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Arts
We are crazy excited to announce that we have a judge for this year's poetry contest! Daisy Fried was a staff writer at City Paper when I started working here during the Jurassic (Park: The Lost World) era, and went on to become a poet of renown in places where poetry is properly renowned. She teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program in North Carolina and writes for the New York Times, Threepenny Review and Poetry. Her latest book, Women's Poetry is funny and touching and a joy to read. Here's what the New York Times had to say:
Fried is a poet who will “tense up” when she hears “an affirming poem,” finding “Sourness a kind of joy I try for intricately.” Her present-tense poems vividly record the impressions of our moment: road rage, smartphones, magnet loops, Facebook, a “gun megachurch.”
Point is they loved it. Read the whole review here.
SO: Get to it poets! And fiction writers!
The deadline is Tuesday. Here are all the details.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: The Hand of Gaul
GENRE: Theater
GROUP: Inis Nua Theatre Company
ATTENDED:Wed., April 10, 7 p.m., Off-Broad Street Theater
CLOSES: April 28
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: When French soccer superstar Thierry Henry single-handedly knocks Ireland out of the 2010 World Cup with an unchecked foul, three fiercely proud (albeit not overly bright) Irish fans decide to avenge their team.
WE THINK: Jared Michael Delaney's new play is a barrage of ridiculousness. Delaney, Adam Altman, and Harry Smith engage in non stop non sequiturs, arcane movie references, and Three Stooges-style violence. They pull together enough to hire a hit man — Le Falcone (Damon Bonetti), an English-mangling Belgian with a pencil-thin moustache also obsessed with Henry — to avenge Ireland's stolen honor.
This would be enough for great fun, but director Tom Reing adds witty live accompaniment by Langabeer & Machiz on guitar, bass, accordion, drums, banjo, penny whistle and saw, plus video by Janelle Kauffman of hilarious dueling press conferences from Irish president Mary McAleese (Megan Bellwoar) and French president Nicolas Sarkozy (Leonard Haas) — AND convenient pop-up facts about soccer, beer, and bad movies. Some of J. Alex Cordaro's fight choreography is rendered in gloriously silly slow motion. Delaney's script is boldly politically incorrect (the debate about national slurs is outrageous), yet concludes with a constructive moral.
The Hand of Gaul is performed with a comfortable looseness, a knowing wink to the audience that the cast is having as much fun as we are. I can't think about it now without shaking my head and laughing.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Parents with cameras disrupt a solemn Holocaust play.
Deadline: 5 p.m., Tuesday, April 16
Fiction: $5 entry fee per story. Stories should be 3,000 words or less and previously unpublished. No more than three fiction submissions per author.
Poetry: $5 entry fee per five poems. No more than 10 poems per poet.
Prizes: Winners get all the money — minus the judges’ honorariums — and have their work printed in City Paper. Runners up, also chosen by the judges, get posted online. Hopefully there will be a reading, too (but we said that last year).
The first Hidden City festival in 2009 opened the doors of several usually inaccessible buildings to the public, from the fairly well-known, like the Inquirer Building's tower, to the obscure, like Tacony's Disston Saw Works, to the truly spectacular, like the broken-down stage of the former Met-franchise opera house on North Broad. Each space had a specific art or music installation somehow related to the building's history.
So they're doing it again from May 23-June 30, they announced this morning, and they need a lot of volunteers and cash to pull it off: Nine (probably) projects across eight sites, each with its own separate Kickstarter-like thing to route donations of money, man-hours or specific items (tools, old musical instruments, etc.) to whichever project the donator is most interested in.
While the partner artists are mostly well established - Ars Nova, Data Garden, King Britt, the Dufala Brothers - I'm not embarrassed to admit that I'd heard of only one of the sites, Washington Square's Athenaeum, where the press conference was actually being held. The other sites were a pretty interesting scatter plot around the city: A in Germantown, a South Philly synagogue that's going to be slowly covered by textiles from Andrew Dahlgren's knitting machines, Frankford's Globe Dye Factory. The only place I could even picture off the top of my head was the building at Lancaster and Powelton in West Philly, which will be turned into what sounds like a giant pillow fort minus the pillows.
The sites will be open Thursday-Sunday over the stretch of the festival. Unfortunately, it's still a little pricey — $25 for single tickets, $150 for a pass to everything NOTE: That's what they said at the press conference, but just got an email update:
We’re offering special discounted deals on the Festival tickets and passes to Hidden City members. The regular price for a one day Festival pass is $20; a weekend pass $40; an all Festival pass $70. Members will pay only $15, $30, and $50 so we encourage you to become a Hidden City member today.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: The Butterfly Project
GENRE: Family theater
GROUP: Wolf Performing Arts Center
ATTENDED: Mon., April 8, 7:30 p.m., Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: The play by Celeste Raspanti, I Never Saw Another Butterfly, based on the book of the same name, uses the art and poetry from the children of Terezin [Concentration Camp] to tell their story of courage and survival. ... a young Jewish girl enters the concentration camp alone. Just when all seems lost, she meets a hopeful teacher who helps her and the rest of the children express themselves through art and poetry.
