5.13.08: M.I.A. at the Myth

(Warning for all my civilian readers: inside hipster joke forthcoming.) Hey, I love the new Santogold album, but I still went to M.I.A. at Myth last night. Call me nostalgic. (Civilian reader tip: laugh here.)

Seriously though, last year’s hipster princess, the Sri Lankan rapper Maya Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A., really did perform in Maplewood. I mean, had to see that, right? Even though the show was coming only five months after she so memorably went knocking on the doors of First Avenue’s Hummer Hummer last November.

The production values at the Myth are always exquisite, and M.I.A. made full use of them. She performed in front of a large, maybe fifty-foot-by-ten-foot video screen that spanned the length of the stage. Atari-inspired graphics and quick-cutting footage of multicultural children dancing in various third-world gutters was the backdrop, as M.I.A. bounced her exotic Colombo-via-London-via-Brooklyn cockney off her trademark window-rattling beats.

As a draw, M.I.A.’s globalist exotica is just behind her bamboo banga beats and her overt sexuality (she raps from this weird frog crouch that is imaginatively obscene, and she ends a lot of her bars with a Monica Seles-pitched diphthong of a whelp). The hyperactive energy and color of her stage show seem to be borrowed from a refugee camp anywhere in the world. She came out last night wearing purple tights under white quilted designer hot pants, wearing some sort of Peruvian wool jacket, silver lamé Chuck Taylors, a platinum-bob wig, and gigantic sunglasses. The hipsters in the packed club had followed her lead, dressing just as colorfully, just as exotically.

The ironic thing here is that Myth is actually more multicultural during any of its popular dance nights—The M.I.A. Nation is as white as the people that voted for Hillary in West Virginia last night.

Did anybody read Frank Rich’s column on Sunday, “Party Like it’s 2008”?  Well, Rich’s point about the out-of-touch cable-television-pundit class is made clear by watching all these young middle-class white kids in Maplewood shaking it to songs like “20 Dolla,” where M.I.A. raps over a bastardized Pixies riff in the voice of the collective Third World radical:

“We goat rich we fry/Price of living in a shanty town just seem very high/We still like T.I./We still look fly/Dancing as we shooting up/And lootin just to get by.“

Just like Biggie and 2Pac, M.I.A.’s art is a powerful, necessary reflection of what’s wrong with our culture—it's just that instead of Bed-Stuy or Long Beach, she takes her stories and stances from the global ghetto. Some question Maya Arulpragasam’s authenticity in the same way they questioned 'Pac’s once upon a time. But even if it was necessary to have actually called your boyfriend in Darfur on a sat phone in order to rap about it, M.I.A. has come close enough in real life—she fled Sri Lanka’s civil war with her family in the 1980s and spent time at a refugee camp in India before making it to London and attending an art school there, where she learned both the graphic and sonic techniques necessary to make her background relevant to all these hipster kids.

And it’s clear how much fun she has putting on those of us who lack an irony sensitivity meter. The highlight of last night’s show was the mash-up of “10 Dolla” and “Boyz.” First, she called up all the girls in the crowd to come on stage. It was mayhem, with maybe 100 women forcing M.I.A. to the very edge of the stage, just in front of the monitors, as she rapped about a Chinese prostitute climbing the ladder. “What can I get for ten dolla,” M.I.A. called out to a stage full of Minnesota girls. They responded, “Any ting you want!” After the girls were sent off, it was the boyz’s turn. Again, they crushed the stage, and she had them hollering along to their own song. ”How many no money boyz are crazy/How many boyz are raw//How many no money boyz are rowdy/How many start a war.”

Yeah! Fun times! Oh…wait.

5.10.08: VocalEssence's A Slice of Americana at Trinity Lutheran Church

VocalEssence concluded their American Masterpieces tour (a season-long series of concerts and educational programs throughout the Midwest) last night in Stillwater at Trinity Lutheran Church with a program called A Slice of Americana. The concert and tour were part of a wider National Endowment for the Arts initiative designed to celebrate our national musical heritage by highlighting significant American choral composers and works.

A note from NEA Chairman Dana Gioia applauding VocalEssence artistic director and founder Philip Brunelle for his national leadership of the choral component of this endeavor read, “Not only do we want more Americans to hear this great music, we want to cultivate a love and appreciation for it for future generations.”

