The Dressing

Volunteers in white clothes laid out one million bones on the National Mall near the Capitol building on June 8, 2013. June 9, the Dresser ventured into Washington, DC's stuttering subway still under renovation after two years (weekends are difficult for Metro travellers under the repair schedule) to find this art exhibition with political and humanitarian punch that reminded her of the October 11, 1987, display of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. The purpose of One Million Bones and The Quilt is to bring awareness to lives lost and to move ordinary and remarkable people to do something about it.

Calling the display of white and gray bones the art of revolution, the organizers led by Albuquerque artist Naomi Natale hope to bring attention to the genocides taking place in countries such as Sudan, Burma, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Natale, known as an installation artist, has done other projects like this, including one called The Cradle, which called attention to 48 million children orphaned and made vulnerable by disease and poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. Both OMB and The Cradle were initiated and are supported by an Albuquerque organization called The Art of Revolution, that Natale and poet Susan McAllister founded in 2011.

Students, educators, artists and activists sculpted the bones made of clay, papier-mâché and other materials over a period of three years in workshops held in over 2,000 schools and supported or facilitated by The Art of Revolution. The community involved includes over 100,000 participants in all 50 United States and more than 30 countries. The gray bones represent bones made in countries outside of the U.S. where the cost of shipping to them to the U.S. was prohibitive. FEDEX donated the shipping of the bones from Albuquerque to Washington, DC.

For three days, program offerings went under such titles as "Laying of the Bones" (opening invocation by Rabbi Bruce Lustig of Washington Hebrew Congregation), "Students Rebuild: Young People Take Action and See Change on Global Issues," "The Conflict in Congo and What You Can Do to End the Violence," "Crisis in Syria: The Current Displacement, Devastation and Destruction," "Somalia: Empowering Youth to Create a Brighter Future," "Burma: The Road to Democracy," "Art and Activism," "Sudan Now and What You Can Do," "Take a Bone to Congress," "Act Against Atrocities Advocacy Day Orientation and Training," and "Reclaiming the Bones."

Besides taking bones to the United States Congress, the group plans to bury some of these million bones in gardens around the United States. The Dresser believes that Americans have trouble coming to terms with death and violence. Here is a country where gun violence against the children of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, has failed to move enough people to take action to prevent mass killings. This fact was pointed up in an essay published in The Washington Post June 10 regarding the Santa Monica rampage that hardly caused a blip on the news media though the perpetrator carried 1300 rounds of ammunition. The Dresser believes that Natale and McAllister have it right--that educating children about mass killings may be the only way to move people to act on such crimes of humanity but this sadly, like the Washington subway repair, will follow its own path for resolution.

In B. K. Fischer's poem "Week 11 (Trade Routes)," the narrator of the poem is the Boy of Teshik Tash. The world of archeology knows this boy from his skeletal fossil remains discovered in Uzbekistan in 1938. The original belief is that this was a Neanderthal child around the age of nine to ten years old. In the poem, the boy is speaking to a museumgoer. The poem is part of St. Rage's Vault, an award-winning book of poems charting the conception, development, and birth of a child. Week 11 is around the time bones form in the developing fetus. Fischer's poem provides an impressionistic vision compatible with the One Million Bones exhibition and "Week 11" was inspired by a diorama on exhibit at the Gardner Stout Hall of Asian Peoples in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Particularly poignant are the last lines "I am your brother./Bone spokes fasten a vise around my neck."

WEEK 11 (TRADE ROUTES)

Who gave you the right to click your heels
across museum tile, your notebook balanced
on your forearm like an expert waiter's tray,
while I sleep in my frozen cell, one more
display? Though years of glacial ice expand
and crack the marrow lodes, I'm well preserved,
unearthed fresh as an artichoke. They brought
me back. I felt the slosh of brine inside
the cargo bay, where blood and limbs began
to thaw.

.................... Like all the rest you jot and list:
turmeric, curry, camphor, nutmeg, myrrh, a dust
of pectin to prevent the rot of snuff or coriander
under glass. I'm yet another name you might
collect, a stenciled placard, Boy of Teshik Tash,
the region hatched in red, where minerals and
malachite are mined, the rhomboids fringed
with silver hairs like magnets drawing pins.

Come, caress my acorn skull, my tomb
of stag's horns crossed and tied to weave
a dome, a basket overturned. Reach through
the halo of my shivered sleep and stroke
this fur papoose, this crypt. I am your brother.
Bone spokes fasten a vise around my neck.

by B. K. Fischer
from St. Rage's Vault

Copyright © 2013 B. K. Fischer

Without the complications of a sexual relationship, Noah Baumbach's film Frances Ha is reminiscent of Woody Allen's film Annie Hall. Or rather Greta Gerwig's rendering of the character Frances Ha reminds the Dresser of Diane Keaton's rendering of Annie Hall. There is something uniquely wonderful and whacky about how Frances and Annie approach the challenges of life in New York City. Both seem more suited for the laidback life of California where a young woman can behave in irresponsible ways that East coast rigor does not sanction.

