Feb 9 "Blues at the Crossroads" at Hill Auditorium

The expression "Blues at the CrossRoads" obviously has two separate meanings. This clever title for the event referred simultaneously, I suppose, to both the past and the present of the blues. On the one hand, given that the event was a tribute to the great delta bluesman Robert Johnson, the "crossroads" of the title was a reference to the celebrated mythology that has grown up around Johnson: that he is reputed to have met the devil at the crossroads and struck a bargain with him, dying early in exchange of acquiring the ability to play the guitar so prodigally in such a short period of time. (Here is Ann Arbor's own John Sinclair performing his poem "The Crossroads" about this legend -- although John Sinclair wasn't part of the HIll Auditorium event, blues and Ann Arbor cannot be mentioned in the same breath without thinking immediately of John Sinclair!) But "crossroads" also have another meaning; they represent possibility and choice, the ability to veer off into a new direction. A concert that gives itself over to celebrating "blues at the crossroads", then, signals through its very title that it is interested not so much in preserving the music as if it were frozen in time, as it is in being open to new directions and possibilities even as it pays homage to the past.

This dual celebration of old tradition and new possibility was well expressed in the roster of the event's musicians. On the one hand, there were the canonical bluesmen, grand old men of the tradition, its legends: the 95-year-old David "Honeyboy" Edwards and the 79-year-old Hubert Sumlin. On the other hand, there were also Todd Mohr (of Big Head Todd and the Monsters), the guitarist Steve "Lightnin' " Malcolm and the drummer Cedric Burnside, the grandson of the great Mississippi bluesman R.L. Burnside. While several blues standards associated with Robert Johnson -- such as (of course) Crossroads Blues, were interpreted by the evening's performers, and such blues standards as Johnson's "Sweet Home Chicago" were sung, there was also ample room, especially by the likes of Todd Mohr and his bandmates Squires, Nevin and Lawton, for a more contemporary, experimental, rock-music-inspired blues sound as well. (Interestingly, the review of the event by annarbor.com is scathingly critical of this aspect of the concert, opining that the insertion of a more contemporary sound into the event represented a lack of authenticity. I disagree -- I think it is much more interesting to "mix it up" as the event did, to have the old and the new sound share the stage and rub shoulders, so to speak.)

Laurie Anderson's _Delusion_

When Laurie Anderson talked to a large and expectant audience at the Michigan Theater on Thursday January 13, before her performance at the Power Center the following weekend, it must have clear to everyone present how original she was in her thinking --- and how the promise of that originality of thought is translated into her out-of-the-box performances. Two of the things that she said in course of her talk at the Michigan Theater especially struck me.






The first concerned scale: she said that while digital art (like the multimedia performances she has become famous for) is increasingly more convenient to create using computers, what this kind of work lacks is a sense of scale. Mentioning that she started her artistic career as a sculptor, she said that that early training had ingrained in her a respect for scale, because sculptors work directly with physical material in three dimensions. What she is trying to do with her multimedia performances now, she said, was to attempt to introduce a sense of scale. Perhaps one way of thinking about this is that she is trying to mingle reality with virtuality.

The second comment made by Anderson at her Michigan Theater talk that struck me had to do with her statement that she was tired of the production of more and more conventional artifacts in the name of art. This, one suspects, has probably made her turn to multimedia performances, for performances are not artifacts: rather than commodities, they exist ethereally, only in performance. Her impatience with conventional artifacts found yet more expression in her talk when she decried how used we have gotten to staring at rectangular screens all day: the computer screen, the television screen, and even the screen on which a film is projected, are all variations of the same boring rectangle, after all. That she is trying to get beyond this is apparent in Delusion, in which there are at least three oddly shaped "screens" onto which images are projected: a crumpled-looking screen, another which is non-rectangular, and even, oddly enough, a curiously undefinable object that looks somewhat like a love seat, on which, in fact, Anderson appeared to sit during parts of the performance.

