The Animals and Children Took to the Streets - Spoleto Review

Jasper is back at Spoleto for a few days and we hit the ground running by catching the last performance of theatre company 1927's The Animals and Children Took to the Streets at noon on Sunday. This show represents some of the best of what arts festivals can bring -- risky, innovative, multidisciplinary performances that carve out new ways of looking at humanity. Granted, shows like this don't always work -- we remember with horror some Spoleto and Piccolo Spoleto bombs from the past that will go unnamed. But this time, all the quirkiness and uniqueness anda darkly Dickensian attributes of The Animals and Children Took to the Streets come together to form a creepily satisfying narrative that acknowledges both the best and the worst in all of us.  

Written and directed by Suzanne Andrade, who is one fourth of the company 1927 along with her partner, animator Paul Barritt, and actor Esme Appleton with Lillian Henley, who is a musician, Animals and Children brings music, animation, live action, and storytelling together. The stage is a combination screen and set in three parts with sparse moveable scenery carried on and off stage by the actors. There are three windows behind which typically sit the actors -- though, as mentioned, they are  mobile as well -- and from their various positions they sing in an almost madrigal manner at key points in the play. But, their primary job is interacting with the Edward Gorey-like animation projected onto the screen/set. The screen/set is identified as a tenement house called Bayou Mansion on Red Herring Street where nothing good ever happens. Full of an assorted cast of perverts ranging from a 21-year-old granny to an underwear thief to a guy who likes to sniff women's bicycle seats; one would think the adults would be to blame for all the bad things that happen on Red Herring Street. But no, when the sun goes down and the shades are drawn, residents lock their doors against the hordes of marauding children who wreak havoc on the community, usually en masse. But one day, a new pair arrive in the neighborhood in the form of a mother and daughter -- described as being "cleaner and prettier" than all the rest -- and they introduce a form of optimism into the atmosphere at the same time that all the children have been subdued via a giant drugged gumdrop. So the story is told of a pessimistic, and somewhat lovelorn, caretaker who is caught in the middle and, through a series of interactions with the audience, must choose either the path of idealism or the path of realism which will bring us to the end of the story.

Even though we caught the final performance of the play at Spoleto, we'll keep the ending to ourselves lest we spoil it for those of you lucky enough to catch this show in one of their next gigs. (The Charleston stop came between a shows in Dijon, France and an upcoming performance in DC.)

We loved the delightful creepiness of the show, the tongue-in-cheek manner in which it was presented, the underlying nastiness of the lines and lyrics -- who doesn’t like songs about living in a "shithole?" -- and the fact that, yet again, animation is proven to be a proper art form for exploring decidedly adult topics of social issues.

A musical trip through time and place with Spoleto & Jeffrey Day

 

My Spoleto weekend wrapped up with a tour of music spanning many centuries and the entire globe.  The trip went from ancient China to 1790s London, to 19^th century New England, and May 2012 Japan. And I was able to do it all in a 10 block area of downtown Charleston between 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. Sunday.

Let’s start in the oldest and last stop – which also has the benefit of being very new.

The opera Feng Yi Ting by Duo Wenjing had its first full production and American premiere in Charleston Sunday night. It’s based on a tale from the Han Dynasty (206 BC  - 220), but was written in 2004 and brings together musical and theatrical elements from both ends of that time frame. In the story, the despotic leader of the country has recently adopted a new godson. A young woman, Diao Chan, decides to seduce them both to set them against one another allowing for for more sensible leaders to take charge. The story is told with humor and beauty, but this is no epic – it has only two performers (the young woman and the godson) and lasts barely 45 minutes.

What makes it unique is the blending of Eastern and Western music and opera styles. In the pit of the Dock Street Theatre along with the violins and oboes are several musicians playing traditional Chinese instruments. On stage the performers sing and act in the highly mannered style of Chinese opera, while surrounded by state-of-the-art video projections as well as live video feed of the actors in giant black and white close ups. It sounds like it could be a mess of too much, but it isn’t.

The highly-praised composer’s music is always engaging and the quality of this production shouldn’t be a surprise considering the rest of the team working that created it. The director is Atom Egoyan (best known for his many movies including The Sweet Hereafter) and Derek McLane, a Tony-winning Broadway designer.

For some audience members an hour of the Chinese opera style singing is probably plenty. But we did 15 hours of the 18-hour Chinese opera The Peony Pavilion at the festival a few years ago. Another hour of something as imaginative and excellent as Feng Yi Ting would have been fine with us.

Additional performances take place May 29, June 1, 4 and 7.

A few hours before the trip to ancient China we were in Japan in 2011 – when the earthquake and tsunami struck. The first concert in the Music in Time series, which focuses on contemporary classical, brought to the hall three works by prominent Japanese composers many of us have never heard of. All the works were written for traditional Western instrumentation and one would be hard pressed to find anything particularly “Japanese” about the music.

