This week, SundayArts looked at Lincoln Center’s Out-of-Doors, which on Sunday 24 celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Roots of American Music series with a bill that’s nothing short of killer. “Roots music,” just like “world music,” has become a catch-all term that often means more in the marketing realm than in musical or aesthetic ones, so the bill in question is particularly exciting because it makes us reconsider what exactly we mean by “roots”: The bill is shared by Charlie Haden Family and Friends, starring the famous jazz bassist, Patti Smith, the Knitters, featuring John Doe, Exene Cervenka and DJ Bonebrake, and the Music Makers Blues Revue. All of them draw inspiration from the past, but then they put it through their personal musical food processors, and come up with music that’s everything but frozen in amber. read more
What happens when unfamiliar cultural elements are set within an all-too familiar framework? The result can be a kind of cultural slide show where the structure takes over and the content becomes secondary, as with Lemi Ponifasio’s Requiem. The director says Mozart’s same-titled work inspired him, yet it is not part of his theater piece, presented in the Rose Theater by Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival.
This is not the only source of disconnect about Requiem, originally created for the 2006 New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna. For this work about loss – cultural, environmental, or otherwise – Ponifasio pieced together songs, chants and rituals from his native Samoa, where he is a high chief. The program contained a libretto with the text, but apart from that, there was little onstage to give the audience some sort of grip on the various acts’ meanings. So the martial arts arm gestures, thigh slaps, shuffling gaits, and songs became more decorative and superficial than meaningful.
And yet the structure places it firmly within the anthology of contemporary performance art created recently in either Europe or the US and presented at venues such as Lincoln Center. read more
Since 2005, Australian native Kathryn Bennetts has been artistic director of the Royal Ballet of Flanders, which makes its full-company Manhattan debut with William Forsythe’s Impressing the Czar at the Lincoln Center Festival in the Rose Theater. Impressing the Czar, described simply as a history of western civilization conveyed with humor, was choreographed in 1988, and has not been performed in the US since 1989. Bennetts spoke from Antwerp by phone on July 12, prior to coming to New York.
Impressing the Czar seems like an ambitious work with which to acquaint New York with the company.
It’s a great way to acquaint New York with the company, because it shows the many talents they have. It’s a piece on a very large scale, and it shows off the company very well. read more
It’s hard to find a more fitting act to open Lincoln Center’s annual Midnight Summer Swing series than Nellie McKay. Now, Lincoln Center isn’t new territory for McKay, who appeared in that institution’s Great American Songbook in March 2005, but the interesting development this time around is that she’ll be fronting a band called the Aristocrats, featuring musicians pulled from the Swingin’ Hot Shots. It may look like an idiosyncratic move for a singer-songwriter who usually backs herself on the piano live, but then McKay specializes in odd moves. And even when they don’t quite pan out, the results are never boring. Let’s not shy away from hyperbole here: McKay is possibly the most interesting artist to emerge out of New York in the past decade. read more
There are quite a few good reasons to see the new revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. One is Brazilian baritone Paulo Szot, a transfuge from the opera world who emits a veritable glow of old-fashioned virility as plantation owner Emile de Becque. Another is hearing Richard Rodgers’s score and Robert Russell Bennett’s orchestrations delivered by a 30-piece orchestra. With producers saving costs by scrimping on musicians nowadays, this size has become very rare in contemporary theater, and so we’ve progressively forgotten how spectacularly lush American musicals can sound.
In the current production of South Pacific, the players are in a pit under the movable stage; during the overture, said stage retracts so the audience can see them. It’s an exhilarating moment, confirmed by the orchestra taking a bow at the end of the overture. read more
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