That’s the Norwegian multi-disciplinary artist Lisbeth J. Bodd’s attempt to describe “And All the Question Marks Started to Sing.” During our long-distance interview it probably didn’t occur to her that the theater piece would actually be appearing at an engineering school.

“All the Question Marks…” will be performed tonight and Friday (2/17-18) at EMPAC, on the RPI campus.  It’s the second appearance at the venue by Bodd and her experimental company, Verdensteatret, which was founded in 1986 in Oslo. They participated in EMPAC’s opening festival two years ago with a piece bearing the intimidating name “Louder,” that featured not just amplified sound but a varied battery of other new and old media.

Typical of the hybrid events on the EMPAC stages, Verdensteatret’s latest work is another mixture of genres.  This time, it’s a blend of theater and sculpture.  A dozen performers and technicians will create an hour-long work and then the stage will be opened for audience members to wander around and get a closer look at the combination of junkyard objects and electronic gadgets that form the set.

“We like to mix older materials with new technology,” explains company member Asle Nilsen. “We don’t like just the sleek and high tech.  On stage you have several bicycle wheels, which are connected to switches that we map onto sound and video.  So the stage itself is a functional instrument.”

The work’s title is borrowed from the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.

“In the poem, there’s a guy who has been up in a hotel room with his secret lover,” says Nilsen. “When he goes out into the winter streets he thinks about all these big questions that we always think about in our lives.  We never do find the answers.  But he’s content and he imagines that all the question marks are singing.”

“We found that quote to fit the feeling in our creative process,” continues Nilsen. “In fact, that’s almost our definition of art.”

Nilsen and Bodd explained that the genesis of a Verdensteatret piece is long and laborious. “All the Question Marks…” was two years in the making.

“When we start, we don’t know where we’re headed,” says Nilsen. “We work with material until it gets warm and interesting.”

Typically the collaborators do everything from programming the computers and to welding together the elements of the set. “Everything is made from the very bottom up,” says Nilsen.

During its history, Verdensteatret has toured the world and its creations have been featured not just in theatrical venues but also in art galleries and museums.  After their appearance in Troy, they’ll bring “All the Question Marks…” to the Dance Theatre Workshop in New York for four performances. The run will inaugurate a new series titled “FuturePerfect,” intended to highlight works that bring together art and technology — a mission strikingly similar to that of EMPAC.

Whether they’re performing for the culture elite of Manhattan or some engineering students in Troy, the Verdensteatret team just wants to be offered the same open-mindedness that they put into the building of their pieces.

“We hope that we have made something that people can relate to,” says Bodd. “Audiences should just stay open, as if they were going to a concert or seeing a painting.”

Verdensteatret
“And All the Question Marks Started to Sing”
EMPAC, RPI campus, Troy NY
February 17, 2011

As a kid, did you used to turn your bicycle upside down and balance it on its handlebars and seat? And then spin the wheels and think they were magic?  Have you ever wished the steering wheel of your car controlled the music on the stereo, and could make it play forward or backward, or faster or slower?

You know that cute gooseneck desk lamp that sort of turns its head and smiles at you just before the start of a Pixar film?  How would you like to meet its extended family of luminous technological life forms, watch them dance and mate in near darkness?

Ever wondered about the secret life of light bulbs? Would you like to spend a while inside the mind of Thomas Alva Edison?

Can you picture a giant metal sculpture with half a dozen poles reaching up 10 or 15 feet high, each capped by round discs tilted at various angles as if to catch rays of sun? What if they are set against a dreary junkyard landscape and yet the whole imagine was somehow cheerful and made you think of flowers?

Does it usually annoy you when folks behind you during a performance are whispering incessantly? And yet, has it happened that you’re not really bothered by it because the gentle minutia of sounds they’re making kind of fits in with the bizarreness of the show you’re experiencing?

Have you read artsy jargon, terms like “object theater,” and wondered what in the world these people are talking about?  And then go to a show and saw frail little metal constructions that seem to act of their own accord and you say to yourself, “Oh, is that what they meant?”

Would you like to be a chic European performance artist in a company called Verdensteatret? How about making lots of noise and get grant funding and international travel for your efforts?  And maybe go onstage and do a flirtatious dance with another artist, while the two of you also create a sonic collage out of old jazz recordings?

Have you been to EMPAC yet?  Have you sat through something and alternated between loving it and being a bit bored by it and still wished it kept going just a bit longer?  Have you been glad to realize that you’re not the only one who actually likes something that’s almost impossible to describe?