Blond, trying-to-make-it-as-a-modern-dancer Frances, in fact, is a Californian and, among the places she travels to in the film, we see her quick trip home to her loving family in Sacramento after best friend brunette Sophie (played by Mickey Sumner) moves out of their shared apartment. Sophie, whom Frances refers to and her herself as "same person with different hair," explains she (Sophie) is just following her dream to live in Tribeca. No matter this abandonment puts Frances in a bad financial predicament if not an emotional fugue. The movie, filmed in black and white, is heavy on talk, the kind of talk young people exchange in trying to figure out how to live, how to succeed, or just how to survive.

The reality is that Gerwig, who helped Baumbach write the script of Frances Ha, is a native of Sacramento and the parents of Frances are the real life, non-actor parents of Greta Gerwig--Christine and Gordon Gerwig, respectively a nurse and a financial consultant/computer programmer. So the way Frances behaves is enhanced by Gerwig's participation in writing the script.

The film is filled with reversals and little surprises. Initially, the Dresser wondered if Frances and Sophie were lovers because Frances often says she loves Sophie and one of the early scenes shows Frances visiting with Sophie in her bed. However, these young women are just typical of their Millennial generation with no inhibitions about crossing gender role lines. Initially, Sophie is depicted as the reasonable other half of Frances, that is, until Sophie shows up at their alma mater (both women went to the same college in upstate New York), where Frances has taken a demeaning summer job. Sophie becomes shit-faced drunk, spurns her fiancé, promises to stay with Frances, and says things she absolutely doesn't mean both to Frances and her fiancé.

Sophie's fiancé Patch (Patrick Heusinger) is a huge shock to Frances, who doesn't want things to change between her and her best bud. Although Frances says she doesn't like Patch and later tries to take back what she said, the Dresser sees him as an amazingly mature young man who does not give up on the drunken Sophie when she completely disrespects him in a scene over the need to depart for his grandmother's funeral.

And Frances is desirable to the opposite sex (early in the movie she refuses a beaux's offer to move in with him and be a couple) but her post-Sophie roommate Benji (Michael Zegen), who is attracted to her, nails the problem and pronounces her "undate-able." It's this living-in-the-past thing like the nostalgia Americans have for making the scene in Paris, no matter the cost. So for two days Frances, without pre-planning and without enough money, escapes to Paris and totally misses connecting with the one person she knows there.

While there is no resolution to this stream of images in this coming-of-age tale, the Dresser assumes the truncated Frances Ha (Dear Reader, you will get the double meaning of this by the end of the film) will some how manage to move on with her life. Meanwhile, the Dresser will savor the irrational Frances who tries to engage a new female roommate in a playful fight reminiscent of behavior she engaged in with Sophie.

In Michelle Chan Brown's poem "Autobiography (II)," a young woman presumably of Chinese heritage (the author is half Chinese) is being counseled by her mother on the subject of how to behave with others and especially men who might well be "the enemy." However, the subject is fraught since it is the daughter relaying the mother's words. By the end of the poem, the daughter is addressing a lover asking that this person "Gather me up." It is a take-me-as-I-am plea where the daughter seems to be on fire and needs to be watered. While Frances Ha lives in Chinatown, New York, and seems to have a Chinese surname, things aren't as they appear and indeed like the advice of Brown's mother in "Autobiography (II)," a spoken universal adage to her daughter, or any daughter like Frances Ha, that one must believe in what you do not see--such intangibles as love, faith, good luck, and maturity.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY (II)

Copyright © 2012 Kore Press

Hurry, while there are still a few performances of composer Gregory Spear's new opera Paul's Case scheduled in the outstanding world premiere production by UrbanArias at the Artisphere in Arlington, Virginia. Everything about this 90-minute chamber opera organized in two acts and five scenes works.

The music, with a Minimalist through line, perhaps a little less insistent than Philip Glass' style but not less exuberant, surprises with various kinds of quotation or influence including the sounds of an oncoming train, Benjamin Britten, Vienna waltz, and the polyphony of Monteverdi and Cavalli (per Gregory Spears). Spears, in a short email interview April 21-22, 2013, with the Dresser, said his "more modern influences included David Lang, Michael Nyman, and yes, definitely Britten. I'm also influenced by the operas of John Adams, Robert Ashley and Philip Glass."

Part of the musical soundscape is humming and whistling, which to the Dresser's mind adds an edgy and primitive response of the characters to their situation and each other. When asked about how these sounds entered the composition, Spears replied, "The humming and whistling were part of the piece from the beginning. I thought of the humming like a sort of sonic equivalent of thinking or pondering. Humming can also be a very mysterious and strange sound to hear onstage. And then I knew I wanted Paul's response to the teacher to be whistling. It seemed both irreverent and enigmatic--he doesn't really have anything to say to them. (In the story he whistles Faust at one point.)"

The libretto, written by Gregory Spears and Kathryn Walat and based on a much anthologized story of the same title by Willa Cather, deftly pares down to essential phrases like "something of a dandy" (his teachers' accusation against Paul's arrogance) and "I did not mean to be polite or impolite" (Paul's response to his teachers who do not understand his behavior).