Knowing this intention, I listened to the concert with perhaps a different filter than I would have had the concert been conceived as a sampler rather than a cross-section, and found myself pondering, what defines “Americana?” And whose Americana is it?

The first half of the concert was dedicated to “classical” American choral repertoire (perhaps choral art music would be a better way to describe it) and showed the group’s strengths to great effect–the sense of ensemble and highly polished details, diction so impeccable you don’t really need to follow the lyrics in the program, and the expert attention to the text that brings the music to life. Oh, and the chocolaty warmth of the bass section. That especially.

The opening selection, “O Praise the Lord of Heaven,” written by William Billings in 1794, was the only work on this half composed before I graduated from high school. The rest, while a very small sliver of our American choral pie, shows that modern American composers still are still making discoveries in choral music as they keenly explore the delta of music and language in rangy and highly individual ways.

Works by Twin Cities composers Stephen Paulus and Libby Larsen were placed alongside those of William Bolcom and Aaron Jay Kernis, but the two standouts for me were the lesser-known composers. Brent Michael Davids’ evocative “Zuni Sunrise Song” featured bird whistles handcrafted by the composer and spun by the singers, percussive and dancelike chanting by the men, and nasal incantations by the women. Unfortunately, the poetry was not listed in the program, but the work draws on a Native American song about the dawn. Eric Whitacre’s “Water Night,” which sets an English translation of an Octavio Paz poem, was musically as sensual as the text. Whenever I hear a Whitacre piece on a program, I kind of wonder why anyone ever programs anything else. He simply has a knack for setting gorgeous texts gorgeously.

The “intermission” of the seventy-five-minute concert was more of a break for the singers, who needed it more than the audience, was a treat: Charles Kemper played Gershwin’s “Embraceable You” and made it sound like Chopin. (Or perhaps Chopin with a martini.)

Brunelle introduced the second half, which was all folk songs and spirituals, to the mostly gray-haired audience, with a story about a high school choral conductor he met who didn’t know the folk songs on the program. He argued that this was our shared cultural heritage to celebrate and pass on to the next generation. This statement provided a lively debate with my concert buddy, who didn’t know the songs either, on the ride home. (He pointed out that if he was supposed to get to know them by coming to the concert, it would have been helpful to have the lyrics in the program.)

While VocalEssence sang arrangements of “Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be?,” “Gentle Annie,” “Black is the Color,” “Cool Water,” and “Skip to My Lou,” I tried to determine, other than learning them in school, whether folk songs really played into my understanding of myself as an American. As much as I enjoy their nostalgic beauty, I couldn’t persuade myself that nineteenth-century American folk songs are relevant to my generation. We simply don’t sing them.

However, you can only appreciate your musical heritage if you are given the opportunity to hear it. Whether these tunes are masterpieces that will live on for generations is a matter of opinion and posterity, but Brunelle and VocalEssence gave us a wonderfully performed taste.

5.9.08: By the People, For the People at the Weisman

Thousands of artists received funds through the Works Progress Administration and other New Deal programs during the 1930s and early 1940s. Some of the artists became household names—Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, and Cameron Booth, to name a few. Many others did not, but their work became part of the fabric of American culture in the form of post-office murals and handicrafts. By the People, For the People: New Deal Art at the Weisman offers up the full spectrum of work from this era.

The show draws from the museum’s impressive collection of New Deal art. It’s organized by a mish-mash of aesthetic and topical themes: work and industry, abstraction, photography, the University and Minnesota, women. The themes only serve to underscore the premise of the show: that New Deal art encompassed far more than social realism. The Weisman folks even managed to come up with a few examples of Surrealism, which gives you an idea of  how eclectic and interesting this show really is.

The New Deal programs placed emphasis on regional folkways and traditions as subject matter. By the People contains many examples, but Lucia Wiley’s series based on the legend of Paul Bunyan—and, more broadly, the world of logging—caught my eye. She based a series of post-office murals on the oil illustrations, which resemble woodcuts in style. In one, Bunyan nearly fills the canvas. On one knee, head bowed, he cradles a young ox. The other images in the series swirl with energy, but the simple exchange between ox and man is oddly touching.