WE THINK: More a testament than a play, I Never Saw Another Butterfly reveals the terror and dismay felt by children sent to the Terezin concentration camp; of the more than 15,000 who passed through, only 100 survived World War II. Wolf has performed it for free 40 times all over the area over the 2012-2013 season at community venues and schools; on Holocaust Remembrance Day, they got to do it in the Kimmel Center.
An eloquent love story narrated by a survivor is framed by the stark historical facts, staged with brutal simplicity: directors Tim Popp and Bobbi Wolf fill the stage with children who are gradually marched off to death camps until only one is left. At the end, though, Lorna Dreyfuss' colorful tapestry of over 4000 handmade butterflies expresses hope with a triumphant burst of color.
Unfortunately, the Holocaust Remembrance Day performance I attended was marred by camera-wielding parents, who treated this poetic and solemn play about one of history's great tragedies like a TMZ celebrity ambush. Some didn't even have the sense to turn off their flashes, which are useless with stage lighting but are maddeningly distracting to the rest of the audience. We know it must be exciting, but seriously: Just turn off the gadgets and be there. Pay respect with your undivided attention.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Freude, schöner Götterfunken, tochter aus Elysium! Wir betreten feuertrunken — himmlische, dein Heiligtum!
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
(Full disclosure: CP arts editor Emily Guendelsberger is a member of Mendelssohn Club and sang in this concert; the writer of this review was not aware of this.)
SHOW: The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Beethoven’s 9th Symphony
GENRE: Music
GROUP: The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia / Mendelssohn Club
ATTENDED: Sun., April 7, 2:30 p.m., Verizon Hall, Kimmel Center
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Journey to a historic moment in time with a program that commemorates the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989, leading to Germany’s reunification.
WE THINK: “Strange bedfellows” is how conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn described his pairing of Scorpions’1991 hit “Wind of Change” with Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. As symbolic and beloved as the song is, it’s a kitschy rock ballad, and orchestrating it along with tenor Adam Frandsen performing vocals and two projection screens displaying the Berlin photography of James Abbott only emphasized how overwrought the anthem is.
After that opener, Solzhenitsyn (whose father is indeed that Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, who was mistreated, imprisoned and eventually deported by the Soviet Union for his human-rights activism) spoke at length about his own memories of the fall of the eastern bloc. Then the concert truly began.
First was Smirnov’s ominous Epitaph for the Victims of Communism, which trickled away on plucked strings so subtly one hardly even knew it has just passed — a penetrating evocation of how thousands of people passed into silence, unacknowledged.
Finally, the 9th — and for all of us philistines whose collective memory had reduced it to nothing but the famous choral fourth movement, the first two movements came on like a force of nature, each shift in tempo and variation in theme containing a thrilling suddenness. And to hear hints of the famous “Ode to Joy” theme in the second movement was to be surprised by it all over again.
Still, the fourth movement was ecstatic, with the choir on their feet and bobbing, the four soloists soaring, the orchestra obviously animated in their playing and Solzhenitsyn with a forward lean in his body, hands conjuring both choir and orchestra. The last note had hardly sounded before the audience was on its feet in sonorous applause, where it stayed for several minutes.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: A… postmodern flamenco gynecologist? It’s cool, it made sense at the time.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: 1096
GENRE: Dance
GROUP: Pasión y Arte/Fresh Blood
ATTENDED: Sat., April 6, 7:30 p.m., Fleischer Art Memorial
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Two all-female-companies interweave women's stories through the layering of text, song and dance while investigating the dialogue between the distinct languages of its two artistic collaborators, flamenco and post-modern.
WE THINK: Flamenco, a centuries-old Spanish dance style featuring controlled structures and complex rhythms is an odd pairing with postmodern technique, built on release and rule-breaking. Plus, the piece is inspired by women's history from 1096 onward, and subtitled "The Birth of the First Female Gynecologist." Ay caramba, how's that gonna work?
Splendidly, it turns out. The divergent dance styles merge seamlessly, though Flamenco gets the upper hand. It's a treat to see the post modern aesthetic adapt flamenco's emotional fervor and expressive arm movements. The evocation of journey comes by way of the dancers moving about Fleisher Art Memorial's historic cathedral-style sanctuary, performing various flamenco forms and hybrids thereof. A live flamenco singer goes along, intoning poetic songs. The lyrics are Spanish, but even if you don't speak that language (like me), the passion and pathos ring through loud and clear. The audience is close to the action, making the performer's intensity all the more visceral. Powerfully expressive, this one worked on all fronts. Olé!
