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| October 2008 »
Camelback II: Dance, Physical Theater, Contexts
A few of us — Lily, Natalie and I — left the hotel at 10 a.m. and climbed Camelback on our second day here.
© Lily Baldwin, 2008
On the way up, I commented that our audiences, who are pretty much universally loving the dance elements, would probably, most of them, never go to see a contemporary dance performance if it was in town. We agreed that somehow this context removes any sense of pretension and fear from the viewer. There is none of the intellectual questioning and pondering by the audience that often occurs at a dance or at a performance context. No one is asking, “What does this mean? Do I get it? Do I like it? Is this over my head?”
Somehow mixed with popular music, these elements in the show bypass those critical and questioning centers and people receive them as part and parcel of the total performance. If they are enjoying it, then it must be OK. Lily suggests that dance, often marginalized but now increasingly so, needs to insert itself into other places and join with other media, as this show does in its own way. She mentioned some places dance might fit: fashion shows (which is a great idea to make those events a little more acknowledged as performance); film; fine art; and elsewhere.
Orpheum Theater
The renovated Orpheum Theater here in Phoenix is beautiful, as is its namesake in Memphis. I hope that with the changing fortunes and structures in the worlds of music and performance, these places, ornate palaces for performance, will flourish once again. Maybe, as people crave the authenticity of a live show and music in a world of virtual and limitless interconnectivity, these places will be increasingly well attended.
© Lily Baldwin, 2008
This one had a built-in lighting effect that mimicked clouds passing over the starlit sky. The giant murals are of Monument Valley/Sedona-type landscapes — God’s theater.
Phoenix
At 10 a.m., a group of six of us left on bikes to hike up nearby Camelback Mountain and the climb was strenuous, fun, and exhilarating. After a while, the Echo Canyon Trail we took got rockier and steeper; we had to use installed railings to help pull ourselves up some parts, and then other parts were a long scramble up towards the summit.
© Lily Baldwin, 2008
A man named Claude came up behind us when we were not quite halfway up and asked if we needed water. This guy was going to offer us his own water!? It seems Claude is a self-appointed Good Samaritan on this trail. He has gone up and down every other day for 20 years now! He said we really needed more water than we had with us (one small bottle each) so he topped us up and directed us when to bear right or left.
At the summit there was a lovely breeze and one could see the immense sprawl of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, and the many extravagantly green golf courses scattered here and there.
Mark, Mauro and I © Jenni Muldaur, 2008
When I commented on how much water it must take to keep those yards and golf courses green, Claude offered that the golf courses at least use gray water — recycled from toilets — but it’s still water that’s got to come from somewhere, and those somewheres are drying up fast.
Lily organized an early morning trip for a group of us in a hot air balloon. Six a.m. is a little early for us, but 6 of us got up and were met by Jeff Hooten. He drove us to a field behind a pre-fab church on the northern outskirts of town where we could see others in neighboring fields also dragging large wicker baskets, propane burners, and balloons out of small trailers. A fan blew regular air into the unfurled balloon, which inflated it, but didn’t make it rise. It was a weird whale lying beached.
© Lily Baldwin, 2008
The basket, now attached, lay on its side. We were enlisted to hold towropes and keep the opening open for the fan. When it was well engorged, like a strange cave-shaped tent in a vacant lot, the propane blowers were directed away from the fabric and the thing began to rise. Jeff’s assistants held more cables and as the basket righted itself, the balloon rose above it and we clambered in.
[Link to video of balloon launch]
Barely a few minutes after, with another blast of the flame, we rose into the air, silently above the church and towards the trees and brush of the Rio Grande floodplain. We could see suburban sprawl and early morning traffic and the sun was just rising over the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance.
It was strangely not terrifying — even though we could have easily leaned out over the waist high wicker basket and tumbled out. We could now see the river and the levee that we’d biked on, and not too far away we could see other balloons rising.
© Lily Baldwin, 2008
The balloon would rise and fall in a delayed reaction as Jeff blasted the flame from time to time. When he didn’t blast, there was a beautiful silence as the light breeze caught us and carried us downstream following the floodplain. The balloon seemed, at times, perilously close to going into the trees — and Jeff intentionally let the basket touch the uppermost branches a couple of times. Then we’d silently rise up again. On one stretch, he let the basket drop low enough that it dipped into the river; the river water flooded the bottom of the basket.