The show has a little of something for everyone. The colorful abstract paintings of Alexander Corrazo in one room, documentary photographs of Marion Post Woolcott in the next, and a handful of local landscapes of the Twin Cities circa 1940 in the next. The exhibit also highlights the work of women hired as New Deal artists, and will serve as the foundation for a series of lectures and seminars on this fascinating period in American art.

Through July 27, Weisman Art Museum.

Pictured: Dorothy Lau, Workers-Five O'Clock, ca. 1935-1940, oil on canvas

5.6.08: Cabaret at Ordway Center

Taken on its own terms, Ordway Center’s production of Cabaret is dazzling. The full resources of the theater, both financial and technical, are on vivid display in the physical production, from the Emcee’s first entrance, descending on an illuminated sign, to his swinging out over the audience with a gorilla.

But I couldn’t get past the persistently nagging feeling that all this glitz and glamour was, in reality, antithetical to the original story. In 1930s Berlin, Sally Bowles, a singer at the Kit Kat Club, romances American writer Cliff Bradshaw on the verge of the Nazi takeover of Germany. From its beginnings in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and the play I Am a Camera by John van Druten, the story has emphasized the seedy decadence of Weimar Germany. Kander and Ebb's musical version maintains the dark sleaziness of the original source material, but that tawdriness is nowhere to be seen on the Ordway stage.

Ordway producing artistic director James Rocco makes the case for the production’s historical accuracy by referencing University of Minnesota professor Eric D. Weitz’s New York Times bestseller, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. According to Rocco, “What this research reveals is that the look and feel of Weimar Berlin cabarets and nightclubs were not all that different from night spots in New York, London, and Paris during the same period.” The Ordway’s production focuses on the glittering cabarets that Hitler kept open to fool an unknowing nation of citizens who continued to party while Berlin was burning. Such high-class establishments obviously existed. But would a garish character, such as Sally Bowles, have worked in one? And if she did, wouldn’t she have earned enough to pay for her own lodgings rather than having to crash with Cliff pleading poverty?

The production team seems to have overlooked these logical flaws in their zeal to create a magnificently opulent set. And, frankly, all such concerns are swept aside by the strong energy and staging of this show.

The revisions to Joe Masteroff’s original book go uncredited, but they are delicious. Adding the conceit of Brechtian conventions is smart and helpful in the staging while also being an appropriate evocation of the period. The emphasis on homosexuality further evokes the liberated attitudes of that age and hearkens back to the Isherwood original.

Bill Berry’s direction is glitzy, but it’s glitz with substance. He finds the abundant humanity as well as the horror in this dark show, especially as the Nazi influence becomes increasingly omnipresent. And there are plenty of clever bits and touches that will surprise even those who have seen several other versions of Cabaret. For example, the “girls” of the orchestra are played by men in elaborate hag drag, and Bob Richard’s choreography in the dancing chorus is splendidly fresh and energetic. 

There is nothing subtle about the staging; it is a broad, no-holds-barred spectacle from beginning to end, including the portrayals of the individual characters. That over-the-top mania works perfectly for the Emcee (Nick Garrison), who is outrageous but pulls it off by capturing the period’s decadence. Tari Kelly’s Sally is somewhat less successful. Her performance is too loud and brassy and would have benefited from a little delicacy here and there. That said, her performance of “Maybe This Time” rivaled even Liza’s from the film.

Next to the Emcee, the strongest performance is Suzy Hunt as Fräulein Schneider, Cliff and Sally’s landlady. She became the emotional heart of the production and made the most of her two songs (cut from the film), “So What,” a statement of her fatalistic philosophy, and “What Would You Do?” a painful justification of her decision to break off her engagement to the Jewish Herr Schultz. Her lacerating performance truly raised the show to the level of tragedy. Allen Fitzpatrick’s Schultz was not in her league, but his sweet naiveté proved endearing.

In that company, Louis Hobson, as the very “nice” Cliff, made little impression. He is ostensibly the lead character, but the role is so pallid and underwritten that it’s not his fault that he receded into the background. He is at his best when singing and has a strong baritone that enlivened even his mediocre songs.

One of the most exciting elements of this production is that it is a coproduction of the Ordway, Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre, and the American Musical Theatre of San Jose. Opera companies discovered years ago that coproductions are essential for survival, but it’s a relatively new concept for nonprofit theaters. More such coproductions are in the works, which speaks to the Ordway’s excellent stewardship of its resources.

Cabaret continues at Ordway Center through May 18.

