How I Got To... (introduction)

It's no mystery that if you hear about a performance from a friend (particularly one with good taste), you're bound to like it better.  I challenge you to take it one step further.  By far, the best things I've seen have been the result of knowing someone (or some company) affiliated with the production and trusting they won't lead me astray.  Ie: not just word-of-mouth, but "from the horse's mouth". 

Each Thursday, I'm going to publish a "How I Got To..." map to show how I ended up at certain performances.  If you find yourself agreeing with me, follow the map and see for yourself what you should be seeing next...

How I Got To... Rappaccini's Daughter @ Gotham Chamber Opera

 

Up Next:
Goodman Theatre- Ask Aunt Susan (May 24-June 22, Chicago)
Sarah Ruhl & Rebecca Taichman- The Oldest Boy @ Lincoln Center Theater (previews start Oct 9)
Gotham Chamber Opera- The Raven (May 28-31, New York)

A matter of taste.

Questaway is about taste-profiling.

It's amazing to me when I give people this term, how few of them know what I'm talking about--yet it's one of our most basic learned instincts.  I ate green olives out of my grandpa's martinis pretty much my entire childhood.  I have no idea when I actually started liking the taste of olives, but I always loved the taste of my time with him.  Yet, eventually we accept that certain things are what they are and that we like them or we don't.  We forget that there's a history.  We forget that we make that history.

I started a personal wine journal in college (yep, I was that girl that set up a retractable full wine bar in my dorm room).  I subscribed to Food&Wine and Wine Spectator and fully expected to have to memorize every fact of every label in order to know a good bottle.  And then I realized that I have a horrible memory for facts.  More importantly, I realized that the reason I loved wine was because of the experiences I had with it.  Who cares what an expert says a good pairing of this year's star Cabernet is if it doesn't taste good to you?  Or if you don't share it with great friends?  So soon (and ever since), my journal started to look like this:

 

(you probably can't read my handwriting-- I promise it's brilliant)

Over the years and many drunken, pretentious, exclamatory pages, it occurs to me how valuable this process could be to people who don't think they know what they would like out there in the arts.  Reading a review of a performance is the equivalent of memorizing a wine label.  But figuring out what you really like about a performance gives you a reason to see another.  

What my journal taught me first was that I like certain grapes.  I quickly learned next that certain grapes work for certain occasions.  I may love a funky, soil-tasting Zinfandel, but my splurge bottles are usually gifts and 'funky' doesn't quite say "congrats on the new house".  Next, I realized how much events affect my taste.  I don't think people feel comfortable saying, "I loved that string quartet because of that amazing salmon at dinner."  But saying that I love a certain Riesling because of the conversation I had while drinking it, is one of the most profound ways to remember a bottle. 
Finally, I made a point of ordering local on trips I would take.  Subsequently, I learned more about the conditions there, the history, and (to no one's surprise) they are now my favorite wines. 

Not to be too heavy-handed here, but I find it fascinating to consider why people attend live performance.  It seems that for a lot of people, there is one reason to see a show--and unfortunately, if that show doesn't satiate exactly that impulse, you're going to feel let down.  I want to start a different conversation--a broader one.  And it occurs to me that my wine model isn't a terrible starting point.  I knew I liked wine at the beginning, but as I payed attention to what I really liked, my palate also grew.  This is how I see the conversation beginning:

1) Grapes.  What performances have you seen that you really liked?  Why?
2) Grapes in context.  What is around you?  What do your friends go see?
3) A timely glass.  What things going on in your life could affect how you see a performance? 
4) A life of drinking.  How can all of these things spill into your life continually?

Somehow I've convinced my friends and family that I'm the best person to pick a bottle off a wine list.  This would be stressful if it were a win/lose situation, but it's actually deeply satisfying because  I'm not just suggesting something "I heard is good".  I'm suggesting something that I have a very nuanced history with.  And in sharing that bottle, the history grows.

Economically Speaking.

I’ve been working for a company this week that gives money to incredible justice and human rights projects around the world, so my head’s been ticking a bit about money.  This place is amazing because it doesn’t think “there isn’t money, how do we get some?” rather, “there is money somewhere, so let’s consider infrastructure”.  Meanwhile, I have this rather dire conversation with one of my favorite coaches in which he looks at the roles I sing and says, “Okay—let’s say you sing these better than any single other person—companies already know who they’re going to hire for these parts.  And who does any of these operas anyway?”  Now, I could vaguely blame America for that conversation.  Or the recession,  Or my 18 year-old self.  But, brilliant economist that I am (ahem.), it made me wonder: does this tightening of the job opportunities in opera benefit the actual quality of the market?  Let’s take me out of it (who knows if I’m good—who knows who is).  Let’s look at this like Darwin:

Fewer jobs = only the best get hired = better productions = those singers are paid an overall more sustainable wage as a whole??