Do you now maybe understand the title, “And All the Question Marks Started to Sing”?

Originally published in the Times Union.

Pianist

Some years back de Mare put together a whole evening of theatrics at the piano and titled it “Playing Myself.” (I liked the original title, “Playing with myself,” but that was vetoed by management and venues.)  The show involved talking, singing, tap dancing and more, all from the piano bench.

De Mare’s new disc “Speak!” (Innova) is his first CD collection of such works.  Encountering the five talk-and-play pieces from a purely sonic perspective, much of the wonder of the parlor tricks gets lost.  There’s a greater emphasis on the substance of the compositions, which isn’t uniformly strong from piece to piece.  What’s more, de Mare’s voice – breaths and hums, whispers, shouts and yelps – sometimes isn’t clear without a very close listen.  Of course it would have gone against the conception of the pieces to have the narrative tracks recorded or mixed separately.

The best and most substantial pieces are the opening, Jerom Kitzke’s “Sunflower Sutra” to texts by Allen Ginsberg, and the closing, de Mare’s second recording of Rzewski’s “De Profundis.”  A reworking for piano of Laurie Anderson’s “Statue of Liberty” has de Mare singing. It’s brief and lovely, with the keyboard writing managing to convey her signature electronic haze.  Derek Bermel’s “Fetch” is a riff on fragments of Bach and sundry other throw away bits. Will Eno’s text tries to be chatty and irreverent. Maybe it works in concert, but it’s kind of annoying to encounter on disc.  “Urban March” by Meredith Monk (and transcribed by de Mare) is less than three minutes of undulating piano chords with whiffs of de Mare humming.

Rodney Sharman‘s “The Garden,” to texts of Peter Eliot Weiss, involves both speaking and singing.  It’s totally charming and has got an explicitly gay subject. Somehow it jumps back and forth between playful little boys learning to play and kiss, and randy adults at a men’s club, as well as lessons learned on the knee of grandma.  Here’s an excerpt from the notes by Jason Victor Serinus:

“I’ve written a lot of music for Tony,” says Sharman. “This was written at his request with a gay theme. I didn’t want to write about AIDS – I’d already written three memorial pieces – or about coming out. Tony said he was so relieved, because those are the standard gay literary subjects that are done constantly.

“When I approached Weiss, he suggested a piece about the politics of men kissing men, and the possibility of a perfect kiss. Tony wanted the section where he could whisper ‘Come on, kiss me, kiss me’ under his breath. It’s like a spoken cadenza, as it were.”

Previously on MyBigGayEars:

Happy 80th Birthday Stephen Sondheim

Anthony de Mare, Power Pianist

Creator Sean Griffin chose the title as a reference to the studies in human potential conducted in Cold Spring Harbor, Suffolk County, during the early part of the 20th century. The research, which he found published online, unexpectedly supported the Nazi’s efforts to build a master race.

Another examination of humanity’s strengths and weaknesses — by aliens from outer space — also plays a prominent part in the show, through the re-enactment of the famous alleged UFO abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961.

But the question that most comes to mind in considering “Cold Spring” isn’t about the genetics and breeding of humans as much as the cross-pollination of art forms that goes into the show itself. According to Griffin, the piece is a new kind of hybrid structure that weaves together the DNA of opera, theater, dance and performance art.

“I’m a composer, and this is a composition for actors and musicians and dancers” says Griffin. “It converts the theater into a big kind of organ. There are traditional notes, but also all these characters become notes who present the material in different modalities.”

Griffin spent the last two years working on the piece, and plotted its flow through the use of a spread sheet.

“There was a developmental process that we went through as a group, yet this is not improvised but highly structured. All of the performers are given the same structure and they all have to count the score as if they were playing an instrument,” explains Griffin. “It ‘instrumentalizes’ a lot of the interesting, unique qualities of the people who are performing.”

The cast of approximately 30 includes a half-dozen musicians and a few of Griffin’sregular collaborators, plus a number of local performers who auditioned at EMPAC earlier this year. Portions of recent theatrical productions — Curtain Call Theater’s staging of Alfred Uhry’s “Driving Miss Daisy,” and local playwright John Birchler’s “Good Fences,” as recently produced by Colonial Little Theatre in Johnstown — are performed in fragments in the balcony of the theater.

“The people who are in this represent (the Capital Region), and it’s a distillation of the area’s cultural behaviors,” says Griffin. “It’s a different kind of orchestration. Instead of writing for the flute, I have ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ up in the balcony, as if American community theatre were a sound.

