12.23.07: All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914

I am a sucker for a white Christmas. But last night, the snow seriously got in my way. Both my husband and mother pointed out I had been overly optimistic in planning a return flight from Santa Fe the same evening as I had planned a family outing to one of the concerts I had most highly anticipated this season: Cantus’s and Theater Latté Da’s All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914. Sure enough, our flight was delayed. So in full disclosure, this is a review of the half of the evening that I heard.

All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914 is an unstaged but still dramatic telling of an extraordinary event in human history, when during the first year of World War I, thousands of young men lay down their arms and celebrated Christmas together in no man’s land.

Director Peter Rothstein chose to tell the story with the tool that would have been available to the story’s real-life characters—radio. So the concert took the form of a musical radio drama, featuring war documents and letters and journals of the young men in the trenches as text and Cantus’s arrangements of sentimental war-time songs and Christmas carols.

Actors John Catron, David Roberts, and Alan Sorensen narrated convincingly, alternating the voices of French, German, and British soldiers. The men of Cantus provided an effective soundtrack of quiet drones and harmonized hums in addition to the beautiful array of original arrangements in the three languages of the front that lent a compelling emotional through-line to the texts, which themselves were made more dramatic by virtue of their reality.

That cold night in 1914, the enemy troops traded carols, food, and drink, shared Mass and soccer matches, and helped each other bury their dead, who had lain frozen on the battlefield for weeks. They found points of connection in their stories, like the German whose uncle trimmed the beard of the Englishman’s father. These scenes were effectively painted, as spoken accounts mingled with music and a German carol (“In Dulci Jubilo”) merged into a British holiday drinking song (“Wassail”). Another fine moment was the recollection of one soldier’s awe in hearing a French opera star singing “O Holy Night” from across no man’s land. As if from afar, a single tenor voice quietly rang over the attentive hush of the rest of the “soldiers” in the ensemble, and the hush in the audience made me feel I was with them in the trenches.

Inevitably, the truce is ended, and by orders of their superiors, the battlefield they had made a soccer field and graveyard turned back into a battlefield. After the first shot was fired, the young men went back to war, according to one soldier’s account, with a vengeance. This scene was movingly depicted by several beautiful verses of "Auld Lang Syne," the last of which devolved into battle cries.

The concert wound down with a question—not a sappy sound bite, but a real question from a soldier as he reflects that it was as if they had decided to end the war all by themselves. He asked, “What if we’d all walked away and refused to fight? Could the war have ended in a truce?” The same voice admits probably not, but the niggling question lingers, rippling through history. The audience was left to imagine the faces of these young men—the faces of war, and the faces of peace, and again the faces of war. 

This Cantus/Theater Latté Da event came off less as a heart-warming holiday concert than as storytelling, and as such, it was a dramatic, real-life musing about the power this season has to make us stop, reflect, and decide to operate in a mode of peace, and the enormous impact those decision can have.

12.20.07: Hormel Girls at the History Theatre

Hormel Girls, which just extended its run at the History Theatre through December 30, is about as good as a can of SPAM. If you like that kind of thing, you’ll thoroughly enjoy this musical. If you prefer, say, Kobe beef, you might want to sit this one out.

Hormel Girls is about the sixty-plus World War II veterans (with some beauty queens thrown in) who comprised the first female drum-and-bugle band, and later hosted their own radio show. The act was an ingenious marketing tool created by J. C. Hormel to promote his plethora of canned meat products. The ladies toured the nation, singing and dancing their way into housewives’ kitchens and capturing the hearts of red-blooded Americans everywhere.

The music, written by Hiram Titus with lyrics and book by Laurie Flanigan, is written (so says the press release) in the spirit of the Andrews Sisters, which basically means there are a lot of all-female ensemble numbers; unfortunately, there are no hummable, memorable tunes. The main problem lies in the music’s predictability, as well as its appropriation. The show is titled Hormel Girls, but the men get all the solos. It makes one wonder whose story this really is—the tale of young women journeying into adulthood after World War II, or Hormel’s, whose fatherly affections help turn them into highly groomed pets.