If parts of Delusion, with its often surrealistic imagery, stream-of-consciousness narrative, and Anderson's adoption, from time to time, of the baritone voice of her male alter ego, Fenway Bergamot, might have seemed bewildering and disjointed to the audience at times, it perhaps helps to think of the performance, as Jenn McKee writes in annarbor.com, as "a collection of some of Anderson’s most vivid dreams." Some comments by Anderson about the show, which were published in the Metro Times a few days before the Ann Arbor performance, are also quite insightful in trying to grasp what she was trying to do in the show, and why.

TED Talks Music!

If you've never heard of the TED talks, go to Google and check them out. You can find a short, intellectual discussion on nearly any topic imaginable, and I promise you will leave feeling enriched or at the very least entertained.

Some fellow bloggers just posted this list of 20 Incredible TED talks for Both Music Students and Lovers alike*.

Click on the link you can listen to talks by musical superstars (Eric Whitacre and Bobby McFerrin both have their own piece), well-respected musical therapists, and multicultural artists.

Enjoy!

Sarah Bichsel
UMS Student Committee President

*Special thanks to Florine Church and company for the link*

Handel’s Messiah

Something really special about this year's performance of this long-standing Ann Arbor tradition, Handel's Messiah by the UMS choral union, was that the principals of the event all shared a strong connection with Michigan. Three of the four soloists (Caitlin Lynch, Nicholas Phan, and Jesse Blumberg) were actually UM alums., while the fourth, Meredith Arwady, was also a Michigan native -- a resident of Kalamazoo. Two UM music professors were also prominently featured: Edward Parmentiari on the harpsichord, and Jerry Blackstone, conductor and music director.

Handel's Messiah has a tripartite structure. Concerned as it is with the story of the "messiah", that is, Christ, Its three sections correspond to "the prophecy", "the passion" and "the resurrection", with the most intense part of the piece consisting of the "Hallelujah" section just before Part II. Traditionally the audience joins in the chorus during the singing of this "Hallelujah" section, and that was the case, too, in this performance. In fact, the University Musical Society actually made the music available to audience members to sing to. The text (oratorio) of Handel's Messiah is actually drawn from various verses of the Bible. The "Hallelujah" sections, for example, are taken from Revelation 19: 6, Revelation 11: 15 and Revelation 19: 16. (By the way, the British Library has made the original score to Messiah, in Handel's own handwriting, available on the Web.)

The stage of the Hill Auditorium was beautifully decorated, with a mass of white poinsettias near the front of the stage and a large wreath hanging from the cavernous ceiling. The red color of the harpsichord was a nice touch.

In performing a work like Handel's Messiah, the elements of the dramatic in the work have to be carefully balanced against the element that expresses piety. This performance, overall, managed to do that well.

"Sankai Juku" last Sunday, Oct 24

I had attended Sankai Juku's last performance in Ann Arbor back in 1999, and, ever since then, I had been enthralled by the dance form of butoh, of which Sankai Juku is a proponent. Last Wednesday, I went to attend the film screening at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, in which two films about butoh, both of them dating from the 1960s or 1970s, were screened. (You can see excerpts from one of the two films, Dance of Darkness, online). So, I walked into the Power Center on Sunday with some familiarity with butoh asw well as some expectations about what the performance was going to be like.

My expectations were both confirmed and belied in interesting ways. The performance that I had seen in 1999 had been much less lyrical and much more minimalist -- and, in that sense, with much more in common with butoh's early years of 1960s-1970s. That performance, with its slow writhing gestures and guttural cries that seemed to approximate cries of pain, had put me in mind of what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called "bare life". Christina Mcfee writes about this notion in a powerful passage:

'Bare LIfe' -- A Lyrical and Even Ecstatic Dimension

What is "bare life"?

This question underscores the sheer vulnerability and complete exposure of being.

Bare life deals with that part of our existence from which no measure of security will ever protect us. It is the part of life that is absolutely exposed.

