Random Acts of Art

WITS students from St. Michael Catholic School take an exclusive tour of the Menil exhibit space and write about what they see. Photo by David A. Brown

Reprinted from Culturemap.

What did you do this summer? I cleaned about 100 junk drawers in the process of selling my family home in Buffalo, NY., and found a gorgeous tabletop biography of Anna Pavlova. Just recently, I learned that my own ballet teacher, Kathleen Crofton, known as “Pavlova’s baby,” danced in her company during the 1920s. No way was I going to leave this treasure behind. My ballet roots run deep according to the contents of my junk drawers.

It’s no wonder that I’m called an arts evangelist; every other object I came across in my house seemed to have something to do with dance, music, theater, visual arts or literature. My life path left its mark in the remnants of my childhood home. From a reel-to-reel recording of Joan Sutherland singing Norma to a dusty collection of prints from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I literally grew up tripping over art.

All of this got me wondering, how do we attach to art?From a reel-to-reel recording of Joan Sutherland singing Norma to a dusty collection of prints from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I literally grew up tripping over art. All of this got me wondering, how do we attach to art?

Finnish choreographer Jorma Elocame to dance via ice hockey. Watching Houston Ballet perform his wild ride of a ballet ONE/end/ONE, I wondered what other movement practice inhabited his body. With Elo’s daredevil lifts, swooping contours and breathtakingly reckless partnering, hockey seems about right. I’m heading to see Elo’s piece again when Houston Ballet makes their big return to New York City at The Joyce on Oct. 11-14.

This weekend you can watch Houston Ballet principal Simon Ball dancing Jerome Robbins’ romantic classic, In the Night. Both Ball and Robbins came to dance by hanging around their sisters’ ballet classes. Aren’t you glad their mothers didn’t have anything else for them to do back then?

Robert Moody, a guest conductor for River Oaks Chamber Orchestra (ROCO), has a great story on becoming a musician. Moody is music director of the Winston-Salem Symphony in North Carolina. He did not grow up in a musical family at all, it was a prank that led him to the cello, when his 4rd grade girlfriend signed him up for a demonstration on string instruments as a joke.

“As a 9-year old, I had no idea how to explain any of that to a teacher, so instead, I just got up and went to the class. I started on the cello, and that is why I’m a musician today,” writes Moody in the ROCO program notes.

I attended the superb concert last season, and extend my personal thank you to his childhood girlfriend.

When Houston native Everette Harp performed at the Hobby Center as part of a Musiqa benefit, he mentioned growing up in a house with Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. Harp spoke honestly about what the impact of Davis’ seminal jazz album had on him.

Later in the evening, Ricky Polidore gave his now-famous speech on exposing kids to art. It’s a plea to keep arts in children’s lives as moving as Jane Weiner’s hilarious rant/dance called Salt, where she argues that art is as essential as salt for our subsistence. I have no trouble believing that some of Weiner and Polidore’s students will end up populating Houston’s future audience seats and stages.

Let’s hear it for the schools

Certainly schools play a huge role in the attachment process. Bravo to Todd Frazier and his cohorts over at Houston Arts Partners for making it easier for educators and arts organizations to connect. I’m looking forward to their conference next Tuesday at the MFAH, especially Musiqa chief Anthony Brandt’s talk, “Why Young Minds Need Art.”We can’t leave it all for the schools, arts organizations or even parents. Life unfolds more happenstance than that.

“I’m using brain science to put forth an argument that, I hope will be both clear and convincing,” says Brandt. “I’ve never worked harder to prepare a talk.”

Houston artists are making a difference in the city’s classrooms. It works best when, like Writers in the Schools (WITS), it’s not a passive experience. For example, this summer, young writers visited Houston Ballet to investigate everything from tutus to toe shoes. Writing is a form of attachment. WITS partners with numerous arts organizations, including The Menil, Art League Houston, Blaffer Art Museum, among others.

Yet, it’s too much of a burden to think that the school system is our sole exposure to the arts. We can’t leave it all for the schools, arts organizations or even parents. Life unfolds more happenstance than that.

An arts version of Pay It Forward

Perhaps we should go the way of BookCrossing, a practice of leaving a book in public places. How could we use that concept to bring art more into the world? We could leave a Houston Met class schedule, a pack of colored pencils, the Glassell School course catalog, a magazine folded to a enticing story, Matthew Dirst’s Grammy nominated CD, or a pair of Miller Outdoor Theatre tickets.