The story set in 1906 is about a high school boy who is kicked out of school for his impertinence. His father decrees that Paul must become a cash boy and work in his firm. He tells Paul he is no longer going to be allowed to work as an usher at the Carnegie Music Hall, the only activity in the town of Pittsburgh that the young man loves to do. So, Paul steals money from his father's business and runs away to New York City where he books a room at the Waldorf Astoria. He has a drunken night on the town with a college student from Yale and awakes to hear that his theft has been publicized in the Pittsburgh newspaper and that his father is on his way to collect him. Paul decides he cannot go back and in desperation steps in front of an oncoming train.

Commenting about how the libretto with Kathryn Walat was written, Spears said, "I absolutely love her approach to playwriting and dialogue, so I knew her style would be perfect. I decided on the overall structure of scenes and then she wrote about 2/3 and I wrote about a 1/3 of the first draft. After we had a draft, she helped craft the scenes I wrote, and I would ask permission to layer, interweave, or fracture certain lines in her scenes. She was very gracious and open minded about letting me experiment with creating various ensemble moments. She also helped revise and tweak the piece and its structure throughout the development process."

The performance by tenor Jonathan Blalock was tenderly executed. Playing Paul is a challenge because Paul is a complicated young man who is a throwback in time. He is courtly but without affectation. Blalock is able to portray this emotional complexity without overdoing Paul's youthful defiance. The Dresser was deeply moved by the duet between Blalock and tenor Michael Slattery who played the Yale student. The exuberance of these two young men out painting the town of New York red was palpable.

Predominantly, the singing is ensemble, creating a good deal of syncopated texture. The supporting cast baritones Keith Phares (Paul's father) and James Shaffran (the high school principal and Astoria bell boy), mezzo-soprano Amanda Crider (Paul's English teacher and Astoria Maid #3), and sopranos Melissa Wimbish and Erin Sanzero contribute satisfyingly to a rich vocal score.

Costumes of turn-of-the-century styles lend professional authority to the production, which is spare on sets but rich in lighting technique. Notable is movement technique used by Paul as he enters the runway style stage and later this same stylized movement is mirrored in the swagger of the Yale student. When asked how the stylized movement came about, Spears answered, "The opening of the opera foreshadows the final moments of the opera musically, but it was [Director] Kevin Newbury's idea to stage that slow motion walk and have it return. As a director, he was very sensitive to big structural moments in the music and the symmetry of the piece's design. He really knows how to take musical structures and make theater out of them."

The chamber ensemble includes two violins, viola, cello, bass, two clarinets (one base), harp, and piano. Robert Wood conducted masterfully.

In James Arthur's poem "Aspirations," the reader encounters a voice that the Dresser suggests could be Paul's. The end lines reference Prospero (same character from Shakespeare's The Tempest) but these lines were written by W.H. Auden in his long poem "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's "The Tempest."

ASPIRATIONS
........... after W.H. Auden

to address mystery
without being mysterious,
never expecting anyone
to know, speaking only for yourself

..... but not being self-centered,
conducting yourself
as if your work matters, knowing nothing

makes nothing happen, never naming
what you love, believing in truth--
as who doesn't--and not selling
something, not contenting yourself

with saying nothing, to bow down
and obey, to hate nothing
and to ask nothing for its love

James Arthur
from Charms Against Lightning

Copyright © 2012 James Arthur

Photo credit: C. Stanley Photography

"Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart."
Anne Frank

If Anne Frank, the young Jewish diarist of World War II had survived the Holocaust, what would she have been like as an adult?

The Dresser suggests that Estelle Glaser Laughlin's Transcending Darkness: A Girl's Journey out of the Holocaust might provide a glimpse at that question. Laughlin, along with her mother and sister Fredka, survived the Warsaw Ghetto extermination and uprising, several concentration and labor camps, extreme starvation and deprivation that continued as she and her family made their way out of a liberated prison camp into a still hostile Europe to make their way to family established in the United States who had no understanding of what she, her sister, and their mother had suffered. Yet those years of horror are not reflected in the adult voice or visage. Furthermore, Estelle Laughlin is no Pollyanna, giving wide berth to bad people.

KILLING AND BEING KILLED IN MAKE-BELIEVE PLAY

What the Dresser particularly liked was the honesty of this well-crafted testimonial that often reads like poetry.

"I took turns killing and being killed in make-believe play with friends. But I was too young to comprehend the finality that death really is. As a matter of fact, death did not terrify me as much as the possibility of being separated from my parents. I desperately wanted for us to live. But if we had to die, I wanted my parents to assure me that we would all meet death holding on to each other--like a joint transfer to the unimaginable." (Chapter 4 Deportation, p. 24)

Laughlin has vivid memories of growing up in Warsaw and living in the Warsaw Ghetto. The street where she lived became part of that ghetto which was lucky for her family since 400,000 displaced Jews, representing 30% of Warsaw's population, were forced into that walled off neighborhood of 1.3 square miles without the comforts of their former homes and possessions. Because Laughlin was only thirteen when deportations from the Ghetto began, her mother cut off her pigtails to make her look older. The Germans considered children useless to their forced labor plan. Her parents asked Laughlin and her sister to go to a convent but they were a close-knit family and neither girl would consider leaving their parents.