5.2.08: Jesus Christ Superstar at the Orpheum

So if you’re going to have a black guy play Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar, it better be Corey Glover. If you’re a guilty white person like me, you still might squirm a little bit when you see Glover take his forty pieces of silver to hand over Ted Neeley’s J. C. I mean, the historical Christ probably looked more like Osama bin Laden than Barry Gibb with Jennifer Aniston hair extensions, right? So having a black man betray a white Jesus with a kiss in front of a predominantly white audience at the Orpheum could be interpreted as an irresponsible move. But the casting is defensible on two prongs: (1) If you’re going to do a rock 'n' roll passion play, you need rock stars—and Corey Glover was the only African American to front a big rock band (Living Colour) in the forty years between Jimi Hendrix and that dude from Bloc Party. (2) If anybody can illicit sympathy for having issues with Jesus, the guy that sang the Grammy-winning 1988 hit “Cult of Personality” can.

Neeley, of course, is reprising the role he transubstantiated in the original 1973 movie version of Superstar—and even though he’s now way past thirty-three years old, if you’re sitting back far enough, he still looks good in the robes (even the crucifixion diaper, actually). And he can still sing: He comes close to bona fide Axl Rose range, going from a warm Seger baritone to what Chuck Klosterman once referred to as Rose’s “crazy devil woman” voice.

Actually, Neeley’s Christ—or should I say Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Christ— is a very specific cultural interpretation that has a lot in common with Axl W. Rose. First of all, they both love the Elton John/Queen, almost operatic hard rock, with gigantic guitars, strings, and over-the-top vocals. They both were country boys living in the big city amongst groupies and sinners—Indiana Axl had his Michelle, and Jesus of Nazareth had his Mary Magdalene; they both were hella judgmental towards the people in their new homes (Axl penning Hollywood-is-a-New-Sodom ditties like “Welcome to the Jungle” and “One in a Million,” Christ using his own crazy devil woman voice to kick the merchants out of the temple). And they both had insane martyr complexes—Axl with the "November Rain"/"Don’t Cry"/"Estranged" video cycle, where he imagines himself dying alone repeatedly, and Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane , asking first, plaintively, “Will no one stay awake with me, Peter, John, James? Will no one wait with me, Peter, John, James?” and then, in devil woman voice, “Whyyyyyyyyyyyy, whyyyyyyyyyy should I die?!?”

In a way, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s J. C. is, like Axl, the paradigm for the perfect rock star. Maybe even a painful reminder to people like me, who actually miss rock stars. Some people don’t—and you guys can have Weezer and Deerhoof and Stephen Malkmus. But I miss my rock stars. And outside of nostalgic video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, do we have any contemporary musical messiahs? After Axl, we had a few reluctant prophets: Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder had J. C.’s sensitive side down, but they were reluctant Superstars. The post-grunge guys, Chris Martin and Thom Yorke, are both holier-than-thou enough, but they seem so proggy, and hidden behind technology, so English. The Strokes are more like a cool clique of apostles than The Second Coming. I dunno, Jack White? Isn’t he a little too wan? And some people see Mary Magdalene in Meg, but I really don’t. I guess there’s always Bono—but have you ever really seen Bono angry? Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Christ gets angry, and he sort of has a sexy girlfriend, and he’s full of angst about his position in the world. You could make the argument that hip hop has cornered the market on superstars—remember P. Diddy and Nas rapping up on twin crosses on “Do You Hate Me Now?” But most of the superstar rappers, like Jay-Z, who actually refers to himself as J-HOVA, or “God MC,” have the persecution complex down, but lack the element of introspection, the “Why me, Lord?” that comes with the responsibility of trying to do the right thing.

Which brings me to an old Yoda quote: “No. There is another.” Like Axl and J. C., I also would rather hang with the sinners than cry with the saints, so with that in mind, my sex columnist friend, Alexis, is always asking me, “What do you white boys love so much about Kanye West?” This is the perfect opportunity to give her a definitive answer.