The actresses have perma-smiles, even when they sing about going crazy within the confines of life on the road. Individual personalities go mostly unexplored until act two. Jen Burleigh-Benz has some lovely moments as mother figure Meredith, and Sondra Norland wisely avoids turning her character into a stereotype. As for the men (Richard C. Grube and Mark Rosenwinkel), they get the best writing, the best songs, and have the most developed roles. It’s a shame, really. After sitting through two-and-a-half hours of nostalgia for the way things were—women in the kitchen, men allowing them to work—it would have been nice to get to know the women behind the SPAM.

Hormel Girls continues at the History Theatre through December 30.

12.20.07: Loyce Houlton’s Nutcracker Fantasy at the State Theatre

Ah, The Nutcracker—once the first notes spring from the orchestra and the curtain rises on the first scene, we are enchanted. With so many versions of the classic Christmas story, Minnesota Dance Theatre’s Nutcracker Fantasy is easily the one to see in the Twin Cities. Everything announces its preeminence: the jewel-toned, deeply detailed sets and costumes; the exciting light changes; the skilled orchestra conducted by Philip Brunelle; the well-trained and perfectly rehearsed dancers; the audience’s ohhs, ahhs and spontaneous applause. From start to finish, this Nutcracker never lifts its spell.

What happens in The Nutcracker? You probably know the story: Young Marie, her strange uncle or godfather Drosselmayer, the nutcracker doll, the Christmas tree growing, et cetera. But what is all about? A girl on the edge of childhood proves her courage and her ability to love by saving a young man (the transformed nutcracker). As her reward, she’s taken to the kingdom of a beautiful princess, where she watches dances from various nations. It’s a coming of age story. But what’s more unusual, is that it is a girl’s coming of age story, full of mystery, power, love, and kindness. MDT’s version, choreographed by Loyce Houlton, showcases this aspect of the ballet. In the Sugarplum Fairy’s kingdom Marie meets characters from her own real life—most notably her mother transformed into an alluring Arabian dancer, who promises Marie that she too will have this strange power when she grows up. The Snow Queen, rising in a flawless lift a moment after Marie’s smaller lift, signifies Marie’s adult strength and beauty. At the same time the ballet is full of children—past, present, and future, all knit together.

I saw some wonderful performances on opening night (casting varies). Mathew Janczewski makes a happy, friendly Drosselmayer, his apparent pleasure in the role spilling into the audience. Kylie Potuznik was an outstanding Rat Queen, her needle feet and skyscraper extensions truly frightening. The Spanish dance, with Eve Schute and Maxamillian Neubauer, might have been the best of the very good divertissements, with Schute and Neubauer both hitting every single step and Neubauer throwing off some flawless tours (spinning jumps). Flower Queen Elayna Waxse’s musicality and the corps de ballet’s technical excellence made the Waltz of the Flowers especially lovely. I wish I’d seen MDT’s own Caitlyn Fitzpatrick and Sam Feipel as the Sugarplum and her Cavalier, but not because guest artists Leticia Guerrero and Gleb Lyamenkoff were anything less than stellar.

The Sugarplum’s grand pas de deux—it always makes me cry. For me it’s the essence of ballet. It’s beauty and perfection on stage, with Tchaikovsky’s haunting music full of foreboding, reminding us of what we already know—life is never like this. But the fact that we can rise in the midst of our mortal trouble and make such a picture of happiness—it’s heartbreaking and wonderful.

And then it’s over for another year. Carnival music succeeds, there is laughter, applause, and we go home. It’s just as well, we can’t take too much of this rich experience. But, for a few hours at least, what a holiday present it is.

Loyce Houlton’s Nutcracker Fantasy continues at the State Theatre through December 24.

12.18.07: Period Rooms at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

There are many reasons to love the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The period rooms, scattered about the second and third floors, occupy the number-one spot on my list. Maybe it’s a deep historical voyeuristic streak, but the strange lumpy canopy bed in the dour early American Connecticut Room and the dark panels and molded ceiling of the late-Renaissance English Tudor Room evoke visceral responses. During the holidays, the museum adds period holiday decorations to the mix for a glimpse of Christmases (and Hanukkahs and Thanksgivings) past.

Walking through the rooms all made up for the holidays, I was struck by the continuity between past and present—the impulse to celebrate, to indulge, and to elevate. But sometimes it’s the differences that engage the imagination most. I’m thinking of the Thanksgiving spread in the Connecticut Room in particular. The room, which dates to the 1700s, features a table serving a typical holiday meal with mostly familiar offerings. Oh, except for the pigeon pie. It’s as if a pigeon took a nosedive into the dish, its feet still protruding from the top of the crust. Those pilgrims and their dark humor!

