (determined by an unannounced panel of judges) played to a full house at the Riverview, where awards were also given, including for Best Picture to the film that will now compete against other cities’ top films.

The big winners were two clever comedies—Buddy, Buddy by St. Paul–based creative firm Mojo Solo and Open House by Keith Hurley of 7 Minutes Late. The two films swept the acting, directing, and writing categories, with Buddy, Buddy winning Best Picture bragging rights over audience-favorite Open House. The latter follows a Realtor’s doomed attempt to sell a house occupied by a grumpy ghost who keeps interrupting his sales pitch by spooking prospective buyers, while the former tells the story of a mentally challenged man who decides to euthanize himself before allowing his brother to do the same to his beloved cocker spaniel. It had to be a close vote. Buddy, Buddy ended too abruptly for my taste, but it made better use of the required veterinarian character and was arguably the acting showpiece of the bunch.

Animals were everywhere in the “Best Of” reel. In the pitch-perfect Single Female Sci-Fi Vet, a cast of puppets and stuffed animals escape a lab before they can be incinerated. Le Film Animal opens with the filmmakers arguing about what to do with their assigned genre (animal film) and then turns into a homage to the French New Wave with its lead actor dressed in a mangy animal costume and about to undergo an unpleasant procedure at the vet.  In The Natural Channel, a bored channel-surfer bonds with a skateboard-riding Boston terrier in his dreams. And although it’s off-camera, a dog ends up being the perfect punchline to Eric Mueller’s Der Hund, a ribald story of a vain singer bragging about career triumphs and sexual conquests of days gone by. For my money, Der Hund was the most creative in incorporating the required prop, character, and dialogue—plus, it had a killer set design.

On average, the comedies fared better than the serious stuff, with the global warming–themed actioner Megastorm an example of an idea too big and costly for the confines of this competition. In the drug-crime-gone-wrong horror film Safehouse, by Minneapolis creative agency Urban Mountain Media, visual effects overshadowed the story as they did in Prime Productions’ The Feminine Mystique, which is set at an art gallery opening and shot in one continuous take. And then there’s Midnight Motel, a gorgeous black-and-white murder story that was that rare film that seemed stifled by the time constraints and begging for a longer-form execution.

I've got my fingers crossed for Buddy, Buddy's competition with 48HFP's other sixty-five cities' winning films.

6.24.07: Time Track Productions' The Closer I Get, the Less I Believe It at the Ritz Theater

Time Track Productions makes stage images no one else can. This, for instance: a dancer (Kari Mosel) stands, dances, spins. Around her, others dance, some in brilliant close-up, others far off, while fireflies flicker across the space. What you see is a collage, self on self, not feverishly busy but beautifully full, as if you were looking into a web of memory. How do they do it? To choreographer Paula Mann’s muscular, whole-hearted modern dance, animator Steve Paul adds layers of video projected onto scrims before and behind the dancers. Where other companies use animation as a backdrop or highlight, the wife-and-husband team of Mann and Paul integrate animation into the fabric of the work. They’ve spent, they say, two years creating this latest work, and the work and the close partnership are apparent. Dance and animation work together, neither so busy as to overshadow the other, and result in stunning moments such as Mosel’s firefly dance.

But The Closer I Get, the Less I Believe It is not a technique showcase. Mann and Paul use their unusual collaboration to explore virtual reality, the realm of simulated humans and simulated experience. A story winds through the performance: four ordinary humans, seeking fun, excitement, or connection, wander into a funhouse in which their memories are re-enacted and their fantasies of happiness fulfilled. But during a saccharine rendition of the Carpenters’ “Top of the World,” something goes wrong, a la Westworld, and the creepy robot humans get out of synch. And then everything gets confusing. Concept-laden, heavy with irony, the show goes on, the performers grimacing and mugging inexplicably, until the “what just happened?” end. The irony is particularly crushing, as it prevents us in the audience from judging for ourselves. When we’re allowed to simply look into the funhouse, to be seduced by its beautiful images or put off by its ultimate distance, we’re active and implicated. There’s even some meta-play with the idea that the theater itself is a type of virtual reality. Most of the time, though, the funhouse comes to us mediated by Mann and Paul’s idea that we should distrust the pleasures it offers.

Still, there are moments when Mann and Paul lift the screen of irony. The funhouse barker (Nora Jenneman), who has appeared before only as a distorted face, shows up in a crowded mall, standing still, talking to herself about her loneliness. Meanwhile, a woman with baroque blonde hair moves before this projection. She reaches up and takes off the blonde wig, revealing the close-shorn head of the barker. Here the fake and real blend, shot through with longing. In the dance, too, emotion comes through. The performers differ in acting ability, but they all dance with strength and wild abandon, particularly the whirlwind Mosel.