36 RIGHTEOUS PEOPLE

"I am sure that the humble old woman in Kielce was one of the Zaddikim. Mirrored in her humanity, I now see the beacons of my other heroes who kept my soul from dying. I see my father whose kindness and courage remain immortal. I see Dr. Janush Korczak who joined the starving orphans to be delivered to the ovens of Treblinka. I see Raul Wallenberg, Oscar Schindler, individual resistance fighters, and all the ordinary people who paid the supreme price to live by their values.

"The Lamed Vav Zaddikim may be only legend, but what if they are not? What if our fate depends on there being enough righteous people?" (Chapter 14 The Old Woman in Kielce, p. 94)

Laughlin's family were not particularly religious but her reference to the Jewish legend of the 36 righteous people, the Lamed Vav Zaddikim, was poignant in the way she related this story to heroic people she saw around her including her father and Dr. Janush Korczak, who was caring for a band of starving orphans.

THE GOOD NEWS INSIDE

"The struggle to hold on to my humanity had been a concern for me ever since Nazi boots stepped on our streets and began to trample on our lives. How do you keep your faith in love and trust when your people are being shoved, by your fellow men, into gas chambers and crematoria? With bitter hatred, I often vowed to wreak vengeance upon the barbarians." (Chapter 24 Hof, p. 169)

How does a teenager survive death camps and an escape afterward wearing only a burlap caftan and wooden clogs in the frigid cold of winter with little to eat? People often asked Laughlin why didn't she and others around her rise up and beat back the Germans and the Poles who supported such barbaric behavior? She reports seeing dead bodies on her street in the Warsaw Ghetto as well as the bloodied pregnant neighbor whose fetus was slashed from her womb.

Certainly a large part of why the author of Transcending Darkness survived was the constant contact and encouragement of her mother who had herself as a girl survived pogroms in her native Belarus. In the United States, Laughlin flourished going on to have a family of three sons with another survivor of WWII and managing to achieve undergraduate and graduate college degrees in education despite having arrived in America with only three years of formal educational training.

Anne Frank wrote, "Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!" Estelle Glaser Laughlin managed to realize her life beyond the Warsaw Ghetto and carry forward, despite immeasurable grief, anger and frustration a life worthy of universal memory.

Revisiting the past, especially one as difficult as Estelle Laughlin's, can be difficult for the memorist but illuminating for her audience. In her poem "How the Past Comes Back," Natasha Trethewey tackles the burden of memory showing both its dark and light aspects.

HOW THE PAST COMES BACK

Like shadow across a stone,
.......gradually--
.............. the name it darkens:

as one enters the world
.............. through language--
....... like a child learning to speak
..............then naming
everything; as flower,

the neglected hydrangea
..............endlessly blossoming--
.....................year after year
....... each bloom a blue refrain; as

the syllables of birdcall
....... coalescing in the trees,
..............repeating
a single word:
..............forgets;

as the dead bird's bright signature--
..............days after you buried it--
....... a single red feather
..............on the window glass

in the middle of your reflection.

Natasha Trethewey from Thrall

Copyright © 2012 Natasha Trethewey

After partaking of "Florence: Christmas Music of the Trecento" played by the Folger Consort with animated singing by Trio EOS, the Dresser was filled and remains full of the peaceful joy that comes with the exuberant delivery of a program of praise songs (more formally known as laude) and dances. The two-hour program with one intermission offered a range of 14th century, mostly polyphonic compositions. Folger Consort artistic director Robert Eisenstein on medieval fiddle, recorder, and lute played with guest artists Christa Patton (harp, recorder, bagpipe), Mark Rimple (lute, psaltery, medieval fiddle), and Mary Springfels (medieval fiddle, citole).

Most of the program was done in sets of three to four pieces alternating between voice and instrumental performance. The opening composition "Altissima luce col grande splendore" established the role of sopranos Jessica Beebe and Michele Kennedy and mezzosoprano Maren Mantalbano. Mantalbano in this ethereal and joyful opening number stood out with her engaging stage presence that continued throughout the concert.

Bagpipes were employed in several compositions including the first "Salterello" (two were played) where the bagpipe's drone gave a special texture to a vigorous dance tune.

At the intermission, the musicians stayed on stage to talk one-on-one with audience members curious about the medieval instruments. Mary Springfels answered questions about the citole, which she said was particularly shaped for the strolling troubadour. Further enhancement of the evening included an intricate piece of precepe folk craft from Naples, Italy. Look for this display in an out of the way alcove at the back of the theatre. Precepe craft began in the 1200's in Italy when St. Francis of Assisi asked Giovanni Vellita from the village of Greccio to create a manger scene.