The Trey McIntyre Project has a blast dancing in the streets, cafes and shops of whatever city they happened to be visiting. Or imagine the delight of pedestrians watching a shoot from Jordan Matter’s Dancers Among us. He literally sneaks dance into the urban landscape. I’m just dying to trip over some of those mini figures in The Little People Project: abandoning little people on the street since 2006. What wonder!

If random acts of kindness work, why not random acts of art? Although can we hold on the flash mobs? Once they are on commercials, they are done for me.

As I was scurrying about my Buffalo house for one last look, I found a grand illuminated volume of William Blake’s poems and prints. Just before I stuffed it in my suitcase, I thought to myself, no, don’t take it, leave it for the next set of dwellers.

Years from now, I picture a young poet talking about finding this book his grandmother’s house. It could happen.

Now go leave some art out there for people to trip over.

Art Wakes You Up

Walter De Maria, Bel Air Trilogy, 2000–2011 (detail), stainless steel rod with 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air two-tone hardtop Photo by Robert McKeever Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery/© Walter de Maria

 

Reprinted from Culturemap

Sleepy? Lethargic? Listless? Having trouble focusing?  Don’t remember what you did yesterday? Walking around the house in daze, looking for your glasses while wearing them?

I have just the thing for you — art.

Yes, you heard it here first. Actually, I heard it elsewhere first, but I’m the one selling art as the wake-up cure. If all this art-making holds the potential to not only bring something of beauty into the world but also wakes us up, you have to admit it’s considerably more alluring than gulping an energy drink.

I’ve heard it all: art generates cash when we eat out, park and pay the babysitter. Art helps kids learn just about every subject, or at least make it more interesting. And then there’s my favorite rant, art has value, now just get over and on with it.

But when I heard Anthony Brandt utter, with a mischievous smile, “I protect consciousness, what do you do?” during his talk “Why Young Minds Need Art” to an eager crowd of educators and arts administrators at the first Houston Art Partners conference held at the MFAH last month, I thought, well now, that’s a new one. The premise of Brandt’s theory is that art has the power to wake us out of our coma though a process of bending, breaking and blending an idea.

Brandt is an associate professor at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and artistic director of Musiqa. He runs the popular Exploring the Mind through Music conferences and likes to hang out with neuroscientists. Later this season he teams up with celeb scientist/authorDavid Eagleman for Maternity – Women’s Voices Through the Ages, premiering with River Oaks Chamber Orchestra on April 21. The guy knows his way around gray matter.

But let’s let the brainy composer speak: “Human minds constantly make a choice — prune neural networks for efficiency and reliability, which removes options and makes the behavior unconscious; or allow redundancy to thrive and promote networking, which offers flexibility and allows the conscious mind to participate,” says Brandt. “Activities that involve drilling and rote learning lead down the path to streamlining; that’s why habits are so hard to break.  Activities that offer novelty, problem-solving and subjective reasoning keep the brain’s options open. That’s how the arts protect consciousness: They fight automation and keep us awake to our experiences.”

Here’s how the three B’s rouse us out of our automated trance: Bending involves a transformation to the original. Breaking happens when we smash up the pieces to make something new. Blending occurs when two sources merge.

It’s no wonder I could penetrate Stanton Welch’s angled offshoots from classical technique in Indigo, during Houston Ballet’s recent performances. In fact, much of Welch’s work bends classical forms to new contours, summoning many a “how did they do that?” sort of experience. Nice, Mr. Welch, keep that up. I wasn’t alone in my accolades; the audience went bananas. We like waking up when it comes to ballet.

Amy Ell, artistic director of Vault, challenged the norm of partnering inTorn as part of her DiverseWorks residency ConTornTion. Bending the rules of aerial dance, Ell twists the rules of gravity as the dancers lift each other through novel uses of rock climbing harnesses. Later in the piece, a trio hanging from the ceiling further skews our perspective by dancing perpendicular to a wall. The founder of “area” dance, the choreographer considers walls, ceilings and floors all reasonable places to dance. ”Activities that offer novelty, problem-solving and subjective reasoning keep the brain’s options open. That’s how the arts protect consciousness: They fight automation and keep us awake to our experiences,” says Musiqa artistic director Anthony Brandt.