Visually stunning, rich in ideas, but also frustrating, The Closer I Get concludes a trilogy of work on technology and human life. It will be interesting to see what Mann and Paul turn to next.

6.24.07: Riot Act Reading Series with Laurie Lindeen at the Turf Club

The Turf Club, near Snelling and University Avenues in St. Paul, is marked by a green horseshoe sign which calls it the “Best Remnant of the '40s,” a claim that contrasts with the decidedly more contemporary patrons smoking in the doorway. Enter the darkened interior and you’ll spot a long bar, strings of lights, darts, pinball, and a photo booth. This classic dark and gritty dive bar is the perfect place for a reading.

Last night, the bar hosted its almost-monthly Riot Act Reading Series, organized by Paul Dickinson and Laura Brandenburg. The series got its start about five years ago at the Loring Pasta Bar (then put on by Dickinson), and recently moved to the Turf Club. Says Brandenburg, “[The series] has a punk rock history.” (Dickinson is the lead singer and guitarist in punk rock band Frances Gumm.)

Underscoring Brandenburg's assertion, Laurie Lindeen read from her new memoir, Petal Pusher, A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story, which chronicles Lindeen’s experiences as a member of Zuzu’s Petals, an all-girl pop-punk band that formed in the late 1980s and made its mark on the music scene in the early 1990s.

Dickinson opened the evening by joking, “I know many of you are here on court order,” as he raised his pint of beer and launched into a series of darkly funny poems punctuated by quips such as “I’ve been thrown to the wolves so many times I’m part of the pack,” and “Air Force laser beams slice government cheese for lunch,” and “Foucault, you rabid Frenchy.” Brandenburg followed with a “poem cycle” on fear, jealousy, and rage delivered partly in a slightly demented-sounding southern accent.

Then Lindeen took the stage, book in hand, her blonde curls and red and white floral print dress lending her a rather angelic aura amid the red glow of the ceiling lights. She looked more like the mom, writing teacher, and published author that she’s become than a rock 'n’ roller. But then, looks can be deceiving.

Lindeen read a few passages, including one about a night spent in an hourly motel—the only place the band could afford—with rather unpleasant traces of former couples left behind on the floor, walls, and bedspread in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, after a gig at NYC’s legendary CBGB club. Needless to say, they sleep with their clothes on. She continued to read from chapters about opening for Adam Ant, singing Jesus Christ Superstar in the van on the way to a gig, and getting busted by an overzealous highway patrolman on the way to an important gig. Reading at the Turf Club instead of her more usual venue—Barnes & Noble—seems a bit more fitting: The stories are funny, insightful, and even a little quixotic. As Lindeen says, “Sometimes you can’t help yourself. Rock 'n’ roll is sexy as hell.”

6.23.07: Michel Gondry at Walker Art Center

In a CGI-saturated summer movie season, there’s something refreshing and honest about Michel Gondry’s films. Eschewing digital effects in lieu of the laborious art of stop-motion animation, puppets, and, in one case, cities constructed entirely from toilet paper rolls, Gondry makes offbeat romantic comedies with a wildly imaginative but comparably low-tech aesthetic. Even when the narratives meander or annoy (and they do), you can’t help but admire the person working really hard behind the scenes to create the magic.

The French-born director, best known for his music videos and 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, sat for a free-flowing conversation with Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum last night at Walker Art Center. On the heels of last month’s Gondry retrospective, the latest installment in the Walker’s always entertaining Regis Dialogue series (think Inside the Actors Studio, minus the imperious James Lipton) sold out in a record three hours to a hipster crowd that Rosenbaum quickly acknowledged was more familiar with Gondry’s music videos than he was—the first indication that this odd-couple pairing wouldn’t be among the series’ strongest.

The cerebral critic did seem out of step with his subject, but Gondry gamely and often humorously fielded questions in his soft-spoken, heavily accented English. He touched first on his artistic upbringing in the Parisian suburb of Versailles, where he cut his cinematic teeth making videos for his pop band Oui Oui (Gondry was their drummer—“I don’t know why people laugh at that,” he quipped, responding to the audience’s chuckles). A fortuitous meeting with Björk, his creative soulmate it would seem, led to several other video gigs and eventually to the Foo Fighters and The White Stripes, whose “Everlong" and “The Hardest Button to Button” videos, respectively, Rosenbaum illuminated as small showpieces for the kind of highly allusive, dense narratives Gondry is drawn to as film subjects.