Things get decidedly brighter and livelier in the Bell Family Decorative Arts gallery just down the hall. The gallery, bordered on both sides by period rooms, brims with nativity scenes and Christmas trees, including the Kimmel Christmas Tree—a small holly tree decorated with sugar cookies with a nativity scene below. The tree recreates one of the earliest visual records of a Christmas tree in America. There’s a Swedish tree with candles, blue and yellow flags, straw ornaments, and Julbock, or Christmas goat. Nativity sets from Mexico, Germany, France, and Italy add dimension.

The Macfarlane Memorial room—the one with the dizzying Chinese landscape wallpaper—delivers a Victorian theme with holiday trappings from the late 1800s. Think porcelain dolls and elaborately illustrated Christmas cards. The Charleston Dining Room, just across the Bell gallery, offers a display of all manner of period sweets, even one resembling a hedgehog!

Down the hall in the Tudor room, a meal of a very different sort is laid out. A huge ceramic boar’s head, a brimming pile of crabs, and—the pièce de résistance—a fully feathered peacock, await the “lucky” celebrants. Period instruments reflect the popular holiday entertainment of the time.

Closer to home, literally, the Duluth Living Room, dating to the turn of the twentieth century, blends Asian, Art Nouveau, and Arts and Crafts influences with a distinct Northwoods aesthetic. The room features a Christmas tree with both candles and electric lights, reflecting the transition from Victorian to modern at the beginning of the last century, bringing everything full circle. It’s an idealized version of our own world . . . the idyllic Minnesota Christmas.

Holiday decorations and period room tours continue through January 13 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

12.16.07: Wu-Tang Clan at First Avenue

There were plenty of Wu-Tang autodidacts at the show last night. This was made obvious when the dude behind me was able to make the transition from “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthin to F**k Wit” to “Severe Punishment” like Prince Rakeem himself.

Actually, Bobby Digital wasn’t there, so maybe they should’ve pulled one of these obsessives out of the crowd and handed him a mike. I mean, it would’ve meant one less Cappadonna freestyle, maybe, but we would’ve gotten over it.

The show was fine: great energy at the beginning, and they played all the hits off 36 Chambers and Wu Forever, and some of the earlier classic solo albums: Liquid Swords and Only 4 Cuban Linx, but with RZA missing—their producer, their spiritual leader—some odd stage dynamics became apparent.

Now, a lot of this might be retrospective conjecture based on something somebody e-mailed me today (I can’t reveal my source or his house might get flooded with waves of bloodthirsty ninjas Kill Bill-style). Evidently, all eight of them get paid individually after the show, unlike most bands, where the drummer or the manager will settle up with the club after the show and then split it in the van. So the guys get paid separately, a true capitalist collective, and their artistic leader wasn’t there. (He didn’t really produce much of the Wu’s new album, 8 Diagrams, either. Too much time spent on that Russell Crowe movie, maybe?) Consequently, there seemed to be a lack of Shaolin discipline.

What I mean by “lack of discipline” is “Method Man went crazy.” And it felt like some of the Wu wasn’t really into it. Ghostface Killah spent much of the show slumped against the DJ stand without even holding a mike. And GZA, who, first of all, looked like the grown-up Wu-Tang member, in some sort of jeans and Members Only jacket situation, would wait until the end of his parts and then walk off stage right. Ghost and GZA are arguably The Clan’s two best MCs, and they seemed to be, not so gallantly, ceding their time to Meth.

Or maybe Meth was just grabbing the spot. I mean, the dude is a star, for certain, and watching him flip his hood over his head and use his dusted pipes to blowback “Tical” or “M.E.T.H.O.D. Man” is thrilling. But he was climbing the speakers, doing backwards trust falls into the crowd, generally just acting like an ass, often right in the middle of a killer song like “Criminology.” A song, significantly, where Meth doesn’t get a verse.

At this point, it must be hard to keep the egos in this group synchronized, because it’s not like modesty is encouraged. Raekwon asked the crowd to boo him, just because, “It’s never happened to me and we wanted to know what it felt like.” Rae laughed it off after they complied and then announced, “We’re about to do another mon-u-mental classic.” Then he encouraged us to throw dolla, dolla bills on the stage, just like the crowd did in Chicago last night. It worked: the song, of course, was “C.R.E.A.M.” and Wu must have earned a couple extra hundred dollars.