If Houston Ballet and Vault woke up my eyes, then theCatastrophic Theatre woke up my ears in their recent production of Mickle Maher’s There Is a Happiness That Morning Is,running through Oct. 23 at their Sul Ross office. The entire play rolls off the tongue in rhyme. You don’t want to miss a word. Even the title represents a clever arrangement of words. The set-up of two William Blake scholars facing the aftermath of a night of public love-making on the yard of the their fledgling liberal arts college makes for a rich language feast. Blake liked to mess with the order of words, too. In fact, “I happy am” from Songs of Innocence factors into the drama big time. Maher bends language with a breathtaking originality. The terrific cast has a blast with Maher’s word wonk ways.

For breaking, head over to 3705 Lyons St. to see Dan Havel and Dean Ruck’s Fifth Ward Jam, made possible in part by a 2008 Houston Arts Alliance Artist and Neighborhood Project grant. The public art for the everyman team, who gave us the sucked in house called Inversion, sure know how to smash up a couple of bungalows to show us what breaking looks like.

I found blending in the most unusual place — the 18th Century — as part of MFAH’s Life and Luxury: The Art of Living in Eighteenth-Century Paris.French aristocrats’ savvy silversmiths merged their designs with the food underneath it. Who would imagine broccoli would blend so well with silver?

Bending, breaking and blending are harder to discern at The Menil inWalter De Maria’s Bel Air Trilogy, featuring three red shiny 1955 Bel Air Chevrolets, each speared by a 12-foot-long stainless steel rod, resulting is something new, bent, broken, blended and quite extraordinary.

See what I mean? Nothing refreshes our neural networks like art.

As we continue to quantify the value of art in our children’s lives, Brandt’s thesis may be the one with staying power. Too often, we speak about creativity as a vague, mysterious thing. Clearly defining the territory, as Brandt elegantly did, elevates the discussion. Musiqa will be doing their part in that mission on Oct. 25 through 28 with their NEA-funded school programs Around the World and Musiqa Remix on Dec. 6 and 7.

I’ve often gravitated toward art as a way to change my brain, my mood, or just to jar me into a new perspective. As I traipse the the city, eyes wide open, I see much to keep me awake.

Art & Memory

Lorena Guillén Vaschetti, Untitled VI from the series Historia, memoria y silencios (History, Memory and Silences), 2009, giclée print

Reprinted from Culturemap.

I found the Lincoln Logs yesterday. What’s curious about such a find is that I bought them for my boys when they were little because it reminded me of my own childhood.

I exist in a cloud of memory these days, having recently dismantled my childhood home. A year ago, I called my two sons into a family meeting and told them, “We’re ditching the burbs boys, go upstairs and put your childhood in a box.” And so they did, while I walk around as some kind of zombie curator of family nostalgia.

Now, with the family photos packed up in storage and the house transformed into a neutral zone, I call “chez creamy and dreamy,” the house has lost its soul.

Artists have better things to do than cling to a set of dusty Lincoln Logs. Examples of artists sourcing memory abound in Houston right now starting with the FotoFest International Discoveries III exhibit, through Dec. 22,  followed by Becky Beaullieu Valls and visual artist Babette Beaullieu’sMemoirs of a Sistahood- Chapter Three: Ava Maria at DiverseWorks, tonight through Saturday and finally, Brandy Holmes’ KriegieWartime Log, based on the POW Journal of Warren E. Arieux, at Divergence Music & Arts,  Saturday through Monday.

Left in the exact tight rubberbanded bundles, one of Vashetti’s photos lets us experience the treasure of memory, revealing its hidden quality instead of the image itself.

Photographer Kyu-Ho Kim knows about losing his home. The body of work now showing as part of International Discoveries III includes striking photos of his demolished residence.

Kim is from the Bukgajwa-dong section of South Korea, which recently embarked on an aggressive redevelopment plan called, “New Town.” Barbed wire and sharply angled concrete formations take on an eerie, bittersweet tone in Kim’s lens. These otherworldly landscapes suggest an inbetween space, between decay and rebuilding. There exists a whiff of sadness, tinged with an emotional distance. From rubble, an unseen beauty emerges. “Your work makes something beautiful out of destruction,” I told the artist. He nodded yes, smiling.

Hidden and invented

Lorena Guillen Vaschetti rescued what was left of her family photos from the trash. With her mother and herself being the only living members of a large Italian family living in Argentina, the discarded photos took on an added meaning.