Claiming that he can’t always decipher the lyrics of the songs he’s hired to direct videos for, Gondry said the language barrier has actually proved to be more help than hindrance, joking that “I learn to follow certain words and create my own little reality on the side.” Part of creating that alternate reality includes handcrafted-looking visual effects that have a timelessness, he argued, that of-the-moment digital technologies simply don’t. He can always find the means to realize for the screen the wild ideas he sketches in elaborate storyboards (“technically there’s always a solution,” he insists), hinting instead that it’s the scheduling and other demands of the stars he works for that are more of an impediment to realizing his creative vision.

Although more than half of the evening’s clips and questions were reserved for Gondry’s videos, when the conversation finally turned to his feature films, the focus was on his collaborations with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who wrote the screenplay for Gondry’s feature-film debut, Human Nature, and the Oscar-winning script for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The Kaufman partnership has done much to build Gondry’s critical and commercial reputation, but has had the unfortunate effect of illuminating the muddled results when he’s left on his own, namely on last year’s semi-autobiographical, Gondry-scripted The Science of Sleep.

During the audience Q&A that ended the evening, Gondry acknowledged the uncomfortable position this puts him in. “People might think that there’s more depth in the work I do with [Kaufman],” he said. “But I want to give myself a chance to be a writer.” In some respects, it was a fitting reminder of the unusual place this talented filmmaker finds himself in—heralded as a gifted visual stylist with a great imagination, but having to defend a small, uneven body of work that might be a bit too premature for a retrospective and dialogue such as this.

6.22.07: Two for the Seesaw at the Jungle Theater

There are plays that should never be resurrected, and Two for the Seesaw is probably one of them. For starters, the outdated language (and the actors’ over-the-top articulation of it) obfuscates the story: emasculated divorcé from the Midwest meets kooky Jewish girl from the Bronx who wants to be a dancer and lives on the Lower East Side. They’re both unemployed and are hard nuts to crack—they can’t decide if they need to be cared for or taken care of, who’s the hustler and who’s the hustled. But by the end, by golly, they’ve really learned a lot about themselves from the relationship and will go on to bigger and better things. Considering that William Gibson’s play was written in the 1950s and takes place in 1956, guess which gender gets shafted?

Bain Boehlke’s director’s note promises much more than the play delivers. In 1950s America, Boehlke writes, the country was a pressure cooker waiting to explode: the women’s, civil rights, and gay rights movements “burst onto the scene,” forever shattering the white male-dominated hegemony on which America was founded. Two For the Seesaw, he claims, is therefore the story—er, metaphor?—of two people perched precariously on the lid that’s about to blow off and hit the guys right where it hurts.

Yet none of these ideas appear anywhere on the Jungle stage. As usual, the set, designed by Boehlke, is beautifully crafted and serves as the central locus for the play’s emotional resonance. The lighting design by Barry Browning and sound by Sean Healey are stellar as well. Unfortunately, the actors seem lost and unfocused, and the whole production feels as if it’s trapped in time. The social and political turmoil supposedly boiling beneath the play’s surface simply doesn’t come through. Consequently, the play feels as if it has no cohesive core, no heart.

The actors, Stephen Cartmell and Maggie Chestovich (above, courtesy Elizabeth R. MacNally), were wonderful as lusting lovers in Jeune Lune’s recent production of Tartuffe. Here, they’re about as compatible as an elephant and a chihuahua. In Act One, Chestovich veered on the edge of caricature, with her generalized New Yawk accent, anxious hair fluffing, and flopping hands. In Acts Two and Three (yup, three), Chestovich redeemed herself and acted the hell out of her role. This is good, because Cartmell, to continue with the animal analogy, is the chihuahua. He’s all yap, no substance, blustering but obviously fragile, an insecure animal that bites out of fear.

Instead of writing fabulous program notes, Boehlke would have served the play better by figuring out what story he wanted to tell, deciding why it was important, and then going to town. Two for the Seesaw is a script that still has the potential to entertain and challenge, but the Jungle’s production feels as if it popped out of a time capsule, dusty and worn, as if half a century of social progress had never happened—and worse, didn’t really need to happen.

6.15.07: Picasso and American Art After Hours Party at the Walker Art Center

A throng more than 3,000 strong gathered at the Walker Art Center Friday night to celebrate the opening of what is sure to be the must-see art event of the summer: Picasso and American Art. It was a warm, muggy night, perfect for a party, save for the occasional light drizzle that dampened the outdoor Target lounge, but not the spirits of the partygoers themselves.