O Kanye, how great Thou art. On one of his first big hits, “Jesus Walks,” off his debut album The College Dropout, he raps about the responsibility of being the voice of his generation (after surviving a serious car accident, no less). “God show me the way because the devil tryin’ to break me down/the only thing that I pray is my feet don’t fail me now.” He grew up with his single mother in the Midwest, before going on to become a success in the biggest media transmitter cities in the world. He cultivates a martyr complex, on topics both great—“George Bush doesn’t care about black people!”—and small—the Grammys. On songs like “Heard ‘Em Say,” and “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” he’s not afraid to examine his own petty obsessions, nor the larger system that produces those obsessions. He’s always doubting himself and then finding strength in his faith (“Stronger”), in that angsty, petulant, Andrew Lloyd Webber Christ way.

And he does it all with fresher beats, and a much fresher haircut.

5.1.08: Ragamala’s "Sva (Vital Force)" at the Southern Theater

Ragamala’s Minneapolis concert marking the company’s fifteenth season opens with “Ardhanareeshwara Stotram,” a dance of the dual creation divinity, Shakti/Shiva. A statuette in a delicately curved posture, draped in colorful silk and adorned with gold bangles and flowers in her hair, Aparna Ramaswamy also shows a coiled, grounded strength in her stamping feet and flashing eyes. The dance follows a hymn, showing Shakti’s bracelets in one line and Shiva’s live snake jewelry in the next, Shakti’s mercy and Shiva’s dreaded power. Ramaswamy is alternately rose and diamond; the weaving, playfully darting dance of her head and eyes contrasts with her sudden jumps and lunges.

Classical dances (such as Native American fancy dance or ballet), if not ossified, embody a culture’s ideas of beauty and divinity. Watching this new creation in the classical Indian tradition of bharatanatyam, choreographed by Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy (mother and daughter cofounders of Ragamala), it’s hard not to wonder how differently Western history might have turned out if we had imagined our gods this way, or dared to represent them in the body of a young woman dancing (Western classical dances show royal couples or noble abstractions rather than gods). But while the classical ideals of other cultures might have immediate appeal, only deep education can bring us inside those ideals, showing us their roots and their dark side. So we might envy bharatanatyam’s curvy, swaybacked stance, so different from ballet’s ramrod uprightness, or covet the dancers’ bright clothes and red-painted feet, but it’s hard to know the meaning or true cost of those items.   

The Ramaswamys aren’t primarily interested in showing the dance of another place and time, though. Their work is firmly grounded in Indian classical tradition, but the result could be called American contemporary dance in the truest sense—dance of the multicultural America, the meeting-ground America. This is best seen in the other two pieces in the concert. Here we see Ragamala’s trademark crosscultural collaborations—sometimes unlikely combinations that turn out, under the Ramaswamys’ intelligent guidance, to have deep sympathies. “Yathra (Journey)” joins bharatanatyam with Indian music played by a sitar and cello duo, with projected motion drawings by Terry Rosenberg in the background.

Along with fusion, kaleidoscopic complexity of composition is another contemporary element in Ragamala’s dance. Dancers come in from all corners of the stage, meeting and joining in a unity splintered by a new dancer’s sharp entrance. The part speaks for the whole: a brief frieze of women with longing hands stands in for a history of grief. “Yathra” is a quietly moving, beautifully oblique piece, one that any American audience can grasp intuitively.

“Sva (Vital Force)" yields an even more immediate connection. Here, Ragamala’s stellar dancers perform alongside the Tokara Wadaiko Ensemble. Japan’s Taiko drumming does not partake of the tradition of drummers as crazy guys who lurk in the corner: this is unapologetically buff, bare-arm, samurai drumming, played on big drums whose hits reverberate in all the empty spaces of the body (my heart is still echoing). And here, Ragamala joins bharatanatyam’s classical style to a certain modern force. I’m not sure what to call it—democracy? women’s rights? freedom under the law?—but whatever it is, it had opening night’s sold-out crowd straining forward. It’s not that bharatanatyam alone needs this modernity—more that any classical dance needs this modernity to reach today’s American audience. Ragamala shows a way into the twenty-first century for all classical forms. The thrill that the dancers feel in their own strength and grace rolls across the audience; their happy and powerful beauty is one we understand and aspire to.

This concert’s vital choreography, skilled collaborators, and outstanding dancing all make it easy to see why Ragamala’s been on national and international tours for the past eighteen months, and why they’re booked well into next year. It’s also a reminder of how lucky we are to have Ragamala here in the Twin Cities.

Sva (Vital Force) continues at the Southern Theater through May 4.

Photo credit: Ed Bock