“I organized the scripts with the idea that the characters and actors can travel back and forth and break the time-space barrier,” continues Griffin. “This is what I call narrative relocations. You have different time periods, regional things, things from far away, narrative and archival, all merged and forged together. It forces a kind of hybrid, or even a monster.”

Griffin cites the experimental period of the 1960s and ’70s and works of Robert Wilson and John Cage as precedent for his new forms. “Now people are a little more interested in this interdisciplinary large-scale works again,” he says. “I do films and other conventional things, but this is where I see myself as happiest.”

Among the local participants in “Cold Spring” are members of the female roller derby team Albany All Stars. According to Katie Dollard, the All Stars do appear on skates, but they don’t necessarily re-enact roller derby.

“We’re involved in a couple of different aspects, and it’s fantastic,” she says. “We’re meant to be the psyche of one character, repeating what she’s saying very sarcastically and mocking her. We do an homage to the suffragettes, and we also enact the alien semaphore. This character remembers an alphabet from the aliens and we do this interpretive movement to it.”

It’s a long journey from roller derby to the avant-garde, but even for the veteran local actor Michael Steese, “Cold Spring” is something new.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” says Steese, 76, who has performed regularly at the New York State Theatre Institute and many other regional companies over the last four decades. “Those of us of the local scene don’t have the national exposure and experience with this sort of thing that many of the other participants do, so we’re just trying to keep up.

“The whole concept does work from my point of view,” adds Steese. “But my part is a little drop in a big bucket. Still, anybody interested in a spectacular theater experience should come see this.”

_____________________________________________________________

COLD SPRING
Saturday, December 4, 2010
EMPAC, RPI Campus, Troy, NY

It takes daring to have so many words mean so little, as they did in Sean Griffin’s unusual theater piece “Cold Spring,” which was commissioned by EMPAC, where it premiered over two performances this weekend.

Reams of pre-existing texts — from archives, plays, movies and seemingly countless other sundry sources — are fractured and recombined, jumbled up and layered upon each other, and at times even wadded up and thrown away by the performers onstage.  The principal themes were about eugenics and memory, but there was one lengthy section about rabbits, those enthusiastic breeders.

While texts may be a dominate component, the experience of “Cold Spring” is primarily musical.  Yet Griffin’s actual musical score, performed by a half dozen players in the pit, while effective, was almost negligible, mostly just atmosphere and gentle punctuations here and there.

Instead, it was the layering of those many texts that took on a symphonic sweep. At least that’s what can be experienced when one lets go of the need for an intelligible narrative.

Griffin is no pioneer in this realm of sonic collage.  John Cage made similar schematics and the radio documentaries of Glenn Gould also come to mind.  But Griffin’s sensitivity to texture, rhythm and density was often masterful, and was aided hugely by the alert and trusting performers and by EMPAC’s excellent mix and amplification.

There was plenty to look at as well.  The basic stage setup featured a tower of art and artifacts, loaned from the Schenectady Museum, on stage right and a huge grey shelving unit opposite.  At the start, most of the cast emerged from the shelves as if their bodies were some kind of inventory.

The stage blocking often felt as jumbled as all those words, but in the same grander sense it seemed to work. A trio of modern dancers in beige long johns was the only component that never rose above the banal.  It always helped when a performer took flight. The best was operatic soprano Juliana Snapper, who ended the first act perched above the stage like a snow owl.

Rowan Ian Seamus Magee was omnipresent as a kind of master of ceremonies.  Democco Atcher and Carolyn Shoemaker played Barney and Betty Hill, alien abductees from the 1960s.  Members of Curtain Call Theatre and Johnstown Little Theatre performed scenes in the side balconies and seven members of the Albany All Stars roller derby team were a kind of corps de ballet in long dowdy dresses. They opened the lively second act to disco music.

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

“I’m a so-called ‘multi-media artist’ but I have no idea what that means,” says Laurie Anderson, who brings her latest show, “Delusion” to EMPAC on Friday and Saturday nights.

For those unaware of Anderson’s mix of music, stories, and visuals, the other jargony term commonly applied to her is probably no-less helpful:  performance artist.

Maybe it’s better to focus on what she actually produces.

In addition to her touring shows, Anderson has been recording albums, exhibiting works in galleries and museums, and publishing art books at a regular pace since she was a break-out star from the lower Manhattan experimental scene of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.  “Delusion” follows on the heels of her new CD “Homeland” (Nonesuch) and was developed during a series of residencies at EMPAC, the two year-old arts center on the campus of RPI in Troy.