Artinistas young and old shuffled shoulder-to-shoulder just to get into the exhibit, where they slid politely past each other in large but orderly packs, some standing on their tippy toes or peering through a sea of elbows just to get a glimpse of the master’s work. Getting close enough to read the nameplates was a bit more difficult. People at the back could be heard murmuring “Is that a Picasso?,” and a few moments later the message would be relayed from the front, “No—a Gorky.”

In the gallery itself, such herds, despite their size, tend to be relatively quiet, but one is never sure whether it’s out of respect for the occasion or fear of being overheard saying something stupid. This is especially true at the Walker, where the exhibits are known for defying easy interpretation, and patrons have become accustomed to being mystified and humbled on a regular basis.

Which is one of the reasons this show is so different. After showings on the east and west coast, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, this is the tour’s only Midwest stop. It is arguably the most accessible show ever to appear at the Walker (is there a conscious being alive who is not aware of Picasso’s influence in the art world?), and according to outgoing director Kathy Halbreich, deciding to host the show was partly a strategic decision “to attract people who might not normally visit the Walker” in hopes that they might view the permanent collection as well. Such naked populism was entirely uncharacteristic of the Halbreich-era at the Walker for the past fifteen years, and it’s far too early to tell if it is a harbinger of things to come after her departure in November. It is far enough out of character, though, that Halbreich felt the need to mention it to a roomful of reporters on Thursday morning, if only to acknowledge that the management and board are aware of the odd fit.

The decision to do the show apparently hinged on the idea that it was too important an exhibition not to do. Picasso is easily the most famous and iconic artist of the twentieth century, and here is a show that demonstrates, in some of the most startling and obvious ways imaginable, the force of the giant’s influence on successive generations of America’s greatest artists, including such household names as Max Weber, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns. Put together over a ten-year period, largely through the efforts of Whitney curator Michael Fitzgerald, Picasso and American Art is a show almost everyone can “get,” because it puts several well-known and instantly recognizable paintings by Picasso side by side with the work of dozens of artists who either borrowed stylistically from Picasso, shamelessly ripped him off, or tried to combat his influence by mocking or trivializing him. Fitzgerald himself doesn’t want people thinking about this show as being about Picasso’s influence—he prefers the word “response,” because what the show is really about is the many ways in which American artists of the early to mid-twentieth century had to grapple with Picasso’s astonishing productivity (more than 45,000 works, which averages out to about two pieces a day, every day, for sixty-plus years) and the unstoppable juggernaut of his all-encompassing reputation.

There is little subtlety in these responses. Some are so similar that it’s impossible not to wonder why no one has pressed a copyright infringement suit—though in one case, Claes Oldenburg’s sculpture "Soft Version of Maquette for a Monument Donated to Chicago by Pablo Picasso, 1968," which sits next to a model of the actual Maquette (baboon) sculpture Picasso gave to the city of Chicago, a lawsuit was involved. Others, like the many Jackson Pollock’s in the exhibit, feel like angry retorts: “You call that abstract? Watch this—drizzle, drizzle—now that’s abstraction for ya!" As one moves through the exhibit, however, the responses to Picasso’s god-like legacy become less reverential, less emotionally heated, and turn decidedly ironic. One can only do four things with a god—worship it, wrestle with it, destroy it, or mock it—and the artists in the latter half of the exhibit, particularly Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns, seem to have had a fine time poking fun at the legend of Picasso. In a quote on the wall, Lichtenstein points out the extent to which Picasso’s work has become a commodity, and he drives the point home by assimilating Picasso’s style into what are essentially large, if exquisitely executed cartoons. Jasper Johns is even more irreverent, taking one of Picasso’s famous noses and turning it around and upside down in various hilarious ways. The tone is wry and satirical, but it is, nevertheless, a reaction—one of many—to Picasso’s unignorable status as the king of twentieth-century art. And this, after all, is the whole point of the show. There is a great deal of tension in these pieces. One can almost hear the conversation/argument between the master and his disciples, and it is one of the most fascinating cultural dialogues in history.