The central part of Italy seems to inspire happiness and creativity. Hilary Tham in her poem "In Tuscany" expresses the joy she felt in painting the Tuscan landscape, a landscape where olive trees are cut back to regenerate beyond their normal life span. Because music of the medieval period was rarely set down on paper much of it was lost. How lucky the audiences of the Folger Consort are to have their interpretations of this beautiful music.



IN TUSCANY (an excerpt)

...

I am happy painting light, the cultivated peace
of olive trees, their gnarled and strange shapes
as they are cut back again and again to regenerate
and bear fruit beyond the natural span
of uncut trees. Once, I bit into a ripe olive,
had to spit it out. The fresh olive is acrid,
it cannot be eaten until soaked in brine.

"I am a sculptor of marble," Michelangelo said,
cursing his fate that made the pope demand
he paint pictures on a chapel ceiling.
Strange how forcing nature achieves great yields.

by Hilary Tham 

from Reality Check & Other Travel Poems & Art

Copyright © 2001 Hilary Tham

The human condition at the end of life is how the Icelandic Vesturport Theatre and Reykjavik City Theatre frame Faust: A Love Story, an entry in the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. The Dresser saw the December 13, 2012, performance of Faust's six-performance run, a United States premiere.

The script, co-written by Vesturport Theatre members Nina Dögg Filippusdottir, Gísli Örn Gardarsson, Carl Grose, Björn Hlynur Haraldsson, and Vikingur Kristjansson with music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is drawn from Faust plays by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Christopher Marlowe with modern day commentary attempting to weave the old poetic lines together. Once the Dresser accepted that the Faust story, despite the play's title, was not the critical emphasis, she found the tale of an old actor abandoned in a nursing home at Christmas time, looking for a second chance with life and love, a poignantly sad and moving experience.

The way Johann, the old actor, (played movingly by Thorsteinn Gunnarsson) gets his second chance is through acting the Faust story. All nursing home residents, attendants, and visitors become part of his production. Vesturport Theatre director Gísli Örn Gardarsson literally cast a net over the central portion of the orchestra seating such that the players who claimed in a talkback session that they were not acrobats tumble and saunter drunkenly in space that is normally stirred only by dust motes. The Vesturport group, which premiered their Faust play in January 2010, specializes in physical theater, much like what the American Chicago-based troupe 500 Clown does and to certain degree Arlington, Virginia's Synetic Theater.

The Dresser supposes that if she had not seen productions by 500 Clown (500 Clown Macbeth in 2006) or Synetic Theater (The Master and Margarita in 2010), she would be more wowed by the old man in a wheelchair (Magnus Jonsson) who tears open his face to become the evil Mephisto, who throws a noisy firecracker on stage, who steals and moves the soul of Johann to Asmodeus (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), one of Mephisto's devils by holding their hands and letting their respective body electricity swap. The play is a mash-up where the circus arts, except for the old lady who transforms into a contortionist, do not come close to the skills of Cirque du Soleil performers as one was led to believe by the advanced advertising. The play is a mash-up of two classic works in conflict with each other where the tragedy of Goethe is mixed with the comic relief of Marlowe's morality play. The Icelandic play is a mash-up of old classical verse versus modern day lingo.

The Dresser tips her hat to Nina Dögg Filippusdottir who plays the devilish Lilith (yes, Adam's first wife). Filippusdottir in her gauzy slip, red gloves, and red boots is quite the seductress. Her scene atop an upright piano as she runs her gloved fingers across the keyboard is scintillating and much more so than when nurse Greta (Unnur Osp Stefansdottir) as Faust's lover pulls off her bodice revealing her naked breasts.

Stories about aged performers locked into old-age institutions, such as Dustin Hoffman's directorial debut film Quartet, are now accruing a large following in the United States as Baby Boomers have reached their senior years. In Grace Cavalieri's book-length poem Pinecrest Rest Haven, an elderly lady called Mrs. P deals with the drama of growing old. Her twin, unlike Johann's, is anchored in a formative friendship something Johann was not able to achieve during his life.

............................Waking up under water,
Mrs. P thought of Jan because Jan remembered
the flowers Mrs. P had in her backyard, pink and white peonies,
Queen Anne's lace by the tracks, lily of the valley. Pulled up
through the medicine of dreams, people kept waking her up to tell her
to get some rest. Thinking she was young, she woke one day to find herself
old. The shock nearly killed her. The doctor's legs were the first thing
she recognized. One leg looked bigger than the other. She saw that
the day he wore khaki shorts. Who died?! she shouted.
Did somebody die? She lay back down, exhausted.
She'd never wear high heels again. Now she knew. Mockingbirds
outside make the same sound three times. Come to dinner, come to dinner, come.
At camp Jan and she were five years old and they both tried out for the part
of fairy princess. As they were best friends, the Director made the role
for twin fairies, so they said their lines together, held identical
wands, bowed exactly the same time, wet their pants together after.

by Grace Cavalieri 

from Pinecrest Rest Haven

Copyright © 1998 Grace Cavalieri

Where can you experience new American opera? With any regularity, the only place has been New York and most significantly New York City Opera's VOX Contemporary American Opera Lab.