Up we went again, about 3000 feet above the land. We could see beyond the suburban sprawl to the desert surrounding Albuquerque, including some small volcanoes and mesas in the distance.
© Lily Baldwin, 2008
As the propane level in the tank began to shrink, it was time to think about where to “land.” Jeff’s assistants had been trailing us on the ground in their SUV, and I suspect that the wind currents and therefore the balloon trajectories are fairly similar day to day. Jeff radioed them that the St. Pius X High School ball fields in the near distance looked like a likely spot. He prepared us for a balloon landing, which depending might mean the basket hits the ground, bounces, and then tips over.
We landed in a baseball field, after a couple of bounces and slowly, as the balloon gradually cooled, we could get out of the basket. But we still had to hang on to keep our weight holding the thing down. Jeff’s assistant’s SUV was in a parking lot on the other side of the 12-foot ball field fence and the balloon guys said it sure would be better to have the balloon and the basket on that side…so…Jeff reblasted the balloon one more time and we all hung onto the outside (the outside!) as the balloon rose just enough to drift over the fence and into the parking lot on the other side.
We arrived in Albuquerque around 11 a.m. after a bathroom stop in Roswell, the town that has aliens in all their shop windows. Around here, the highway interchanges are painted to look like adobe.
© Lily Baldwin, 2008
A group of us biked down along Central Avenue — past tempting looking Mexican restaurants and thrift stores and a wedding in progress in Old Town — to a park that runs along the banks of the Rio Grande. A well-maintained gravel road runs on top of a levee, but I, possibly (and in retrospect, very) unwisely, steered everyone to a primitive trail that runs along the riverbank. (You can barely see the river from the levee trail.) After biking through some scrub and scratchy bushes, we arrived at a kind of little beach. I slipped in, keeping my jellies on. The banks were of squishy clay and the water was muddy but seemed clean. The current wasn’t too strong and as we waded out, the bottom turned to sand and the depth was only about up to our knees most of the time. Little by little, we all made our way to the opposite riverbank. A kind of baptism of sorts. Had this been a little further downstream we would have found ourselves in Mexico.
More biking through itchy scratchy sunflowers and brush. Though we were still on a path, it was barely a path, and eventually we headed up to the road along the ridge of the levee. By this time, due to the goat’s head burrs that clung to tires and pant legs and socks, 3 of us had gotten flat tires. More will happen to others as more goat’s head thorns worm their way into some tires. Apparently the locals know to coat their tires with some kind of slime that helps prevent these flats, but we didn’t know about it. I biked by a bike store later and got some replacement inner tubes. A generous helpful customer at a gas station assisted in repairing Natalie’s pedal that had fallen off.
On the ride over to Barton Springs, Lily and I discussed our continual fine-tuning of some dance phrases. As is right, she wants to adhere to the choreographers’ creations, but she wonders if we could both honor their intentions and tighten up specific bits. I suggested we take it bit by bit. Perhaps making the phrases at the end of “I Feel My Stuff” less in phase — in 3 or 5 as opposed to 4 (which we agreed seemed to be Noemie’s original intention) before varying the arm movements. We’ll see…
The abbreviated show tonight at the ACL festival was fun; we played as the sun was setting, so we could actually see the massive audience, which gave them a human face. Massive festival audiences can sometimes lose their identity as individual human beings. We cut a lot of the ballads from the set to both keep the energy up and to adhere to the 60 minute time limit — it worked.
Before our show, Jenni, Natalie and I caught a little bit of the Hot Chip set at one of the other stages, which was great. Great grooves, nerdy guys, funny but moving lyrics and catchy tunes. Natalie was hesitant to go see them at all given our time constraint; our show was looming and the festival runs like clockwork, but we made it to their stage and back to our dressing room with minutes to spare.
As festivals go, this one is special. Though they sometimes end up with mega bands as headliners, it’s almost an accident when that happens. For the most part, the booking seems to be less about blockbusters and more about a mix of some interesting music that’s out there.