It would be all too easy to stroll through this exhibit, note the most obvious connections, and say, “I get it: Picasso was a legend.” But those who grazed the show on Friday night would be well-served to return for a closer viewing when the gallery isn’t so packed. It’s easy to take Picasso for granted, because he has become almost as much of a brand as Target, whose projected logo swirled over the walls of the Walker throughout the evening, serving as a reminder that practically everything these days has some sort of corporate sponsorship behind it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just the sort of thing that tends to divert people’s attention from more important matters. In this case, the more important matter would be the profound ripple effect Picasso’s existence has had on the evolution of art in the past hundred years. This show, impressive as it is, illustrates but a pebble in a puddle of the tsunami that was Picasso. By all means go and catch the wave, but don’t assume when you walk out that you have “gotten it.” This is a Walker exhibit, after all, which means that you should end up thinking about it for a long time to come.

Picasso and American Art runs through September 9 at the Walker Art Center.

6.14.07: TU Dance at the Southern Theater

After TU Dance’s spring concert is over and the dancers have gone, the Southern Theater stage seems bereft, empty, orphaned—but the dance goes on in the viewer’s eyes, afterimages of motion flickering over the ordinary world outside. There are beautiful involutions of partnering where bodies twine around and transform each other, and sky-catching leaps echo with a suspension of time. Choreographer Uri Sands (co-artistic director of the company, along with Toni Pierce-Sands) at times adds dramatic edge to his muscular and lovely movement, creating a lift in which a dancer climbs the air with her flexed feet, or piling severe but elegant poses reminiscent of Egyptian art. Sands can be funny too: In “Waiting,” he and Jason Jacobs ham their way through a Tom Waits song as if they were pleasantly tipsy hoofers who’ve almost forgotten their routine. Mostly, though, it’s beauty that he and the company create on stage, and plenty of it. In “For You,” six dancers alternate swirling through a brightly lit space, sometimes solo, sometimes in couples, while the others stand by. At the end of the piece, all six dancers are moving, three couples spread over the stage, with no focal point. What a luxury: more beauty than you can see at once.

At times I wanted more from this lush show. The sweetness of it lulled me, and I wanted Sands to risk more. The ambitious “Veneers” begins well, with a quartet of dancers in Egyptian tunics (by Tulle and Dye) and harsh lighting (by Carolyn Wong). Rapid-fire, the dancers gesture and pose. They draw their hands past their necks, as if cutting off their heads, or pantomime hanging themselves, heads drooping. They take up fencing stances or ballet positions, strained past ease. With their speed and seemingly superhuman coordination, the dancers look as if they’re in an airless other world. “Veneers” also ends well. One dancer (Berit Ahlgren) repeats the opening gestures, but ever more feverishly. The faster she goes, the looser she gets, until at last she becomes ordinary, human. (In the performance I saw, her hair came free of its tight bun and her hairpins clattered on the stage. Let’s hope she can manage that every night.) At the same time, a row of dancers advances slowly toward and past her, going stiffly to the back of the stage. They carry bouquets of multicolored roses, and at last they begin to strike themselves with their bouquets. This strange ritual—flagellation with roses—juxtaposed with the other dancer's sudden freedom, makes for an unforgettable ending. But the middle of “Veneers,” though easy on the eyes, doesn’t add much. Throughout the evening, I wanted more of the imagination that produced the opening and closing of “Veneers.”

Still, this concert is nearly a ten. The opening night audience certainly thought so: The standing ovation was instant and long. As a critic, I see dance all the time, and I get jaded—thus my desire for Uri Sands to push further into his darker side. But I’m not immune to the sheer pleasure that TU Dance delivers, the pleasure of watching a body ecstatic, transformed by energy and rhythm. “Isms,” the final piece in the evening, explodes with the ecstatic bodies of this talented company. As choreography, it’s not interesting. But as dance, as human bodies reaching to our farthest limit, it’s indispensable.

TU Dance’s spring concert runs June 14–17, 21–24, at the Southern Theater.

6.11.07: Richard Thompson at the Fitzgerald Theater

Fans of beret-wearing guitarist/balladeer/icon Richard Thompson are like people who devour Larry McMurtry novels: They’re out there, and their devotion is passionate, but you’d never be able to identify one on the street. They don’t shout their allegiance with T-shirts and trinkets. They don’t dye their hair blue or poke jewelry through their nostrils. Even when they are in the same room with the man, Richard Thompson fans don’t enthuse much. The relationship between Thompson and his audience is more like a comfortable marriage in which the love is taken for granted, thus rendering overt expressions of affection redundant and maybe even suspicious. When the hoots and hollers do come—as they inevitably did at the tail end of Thompson’ s excellent show last night at St. Paul’s Fitzgerald Theater—it means that much more, because it’s applause that’s been earned.