I wonder how they split it. 

12.15.07: The Metropolitan Ballet's Nutcracker and The Rat King at Northrop

With The Nutcracker—The Rat King, the very young local company Metropolitan Ballet takes on a full-scale traditional Nutcracker but with a twist. “Full-scale” means an evening-length production, with an orchestra, guest artists for the leading roles (Marie/the Sugarplum Fairy, here the same character, her Cavalier, and several others), and everything you might remember from your childhood Nutcrackers. The twist is a little harder to explain, but it seems that Marie’s coming-of-age-story is paired with another coming-of-age-story—this time of a young rat prince who turns from evil to good.

 

Like all Nutcrackers, this one has its high points: a charming Chinese scene with dancers peeking around long colored silks (created by guest choreographer Shen Pei), three good doll dances, the most talented male child dancer I’ve ever seen, an acrobatic Russian dance (created and performed by another guest, Slavko Billy), a very clear demonstration of Marie’s purity of heart in choosing the nutcracker over Drosselmeyer’s fancier toys, and a creditable performance by the Kenwood Symphony.

 

Unfortunately, the performance also betrays the lack of a firm directorial hand and strong artistic vision (Metropolitan Ballet founder Erik Sanborn directed and created most of the choreography). Costumes are a mishmash of periods and styles—heavy brocades, barely visible in the dim overhead lighting, sharing space with skater dresses and completely contemporary dresses for the littler girls. The choreography blends some time-honored traditional versions, mostly for solos and duets, with muddy crowd scenes of uncertain musicality. At its worst, in the snow scene, the choir necessary for that piece actually appears on stage in its black and white looking like a bunch of Puritans behind the snowflakes, which meanwhile is missing all the mystery and drama of the music. This lack of large-scale vision and firm direction is also apparent in the dancers and dancing: I saw plenty of bobbles, indicative of insufficient rehearsal; heard clattering pointe shoes; and spotted a few other miscues—a dancer with a red tag on her costume, a dancer caught off guard by a lighting miscue. Meanwhile, the plot twist isn’t developed enough to add much; it merely dilutes the existing story, turning Marie from a valiant heroine to a sweet, but ineffective, girl.

 

I’m not sure how I feel about Sanborn’s recourse to imported guest artists. On the one hand, this allows him to show a good grand pas de deux (the climax of the ballet) with beautiful deliberation from Violeta Angelova and sure partnering from Momchil Mladenov (although I must add that he’s headed for injury if he doesn’t start putting his heels down on his landings).

 

On the other hand, what does this create on the local level? My favorite thing about Metropolitan Ballet (at least in these large-scale productions) is the opportunity it gives to the many local ballet dancers who don’t fit in the limited rosters of James Sewell Ballet or Minnesota Dance Theatre—dancers generally not of the first rank but with ability and discipline. They are worth seeing and would be more so if given more opportunities to perform. It’s common practice to import Sugarplums and Cavaliers, but they cast these local dancers in the cold—more so than imported professionals do to their fellow professionals at MDT. I’d rather see a few local dancers step up to the roles—given time, I think they could. Overall, if Sanborn scaled back and consolidated his efforts on what remains, we’d have a better Nutcracker altogether—and one with a homegrown holiday spirit.

 

Nutcracker—The Rat King, Dec. 16, 2 p.m., Northrop Auditorium

12.14.07: National Lutheran Choir at the Basilica of Saint Mary

A buzz has been building around the National Lutheran Choir since David Cherwien joined as music director in the 2002-2003 season, and several in the choral community are calling him the next Dale Warland. Recently named the 2007 winner of the Raabe Prize for Excellence in Sacred Composition, Cherwien, who is a highly regarded organist, composer, conductor, and clinician in his own right, might not have a hard time achieving that distinction.

But there are similar expectations for the National Lutheran Choir to become the defining non-academic ensemble of the Lutheran choral tradition, taking up where the Dale Warland Singers left off in 2004. Judging from its recognition by Chorus America with the 2007 Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence (an honor shared by other Twin Cities choral ensembles, including the former Dale Warland Singers and VocalEssence), it seems to be well on its way.