But maybe occurrence of this kind of risky programming (the producers of opera fear no one will show up and fill their seats) is changing. On November 19, 2012, Washington National Opera launched its American Opera Initiative, a public workshop for encouraging new American opera in small bytes. The program--a concert-style world premier--featured three 20-minute operas: Part of the Act by Liam Wade and John Grimmett, Charon by Scott Perkins and Nat Cassidy, and A Game of Hearts by Douglas Pew and Dara Weinberg. Sheparding this new program into life with promise of more was Christina Scheppelmann, the out-going WNO Director of Artistic Operations. Mentoring this set of three mini operas was conductor Anne Manson, composer Jake Heggie, and librettist Mark Campbell.

The Dresser, who has often enjoyed the opera excerpts presented in the NYCO VOX showcase, could only think of the WNO mini operas in this context. Twenty-minutes does not an opera make. Of the three presented, only one stood out and that was Charon. The libretto about the weary boatman ferrying newly deceased to Hades and the richly textured percussive music made the entire evening worth dashing from DC's Union Station after a trip that day to partake in the historic closing event of Coursera's Modern Poetry course. Bass-baritone Solomon Howard as Charon was a standout.

Overall mezzo-soprano Julia Mintzer gave notable performances. Although the Dresser was not impressed with Part of the Act's collage of music that quoted everything from stripper bump and grind to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Mintzer gave a memorable performance in terms of vocal range and acting. The story of Part of the Act concerns a Vaudevillian actress having an affair with a man whose wife (played by Julia Mintzer) comes gunning for them. This initial introduction to Mintzer made the Dresser pay attention with favorable pleasure to the mezzo's performances in the other two pieces. Mintzer was the only singer partaking in all three operas.

While Douglas Pew, A Game of Hearts' composer, took the trouble of writing for a variety of voices: soprano (Shantell Przybylo), mezzo-soprano (Julia Mintzer), light lyric soprano María Eugenia Antúnez), lyric tenor (Mauricio Miranda), and lyric bass-baritione (Norman Garrett), the lyrical music was not remarkable and neither was the libretto, whose story was set in a nursing home and focused on several widows and their losses.

The Dresser looks forward to attending the next program in WNO's American Opera Initiative. Jun. 8 - 9, 2013, will be The Tao of Muhammad Ali (A Ghost Story) by composer/guitarist D. J. Sparr.

Merrill Leffler's poem "Performance" not only captures story elements from Part of the Act, Charon, and A Game of Hearts, but it also speaks to the emotional state of collaborating artists premiering brand new work.

PERFORMANCE

Do you think the I standing before you
doesn't want to seduce your attention
and hold you close to the erratic beating
of its heart? Do you think the I here is not performing
for your applause and approbation,
that' it's not needy or demanding
and doesn't want more than it knows it's entitled to,
that it won't pull from its hat every possible trick--
its brooding soulfulness, its comic shtick--
whatever it takes?
..............................Friend, look in the mirror.
Show me we are not a marriage of grief and joy,
of lust, desire, ambition, fear, of every need
that has clung since we are first thrust into this dark
and resplendent world, that all our stunting
our juggling, our masks, all our art and philosophy
want nothing from each other and are not in performance.
Friend, mon frère, ma soeur, astonish us.

by Merrill Leffler 

from Mark the Music

Copyright © 2012 Merrill Leffler

Photo Credit: Scott Suchman

If you love myth and storytelling embellished with music, dance, stylized movement, a dash of acrobatics, and costumes with imaginative flair, the Dresser recommends you take the entire family to see The Folger Theatre's production of The Conference of the Birds playing through November 25, 2012, at the Folger Shakespeare Library on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.

The work by Jean-Claude Carrière and Peter Brook and based on the 12th century Persian fable of the same name by Farid Uddi Attar is much like The Ramayana and The Green Bird that were produced by the Constellation Theatre Company in the last several years. All three involve arduous quests. And all three have featured the percussion performance of Tom Teasley who is a virtuosic player of exotic instruments and also a singer who scats. In the Folger production, he is seen working away on his drums and melodika on the top balcony above the players.

What the Dresser particularly enjoyed was how comically modern the English translation is.

Hoopoe "Listen, feather brains! I'm speaking of our true king. He lives behind the mountain called Kaf. His name is Simorgh. He's the King of birds. He is close to us but we are far from him. The way to him is unknown and only a man with a lion's heart dare take it. ..."

Heron, "Are we sure the Simorgh exists?"

Hoopoe, "Yes. One his feather fell on China in the middle of the night and his reputation filled the world."

Under the leadership of the Hoopoe bird, the birds fearfully set out to find their leader. As the group travels, they move in ways reminiscent of the wide-stance, arm-gesturing African dance. Nightingale (Annapurna Sriram) plays a ukulele while singing sweet ballads that sound like Janis Ian or Nellie Mckay. The cast enacts plays within the larger play.