“Because I was at EMPAC the direction of the piece changed completely,” explains Anderson, recalling that her intention was to write a series of short plays. “I was going to give them to actors and thought that might be an interesting way to go. But I don’t know how to write plays and that became very obvious to me very quickly.”

According to Anderson, it was when some of the technical staff at EMPAC offered her the use of fancy digital projections that the piece began to shift direction and jell.

“It was because they were able to put the equipment together so easily that it became a very visual piece,” she recalls. “I’m used to things morphing into other forms.  Sometimes I’ll start out working on opera and it turns into a potato print.”

Technology has been a constant in Anderson’s work over the years, both as a topic and a tool.  She doesn’t like to make it a fetish though, at least not lately.

“I just try not worship it,” she says. “It used to be new and weird. But at this point it’s not such a great thing for an artist to push a button and say ‘Look!’  Besides, if you don’t have any ideas, it’s nothing. And there are always pencils.”

Anderson avoids describing the new show in too much detail, other than saying it’s a series of 20 stories, lasting a total of about 90 minutes.

“I’m trying to represent a kind of mental drift and how your mind works,” she says. “I realized that one third of your time – one third of your life – you’re sleeping.”

“I need at least 8 hours, and 18 hours would be better. And I just had my 63rd birthday and that means I’ve spent 21 years sleeping,” she continues. “What have I been doing all that time? What’s going on?”

Dreams are not new material for Anderson and she recognizes that artists of all manner draw on the dream state as a source of creativity and ideas.  Yet Anderson’s not keen on listening to other people’s dreams in casual conversation.

“Someone will tell me ‘There’s this man walking down the road. It was my father. But then it was my uncle…’ And it’s like ‘No, please don’t tell me your dreams!’ They’re a private little world that’s not easy to communicate.”

A weird, floating state of strange associations and personal insights, one might say.

Actually, that’s a pretty good description of a multimedia performance by Laurie Anderson.

With husband Lou Reed

Originally appeared in the Times Union (Albany NY).

Music and food have always gone together well, but seldom have they been presented as equals on a stage.

An original theatrical, musical and culinary tribute to Julia Child, the show is produced in association with Diamond Opera Theater. It plays at the Basilica Industria in Hudson for eight performances through Sept. 24. Every performance culminates in free tastings of pastries and other sweets by local chefs.

“Bon Appetit!” of course, was the name of Child’s popular television show, but it’s also the title for a one-woman operatic scene by Hudson Valley composer Lee Hoiby. Jean Stapleton (Edith Bunker) had a successful off-Broadway run with the piece during the early 1990s. The libretto uses Child’s own words taken from an episode in which she makes a chocolate cake in front of a camera.

The new “Bon Appetit!” evening also includes Leonard Bernstein‘s early song cycle “La Bonne Cuisine,” a setting of four French recipes, and spoken excepts from Child’s autobiography “My Life in France.”

“We started thinking about this long before the whole Julia Child fever happened last year with the movie (‘Julie and Julia’),” says Benedict Bertau, Walking the Dog’s producing artistic director, who conceived and directed the production.

The first collaboration between Walking the Dog Theater and Diamond Opera Theatre was two years ago when they combined forces to present “Red Carnations Times Two.” It juxtaposed the one-act play by Glenn Hughes with the operatic adaptation by Robert Baksa, a Columbia County resident. Afterward, mezzo-soprano Mary Deyerle Hack approached Bertau, saying she wanted the companies to continue working together and, by the way, there was this 20-minute opera about cooking she was eager to perform.

“I was really exploring how to create a full evening that would work with the opera,” explains Berteau. “It didn’t really make sense to just do a cooking show.”

Berteau read up on Julia Child and became taken with her autobiography. After a conversation with Child’s co-author Alex Prud’homme, the rights were secured and Berteau began making a theatrical adaptation. In addition to Bernstein’s short songs, some additional French ambience will come from Cole Porter‘s “I Love Paris” and the chaconne “La Vie en Rose.”

The evening actually features three performers. In addition to Hack, who will perform the Hoiby scene, there’s actress Johnna Murray and another mezzo-soprano, Nina Fine, who will sing the French standards. Gili Melamed Lev will accompany at the piano.

“We’re not looking to emulate or impersonate Julia Child,” continues Berteau. “We’re tapping into her spirit, which is one of incredible generosity and a can-do attitude.”