Because of all of this, I went to its Christmas festival concert, “Behold a Branch,” on Friday night with high expectations. I wasn’t disappointed—it was some of the best choral singing I’ve heard in a long time. The precision, control, uniformity of sound, diction, and rhythm were a pure pleasure to listen to. Though it was the choir’s second concert of the day, it sounded fresh, polished, and beautiful.

Though it’s not a unique construct, the staging and movement of the choir around the vast Basilica was effective and held the audience’s interest both visually and aurally. The concert began and ended with the choir out of sight, which magnified the reflective nature of the concert rather than making it feel like a holiday variety show. Especially impressive was the concert’s opening, which had the women in the choir balcony and the men in the aspe singing alternately at first and then together. The group handled the inherent difficulties of obscured sightlines and acoustical delay with nearly perfect precision of rhythm and intonation. (I admit my glee about that might be a little geeky.)

Poetry and audience-participation carols wrapped around a variety of reflective music with numbers ranging from familiar (“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”) to modern (“The Sky Can Still Remember Him”), and included some very effective pieces by Minnesota composers, such as the “Winter Solstice Carol” with a Latin antiphon for Christmas by William Beckstrand and a modern setting of Hildegard von Bingen’s “O Viridissima Virga” by Janika Vandervelde. One favorite moment was when the sweet and stunning “Boyo Balu” merged seamlessly into “Silent Night,” sung by the audience and choir together. For me, the highlight of the evening was a setting of an E. E. Cummings poem by Eric Whitacre, “I thank you god for most this amazing day.” It was gorgeous—choked-up, fighting-tears gorgeous.

Occasionally, the choir’s diction seemed a bit false and forced toward the dark side, but given its luxurious uniformity, it’s a small complaint. A larger complaint is: Why do the carols stall to a dirge just because the congregation joins in? The only weakness of the concert was the occasional instrumental accompaniment, which didn’t seem on a par with the vocal excellence.

I have sung in enough choirs to recognize the creases of angst in singers’ brows, and when their tightness of breath translates into a tightness of my gut, I find myself holding my own breath, hoping they can keep it together. The best part about this concert for me was that the National Lutheran Choir’s confidence and precision allowed me to relax and enjoy the evening thoroughly. It occurred to me when I left that I had just experienced not only great beauty but also the sense of peace that flows from such beauty.

12.13.07: Diablo Cody and Juno at the Walker

As if there hasn’t been enough hype, let me add some more to the Juno maelstrom. For months, the pundits have blessed this movie as the hipster’s hit of the holiday-film season and anointed screenwriter Diablo Cody as estrogen’s answer to Judd Apatow. We’ve been told that the former-stripper-turned-City Pages-bloggist-now-bon-vivant is one of the “Fifty Smartest People in Hollywood” and that she’s a slam-dunk Oscar nominee.

Frankly, I’ve heard enough.

The self-perpetuating cycle of marketing hype that passes as entertainment journalism these days is great for stoking opening weekend box office, but it also raises obscenely high expectations for films that so rarely live up to them.

Here’s the shocking news, though: Juno is actually a really good movie. Smart. Funny. Memorable. The millennials may have found their John Hughes in Diablo Cody, and if saying that makes me yet another gasbag contributing to this media super-circus, so be it.

Juno opens today at the Uptown Theatre, but it also screened to a full house last night at the Walker Art Center where Cody herself was in attendance for a bawdy Q&A. But more on that later.

First, the movie. Our sixteen-year-old protagonist is Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) who experiments one night with best friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), becomes pregnant, and decides to give the baby up for adoption to a childless St. Cloud couple into whose well-manicured life she brings a disarming frankness. 

Adoptive-mom-to-be Vanessa, played by a pinched-looking Jennifer Garner, is a career woman who has had an adoption fall through before and doesn’t know how to react when Juno tells her she wants to “kick this old school” and have a closed adoption. Her husband, Mark (Jason Bateman), composes TV jingles and seems more interested in Juno than the baby she will bring into their lives. His self-satisfied smile and easy rapport with Juno send conflicting messages: Is he test-driving fatherhood or looking for a break from his marriage?