Over four decades of musical productivity have made Thompson the most durable elder-statesmen of both folk music and rock-and-roll—and still one of the best. He could easily rest on his laurels, but last night’s show demonstrated quite convincingly that Thompson has no intention of limping quietly into retirement. If he goes, it’s going to be at the peak of a raging, virtuosic guitar solo. I took my fourteen-year-old son to hear what an electric guitar can sound like in the hands of a master. After a long, weird, ultimately wonderful solo that toyed with all kinds of Bartokian discord, spanned the entire fretboard five or six times, and rolled along in wave after wave of relentless jamming that threatened at times to overwhelm the humble Fitzgerald, it was satisfying to hear the boy say, “Man, that dude can shred!”

Thompson can do a lot of other things too, which is why he’s such an interesting artist. For those who like Thompson’s rocking side, he played a number of songs off his latest album, Sweet Warrior, including such typically droll numbers as "Dad’s Gonna Kill Me," and "Mr. Stupid." For those who prefer Thompson’s mellower acoustic side, he played the obligatory "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" and "Sunset Song." His jazz followers got a swinging "Al Bowlly’s In Heaven," devotees of his ballads and sea shanties got "Hard Luck Stories" and "Mingulay Boat Song," and fans of his more mainstream rock got such staples as "Listening to the Wrong Heartbeat," "Read About Love," and "Gypsy Love Songs."

Thompson’s entire career has been an exercise in understatement, so it wasn’t surprising to see very little flash or dazzle onstage, save for the fireworks that came out of his fingers. No light show, no special effects, nothing—in fact, the only color onstage was in the turquoise body of Thompson’s custom-made Ferrington Telecaster.

No, it was just the legend and his very capable three-man band playing great music for more than two hours without a break. The most surprising thing is how good Thompson's voice is sounding these days (like Dylan, it sounded worse twenty years ago), and how much heart he's still putting into each song. St. Paul was only the third stop on the current U.S. tour, but the band was tight and the energy still fresh. In appreciation, the audience last night finally broke down at the end of the second encore and showed Thompson that yes, they did know all the words to "Tear Stained Letter," and yes, they did love the show, even though they sat through most of it without moving a muscle. "Sorry. We were just pacing ourselves," the final applause seemed to say, "because keeping up with you is no easy feat."

6.7.07: Albert Hammond Jr. at Station 4

A Stroke played in St. Paul Thursday night. A Stroke! In St. Paul! There was no way I was missing that. Albert Hammond Jr., the one with the afro-mullet, came to Station 4 to showcase his winsome little between-Strokes-projects record Yours to Keep.

Station 4 is no stranger to mullets—Winger is playing there this month—but I’m fairly confident a Downtown Mullet of Albert Hammond Jr.’s stripe rarely darkens its door. The blue-collar, heavy-metal hangout has gotten by on hair metal and cheap beer for the last twenty years, but it's decided to give this indie thing a try—because hey, indie fans drink beer too. It was apparent that most of the kids in attendance, decked in ironic T-shirts and tight jeans, hadn’t been to a show in Lowertown before. They walked past the door as if in a daze, murmured apologies for not knowing where the place actually was, and once inside, they wandered around with their PBR tall-boys as if they still couldn’t believe it: A Stroke! In St. Paul!

Hammond Jr.’s band sports afro mullets too (well, maybe the bassist’s hairdo was a little wavy), and the collective clearly takes its time signature and guitar tone cues from His Strokeness. Hammond Jr. and his lead guitarist wove together Commodore 64 guitar lines over a throbbing bassline and backbeat. Sound familiar? Well, they started off with the two most Strokes-y songs on the record, “Everyone Gets a Star” and “In Transit.” At the end of the show, they closed with the third and fourth most-Strokes-sounding songs, “Scared,” and “Hard to Live in the City.” This could be the least threatening side project of all time. Julian must have rubbed Hammond Jr.’s shaggy head in approval when he heard the record. “Atta boy, ‘bert!”

Albert's songs are all pretty good, and they sounded good in the Station 4 cave. To be fair, Yours to Keep, while very Strokes side-project-y, does have its own vibe. While The Strokes often sound like a soundtrack to the ideal Sophia Coppola movie, Albert solo sounds like a soundtrack to the ideal O.C. episode. The music is more upbeat, sunnier, and with his sweet, young Wayne Coyne vocal, he says stuff Julian would never say, like “I miss you already,” or “She just wanted to be friends.”

All told, a fantastic hour of entertainment. I would come to Lowertown to see indie rock again. Definitely. But don’t worry, I wouldn’t expect to see a Stroke.