SATURDAY, 9/18 REVIEW

The original musical theatre piece called “Bon Appetit!” ended with a few bites of chocolate cake for the audience.  How could you not leave happy?

Walking the Dog Theater and Diamond Opera Theater combined forces to produce the tribute to Julia Child.  Benedicta Bertau conceived and directed the enjoyable mix of words, music and food.

The evening began with a monologue based on the famous chef’s memoir, “My Life in France.” Actress Johnna Murray never attempted to mimic Child’s famous voice or demeanor but did convey the presence of a sturdy American woman in a flowered dress and pumps. As book excerpts, the script seemed intended more for reading than speaking. Still it was full of visceral and evocative depictions of Child’s arrival by ship, her first meal (fish and wine) in a French restaurant and her entry into cooking school.

Interspersed in the hour-long scene were a couple of chaconnes, plus Cole Porter’s “I Love Paris.”  It ended with Leonard Bernstein’s “La Bonne Cuisine” nicely sung by mezzo-soprano Nina Fine.  Each of its four songs are rapid-fire recitations of recipes.  Sitting at her kitchen table, Murray listened and jotted them down like they were dictation from a culinary muse.

After intermission, mezzo-soprano Mary Deyerle Hack sang Lee Hoiby’s one-woman opera “Bon Appetit” while preparing a chocolate cake.  Since it uses Child’s own extemporaneous words from two different episodes of her TV show, the chef’s candor and humor came through more clearly. Hack, who is the artistic director of the opera company, seemed to relish the role, which occasionally slips between spoken and sung passages.  Like Murray, she wisely avoided attempting the Meryl Streep feat of embodying Julia Child, but allowed the charm and character come through the words.

An electric mixer, a whisk and a flour sifter were some of the kitchen implements that Hack used as she cooked and sang. They added gentle percussive elements to Hoiby’s fluid and joyous piano accompaniment.  Gili Melamed-Lev was the fine onstage pianist.

The set was a minimal evocation of a kitchen with a variety of pots, pans and teacups suspended above like angels. Some incidental music in the first scene was by Satie.

For each night of the three-week run, a different local chef contributes some kind of chocolate concoction, which is served gratis in the spacious lobby.  Three more performances are scheduled for Wednesday through Friday of next week.

Originally appeared in the Times Union, Albany, NY.

AP:  An annual $150,000 prize has been established by the foundation of Tony-winning playwright-director Arthur Laurents and partner Tom Hatcher. The Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award will be given for an unproduced, full-length play of social relevance by an emerging American playwright. The prize includes a $50,000 cash award for the selected playwright and a $100,000 grant for production costs of the play’s premiere at a nonprofit theater.

The foundation said Thursday it’s the first major award for playwrighting to be named in honor of a gay couple. The 92-year-old Laurents wrote the books for “Gypsy” and “West Side Story.” Hatcher was Laurents’ partner of 52 years. The actor and real estate developer died in 2006.

Submissions from invited applicants will be accepted June 15 to Sept. 15. The first award recipient will be notified March 15.

According to tax filings, the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation is based in Riverhead, NY and had approximately $5.6 million in assets in 2008.

Laurents’ generosity brings to mind Aaron Copland, who left his copyrights to a foundation that supports American music. The Aaron Copland Fund for Music has been giving grants totaling about $2 million annually for almost 20 years now.  In a recent interview, former Copland Fund president John Harbison said that the income flows primarily from just four pieces of music.  The late Virgil Thomson, another “bachelor composer” (no direct family heirs), also established a foundation with his will. But his music and writing never had the same kind of popular success as did that of Laurents and Copland.

Early on in the film a playbill for “Caesar” has the clear statement “Music by Marc Blitzstein” and later the leader of the pit band (never addressed as Marc, but presumably the composer) gets into a brief shouting match with Wells as does just about every other character in the movie, except when they’re kissing his talented brilliant ass.

It’s a sweet film, with lots of period detail that reminded me a bit of the brilliant 1999 adaptation of “The Cradle Will Rock,” but without the political messages, just the feel of the Manhattan arts scene during the Depression.

Cute Zac Efron plays a naive youth hoping he can make it in the theatre while also standing up to the boss.  (Don’t count on it kid.)  It’s the first Zac Efron film I’ve seen and it says something that I wasn’t always thinking, “Oh, that’s Zac Efron.”

The producers of the film didn’t go to the effort of finding Blitzstein’s own original score for the Welles production.  Even if it survives it’s probably only some fanfares, drum rolls and sundry entr’actes. The film’s suitable but not memorable soundtrack is by Michael J. McEvoy.