The Conference of the Birds creates an oasis from the hubbub of the current day, demanding nothing of the audience. Director Aaron Posner has choreographed a piece that moves along like a well-behaved camel caravan. Even when a slave looses his head or gets pierced by an arrow while standing with an apple on his head, the serenity of the scene is not disturbed. Nothing is presented that will scare the children or offend a senior member of the family.

Greg McBride in his poem "Tight Waist" creates a surreal landscape in this athletic action that alters the reality of his opponent in much the same way that the Hoopoe bird controls the belief system of the conference of birds. If the birds have their eyes open, they would see what the end result will be relative to their journey but they do not. Like the losing wrestler, the birds have to move through the whole process.

TIGHT WAIST

Like preening cocks crouched grim, we circle--
he white with red piping, I red and blue.

We hand jive the close space. I'm intrigued
by his strength, his two-step swagger.

His right heel barely rises, rolling weight
onto the ball of the foot where the slightest

lift begins the transfer from right to left,
the way a vaulter shifts from foot to planted pole.

He repeats this move a dozen times.
I'm alert to the possibilities,

observe his pattern, his cadence.
I paw the mat, ready my sugar-foot thigh.

Now his center describes a shallow arc
to an apex that barely arrives, from which

he's suspended, between two havens.
And I strike, lunging past his defenses.

I don't hear his suck of shock.
Or anything else. Not the squeak

of weightless Tigers toeing the Resilite.
Not the rising roar of ten thousand.

He sees me coming, as in a dream,
and wills a landing safe on the left,

but gravity will not be hurried, and
I'm there, behind, savoring his sweat,

clamping a tight waist. "Takedown!"
the ref cries.

by Greg McBride 
from Porthole

Copyright © 2012 Greg McBride

After attending Washington, DC's Marine Corps Marathon to watch her New Jersey shore daughter-in-law finish in four hours and two minutes, the Dresser has a new appreciation of what marathon means to anyone who persists in any kind of endurance course. And especially after the news last night that the good Mayor Michael Bloomberg has bowed to the outrage of conducting the New York City Marathon when so many of his constituents are suffering after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy.

OF MARATHONS & MOOC MANIA

The word marathon derives from a Greek village and plain northeast of Athens where the Athenians were victorious over the Persians in 490 B.C. The village name--Marathon--took on new meaning when a messenger from Marathon ran more than 20 miles to Athens to deliver the news of the victory.

For the Dresser, and perhaps for many of her dear readers, the world has changed recently in ways that will not allow return to what was. Moreover the scale of change is enormous. For the Dresser, who has been running a marathon of poetry this fall by participating in MOOC mania--more on this mind-expanding 21st century be in shortly--the refuge for all this unsettling change is poetry. On the weekend leading to the supersized storm Sandy, the Dresser attended two exceptional poetry events--a by-invitation-only symposium on Gertrude Stein and a performing arts center poetry reading to a large general audience. Both events seem to be a barometer of our time, measuring pressure experienced from accumulated conditions not entirely understood.

In September 2012 as a beta test, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) through a company calling itself Coursera began offering Internet readership a without-tuition-cost opportunity to take University of Pennsylvania professor Al Filreis' ten-week Modern Poetry course. The Dresser signed up immediately last spring (the course will remain open for registration probably until the next offering begins in September 2013) but had no idea how groundbreaking this educational opportunity would be. She had no concept of attending a class with 35,000 classmates, some of whom make themselves known in the discussion forums of Filreis' ModPo, as the class has come to be known. She had no concept how one teacher could make a class of this size seem intimate.

The technology has been remarkably dependable, even during Hurricane Sandy for those who still had power to partake. Yes, Filreis has teaching assistants whom the ModPo devotees know by face, name, and literary preferences as each week the professor rolls out videos where he and his TA's push back their sleeves and do "deep reading" discussions of selected poems. On designated weeks, live web session take place where students from all over the world can call in, tweet, or write into the discussion forum set up for this ModPoLive session. Furthermore, students are invited to the University of Pennsylvania campus and the Kelly Writer's House to participate in the live session. The TA's are as agile as the professor in making the live sessions work. The student body defies expectations and is amazingly active whether late at night or early in the day. Time worldwide has not gotten in the way of students coming together to share this experience.

ON MEETING DJ SPOOKY & GERTRUDE STEIN AT YALE

On October 26, 2012, the Dresser attended "A Symposium on the Work of Gertrude Stein" organized by the Gertrude Stein Society with the collaboration and support of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven, Connecticut. The informative program addressed the corrected edition of Stein's Stanzas in Meditation recently published by the Yale Beinecke, approaches for teaching Stein, and Stein's writings on war. The small gathering of about 60 people was a mix of academics (teachers and students) and independents (scholars and fans). In the world of Stein study, the range of subject matter was timely and perfect for engaging any participant of any current day proceedings on Gertrude Stein and her work.

Now, Dear Reader, step into this picture with the Dresser to get the full effect. At this high-tech library where live cameras watch researchers use original resource documents from such writers as Gertrude Stein and researchers are told to make copies of what they are looking at with their cellphones and do their documenting with their laptops--no pens allowed (If you must handwrite, bring loose sheets of paper and pencils), a low-tech symposium takes place. Most of the presenters choose to stand behind a podium and read their papers word by word. An occasional presenter managed to get a text-heavy slide projected and one of the educators talking about teaching Stein wowed the assembled--he was praised as a "rock star"--with a recording of DJ Spooky's remix of Stein's "Portrait of Picasso."