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: King's College does great justice to Britten.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: The Arc of Curiosity
GENRE: Music
GROUP: Network for New Music
ATTENDED: 8 p.m. April 5, Rose Recital Hall
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Follow that path of the arc of a composer’s curiosity, and discover the many ways that electronic sound can join traditional instruments to become part of our own musical landscape.
WE THINK: The full event description brings up ENIAC (the first all-purpose computer) and how combining electronic music with traditional instruments can lead to a "third space" that extends the human imagination, so you might expect electronics to have a central role in the music. However, with these works technology mostly plays second fiddle to standard chamber music instruments. The combined sounds are of studious process-oriented design, more intellectual than emotional; the exception being James Primosh's Chamber Concerto, which features expressive clarinet solos and hints of jazz swing music.
And what of the "third space" to extend our imagination? Well, that's in the ear of the beholder. I noticed lots of folks listening with their eyes closed to more clearly focus on the sonics: A sign of minds letting the music take you away to private places, though I found these works to be too punctilious to be so moved myself.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Lady history in books.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: From Seneca Falls to Philadelphia: Fourth of July 1876 and the Women of the Centennial
GENRE: Lecture/exhibition
GROUP: Athenaeum of Philadelphia / Philadelphia Center for the Book
ATTENDED: Friday, April 5, 5 p.m., Athenaeum of Philadelphia
CLOSES: April 27
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: The Athenaeum’s extensive collections regarding the 1876 Centennial Exposition combine in this exhibition with the response of contemporary book artists to the themes of the Centennial, Susan B. Anthony and Women’s Suffrage, and the 1876 Fourth of July.
WE THINK: Even without this year’s PIFA theme for context, stepping into the Athenaeum of Philadelphia feels a bit like traveling backwards in time. A member-supported library designed and built in the mid 19th-century, it’s an obvious fit for an exhibition celebrating Philadelphia women of the centennial. “From Seneca Falls to Philadelphia” features work by ten contemporary book artists responding to themes of patriotism and women’s rights.
Several of the pieces are fictional accounts of Philadelphia women of the era—imaged facsimiles of what their personal journals or photo albums might have looked like. Others are more formally experimental, like Susan Bonthron’s Almost There, a scroll printed with the silhouettes of famous female suffragists and contained by four walls of translucent American flags. The exhibition’s standout piece is Carol Phillips To The Ladies Declaration. A two-dimensional work formed by two joined, light green pages, Phillips’ piece juxtaposes text from the Declaration of the Rights of Women of the United States with text and images from a corset pamphlet distributed by Alice C. Fletcher & Company. (We weren't allowed to take photos in the gallery, unfortunately.)
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Dizzy Gillespie on Philly jazz.
These huge arts festivals can be overwhelming — how to figure out what's worth seeing? CP's sending someone to nearly every event PIFA's putting on over the next month to help you decide, so check back with Critical Mass all month long for comprehensive, ongoing reviews.
SHOW: Last Call at the Downbeat
GENRE: Theater/music
GROUP: Jazz Bridge
ATTENDED: Fri., April 5, 8 p.m.,, Society Hill Playhouse
CLOSES: April 13
BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: In November, 1942, 25-year-old trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie is in Philadelphia leading his own quartet at the Downbeat Club… he’s anxious to play you a little and tell you a lot about Philadelphia jazz — back in the day.
WE THINK: The voice of Dizzy Gillespie is divided between two performers in Suzanne Cloud’s new play: the energetic actor Erin Fleming portrays the legendary trumpeter as a gregarious 25-year-old sharing his life story, while Duane Eubanks blows some pre-bop trumpet, fronting a quartet standing in for the one that Gillespie led seventy years earlier at Philly’s Downbeat Club.
As the director and co-founder of Jazz Bridge, Suzanne Cloud has long been a staunch advocate for Philly jazz as well as an educator and a performer in her own right. All of those aspects come together in her first play, which is equal parts biographical sketch, history lesson and musical demonstration.
Drawn from Gillespie’s memoir, To Be Or Not To Bop, the show captures the soon-to-be innovator at a key moment. He’s at a low point, just fired from the bands of Cab Calloway and Lucky Millinder, but on the verge of changing the direction of jazz forever with the “new way,” bebop.
A monologue with extensive musical interludes, Last Call at the Downbeat teeters between drama and lecture, at times overstuffed with names and dates. But despite some opening-night stumbles, Fleming is engaging enough to temper the show’s more didactic tendencies, and Eubanks’ band keeps the music center stage.
PREVIOUSLY IN PIFA: Evolution vs. …not.
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