A Stroke! In St. Paul!

6.6.07: Shojo Manga! Girl Power! East and West at MCAD

When I lived in San Francisco, I would sometimes visit a certain bookstore in “Japantown,” a neighborhood of Japanese shops and restaurants in the middle of the city. Manga of all kinds practically spilled off the tables at the front of the store—a testament to its popularity. Even though I could not discern the meaning of the text or make out the storyline, something about those colorful little tomes pulled me in. Shojo Manga! Girl Power! East and West at MCAD has that effect, too. It just draws you in.

The show—an internationally touring exhibition curated by Masami Toku—features 170 works by twenty-three mangaka (manga artists) spanning about six decades and organized by eras, starting roughly with the end of World War II and ending with shojo manga produced in the last few years. It’s the first show to take such a comprehensive look at Japanese comics for girls. The show features both Japanese masters of the genre and mangaka on our side of the Pacific Rim, hence the “west” in the show’s title.

The influence of American popular culture jumps out at you with the very first image by Osamu Tezuka, dubbed the “father of modern manga.” It’s as if Walt Disney had decided to expand his empire, heading due east. Tezuka’s Princess Saphire has all the elements: a princess with huge sparkling eyes, knights, fairies, anthropomorphic animals. Contrast that with Riyoko Ikeda’s Rose of Versailles, a love story set in revolutionary France and created in the 1970s, the Golden Age of shojo manga. Then have a look at the lush, painterly images produced by CLAMP—a collaborative group of four women mangaka—or the ink drawings of Akimi Yoshida from the last few decades. You come away with a fun lesson in the evolution of Japanese aesthetics and cultural attitudes.

Shojo Manga! runs through June 29 at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Admission is free.

Photo: Hideko Mizuno, Silver Petals (Gin no Hanabira), 1957-59. Courtesy of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design

6.3.07: Minnesota Dance Theatre's Close to Silence at the Southern Theater

Some dances aim at amusement, some to tell a story, some to illuminate, depict, or connect. Other dances aim at sublimity, and at their best, these sublime dances dance for you: Their movement is not only seen, but felt, and in the stillness, you are lifted.

Minnesota Dance Theatre’s Close to Silence achieves this rare elevation of purpose. Directed by choreographer Wynn Fricke, this performance brings together the poetry of the Persian mystic Rumi, the whirling dances of the dervishes, Fricke’s own modern ballet choreography, the talents of MDT’s elastic dancers, David Echelard’s stunning vocal music, simple-yet-mesmerizing animation by Tom Mays, and the guidance of artist, costumer, and cultural advisor Fawzia Reda. All these elements weave together to create catharsis.

At first, I had trouble connecting with this piece. Mysticism offers no stairs to climb, no argument to ascend: You’re either in it or you’re not. It’s one thing to appreciate the connection between the sundial-tracing of Mays’s animation and the kaleidoscopic involutions of Fricke’s choreography, but it's quite another to feel it. In the first half of the performance, I was a mere watcher. The dancers’ control over technique also got in the way. Shoulders in ballet should be fairly fixed, but some dancers seemed immobile. It was hard to believe they felt anything other than stress. Finally, using dance to render poetry of mystic self-annihilation creates a paradox. “They have made for two or three days / A cage of my body,” Rumi says. If the body is a momentary trap for the soul, how can any performance reach ascension?

As the first half ends, a mood of failure sets in. A quartet shows off MDT’s strong men, but each movement, however beautiful, feels curtailed. These false starts made me long to see some simple dervish whirling. But the first half closes with these words: “Our covenant is not of desperation / Even if you have broken your vows a hundred times / Come, come again.” Fricke knows the paradox she’s set in motion. The second half opens with more reality: “Today, like every other day, we wake up empty / And frightened.” It’s hard to arrive.

But Fricke keeps at it. With the words “Let the beauty we love be what we do,” the mood and the dance loosen. A skirt dance ensues, four dancers each taking a moment to cut free, leaping in wild inventions, their skirts a whirl of emerald, azure, sapphire, jade. MDT’s dancers are mostly young, so technique and energy—not confidence and depth—are their strengths, and Fricke wisely keeps them moving. Throwing the self away is a form of transcendence that younger dancers understand. But there are a few exceptions to this rule: dancers Melanie Verna, Abdo Sayegh, and Sam Feipel, for example. In a solo for Sayegh, Fricke has him press in the space around his head as if trying to extinguish himself, and she turns his arms and articulate back into calligraphy. Technique vanishes. The body is a prison, but freedom comes also from the body. As the light dies over Sayegh’s moving back, we have arrived in the heart of the paradox.