But as in sexuality, absolute exposure is intricately connected with infinite pleasure. There is an apocalyptic and obviously political dimension to bare life (brought out by torture and the concentration camp). There is, however, also a lyrical or even ecstatic dimension to freedom of bare life for new and unexpected possibilities (in human relations as well as in our relationship to nature or, more generally, to the world in which we live).

Butoh as a dance form is, I think, expressive of this "sheer vulnerability and complete exposure of being". Clad in minimal, raglike dresses and with a layer of white chalk-like paint covering their entire bodies, butoh performers tend to look anonymous on stage, with all indications of individuality stripped away: life at its most elemental. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza remarked (in 1677, in his book Ethics) that "we (still) do not know what the human body is capable of, nor the limits of what it can do." Thinking of butoh makes me think of that remark, because the practitioners of butoh, with their slow, mindful movements, and their emphasis on the physicality of the body and the mystery of its existence, seem to be exploring the outer limits of the possibilities of the movement of the human body.

Sankai Juku's performance both reinforced this ethos of butoh and simultaneously went against its grain. Titled "Hibiki: Resonance from Far Away" -- you can view UMS's program booklet about the event here -- this dance performance was uncharacteristically "pretty" (in a conventional sense) than one tends to expect in a butoh performance. (Jann Parry, writing in The Guardian newspaper of the U.K., has called 'Hibiki' "designer Butoh for new-age audiences," accusing it of having "little in common with the Japanese 'dance of darkness' that developed after the Second World War," and stating that "Sankai Juku have become the style queens of the Butoh performance circuit." So,well... is this diatribe justified? Have Sankai Juku really sold out, or sold their soul, in order to become a crowd-pleaser, betraying the uncompromising attitude of butoh as originally formed in the countercultural cauldron of 1960s Japan?

I think that the answer is both yes and no. The Guardian's reviewer does make a good point in pointing out that 'Hibiki' is too prettified, too mainstream. (But then, had Sankai Juku not acquired some degree of mainstream status, would the UMS even have brought it to Ann Arbor? Or afforded to? Organizations like the UMS do have to depend on ticket sales, and hence on audience tastes.) That aside, I do not think that the bareness and minimalism of butoh as it originally arose was necessarily missing from the 'Hibiki' performance. It was still there, with other layers and other influences having been overlaid on it and enmeshed with it. This was very apparent, I thought, in particular in a sequence within the performance in which the four or five performers would crouch very close to the ground, in almost a fetal position, and then abruptly rise up, draw themselves to their full height, and raise both hands upwards as if reaching for the sky, only to lie down again and crouch. Arguably, both the bareness that is elemental to butoh and the almost balletic, conventionally beautiful, lyricism of more conventional dance forms were present in that gesture. The two complemented each other, and together they managed to suggest, I thought, the complexity of man's being in the world: caught between animality and godlikeness, always pulled groundward by gravity but also always aspiring towards the sky in leaping exaltation. Man is, the performance seemed to say, a liminal creature caught forever between a nether world of despairing animality and an outer world of exquisite sublimity that always remains just beyond our grasp.

So too with the vase-like objects up near the proscenium's upper reaches, dripping a blood-red liquid in slow, spaced-out drops at a time, collected in a huge circular bowl around which the performers stood. From one point of view, it could be thought painfully kitschy, and perhaps it was. But it spite of coming in arguably New Age accouterments, it also reminded me of the fierce beauty of a famous passage from Aeschylus' Agamemnon:

And even in our sleep
pain that cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our own despite,
against our will,
comes wisdom to us

(Agamemnon, 179-183)

Perhaps this is all part of what Sankai Juku meant by the phrase "resonance from far away" in the title of the performance: not just elementality but resonance, with all human experience -- which perforce must include not only the strange and the unconventionally beautiful, but also the conventionally beautiful; for that, too, is part of human experience.