According to Internet Movie Database, the bandleader in the film is played by Jools Holland. While the actor in the film didn’t exactly resemble photos of Blitzstein, other than the pencil moustache, I don’t think he much resembled the Jools Holland who’s a band leader with a show on USA. But I’ve never seen that show, so I am now out of my league.

Still, it was a nice touch including Blitzstein’s name on one of the film’s properties.

I caught a screening of “Wild Combination” on November 11 as part of the quirky little iEAR series at RPI, here in Troy. The filmmaker Matt Wolf was on hand and took a few questions.  During his final comments he revealed that he’s currently making a documentary about Jerome Robbins who he’s not liking (news flash: nobody did). But Wolf says that he probably would have liked Arthur Russell, even if they might not have been close friends.  Based on Wolf’s beautiful film, I feel much the same way and am also reminded of how tricky it is be very friendly with an artist when you don’t grove to his work.

Russell died of AIDS in 1992 at age 40.  As with so many other gay men of his generation who passed on way before their time, it’s hard to know what more he might have accomplished and whether he’d ultimately find a mature musical voice. Judging from this distant vantage point, Russell’s challenge was to bring together his disparate interests in folk music, the avant garde and disco.

Wolf’s film is a loving tribute that made me root for Arthur and be touched by the tragedy of his life and the still palpable grief of those loved ones left behind, namely his parents and his partner Tom Lee.  It’s based primarily on archival footage and Wolf said that every scrap of film that exists of Russell is in the movie. Admirable work, for sure.  We see Russell singing as he plays cello, also playing guitar and generally hanging out at venues like The Kitchen and Experimental Intermedia.  There’s footage of Ginsberg speaking at Russell’s memorial, and the dozen or so talking heads who were interviewed include Philip Glass. There’s also plenty of colorful original footage and enough keen editing to show the hand of a smart and promising filmmaker.

What’s not present is much of an understanding of the gay experience. The memories of Arthur’s slightly trouble childhood in Iowa — being too smart, picked on at school, etc. — are set up to suggest the youthful presence of a great artistic persona. But what it really sounded like was just another fag child suffering on the playground.  Painful but very familiar.  Wolf also includes two comments from interviewees that simply aren’t believable.  There’s Arthur’s mother saying she did a double take when she heard, second hand, that her son was gay. As if every mother doesn’t always have more than an inkling.  And then Arthur’s companion tells of how he spotted (cruised) Arthur three times in the East Village before finally approaching him. But then he adds something like, “whether or not we might both be gay never crossed my mind.” Hello?  You were chasing him around your neighborhood hoping for what? An evening of watching the Yankees.

Anyway.

After setting up his subject as a mighty innovator and iconoclast for the first two-thirds or so of the 71 minute film, Wolf does let his interviewees talk about Russell’s difficult personality (he could lead a band, but not be a member of one) and his jealousy and paranoia (at one point he was convinced the Rolling Stones were stealing his ideas).  Besides the friendship with Glass and Ginsberg (who admits to a crush), there’s documentation of two brief collaborations of interest:  he played with the Talking Heads a few times and he wrote music for a Robert Wilson creation, “Medea,” though Wilson pulled Russell’s music after only one performance.

“Wild Combination” (the title comes from a Russell song, by the way) also puts forth the facts of Russell’s death from AIDS with admirable clarity and matter of factness. I liked how one friend said that Arthur was always rather spacey and dissasociative and that AIDS ultimately made him more so.  And my eyes got moist when Russell’s dad recalls a brief final conversation with his son in the hospital (“You’re a good sport.” “Really?” “Yeah, really.”)

The recent revival  – or new but long overdue? –  in Russell’s music serves as a kind of coda to the film. This section runs a little long, but is still heartening.  Russell was a finicky dabbler and made numerous takes, edits and mixes of his music, so there’s thousands of tapes that might be fodder for still more releases to come.

Hearing his mumbly but soulful voice, jumping between registers and heavily laden with echo, I thought of Antony and the Johnsons.  Bridging avant garde and disco, or serious and pop (or whatever the latest terms are) is a never ending effort and apparently younger generations are seeing something prophetic in Arthur Russell.  If not for AIDS, he might have been right there with them.

