No, I haven't been resting on any laurels; in fact, I've been plenty busy over the last stretch of nights. I actually got halfway through blogging one particular evening's activities, only to have Time Warner Cable peter out on me. (Happily, I was able to save what I'd written.) But at this distance from most of the events in question, going into great depth seems a bit superfluous. So I've decided to try to get back up to speed with a quick burst of blogging before Dr. LP comes home for fall break Thursday night. To begin with, the aforementioned technologically stymied post -- which was originally to bear the headline, "Stop making sense."
Audience members at the BAM Harvey Theater last Wednesday evening [October 4] might well have thought they'd accidentally wandered into the BAM Rose Cinema by mistake. We were there to see Mikel Rouse's latest stage work, The End of Cinematics, but what greeted us was a blank silver screen, a warning to turn off cell phones, then...movie trailers. Specifically, a clever teaser for the upcoming big-screen Simpsons film. A preview of the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles feature. Another for Lucky You, a gambling flick starring Eric Bana, Robert Duvall and Drew Barrymore. Finally, a full-length trailer for Spider-Man 3, reportedly Sam Raimi's final installment, in which Sandman and Venom are the nemeses; unless my eyes deceived me, Gwen Stacy will also be introduced.
Cool enough for my not especially well-hidden inner comic-book geek; not remotely what one would expect to see when attending a performance billed as an opera. But Rouse has been playing fast and loose with this genre for quite a long time now. Failing Kansas, the first installment in his "opera-vérité" trilogy, was a one-man show based on themes from Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, while Dennis Cleveland, Rouse's best-known work, blurred the line between performance and audience in a powerful rumination on talk-show fame that riffs on The Jerry Springer Show and its ilk.
The End of Cinematics was inspired by a pair of Susan Sontag essays, "The Decay of Cinema" and "A Century of Cinema." The central concept of Rouse's piece is the end of cinema-as-art, the commodification of film as a vehicle exclusively devoted to the Hollywood blockbuster -- thus the trailers. Instead of provocative, sometimes head-scratching celluloid journeys, moviemaking today in Rouse's view is overly devoted to the special effects-laden extravaganza.
Naturally, Rouse's response came in the form of a special effects-laden extravaganza. The End of Cinematics includes a cast of six performers -- three men, including Rouse, dressed in variations of a trenchcoated traveller, three women garbed in checkered coats and pageboy haircuts -- performing between a frontal scrim (on which those initial previews were projected) and a six-panel rear projection wall outlined in neon. Several camera operators and a robotic camera that rolled back and forth across the front of the stage captured and projected the performers on the front scrim. In the rear, film footage shot in Paris played on the top three screens. Similar footage played on the bottom three screens, but with the characters erased by CGI so that those screens served as backdrops to the live performers.
Rouse's score provided a kinetic electropop soundtrack, seductive enough on a surface level yet also deeply sophisticated in its layering of melodic, harmonic and rhythmic strata. As Allan Kozinn reported in his New York Times review, one song in particular, which was repeated twice, evoked the Beatles circa Revolver. (It wasn't the only song to appear twice: Several numbers from the beginning of the piece eventually returned near the conclusion.) Other likely influences included vintage doo-wop and contemporary hip-hop.
I'm still having trouble drawing a bead on precisely how Rouse's visually gorgeous, sonically stimulating show actually furthers his chosen subject matter. For example, the work is completely non-narrative in structure, yet the action is often accompanied not only by subtitles but also by performers accompanying their singing with sign language. A will to communicate is strikingly evident throughout the piece. But precisely what is being communicated was more readily discernable through Rouse's pre-concert interviews and press clips than through the piece itself.
Did this fundamentally wound the production in any way? Not especially. Rouse's music, as always, was instantly appealing. And while the iconography of Rouse's images suggested sexy French cinema, when this was combined with constantly shifting visual perspectives and unexpected jump cuts, what The End of Cinematics evoked most was the schizophrenic look of MTV, as well as '80s rock shows by Talking Heads (which Kozinn noted) and even Laurie Anderson circa Home of the Brave, taken to the next level of sophistication. It was as if -- and I don't mean this to be glib -- Robert Ashley had been provided with the means and tools to mount a production of Rent.
