Los Angeles Performance Practice presents PASSION, a new work “exploring the space that our desire and longing inhabit while rehearsing perseverance.”
Taking Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent film Lapassion de Jeanne d’Arc as a point of departure, Rachel Jendrzejewski and Zoe Aja Moore “collaborate to create an embodied investigation of the fraught relationship between feminism and emotion, from Joan of Arc’s day to current political moments.”*
PASSIONwill be performed by Dorothy Dubrule, Jessica Emmanuel, Brigid Gallagher, Mireya Lucio, and Gabriella Rhodeen—recently seen at Redcat inParadise Island—and the one-night-only event features recorded excerpts of a live score by Julia Holter for Dreyer’s film, performed by Holter, Corey Fogel, Devin Hoff, Dina Maccabee, and TashiWada.
“As much as I’m engaged with it, with violence, I remain ever hopeful that change is possible and necessary, and that we will get there. I believe that strongly, and representing that matters to me: a sense of aspiration, a sense of good will, a sense of hope, a sense of this idea that one has the right, that we have the right to be as we are.” — Carrie Mae Weems*
The timeless themes of political power, social justice, gender oppression, and valiant persistence are brought to life in a modern context in PAST TENSE, Carrie Mae Weems’ multimedia take on Antigone.
Combining music, spoken word, video, and projected images, PAST TENSE—presented this week in Los Angeles by CAPUCLA—includes works by poet Carl Hancock Rux and composer Craig Harris, and will be performed by Weems, Eisa Davis, Francesca Harper, David Parker, Imani Uzuri, and Alicia Hall Moran, who brought the house down at Disney Hall earlier this week in Bryce Dessner’s Triptych.
*Megan O’Grady, “Carrie Mae Weems,” T: The New York Times Style Magazine, October 21, 2018, 140.
From top: Carrie Mae Weems, Past Tense, in performance; Past Tense production photographs (2) by WilliamStrugs; Carrie Mae Weems, portrait by Jerry Klineberg; Past Tense, in performance with, from right, Alicia Hall Moran, Imani Uzuri, and Eisa Davis. Images courtesy CAP UCLA.
“We begin as piano virtuosos and then start rummaging about and foraging in the human sciences and philosophy and finally go to seed. Because we didn’t reach the absolute limit and go beyond this limit, I thought, because we gave up in the face of a genius in our field. But if I’m honest I could never have become a piano virtuoso, because at bottom I never wanted to be a piano virtuoso, because I always had the greatest misgivings about it and misused my virtuosity at the piano in my deterioration process, indeed I always felt from the beginning that piano players were ridiculous; seduced by my thoroughly remarkable talent at the piano, I drilled it into my piano playing and then, after one and a half decades of torture, chased it back out again, abruptly, unscrupulously. It’s not my way to sacrifice my existence to sentimentality.” — The Loser, by Thomas Bernhard*
In the novel The Loser—Bernhard’s comedic 1983 screed on artistry, obsession, and mediocrity—a garrulous narrator recounts, with comedic vitriol, the lifelong consequences of a summer he and his friend Wertheimer spent with the young pianist Glenn Gould at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, all under the instruction of Vladimir Horowitz.
Once the narrator and Wertheimer—labeled “the loser” by Gould in the novel—finally realize that their talents will never equal Gould’s, they abandon their pianos. The narrator gives his Steinway to the nine-year-old daughter of a schoolteacher, who ruined it “in the shortest period imaginable, I wasn’t pained by this fact, on the contrary, I observed this cretinous destruction of my piano with perverse pleasure.”*
The narrator’s story had a profound effect on David Lang when he read the novel in the late 1990s: “I couldn’t read it silently. I ended up yelling the entire book to my reflection in the mirror in my bathroom, from start to finish, which was very exciting. And that day I started imagining what it would be like to add music to it.”
The result is Lang’s hour-long opera the loser. For his libretto, Lang was compelled by necessity to eliminate much of Bernhard’s text, including the long-winded political diatribes—there was nothing the Austrian author hated more than Austrian society. Lang’s focus was the persona of the narrator, and “managing our [changing] perceptions of a character” became the way to bring action to the piece.
Not that the protagonist moves around much. In Lang’s dramatic staging, the narrator stands atop a twenty-foot-high platform, suspended in space and performing exclusively for the audience in the balcony. (Orchestra seats are not occupied for the production.) During the second half of the loser a piano (and pianist) appear on stage, and delicate, ghostly sounds echo throughout the auditorium.
This astonishing work premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2016, with baritone Rod Gilfry as the narrator, and Conrad Tao on piano. The LA OperaOff Grand presentation of the loser brings both of these artists to downtown Los Angeles, joined by Bang on a Can Opera—Isabel Hagen (viola), Mariel Roberts (cello), Pat Swoboda (double bass), Owen Weaver (percussion)—and conducted by Lesley Leighton.
The lighting design is by Jennifer Tipton, the sets by Jim Findlay, and costumes were designed by the performance and installation artist Suzanne Bocanegra.
“When I wrote Partita for 8 Voices, it was like if you had the little box of eight crayons for a long time, and then you suddenly have the box with 64, with the little pencil sharpener in the back, you kind of go all out.
“I like writing for string quartet because it’s not a wildly new palette, but there’s something constantly exciting about it. I don’t know why we make music, make art, or write… but [there’s] something about it—it’s like you just have to keep carving.” — Caroline Shaw, PARIS LA, 2017*
Join composer-musicians Caroline Shaw and Andrew Norman, the music ensemble Wild Up, and host (and viola player) NadiaSirota for an “enhanced concert” featuring live performances of Shaw’s and Norman’s work, and free-wheeling conversations about their process.
This celebration of music creation is presented by CAP UCLA in downtown Los Angeles.
This weekend in downtown Los Angeles,CAP UCLA kicks off its 2018–2019 season with BLIND SPOT, a collaboration between pianist-composer Vijay Iyer and writer-photographer Teju Cole, based on Cole’s 2017 book of prose and images.
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