Austin
Biked out to Barton Springs pool with Graham, Lily, Natalie, Kaïssa, Jenni, Mark and Steven. What a wonderful place! Have been to Austin many times but had yet to go swimming here. A natural spring has been used to create a massive pool in a city park. Surrounding the pool are walls of natural rock, some man-made walls and fish swim in the deeper areas. The water is chilly, but you get used to it. Other towns should do this if they can — if they cleaned up their rivers, they could create secure walled-in areas of river water or even ocean water, as they do in Australian cities.
[Source]
Memphis
In the afternoon, one group went to the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and raved about how interesting, well thought out, and moving it is. I went to visit Winston Eggleston regarding a project to project some of his dad’s photos onto the side of a massive former Sears building here in November. This project would coincide with dad Bill’s upcoming retrospective at the Whitney in New York City. Jenni and Graham stopped by Willie Mitchell’s studio, where so many amazing records were and are recorded. On my way to the Eggleston Trust, I took a phone call from Teenie Hodges, co-writer of “Take Me to the River,” while I was biking down Poplar Avenue. (Teenie played guitar on most of those great Al Green songs and hundreds of others.) We agreed to connect in a few hours.
Between the richness of the Country music that we had soaked up by osmosis in Nashville and the Soul music that still lives in this town, a big part of my cynicism that continually dogs me about the U.S. got lifted, slightly. The beauty and depth of the music from many of these places is simply astounding. There are scoundrels and greed and things are fucked up, but look at the music these folks have produced and you sense there’s a lot of soul and heart beyond the highways and strip malls. Not just the music — Teenie joined us on stage for our version of his song wearing a bright yellow and blue outfit with an open shirt revealing a kind of shiny blue spandex wifebeater. I am reminded of Elvis’ outfits too, and all those spangly Nudie suits the Country artists used to wear — a whole world of haberdashery untouched by the fashion and tastes of the big coastal cities.
We sat around the catering table backstage after soundcheck as Teenie told stories about being mistaken for Al Green (he signed a lot of autographs) and playing on an Albert Collins session without knowing who he was — thinking to himself, “Who is this unhip guy with the process? And why is a white man carrying his amp for him?” After the Collins session got underway, they cut maybe 7 songs in 3 hours. Teenie, nicknamed Cool Breeze by his bandmates (many of whom were his brothers) was nudged by one of them who said, “What do you think NOW, Breeze?”
At the end of our set, as I began to introduce Teenie as “someone many of you will know,” someone in the audience shouted out his name, confirming my suspicion that these guys — Teenie, his brothers, and many others — are not completely overlooked and unknown in their home town. Sometimes there is a little tiny bit of justice.
Asheville
A lovely small town with a few schools tucked in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. The sweet pungent smell of North Carolina’s finest filled the air during the concert. The county also harbors a lot of money — a Vanderbilt mansion is open for tours at $47 a head, so we gave that a pass. Instead, a group of us — Natalie, Jenni, Lily, Steven and I — went for a bike ride on a road that goes through Biltmore Forest, passing one large house or mansion after another. A beautiful old one was for sale; we found an open basement window and took a look inside.
© Natalie Kuhn, 2008
Further down the road, we passed an incredible country club with people on the porch of the clubhouse drinking ice teas enjoying a view of the surrounding mountains. At another empty mansion, we discovered a flock of wild turkeys on the back porch that calmly fled into the nearby forest as we approached…and there was an abandoned trampoline. Steven knows how to do flips — front, back, and a side flip, I think, he called a Brandy. He also showed us how to “assist your bounce,” where he pushes down on the trampoline while someone else is bouncing on it, shooting them up in the air.
© Natalie Kuhn, 2008
The ride back to the hotel was mostly downhill so one didn’t have to pedal as much.
© Steven Reker, 2008
Nashville
In Nashville, I stopped by a great local record store, Grimey’s, and signed a bunch of old records and various odds and ends. Mostly though it was just to say hello. Kurt from the group Lambchop stopped by — also on his bike, as he lives nearby — and gave me a copy of their new CD. There was a lot of talk about the gas shortage in the area, which was news to me, as there has been no mention of it in the national news. Many gas stations have closed (temporarily, they hope) because they can’t get gas. Hurricane-related disruptions on the Colonial Pipeline, which runs from the Gulf to New Jersey, are the reason, so we are told. It seems pretty serious, at least around here. The guys at the record store said no one has been in lately since everyone is conserving gas. People spend hours searching for a station with gas, and then they have to wait in line, sometimes for hours. Some folks can’t get to work, as they are totally reliant on their cars for transport.