The program had a very last minute change when composer Toshio Hosokawa called series director John Kennedy a few weeks ago and offered a brand new piece instead of the one scheduled – and it turned out to be a work about the disaster in Japan, as was the piece by Toshi Ichiyanagi that was the linchpin of the concert. The new work, Meditation, had its world premiere in Korea just a few weeks ago; the festival didn’t even receive the music until five days before the concert.

The lateness of the addition showed in no way. This is an intense and dramatic work that musically reflects the power of the earth to shift, move and heave land and water at will. It calls for 30 players which made for a very packed stage at the College of Charleston recital hall and a roar of sound always. The first movement is called Beat of the Earth and that beat, aided by ample percussion is the thing that marches forward through Meditation.

Ichiyanagi, the most distinguished senior composer in Japan, wrote his Symphony No. 8 – Revelation 2011 less than a year after the earthquake, tsunami and resulting death and damage to a nuclear power plant and the Sunday concert was the American premiere.  Like Hosokawa’s piece, this one is very much about the power of the earth - how it can kill and how it can heal. Although the ensemble was slightly smaller at about 20 it is still a loud and dramatic piece, but had the benefit of many passages where several young players from the festival orchestra shone as soloists.

The final piece, Listening to Fragrances of the Dusk by Somei Satoh, was also getting its American premiere at the concert. Although written in 1997 long before the disaster, it seemed to be speaking to the tragedy as well. Unlike the two other pieces this is a very quiet, slow and meditative work – and served as a perfect elegy for the victims and coda for the concert.

The second offering of the chamber music series served up what series organizer and host Geoff Nuttall described as a “Haydn sandwich” – the Haydn Symphony 101 between works by late 19^th and early 20^th century American composers Arthur Foote and Amy Beach. Both of the Americans were from New England and their music, especially that of Foote, felt like a stroll through the New England countryside on a summer day with Beach’s Piano Quintet in F sharp minor being the more dramatic of the strolls. “This is some of the most amazingly exquisite music you’ve never heard before,” Nuttall said, and he was right.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t Haydn.

The Symphony 101 was one of the composer’s famous London Symphonies which were amazingly popular and heaped with praise for very good reason. Wanting to spread the music further than a full orchestra could take it, and there being no MP3 players at the time, the symphonies were arranged for smaller ensembles. In this case the work was played by the St. Lawrence String Quartet with the addition of flute, piano and double bass. I’ve heard dozens of these chamber concerts over the past 20 years and the performance of the Symphony 101 Sunday was in the top 10. The players took this work, which is full of sections in which the musicians appear to be searching for the right music, to new heights.  Haydn loved to create these quirky pieces that played with, but eventually delighted and astounded audience members.  This symphony did so in the 1790s and it did the same on a May Sunday in 2012.

At the end of the work, the musicians appeared ever happier than the audience. I don’t think I’ve even seen a group of players who appeared more thrilled with what they had just done. I thought they were about to levitate, but believe they already had.

-          ­Jeffrey Day

Spoleto presents "Leo" -- a Review

The physical theater production of "Leo," directed by Daniel Briere, conceived and performed by Tobias Wegner, is basically a gag carried out, step-by-step, to its logical and glorious conclusion. At the risk of sounding far too sappy for comfort, Leo is a joy to behold. The performance opens onto a simple set consisting of a large red and blue box -- large enough to hold a frolicking adult male (Wegner) -- but devoid of anything else except said male, a bare lightbulb, and a valise. Adjacent to the overly large box is a screen that depicts the innards of the box exactly with one small exception -- the screen turns the box on its side.

What happens over the next 70 minutes are the physical manipulations of Wegner in the right-side-up box and the projection of his manipulations on the sideways screen. For example, when Wegner is seated on top of the valise, stationed on the floor, it looks as if he is hanging off the right wall on the screen.

It's a simple concept -- the art is in the physicality of Wegner and his movements. The entertainment quotient comes from the fact that despite the audience's ability to see that at no time does Wegner actually hang from the ceiling or walk on the walls -- though he does do some mean hand and head-stands -- we watch his movements on the screen and guffaw at the illusionless illusion he creates.

Though the bit slows down some during the second half of the show -- Wegner lulls us into an unusually relaxed state with his saxophone (the valise is there for a purpose) -- it picks right back up again when animation is added to the screen. Our only other complaint is that, despite our perfectly fine seats, we were unable to get a good view of the inside of the box where Wegner frolicked -- and we were sure others saw less than us.

Overall though, Jasper gives Leo a strong 4 out of 5 stars. There are three more opportunities to see the performance -- Sunday at 8 pm, Monday at noon, and Tuesday at 7 pm.