Juno’s supporting players don’t stray far from the coming-of-age template: the kooky, advice-giving gal pal; the dorky best friend who is really a soul mate; the un-hip parents who actually do get it. Nearly every character except, appropriately, bland Mark and Vanessa, speaks in an elaborate sort of quick-witted, pop-culture-infused shorthand that some twit will undoubtedly coin “Diabloesque.” Even Juno’s blue-collar dad, played with crackerjack timing by J.K. Simmons, delivers his share of choice bons mots. “Hey, big-puffy-coat-version-of-Junebug,” he greets his daughter late in her pregnancy. With the WGA strike now well into its sixth week, there’s great satisfaction in watching a film that is nothing if not a showcase for the weird and wonderful way Cody puts together words.

Juno is director Jason Reitman’s sophomore follow-up to Thank You For Smoking, and he once again has the good sense to cast the best actor as his lead, not necessarily the most marketable one. Ellen Page (heretofore most memorable for torturing poor Patrick Wilson in Hard Candy) brings a brainy individuality to Juno’s motormouth insecurity. She’s a less cynical version of Thora Birch’s geek-cool Enid in Ghost World. When Juno’s sass turns sweet in the film’s finely rendered third act, the tone shift works in large part because we can spot Page’s vulnerability from the start.

Cera is also wonderful as Juno’s maybe-boyfriend, a gangly kid who runs track and is trapped in that awkward space between childhood and adolescence. His endearing self-consciousness may not come from the Stella Adler playbook, but it’s arguably a more valuable commodity for a young screen actor these days.

Self-consciousness is decidedly not an issue for Diablo Cody, who bounded out onto the Walker stage for last night’s post-show Q&A, ditched the Eames chairs arranged for an interview with film curator Sheryl Mousley, and declared, “You can’t keep me in a chair.”

Fidgety and clearly in press-junket mode, Cody flirtatiously dismissed Mousley’s attempts to discuss the movie (“You want a kiss, don’t you?”) and segued directly to answering audience questions with a glibness that I suspect is going to wear a little thin by the time the Juno Oscar campaign really kicks into gear. (The Golden Globes delivered Cody a nomination yesterday, so consider the campaign well under way.)

Firing off suggestive one-liners (“I never had that fear—teen pregnancy. I double-bagged it”), name-dropping her Hollywood pals (Spielberg), and discussing what she considers off-limits (uh, nothing), Cody can come across as just another player in the Juno hype machine. We don’t expect (or want) someone so new to the game to be so practiced at it. And yet, with Cody that is what you get. Forget the hype, people. See the movie.

12.9.07: Home for the Holidays at Soo Visual Arts Center

Soo VAC’s holiday show, Home for the Holidays, offers the visual equivalent of eating tapas—a little of this, a little of that. No thematic or stylistic thread connects the pieces in the show, which represents a cross-section of media and method, but most the artists have Minnesota roots and many are recognizable from past Soo VAC shows.

Bethany Kalk is one such name. Her work has appeared inside and, notably, on the walls outside the gallery. Kalk’s pieces actually appear in two different places—one spot devoted to her low-horizoned landscapes, another to her more abstract pieces populated by organic shapes against shadowy backgrounds. She uses a technique called encaustic, also know as hot wax painting, that infuses her work with depth and texture.

Another up-and-comer, Gregory Euclide, offers up a very different sort of landscape. His incredibly detailed wilderness tableaux in acrylic, oil, and pencil on Yupo, a plastic-coated paper, suggest the detailed renderings in the corner of old territorial maps.

The show also offers up new work from Jennifer Davis, whose mixed media creations straddle the line between fanciful and evocative. Davis’s expansive horizons cut through dreamy emptiness consistently delivering a feeling of openness and possibility.

And I couldn’t describe the show without mentioning Joe Sinness, “Clouder No. 2,” which resembles nothing more than a bouquet of cats. Sinness uses colored pencil and gouache in lovely shades of gray and orange and brown with accents of blue and hazel and yellow. It’s strange, but good strange.

Other notables include Andrea Carlson, Amy Rice, and Clint Rost. It’s an excellent survey of up-and-coming talent. Extra incentive: all the work is on sale. So if you like something you see, you can pick it up right then and there. Prices run from a couple hundred bucks to just shy of $2,000.

Home for the Holidays continues at Soo Visual Arts Center through December 31.