For our show at the former Grand Ole Opry, we quickly learned a couple of country standards, “There Stands the Glass” and “Half as Much,” which both sounded pretty good, given an afternoon’s rehearsal.
Atlanta
This will be our fourth show. It’s going incredibly well so far. Even though the Newport News, Virginia audience was a little restrained for a while, they were up and dancing by the end. The dancing element of the show really lifts everything to another level. At first, I was concerned that it would even “work” and be a real integrated part of the show. It is. In Baltimore, at the Lyric Theater, someone yelled out in the middle of the show, “This is the best show EVER!” Wow, I thought to myself, you can’t ask for more than that. It makes me feel strange to say it, but this exhilaration at seeing something slightly risky work reminds me a little of the first few times Talking Heads performed as an expanded band. Then, as now, we’d rehearsed for weeks but had no idea if it would actually work in front of our audience — yet it did. Seeing this work gives me a similar feeling.
My daddy took me to the Lyric in Baltimore to see Ravi Shankar when I was in high school in the late 60s. That says something about what I was into back then and also how supportive my dad was of my musical interests. Actually, going to an Indian music concert wasn’t so hip or unusual then, as Shankar was known to everyone via his Beatles connection…but still.
Just before we left Baltimore, the dancers and singers visited us from their bus (ours has too much testosterone). The driver popped the bay extension (the front lounge extends out about a foot and a half sideways) on our bus and immediately some of the singers and dancers jumped up and began to dance to the Earth, Wind and Fire track that was on the TV system. The lounge became a club, filled with jumping gyrating bodies and wiggling arms. The drivers had to get going, so the bay eventually slid back in, but I heard that the party continued on the other bus as we headed south. I have an image of the band bus filled with boys nursing drinks watching a couple of episodes of The Wire — which is what we did — while on the other bus, one might see a window filled with silhouettes of dancing bodies.
In Newport News, a group of us biked to the beach on the banks of the James River — a long trip, mostly on local highways, passing chain restaurants, industrial parks, gas stations and a steak joint offering square dancing. The residential areas are tucked in behind these strips, I guess, as there were none visible from these connecting roads. There’s an airbase nearby as well. Fighter jets streaked overhead now and then. There’s no town visible in any direction, just endless sprawl. At one point we reached a crossroads, which appeared to be the remnants of a small town, now mostly converted to a row of antique stores, but still pretty quaint. Eventually we found a small beach next to a massive bridge beyond which lay a huge naval station and port. A few of us waded in the water as a film crew set up nearby to shoot a girl in Goth makeup for a TV commercial.
The day after our first show in Bethlehem, videos of the show began appearing on You Tube, the day after that blurbs and photos appeared on Pitchfork and more recently on Rolling Stone. The concept of an out-of-town date that is beyond the view of the media is obviously a thing of the past. Band members’ distant friends wrote them asking, “How do you like dressing all in white?” — something they’d discovered watching us online. How are we — how is anyone — supposed to get the bugs out of a show? Well, we did have plenty of rehearsal, so we’re OK….but in the past many shows wouldn’t gel until they had been tested and honed in front of a live audience for at least a couple of weeks. That luxury is gone.
© Tony Orlando, 2008
A professional photographer I ran into backstage said from his point of view it seemed odd that press professionals are limited to taking pictures of the first 3 songs, while the phone camera and video hoards — the audience holding up their phones with little red lights we can see from the stage — are completely unrestricted. “What are you going to do,” I replied, “take everyone’s phones away from them?”