“My place is the placeless / My trace is the traceless”: So the dance is not achievement, but continuous motion. Dancers run forward only to be intercepted by other dancers, cut off in dropping lifts. A last gorgeous knot of dancers echoes the beginning. And then, out of darkness, one dancer (Feipel) whirls. Other than his feet, he is still. And we are still and whirling with him.

Like Rumi’s poetry, Close to Silence is a crowd-pleaser. The young woman next to me was so thrilled, she couldn’t keep her clasped hands from her mouth, and the women behind me planned to tell their friends about the show. But also like Rumi’s poetry, Close to Silence is radical at heart. It can entertain you, it can sweeten your evening. But it asks much more. “You must change your life,” Rilke wrote of his encounter with a work of art. Close to Silence makes a similar demand—the decision to comply is up to you.

Close to Silence runs through June 10 at the Southern Theater.

6.1.07: Low at Pillsbury House Theater

I’m a gangsta rap man. I’ll take Jay-Z or Notorious B.I.G. or new guys like Clipse over “socially conscious” rappers like Kanye West or Common or Mos Def. I know it’s a lame designation, and most hip-hop artists have learned to dread the “socially conscious” label, even though it’s a proud strain that goes back from Public Enemy to “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash—but for me, the more gangsta the better.

I’ll take gangsta rap over socially conscious rap for the same reasons I’ll take Heller over Vonnegut or Mailer over Baldwin. I’d rather hear about the ills of society reflected in an entertaining way than listen to somebody preach about those ills. I don’t like art with a “message” that’s supposed to be “good” for me.  I like an entertaining story well told, even if it’s profane, socially irresponsible, and violent. And don’t even ask me about my blatantly sexist prejudice against female rappers.

So you can imagine what I was thinking going into Low: Meditations: A Trilogy Part I, a one-act, one-woman play at the Pillsbury House Theater, billed as “an exploration of the fear, stigma, and mythology surrounding mental illness” performed and written by a woman actually named Rha Goddess, an “artist/activist” who wrote the play in her trademark “flowetry” style. Yuck, right? Going in the door, I thought I was going to gag through an evening of well-meaning, socially conscious garbage.

Turns out this play is the most gripping seventy minutes of theater I can ever remember seeing. Watching Ms. Goddess portray Lowquesha (a clever turn on a name even a white guy like me recognizes as a black girl’s name), a girl from around the block who descends into the depths of madness, paranoia, and rage, was funny, moving, and ultimately harrowing. Goddess’s performance is as rich and deep and real as anything you would see on The Wire. As a monologue, it’s Spalding Grey meets Ol’ Dirty Bastard. You need to see this play.

Low is more of a rap concert than a one-act—for seventy minutes, it’s just Lowquesha on a small white stage, with one white chair as a prop, just her voice over some sound and lighting effects. All she needs is one mike, basically. In jeans and a blue hoodie, Goddess portrays Lowquesha and all the characters in her life, from her sister and her mother to her mother’s boyfriends to the psychiatrist at school to the people she waits on at Starbucks. Her voices, inside and outside of her head, her movements and gestures, are all emoted and controlled with a masterful honesty. You can’t take your eyes off her. She seems to be channeling Low and her people, and then, several times throughout, all of a sudden she’ll start spitting full-on hip-hop rhymes in character. As Low says, she’s “ill to the nth degree,” in ways hip-hop hasn’t really anticipated.

Goddess takes you on a journey from a nine-year-old girl who’s “acting out,” to a teenaged cutter getting asked by her school counselor if she ever feels “sad or confused,” to a young woman on several competing psychotropic prescriptions who’s been kicked to the street by her mom and strapped down in the county hospital. After watching this woman get chewed up and spit out by a caffeine-addled, go-go-go society for more than an hour, she starts preaching a little bit, but it feels organic: now she’s just a crazy bitch on a street corner trying to get someone to listen to her. But while most crazy people in the real world are marginalized, on the periphery of whatever social consciousness people can muster while running errands or going to lunch, Goddess’s Lowquesha puts a human face on the crazy panhandler who hassles you on your way out of Block E. When Lowquesha rants about people popping Ritalin and Prozac like candy, about how mental illness has become a plague—when she warns, “If your ass is feeling blue, look out!” because a couple of down days can get you thrown in a mental ward if you’re the wrong color or class—well, she’s earned a little preaching.

See this play.   

Did that sound preachy?