POETRY FOR THE PEOPLE

On October 28, 2012 (same day as the Marine Corps Marathon), the Dresser attended a poetry performance by former United States Poet Laureate (2004) Billy Collins and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Mary Oliver at the Music Center at Strathmore Marriott Concert Stage in Bethesda, Maryland. It was a full house (not every seat taken but certainly well attended) where the tickets sold for $45-$75. While the Dresser believes that some significant portion of the house was occupied by people who had been given the seats at no cost, the fact that people were there late in the afternoon while storm warnings were blaring from the media says something positive about the state the poetry.

Because the Dresser is unlikely to write about the Collins-Oliver reading again, she offers these details about this popular culture, poetry-the-for-people event. First, the Dresser will say quietly that most academics are not fans of Billy Collins and Mary Oliver. Second, the Dresser who always runs into other poets at poetry readings did not see anyone she knew and this is not to say there were no poets of note in the audience but more to say the audience was not the usual audience for poetry. Third, the person introducing this program asked the audience to "welcome these icons of the poetry world" as if they were not living, breathing, working writers.

Continue reading "Poetry Taken to Other Levels" »

If Gaetano Donizetti's opera  Anna Bolena was a story about a mother deprived of seeing her daughter grow up because her husband wants a new wife, the libretto would have been written by a woman. It should be noted that the non-speaking/non-singing role of Henry and Anne's daughter Elizabeth who would become Elizabeth I, Queen of England, was added by Stephen Lawless who conceived and directs this production. The Dresser applauds the interpretation but it did raise a flag about who wrote the libretto. Felice Romani's libretto, a tragedy about a woman  with enormous political ambition--she wanted to be Queen of England as the second wife of Henry the VIII--deeply impressed the Dresser. In today's world, one thinks about Hillary Clinton, a woman who put up with a philandering husband possibly to further her ambition to be president of the United States. Clinton's story is yet unfinished and may very well not be a subject of tragedy as Anne Boleyn's story was. 

On September 18, 2012, the Dresser saw Washington National Opera's offering  of Anna Bolena. This production with impressive sets comes from The Dallas Opera. 

Soprano Sonia Radvanovsky as Anna Bolena (Anne Boleyn) is a force against which no man of ordinary station should compete. Her powerful singing filled the Kennedy Center opera house in what seemed to be an effortless performance. 

Bass baritone Oren Gradus as Enrico  VIII  (Henry the VIII) was a worthy match to Radvanovsky both in  voice and acting. However, Shalva Mukeria as Riccardo (Lord Richard Percy)--the man set up by Henry to cause Anne's demise and who is shockingly Anne's legal husband by an earlier marriage never annulled---has a strange quality to his voice that doesn't meet standards set by Radvanovsky and Gradus. 

Mezzo-soprano Sonia Ganassi with a less powerful voice is a beautiful complement to Radvanovsky. This was especially heard in the scene where Jane asks Anne for forgiveness after revealing that she (Jane) is the woman Henry will marry next and the reason why Henry wants Anne out of his way. 

One other singer of particular note, though in general the casting was excellent, was contralto Claudia Huckle in the pants role of Smeton, the page who loves Anne but  who is tricked into denouncing her because he is told this will save her life. Huckle's singing and acting is particularly animated when he visits her vacant bed chamber to return a locket of hers that he had stolen as a love token. In an opera that lacks movement and seemed exceptionally static in this production, Huckle's performance was a breath of fresh air.  

While the beautiful music was played with exuberance and presented as one would expect, the Dresser often found Donizetti's cheerful compositions incompatible with the tragedy unfolding. Moreover, the Dresser found Lawless' interpretation of the story strangely comic at inappropriate points. For example, during the long overture that begins this opera, the the silent presentation of Henry's marital history with text projections and appearances of Gradus with first a non-speaking/non-singing walk-on who plays his first wife Catherine of Aragon and then with Radvanovsky as Anne Boleyn made not only the Dresser chuckle but also others in the audience.

In Moshe Dor's poem "I Ran," we meet a man much like Henry the VIII. Unlike the historic king who was moving from wife to wife seeking a male heir, Donizetti's Henry is running ragged trying to find perfect love. The problem is the women Henry picks in this opera all have political ambition.

I RAN

Man, why did you run away?
Jerzy Andrzievsky, "The Diamond and the Ashes"

I ran because what I craved proved to be
a mirage, I ran because in the wilderness
my body burst into flames, I ran because
when the last wadi flooded, my soul
also was washed away, I ran because I'm human
and was afraid the bullet would hit my back
but instead it struck the bull's eye of my heart.

by Moshe Dor as translated by Barbara Goldberg
from Scorched by the Sun

Copyright © 2012 Moshe Dor

Photo credit: Scott Suchman