Here in Atlanta, I biked downtown to the Contemporary Art Center — a long-ass ride down Peachtree Street, and longer ride uphill on the way back. The center is in the middle of a small warehouse district tucked between some train tracks, highways, and vacant lots. That evening they had an event that eight of us attended. A local performance artist hosted a kind of mock talk show. The artist/host had a DJ instead of a band, and when he emerged he was dressed all in black, with a cigar and an asymmetrical Afro fade I haven’t seen since the 70s. An auspicious beginning. The artist/host's “guests” were a local woman who is an artist/curator, a historian who was also a delegate at the Democratic convention, and a young man who had just signed a deal with Universal to put out his next record. The event had its ups and downs — the historian was the most engaging — but what made it different than contemporary art events I’ve attended in New York was that the crowd was at least 60% black. Although there was plenty of talk of politics and identity as one would get at a New York African American art event, here there seemed to be a more comfortable mix than I would imagine at a similar event in New York. There was more relaxed laughter and fewer attitudes than up North. The historian bragged that he’d gotten chewed out by Vernon Jordan for a piece he’d written in The New York Times proposing that if Obama wins there won’t be as many jobs for civil rights activists. His comment didn’t go down that well with many of the old guard here in Atlanta. Seems this might be a general reflection of the aspirations, attitudes, and ease among the local community — a pretty good feeling.
The Atlanta show was in a large (4000+) outdoor venue with a covered stage and small tables for food and drinks up front. We’d been warned it might be a picnic crowd that would view the musical acts as background for their Southern social get-together. That proved not to be the case though. By the second song, some audience members were up and dancing. And by the end, the audience, on their feet, demanded a 3rd encore. Everyone — the band, dancers, and singers — was on stage, taking what we thought was a final bow after the second encore. Then suddenly, like a wave, there was a massive swell of applause and shouting, an almost frightening surge. A human roar. We looked at each other and realized we really should do one more song. Paul mouthed the title of an extra song we knew, and I nodded.
© Tony Orlando, 2008
Post-show, Lily commented that in comparison to the polite audience response usually given to dance performances or opera (or classical music), the audience response for a pop concert — well, ours anyway — is so exhilarating and thrilling. She asked, “What do you do?” Lily was so energized that she said she was ready to run laps or something just to burn herself out and get rid of the excess energy, though it was too late in the evening.
I mentioned the article Alex Ross recently wrote for The New Yorker, in which he gives a short history of how audiences for classical and opera (and by extension, dance and performance art, etc.) changed, and to some extent why. It’s well known that early opera audiences were rowdy, socializing and rubbernecking throughout the performances. But this behavior extended to a lot of what we consider the classical repertoire as well. For example, audiences shouted out requests and performers made an effort to “entertain”. At some point, he says, the middle class, the bourgeoisie, wanted in, as it would surely give them some status. And in the process, the current requirement that audiences sit in rapt silence, applauding only at the end and never ever shouting out, began to establish itself as the mode for audience behavior. It certainly wasn’t always the way it is now — it was more like the concert we just gave in Atlanta. Something was gained and something was lost as audiences changed, at least as Ross describes it. With a quiet theater, more subtleties could become part of the performances, more nuances could be heard, and work and composition evolved accordingly. But, as we know, a lot of excitement was lost too. I wonder if some social element may have been lost as well, as audiences were expected to adhere to proscribed rules of behavior. Part of the pleasure of attending any performance is social. It’s cathartic, energizing, and we get to mix with lots of other people — something we sometimes like to do. Sitting in silence is nice sometimes. The polite socializing happens, maybe during intermission, but the pure social release of a more rowdy and enthusiastic bunch has its merits too.
Yesterday, we did 2 run-throughs — not at full speed — with the dancers and the band playing. It worked. Whew! Some of us, like me, forgot some steps and lyrics (we can’t have our music stands anymore since they get in the way) but overall, I was thrilled. We crammed into the rehearsal room with Marley flooring laid out to somewhat soften the effect of the concrete floor and to replicate the size of the theater stages where we’ll be playing.
The flooring took up so much of the room that the space for observers (our “audience”) was limited to a 2-foot wide wedge against one wall. The virtual front of the stage was a foot away from a wall — so that’s what I sang to — a wall.
Choreographer Annie-B watched most of the day and commented that her fear that it might be strange having some numbers with lots of dancing (i.e., many visual things going on) and others with not so much (where it’s just the band playing) was allayed. I wondered how the songs without dancing would stand up and she thought it was actually good that at least half of the numbers don’t have dancing. It gives the eyes a rest and a chance to enjoy the band — who are sounding good. Amazing actually — I got the hairy arm on one song (goose bumps).
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