As much as I’ve loved that slow and lush music and its popular 1992 recording by Dawn Upshaw, I don’t remember ever checking out the words, which are sung in Polish. But supertitles provided translations during the performance of “Lipsynch,” seen on Sunday October 11 in the Harvey Theater as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music‘s Next Wave Festival.   And the poetry provides a potent prelude to what ensues:

My son, my chosen and beloved

Share your wounds with your mother

Because, dear son, I have always carried you in my heart.

While there’s other vocal music sprinkled throughout the nine-hour show, only one character does, almost, lipsynch.  That’s Sarah who we see doing some light housework, smoking a cigarette and mouthing along to Burt Bacharach’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” as it plays on the radio.

Sarah’s a sometime prostitute and also the housekeeper for an elderly, wheelchair-bound speech therapist, who was a mentor and mother figure to Ada, who’s an opera singer and soloist in the Gorecki and who adopts Jeremy, who’s own mother dies on an airplane in the opening scene, while he was just an infant.  After a youthful stint leading a satanic rock band, Jeremy becomes a filmmaker, and writes a script based on what he knows about his birth mother. He researched her heritage in Nicaragua, but didn’t learn the truth about how she got to Germany only to die in a plane headed to Canada until the audience also finds out, at the play’s end.

These relationships, and many others besides, actually make plenty of sense and become quite affecting as they are revealed throughout the daylong journey.

Spending so much time in the theater — the nine hours includes four intermissions plus a 45-minute dinner break — fostered a sense of community in the audience.  I shared supper with a lively bunch sitting near by, including an acting student in her early 20s who’d only been in the city for two weeks.

Manhattanites probably still complain about having to travel all the way out to Brooklyn in order to take in BAM’s unique offerings. But I rose early and took Amtrak down from Albany to see “Lipsynch.”  Not only did I buy a train ticket, I bought my seat for the show, too. That’s not something I’m accustomed to doing. One of the few fringe benefits of being a perpetually struggling freelance writer is free tickets.  BAM’s publicity office pleaded limited availability of press tickets, but were good enough to comp me for Philip Glass’ latest opera “Kepler,” which I’ll return for in November.  (That same week I’ll also catch Lepage’s staging of Berlioz “Damnation of Faust” at The Met.)

I had little doubt that Lepage would be worth the time, effort and money.  My familiarity with him grew out of my relationship to BAM.

After beginning my arts career with a season-long internship working for Philip Bither in the Next  Wave office, I was a loyal subscriber for all of my 13 years living in the city before moving upstate in 2000. I focused my ticket buying on the music and dance offerings but generally trusted Joe Melillo and Harvey Lichenstein’s tastes. And so I took a chance on Lepage’s “Seven Streams of the River Ota” in 1996.  Also an eight- to nine-hour immersion, “Ota” weaved together another bundle of stories involving nothing less than the Holocaust, Hiroshima and AIDS.  I find it difficult to even put all three of those tragedies into one sentence, but Lepage’s show was masterful and transcendent, very human and often hilarious.  It’s not an exaggeration to say it was one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen.

“Lipsynch” doesn’t quiet raise to that level, but it doesn’t shoot as high either. Instead of placing characters in epic catastrophes, they face health issues like schizophrenia and brain tumors, or are trapped in sex slavery and incest. Plus there’s just plenty of good old fashioned family alienation.

Lepage’s trademarks as a director are in the use of audio and visual technology and the reliance on large sets made of multi-panel units.  In “Lipsynch” there’s plenty of fancy live video and audio technology new and old, including cassettes and open reel tape decks.   A large crew wheels in and out all manner of complicated but multi-functional sets.

But in a departure from Lepage’s visual focus, “Lipsyche” is, above all, about sounds and voices.  The whole idea for the piece, which Lepage wrote in collaboration with the actors of his Toronto-based company known as ExMachina, came to him while riding in an airplane. An operatic soprano was warming up in first class at the same time a baby was crying in coach.  Both of those show up in the first scene and are followed by:

• a surgeon illustrating the parts of a brain that affect speech
• voice lessons and the unexpected intimacy they often bring about between teacher and student
• speech therapy
• overdubbing spoken dialogue for a film
• lip-reading
• multi-track recording of vocal music with no texts (one track sounded like a percussion line, two and three tracks together like Steve Reich, and the final four-track like a kind of Medieval take on Meredith Monk)
• choir practice
• jazz scatting
• electronic transformation of a female voice into the male register (a la Laurie Anderson)
• the emotional effect of remembering a deceased parent’s voice
• multiple overlapping conversations in a crowded restaurant
• voices raised in an argument (though the actors are unseen)
• the pervasive, wallpaper characteristics of radio news, as it drones on and on
• poetry recitation
• the necessity of changing one’s voice to change one’s identity.
• recording of audio books
• actors creating a laugh track
• the uncanny ability to identify a person’s age, body type and province by listening to a voice
• the voices heard in one’s head, sometimes as a symptom of mental illness.
• voice mail
• and, of course, cell phones with and without hands free devices.