Ultimately, I continue to consider Dennis Cleveland to be a more complete theatrical experience, mainly for its evocation, however sketchy, of character and motive. Failing Kansas remains a more personally involving work as well, both for its subject matter and its one-man engagement with the viewer. But I can't help but think that even these responses were somehow not only anticipated but actually solicited by what Rouse put on stage -- the net effect being the idea of having to think about why there was so little to think about, plotwise, in the piece, somehow underscoring precisely the point Rouse was trying to make about contemporary film, even while couching it in the nostalgic imagery of the art cinema he has loved and lost.
Still, in viewing a DVD of the production several times prior to seeing the show onstage, I wondered whether some viewers might not simply give up trying to make sense of The End of Cinematics, and instead simply sit back and soak in the tricky visual effects and sexy music. When I posed that very question to Rouse in an interview for a TONY feature, he stated that the work of John Cage and Merce Cunningham had completely validated that response, creating an art in which it was simply okay to "check in and check out." Philip Glass and Robert Wilson employed a similar philosophy to different ends in Einstein on the Beach. And, as was the case with that work, The End of Cinematics may seem intentionally superficial on first glance, but each repeated encounter reveals a bit more sophistication in the underlying architecture.
(Speaking of Merce Cunningham, that venerable choreographer's company is performing a work set to a Rouse score during its current run at the Joyce Theater in New York City. I refer to the primary innovation of that piece, as well as its underlying motivation, in the TONY article linked above -- and I was pleasantly surprised to see that John Rockwell quoted from that article in his New York Times review of the opening night performance.)
=====
On Thursday and Saturday nights, I heard the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, and covered those concerts here. Between those two performances, Frank Oteri and I went to the Nokia Theatre Times Square, a former movie palace converted into a spacious concert hall, for the Porcupine Tree show on Friday night. Admittedly, we were really there for the opening act: ProjeKct Six, a.k.a. Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew of former and future King Crimson renown. This was effectively ProjeKct Two Minus One -- but while I admit that I missed the low end supplied by former bassist Trey Gunn, there's no question that Fripp is playing more full-blown lead guitar in this particular configuration than he has in years, and likely decades. His soaring solos seemed to reference Crimsons past, while still pointing the way to a potential future; Belew, a serviceable rather than prodigious drummer (which was this accomplished guitarist's sole role during the set), maintained a supportive beat and triggered rudimentary bass lines with his electronic kit. It was an egghead jam session between two old friends, and it was deeply satisfying.
Porcupine Tree, one of the more consistently impressive neo-prog bands, played two sets; the first, devoted to music from a forthcoming album, earned mixed marks. It was impressive to hear the band tackling intricate metrical contortions seemingly inspired by Meshuggah. But overall, the new songs sounded samey -- even the sole lengthy "epic" number -- and it was a bit too much to catch lyrics referring to popping pills in at least three separate cuts, even if it's a fair bet that singer-songwriter Steven Wilson was probably contrasting therapeutical and recreational usage. Perhaps I'll feel differently when the finished album arrives in spring. The second set, which Frank and I skipped, was devoted to older material; the next afternoon, in a Long Island City pharmacy, I heard a woman's voice from a cell phone in walkie-talkie mode, held by a young man wearing a Tool T-shirt, proclaiming that the show was "awesome."
=====
On Monday night, I was back in Carnegie Hall for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. James Levine boldly continues to link works by Beethoven and Schoenberg; Monday night's concert featured a broadly Romantic take on the latter's Verklärte Nacht and a vivid yet occasionally congested performance of his Piano Concerto with Daniel Barenboim at the keyboard. It was the concerto I was there to encounter for the first time live, and Barenboim handled it handsomely, although Uchida and Brendel have had rather more to say about the piece on record. As Kozinn mentioned in his Times review, Levine did indeed seem to be micromanaging orchestral balance as an end in itself at times. Still, there was a lot of satisfaction to be drawn from the concluding work, Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4, in which Barenboim was every bit as fastidious as the conductor, yet something of the composer's brusque heroism still shone through.
Playlist:
Mattia Battistini - Prima Voce (Nimbus)
Licia Albanese - Lebendige Vergangenheit (Preiser)
Badi Assad - Wonderland (eDGe)
Richard Schubert - Lebendige Vergangenheit (Preiser)
Various Artists - Covent Garden 1904-1939 (Nimbus)
Ezio Pinza - Lebendige Vergangenheit II (Preiser)
Various Artists - The Record of Singing, Vol. Four (EMI Classics)
Renée Fleming - Homage: The Age of the Diva (Decca)
Bob Dylan - Infidels (Columbia)
Comments