12.7.07: Ethnic Dance Theatre's Nutcracker! at E. M. Pearson Theatre

The simple premise of Ethnic Dance Theatre’s Nutcracker! is that all the various characters and nationalities in the story are represented by authentic folk dances. This makes the story more literal and less highbrow. In her dream the girl heroine meets real representatives of various nations rather than their aestheticized and stereotyped versions, while her own family goes from bland bourgeois to distinctively German. With less fantasy than in most Nutcrackers, this approach still yields some magic. The rats perform a deliberate and strangely menacing tiptoe Georgian dance; the snow scene, filled by tall, gliding, divinely smiling Russian women in long fur-trimmed dresses, is beautiful and mysterious, as a snow scene ought to be. And German dances add interest to the party scene, which can be a bit of a snooze.

Except for some virtuoso moments provided by John Czichray’s Cossack doll and Lynn Petros-Winn’s Appalachian rag doll and Tajik dance, this is a homemade performance. Not that it requires too much indulgence from the viewer; it’s more that off the beaten dance track at the E. M. Pearson Theatre, featuring none of the usual dance suspects (except Stuart Pimsler Dance and Theater company member Cade Holmseth as the Nutcracker), this Nutcracker feels like a break from the routine scene, a hometown show rather than ambitious art. What could be more appropriate to the time of year? The holidays are a homemade time, when we decorate our houses, make food, gifts, and ornaments, sing together, entertain, perhaps even dance. We look back to traditions that for the rest of the year we forget. Folk dance, for many Americans, is a completely lost tradition, and it’s good to see it kept alive by Ethnic Dance Theatre.

The interested can analyze folk dance. Rhythmic footwork is nearly universal across folk dance—feet and ground making the first drum. Some steps in folk dance show up in ballet as well, but with a change. The Cossack’s high jumps, the Georgian arm positions, the Tajik dancer’s fast turns—all are lightened in ballet, as if ballet were the folk dance of angels. Whether you focus on differences between forms or similarities across forms, one conclusion’s unavoidable: dance has deep and complex roots.

The Nutcracker! continues through Sunday at E. M. Pearson Theatre at Concordia University.

12.6.07: Danny Hoch at The Playwrights’ Center

Danny Hoch is one of those New York guys of unspecified ethnicity. Watching him take the stage for his latest piece of one-man “hip hop theater,” Taking Over, at the Playwright’s Center last night, I couldn’t tell if he was black, Jewish, Latino, Polish . . . no idea. He’s very New Yawk in that Bobby Canavale, sounds-like-you-need-a-Kleenex-bro way, but categorizing him beyond that proved impossible.

And that was before he inhabited eight different characters from the streets of occupied Williamsburg, Brooklyn: a Puerto Rican grad student, a French real estate agent, a fifty-year-old black woman, an ex-con named Kiko, a Jewish developer, a Dominican taxi dispatch, a trust-fund baby from Michigan, and a conscientious rapper named Launch Missiles Critical.

Taking Over is a work-in-progress making its way out to Berkeley Rep, but it’s a workshop in virtuosity, because Danny nailed the voice of each character. The multitasking Jewish real-estate agent, Stuart Gottberg, was doing his morning yoga poses as he threatened the art guerrillas tagging his new condos with torture courtesy of his private security firm—well, as soon as he paid off his $300 million loan. Kaitlin from Michigan (“I liiiike your sandaaaals!”) was selling handmade Frida Kahlo purses on the street because her parents were cutting her monthly allowance from $5K to $3K. And Launch Missiles Critical spit a few Brother Ali–worthy bars agitating for revolution before proclaiming: “If you haven’t read Noam Chomsky, you a faggot-ass nigger and you ain’t really hip hop.”

You can’t really accuse the guy of painting in broad strokes because each portrait is so minutely detailed and well constructed. The accents are perfect, the mannerisms precise, the slang authentic, and subtitles are provided for the parts in French and Spanish. But there are spots when one can see the ventriloquist’s lips move. For instance, the Dominican taxi dispatch takes a break from calling the Mexican selling tacos out of his cab a hick to ask somebody to grab him a cup of coffee from the stand down the way. When told that the guy sold the stand for $3 million, the dispatch marvels before wondering where he’s going to buy goat and plantains and beans and rice now that all the white people they’re picking up “only eat sushi.” Maybe this moment of vulnerability wouldn’t seem out of character if it was an inner monologue, an Olivier doing Hamlet voiceover, but it’s part of the outer monologue, so it comes off as slightly preachy.