Throw in a few entitled, a few conductor-darlings, and you have yourself an evolved industry!  Included or not, I would actually be all for that.  And in this hypothetical system, instead of appealing to the masses, we do the opposite: we embrace opera’s learned nuance, its weirdness, its gender and race dysmorphia, close it off to everyone but a small insider’s club and call it what it has been for audiences and what it threatens to be for singers: elite.  Gasp!  Horror!  Forget these words ever existed on Questaway!! 

But understanding this as a possibility is actually really interesting… I don’t think it would better society, but it would create the sustained system everyone has been craving.  Because, unlike theater and modern dance and jazz, broke singers (on the whole) aren’t creating work that is provoking and unconventional—they are scraping by to pay for more training.   In fact, they are scraping by to make breaks at companies that are scraping by.  In this, they are creating a secondary market that is exactly the same as the first (enjoyed and supported by just an elite club—I’m sorry, it’s true).  Yet, there’s a distinct sustainability problem with this second market: it’s funded for and by scrapers (read: there’s no money).  So instead of this under-employed mass putting pressure on the larger institutions or helping to grow the mid-level institutions (yep, I do love Gotham), they slowly drop out.  That may be honorable, but is it responsible…

Hypothetical drunk uncle at Thanksgiving: “…to yourself?”

Real Questie after reading about George Soros:  “to the industry?”

Take me out.

I know, I know, I turn everything into a metaphorical “go to live performance” campaign.  But this opportunity is just too plush: my first baseball game.  Virgin that I was, everything obvious about baseball was, to me, a novelty (and thus infinitely (can I say it?) more evolved as far audiences go). 

#1.  Everyone is there.  I was told because it was an Oakland A’s game, the demographic is a little broad.  But still-- the tattooed skinny guy that reminds you of your punk middle school crush, the obese woman in her bucket hat and team shirt-over-MuMu look, the kids that “better damn well become a pitcher” and the dads that think that.   

#2.  Everyone..including your family.

#3.  “I’m just here for the…”  Pitcher.  Heckling.  Hotdogs.  Beer.  Women.  Strategy.  Tradition.  Nostalgia.

#4.  People can’t wait to see their favorite players.  They know the stats of those people.  They know how much they make.  When those players do something great, they freak out.

#5.  "Sure it's expensive, but it's a resource of living in that place."  People feel connected simply because it's their team.  You take pride in not being a fair-weather fan.

#6.  "You don't have to be rich to be great, you just have to be smarter than the rich guy."  Everyone knows why certain teams are good.       

#7.  All of the above information is discussed ad nauseum in the news.

I found this exhilarating.  This is what I want Questaway to be about.  Not necessarily about making things populist, but if a baseball game can stands for so many different things, no wonder people go!  It's actually sort of delightful to be sitting next to someone rooting for the other team, lick the ketchup off my lips, and say, "I'm just here for the experience."

Fall in Love: It's Personal

City Hall- the night that Prop 8/DOMA were overturned.

As you may have sniffed out, love is in the air this summer.  Literally, the day Prop 8 and DOMA are overturned in the courts, I arrive in San Francisco and see constantly, “Love is for Everyone”.  Having a love of my own be my in-house correspondent from the opera, I had the advantage of butting in to many conversations about The Tales of Hoffman and, in particular, Mark Adamo’s new The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.  Of course, we could strip these productions down a million different ways (and trust me, I’ve tried), my big take from the opera double-header is about their explorations of love.  Stop.  It’s about how the adages that have formed my own expectations in love are inextricable in my own interpretation of the works—and, more importantly, how that’s an okay way to experience them.

Good job, Questie, you’re brilliant: Hoffman’s about love.  But why?  For some reason, my first thought is about how many of my friends have proselytized about the Five Languages of Love.  These women that Hoffman loves—real or not—represent to him and to me, the ways that he wants to love that aren’t every really going to love him back.  Everybody’s been there (that desperate and humbling state), when that guy you swore you love (but your friends of course saw the signs all along), is actually someone who just plays the guitar really well and is an asshole.  You don’t love him, you love the guitar.  In Olympia, Hoffman loves for beauty (classic mistake).  In Giuletta, for lust (which we love to judge, but go ahead and throw the first stone).  In Antonia.  Antonia hits you where it hurts.  He loves her passion, her authenticity, but he doesn’t actually love her.  Watching Antonia, my mother pops into my head: “If you love someone, you can dislike things about them, but you ultimately have to accept them for who they are.  They are OKAY.”  Hoffman’s problem is that he knows deep down inside that these women are not, in fact, okay.  What the muse urges him toward is authenticity.  Which is actually an impossible thing to ask of yourself, in my opinion—to be entirely authentic in your search for love.  Which is why an opera can be written about it.  Which is a perfect segue to The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.