Yet, it’s what she did with them that’s so stunning. Left in the exact tight rubberbanded bundles, one of Vashetti’s photos lets us experience the treasure of memory, revealing its hidden quality instead of the image itself. In another photo, she manipulates a family photo by bringing out more detail in the part that coincides with her own memory and blurs what is less clear. Memory is a murky thing, Vaschetti leaves the mystery intact. ”Memory is not necessarily the truth, it’s our version,” says Babette Beaullieu.”Remembering the past changes you in the present.”

British photographer Marcia Michael was faced with a different problem when she considered her family history.

When she looked for historical representations of black people in the U.K. she found few, so she did what any resourceful artist would do, she created her own archive, appropriating the style of historical anthropometric photography.

Michael’s powerful portraits have created a second history that dwells in loss and reinvention of personal legacy. Chatting with Micheal proved illuminating. “Photography often speaks to how a culture values people,” the artist told me. How true, the lens can indeed judge us.

Our version of the truth

I ran into Valls walking in a dream state among the artifacts of her life and work on the DiverseWorks stage earlier this week. Tattered lace dresses hang from narrow white totems, while delicate wood canoes dangle from the ceiling.

“What’s that?” I ask Valls, looking at a macabre wire and wood sculpture of a woman, that is created during the course of the evening by her sister.

“It’s female,” she replies. “That’s all I know.”

The Beaullieu sisters revel in twisting family tales into compelling interdisciplinary dance/theater. Now on their third chapter, they hone in on their Catholic upbringing, specifically the Virgin Mary, a key denizen of their hometown Lafayette, La. “It’s so satisfying to create art around memories,” says Valls. “I find truth and honesty in my work.”

Yet the team doesn’t always remember everything the same way, which, in this case, makes the process all the richer.

“Memory is not necessarily the truth, it’s our version,” says Beaullieu.”Remembering the past changes you in the present.”

I’ll never forget their very first sistahood piece, which used family films, sculpture and dance to spin a tale of growing up in the 1950s. By the end, I felt like a sista. According to Valls, that’s the point.

“I find personal meaning in my own narrow stories,” she says. “I’m a daughter, sister, mother and wife, and use my place in the nuclear family to connect to a universal sisterhood.”

Holmes found something considerably more potent than an old toy in her grandfather’s POW journal. “My jaw dropped as I turned the pages,” she recalls.

The treasure trove revealed entries from numerous soldiers, and included poems, drawings, jokes and even recipes. Out of the these pages, Holmes has fashioned a devised theater piece with the assistance of aHouston Arts Alliance grant.

Although all the activities of the play come from the journal and her research about the Stalag Luft 1 camp, Holmes has created fictional characters,who each deal with the stress of confinement in their own ways. She even brought in actors Philip Hayes, John Dunn, Alex Randall and Chris Viles into the research process.

“Hopefully, the play does justice to my grandfather’s journey,” she adds.

Memories transformed, invented and transcended, leave it to artists to make more of a memento.

Wim Wenders’ Pina

Ditta Miranda Jasjfi in Vollmond in Wim Wenders' Pina Photo by Donata Wenders/©Neue Road Movies GmbH. A Sundance Selects release

Update:  Wenders’ Pina was sold out at Cinema Arts Festival Houston (CAFH).  I got to introduce the film too. CAFH’s artistic director introduced me mentioning my frequent emails to him about bringing this film.  I have been thanked numerous times for my pestitude. 

Reprinted from Culturemap. 

Walking down a dark street on a balmy Austin October night, a truck driver stopped to ask me if he knew where he was supposed to pick up some redwood trees. Normally, I would think that was an odd request, but still under the deep spell of Pina Bausch’s Nur Du (Only You), I replied calmly, “Right here.”

Redwood trees, mountains of carnations, a pile of dirt or a carpet of velvet green turf, Bausch’s theatrically charged dances spilled out on otherworldly surfaces during the course of her unparalleled career. This November, Bausch’s dances will be projected in 3D in Wim Wender’sextraordinary tribute to the seminal German choreographer, Pina, one of the many arts-focused films headlining the 2011 Cinema Arts Festival, that runs Nov. 9-13 in Houston.

Pina is also part of the Festival’s international thrust, which includes films by Patricio Guzman (Chile), Zhu Wen (China) and Mahmoud Kaabour (Lebanon).