This gentrification thing is a complex issue, and problematic and worth being examined in a multidimensional way. The crack vials aren’t piling up on the stoop anymore like back in Reagan’s eighties, and as one of Hoch’s characters points out, the only things getting shot on Bedford these days are indie movies, but it’s just not that simple. Hoch’s performance draws that complexity out without harshly judging his audience, which on this night— and I’m guessing many nights—is made up of (mostly) overeducated white people. In fact, Hoch breaks character towards the end of the show and talks about his personal experience dating Middle American ex-pats “finding themselves” in Brooklyn.  He points out that Americans from the other forty-nine states now outnumber native New Yorkers and immigrants in the five boroughs, and he blames that stat on the proliferation of Subway sandwich shops and Whole Foods grocery stores in the city. People want to feel at home, he says. As he makes his way around the country, taking his “I’m an alien from NYC” show on the road, he asks many young artists where they’re going to be in five years. They all say New York or California, of course. Hoch points out that for every Diablo Cody who makes it to the coast for good, there are a hundred Kaitlin from Michigans who come home, a few years later, after “finding themselves.” But if the artists and the thinkers leave, even temporarily, Hoch asks, who gets left behind? And what if some of those people left behind become presidents or senators? What if they make policies that change New York, not necessarily for the better? 

With a little more work (maybe one less “insurgent” reference, Danny), Taking Over could inspire more of us to stay put.

Danny Hoch’s Taking Over (a work in progress) is a co-production with Walker Art Center, and continues at the Playwrights’ Center through December 8.

12.2.07: The 2007 British Television Advertising Awards at the Walker

Those Brits. So clever. So cheeky. Just watching sixty of their best TV commercials makes you want to pound down a few Guinnesses and go buy a . . . Toyota. Or a Volkswagen. Or maybe a Coke.

Yes, the annual British Television Advertising Awards are back at the Walker, offering a cultural window of sorts on our allies across the pond. This year’s entries offer all kinds of insights into Britain’s national character. Among them:

• They buy many of the same cars and beverages we do.

• They are not squeamish about vomiting.

• They know how to mike a fart.

• They can show nudity, but thankfully don’t most of the time.

• They have no idea how to judge advertising quality.

The Walker has been showing these awards for sixteen years, and they have become one of the museum’s most popular draws, maybe because everyone in the audience can understand them. They’re entertaining, too, in a way that sixty of the best U.S. commercials probably wouldn’t be, if only because we take our capitalism a bit more seriously here.

For example, when was the last time you saw a funny car commercial? Volkswagen and Toyota appear to be funding teams of comedy writers to entertain British citizens into automobile show rooms. Why do we get stuck watching earnest ads about luxury and quality? Personally, I’d rather laugh my way into debt.

One thing they do much better in Britain than we do is public service announcements. In America, of course, we try to address our most pressing social problems by hiring sitcom celebrities to remind our citizens not to break the law or act like an idiot. In Britain, they don’t fool around—they go straight for the jugular. You stare directly into the eyes of a child molester; you see a girl waste away into nothing from anorexia; you see the scars of breast cancer up close and personal; you watch as kids drink and puke and try to get home without killing themselves. It’s really quite refreshing. I just hope for Britain’s sake that these ads work, because if they don’t, the queen has some serious problems on her hands.

It’s impossible to talk about specific commercials without spoiling the punch lines, but let me say for the record that the judging of these awards was, as they would say in Britain, a bit dodgy. None of the Gold Award winners or the Commercial of the Year even came close to the clear winner of the year, which was criminally thrown in with a bunch of also-rans in the Silver category. I’m speaking about the brilliant series of spots for Pot Noodle, which is evidently a kind of Top Ramen–like instant soup. The series features a bunch of grimy-faced miners who supposedly descend into the bowels of the earth to mine veins of the precious pot noodles that make this soup so special. This commercial isn’t just clever and funny; it strives to build an entire mythology around a lousy clump of instant noodles. Now that’s ambitious advertising!

Too bad they don’t sell the stuff here—I’d buy a case of it and send it to Walker in protest. The Sony Bravia commercial by Fallon London that won this year’s Commercial of the Year was a shallow pretender to the throne. This year’s king was clearly Pot Noodle.

If you agree, please let me know. Maybe if enough of us complain, the geniuses behind the Pot Noodle fable will get a small portion of the recognition they deserve.

The 2007 British Television Advertising Awards continue at Walker Art Center through December 30.