There aren’t just hundreds of ways to interpret this new Mark Adamo/Kevin Newbury concoction, it seems that there are hundreds of ways to understand it.  To the opera club aficionados behind me, it was about Jung.  Clearly, my Catholic anxiety was hitting an all-time high, but I was really interested in the handling of Mary Magdalene cast as a slut.  The show created these gorgeous, intimate moments in which the sacredness of touch trumps any validation of prudity history could provide you with.  But what was compelling to me was the exploration of the pure.  How to love purely.  And (even if you get it right) the judgment you’re bound to face for it—from jealous outsiders, from clueless outsiders, and from the very person that you love.  I love that the piece wasn’t about debunking historical accounts of people may or may not have understood this woman.  It was about rescripting what she could have possibly been.  Jesus saw in her a way to love deeper and not only accepted that, but needed it.  And yes, that includes touch.  Wouldn’t we hope that that the ‘savior of the world’ understood all expressions of love?  Like when you wash someone before they’re about to die?  Yep, and like when you hold them? 

And so I walked out of the theater and across the street to City Hall where DJs and rainbow tutus and stilettos danced into the night   And it struck me…when I see the works in such a biased way (and admit it), the pieces actually have the power to affect how I can understand something as pervasive and confusing as love for myself.

Shivers and Sobs: Meditation on a Royal Ballet

Ask me to go to the ballet--any ballet--and I will go.
Ask me to the Danish Royal Ballet's Romeo og Julie (yep, that's the name of it), in a perfectly old-world opera house, in which the actual Queen of Denmark appears to view from her box--and I will sob.

The orchestra played the first theme of the ballroom scene and the kind of torrential deep-bellied beast of a sob overtook me straight through the first act curtain.  At which point I considered: when was the last time I literally sobbed through a performance and how often is this happening?  Am I not the charming date I thought I was, but instead a ticking emotion-bomb?!  No.  I sobbed my way through War Horse (original cast) and a smattering death scenes, but most of the time I'm more of a shivers-at-the-theater kind of gal.

I used to have a theory that every person should keep tabs on the experiences in their lives that give them shivers--that they should pay attention to the nature of things that make them feel this way and gradually direct their lives to include those types of things more and more.  But that's a whole different soapbox.  What I'm interested in here is what differentiates a shiver-performance from a sob-performance?  And interrupts any sane person: "Ahem!  Perhaps being travel-fried, over-cultured, slightly sick, and one large glass of wine down has something to do with it?"  To which I (of course) say Pish!  When Rebecca turned to me and asked what was on my mind, explaining myself was clear, "it's perfect".  And it was.  This production was perfect storytelling being done by perfectly competent technicians and it was being performed in the place and situation (Queen's watchful gaze) that manifested all these great works through so much of history.  I've seen incredible artists before.  But never have I seen incredible artists share such an intimate story in such an exposed way and then turn to the (supposed) benefactress and deferentially curtsy to her before their audience.

I think of watching Forsythe (we saw Sider in Frankfurt the week before): those dancers too are perfect.  Or, rather, what they are doing together through their sense of ensemble and their storytelling--it makes you notice these little impulses that are deeply human and you identify with it in a way that is at once very minute and very true.  A man kicks a piece of cardboard around and his friend babbles in the distance and you think, "yeah man, tell me about it".  That's shivers.  A moment of recognition: perfection because it does something perfect.

In the case of og Julie, perfection was reached because the world Neumeier created is in and of itself perfect.  Let me explain.  I didn't watch Julie's delicate frame writhe through the towels of her nurses and her mother's starkness, her statuesque coldness, and think "yes!  that's exactly how it feels!"  I thought of a million things in tandem.  Like how I've never once understood so many small, but crucial feelings these characters are bound by.  Like how I never heard in between the musical gestures of Prokofiev's score until I saw the dancers live in them.  Like how every imperfection holds meaning: if the company is out of sync, it isn't a mistake, it's a texture in the storytelling.  This kind of sustained sub-reality builds trust with the audience and provides not impulses, but layers of humanness.  And I think that's why I sobbed.  To recognize so many aspects of yourself being told is humbling.  To recognize that the Queen of Denmark is probably feelings those same things...that's just something else.

A Respite for Tactile

Upon Arrival in Denmark...a trip to the Louisiana Art Museum.  Truly one of the most beautifully made buildings in an extraordinary landscape.  Despite the snowstorm and our travel-fatigue, this place streams light in at every angle and facilitates enormous canvases.  Again, I am awed to see old friends like the rooms devoted to Giacometti, like chapels in the light.  And a sculpture garden sitting calmly amongst the canvas of turquoise ocean and snow-- Henry Moore and Calder.  Really, one of the greatest modern art collections I've seen and in the right amount to digest before you actually go and digest the incredible seedy bread and smoked salmon and pickled vegetables at the cafe. 

The thing that is most exciting to me about this is the Channel that they've created that seems (finally!) to answer one of my clarion calls: "where do normal people that can't tour the world see and hear about modern art!"  (and it's little sister "why can't video art be online?  Is a dark white room with too few benches really so special??")  I have to delve into it more when I'm back in New York, but definitely check it out: interviews, videos, curated very much like the museum itself.  Smart and cutting-edge, but really accessible.  The Louisiana Channel