Many of these drive the plot, while the presence of certain things, especially the brain surgery, seemed a little obvious.

There were only nine actors in the show and each played multiple parts. At least half of “Lipsynch” was performed in languages other than English, including French, Spanish, German and Italian.  Frequently the supertitles dropped away with little effect, since the gist of things was clear enough.  Who needs to know every invective hurled during an argument.

Also present was another trademark of Lepage’s own creations (as opposed to his increasing work in opera) and it’s something that I relish:  silence.  What a rarity in the theater!  Several pivotal scenes were conducted with no dialogue, just some random street noise or the sound of news commentators on talk radio.

In a brilliant and luxurious device, one scene of at least 10 minutes in length was performed twice, back to back.  It takes place inside a small Toronto bookstore on a snowy evening.  First, we watch from the street, looking in through the dirty windows at Michelle, a middle aged woman who’s wrestled with mental illness.  She glimpses out on the chilly sidewalk a priest dressed in vestments and a little girl in play clothes. It’s obvious that they exist only in her mind. All we hear are traffic noises.  But then time jumps backward and we’re inside the warmth of the shop and listen as Michelle patiently assists the browsers and shows an impressive knowledge of literature and poetry.  In the scene’s final action, she hands a large book to a young man who departs without paying.  On first viewing, it seems she’s carelessly giving away the stock. But on second encounter, we hear that it’s a loan to a struggling student burdened with homework.

There were many other wonderful moments in “Lipsych,” lots of funny lines and a wrenching denouement that most of us figured out by the time the last intermission rolled around.

After all those voices, disembodied and incarnate, and all that modern technology, the marathon ends as it began with some of the Gorecki symphony. The singer, Rebecca Blankenship who played Ada, appears much as she did at the beginning. But now, she’s not just a singer, but she’s one more voice that’s not yet been included in the play — that of the earth itself.

Where has he gone

My dearest son?

Perhaps during the uprising

The cruel enemy killed him…

He lies in his grave

and I know not where

Though I keep asking people

Everywhere.

SCHENECTADY – Sometimes theatrical producing means simply investing money into a big ambitious venture, as Proctors Theatre has done a bit lately with Broadway musicals. But producing can also mean finding some dough and also putting together a team of artists to create something new. That was the case with a new hour-long multidisciplinary show that premiered Friday night in the GE Theatre.

“From Within and Outside a Bright Room” was conceived by Peggy Gould, a dancer and actress, who performed with a team of four other women, each of whom displayed a strong stage presence and distinct talents. The piece is a kind of follow-up to Tony Kushner’s “A Bright Room Called Day,” a play that Gould stage managed at its 1985 premiere. Over the years, she’s been exploring its themes and adapting portions of its texts, which address life in Berlin during the rise of Hitler.

Though the show was part of the Dangerous Music series, it consisted primarily of spoken monologues. Cautious fear and simmering anger came through regularly, and yet the whole was a pleasantly serene experience. It’s as if the performers knew that the linking of Reagan and AIDS and Bush and Hurricane Katrina with Hitler and the Holocaust would not be new information to the audience, so it would do little good to shout about it. Actually, there were just as many soliloquies about the foibles of humanity, including the fleeting nature of memory, the desire for spiritual attainment, and the necessity of food.

Lyrical moments were plentiful, thanks to several Schubert lieder, sung unaccompanied and beautifully by soprano Elizabeth Phillips, as well as some modern dance episodes. During a series of “videorants,” each woman addressed a camera while her live image was projected above the stage. Dancer Jules Skloot, brunette and clad in black, was captured so tight that only portions of her slow moving upper limbs and jittery face were seen on screen. Meanwhile, Phillips sang a jazz standard about missing a lover.

Pamela Sneed, a writer and actress, had the most varied or volatile presence. She could be almost self-deprecating one moment and rather terrifying the next as her dark eyes bore down on the audience.

A lively opening chorus in tight harmony was composed by Eve Beglarian, who also held her own in the delivery of texts. Her final chorus, “Flood,” was accompanied by an image of a broken levee.

Originally appeared in the Times Union.