There hasn’t been this much excitement in the dance film world since Natalie Portman flapped her bloody feathered wings in Black Swan,screened at last year’s Cinema Arts Festival. In fact, Festival curator Richard Herskowitz  has quite a track record for including significant dance films; in 2010, Frederick Wiseman’s, La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, proved a Festival favorite.There hasn’t been this much excitement in the dance film world since Natalie Portman flapped her bloody feathered wings in Black Swan, screened at last year’s Festival. In fact, curator Richard Herskowitz  has quite a track record for including significant dance films.

The year was 1996 when Tanztheater Wuppertal performed Nur Du at University of Texas as part of a larger project examining Bausch’s work and contribution to dance theater history. I had the extraordinary privilege, courtesy of the Goethe Institute and UT, to spend two weeks in Austin, taking daily class with the veteran Tanztheater dancer Lutz Förster, and attending lectures on the development of dance theater. Förster not only taught us a section from Bausch’s 1980, my favorite piece of hers, but even shared some of Bausch’s psychologically rigorous creative process. Dancers coming of age during the 1980s straddled the post-modern aesthetic and the emotionally brutal edge of Bausch’s brand of depth truth telling.

Although she had a distinct dance signature, Bausch embodied a fusion of influences. She studied with German modern dance pioneer Kurt Jooss at the Folkwang School in Essen. She also spent a year at Juilliard School, where her teachers included Antony Tudor, José Limón, Alfredo Corvino and Margret Craske. As a dancer, she worked with Paul Taylor, Paul Sanasardo and Donya Feuer. After she returned to Germany in the late 1960s, she eventually took over Wuppertal Ballet (renamed Tanztheater Wuppertal) in 1973.

Born in 1940, Bausch lived through war, violence, epic changes in Europe, all of which played out in her work. Yet, it’s the personal nature of the dancers’ interactions that she is most remembered for. Whatever story unfolded in front of us, it was danced by real people, who delved deeply into their own lives to make something authentic happen on stage. Through athletic movement, a keen eye for set design elements, an uncanny musicality and shreds of a fractured narrative, Bausch let us in on a pre-verbal and unconscious layer of expression. Her name and the work she created while directing Tanztheater Wuppertal defined the dance/theater genre from 1970s until her sudden death on June 30, 2009, just five days after being diagnosed with cancer.

When I first heard that a Bausch film was in the works, I was excited. When I found out that it would be directed by Wenders, I was ecstatic. When I learned that Pina would be coming to Houston, well, simply starry eyed. The legendary director of Paris, Texas, The Buena Vista Social Club and numerous other films, seemed a perfect fit for the choreographer’s enigmatic world. (Wender’s wistful Wings of Desire, selected by SWAMP’s Mary Lampe as part of MFAH’s Movies Houstonians Love, screens on Nov. 7.)

I’m not surprised that Wender’s film is 3D because Bausch’s work operated on numerous dimensions, drawing from dreams, personal memory and psychological investigations of human behavior. The 3D medium may be the best way to capture her raw physicality. It was Wenders’ use of the 3D technology that originally drew Herskowitz to the film.

“His use of 3D is innovative and appropriate. The viewer is drawn into her dances.” says Herskowitz. “I’ve admired Wenders’ work for a long time, yet it’s interesting to note that his arts documentaries are among his finest works. Buena Vista Social Club was a knock out. It makes sense to include a favorite director working at full tilt.”

Herskowitz is also a Bausch fan. “I saw many of her pieces at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and have always revered her work,” he adds.

Pina includes excerpts of such ground breaking works as Cafe Muller, Le Sacre du Printemps, Vollmond and Kontakthof, along with archival footage of the choreographer at work and short solo performances by her one-of-a-kind dancers. Wenders enlisted Bausch’s methodology of using questions to drive the action. The solo sections, filmed in and around Wuppertal, derive from Wenders’ inquiry into the dancers’ memories.

For years, I thought nothing of driving four hours to see her work at BAM. I’ll never forget sneezing through 1980, which sprawled out on a bed of real green grass. The film’s tag line “dance, dance, otherwise we are lost” cuts to the core of Bausch’s transcendent work. We lost a dance giant when Bausch died. One can only imagine the dances she never got to create.

Wenders’ film draws us back into Bausch’s visceral terrain, honoring her legacy in the process, and letting us take one last spin on the lawn.