Some updates on my History of the Future Suite process

posted by Flynn N.A.S.A. grant artist Selene Colburn, writing about her work-in-progress, The History of the Future Suite

First of all, I’m struck more and more by how much of the creative process for this piece is really about navigating the collective act of making. If that’s not how we construct/imagine our futures, I don’t know what is. It barely even feels right to call it “my process,” really it’s ours right now.

As I start to shape the material over the remaining months (is there already only a month left?) in preparation for the 6/17 showing, and add some of the textual elements, I wonder how this dynamic will change. My voice is certainly present in current iterations of the material; I hope it doesn’t drown anything out in the “final” product.

The unison form continues to evolve beautifully, from its somewhat rarified life as a quartet two weeks ago to its more recent incarnation as an epic, high-volume wave of prolonged stillness and near misses.

The up-and-over form is receiving more of my attention at present, because it’s big, messy, loud, unclear, urgent, demanding. I love it. We need signals, and we need to strike the right balance between structure, improvisation, and choreography. It’s hard to prepare for this sequence from week to week, because my own body won’t let me do much weight bearing ahead of time. And how accurately can one really project the mechanics of 10 or more bodies crawling/hurtling/rolling/hoisting at once?

The reading list grows. Most inspiring is the study of twins separated at birth, about which I’m also doing some writing. This led to the development of a simple unison duet structure, which was blessed last week by the beautiful and thoughtful execution of CeeCee and Joy.

Tonight I head back into the study to work on the solo section. I hope I’ll soon experience the “so this is how it all fits together” click I had in relation to the separate forms last week with the solo material soon.

The beautiful photographs you see here are the work of Daisy Benson.

Balance and Unity

posted by Flynn N.A.S.A. grant artist Selene Colburn, writing about her work-in-progress, The History of the Future Suite

Twelve dancers on Sunday, and a baby. Josh wants to know when he gets to throw somebody and I’m still wondering how to balance the small, the tiny against the potency of the many.

I keep giving instructions about the unison form, which now includes some much-needed level-shifting in the form of a kneeling sequence, as such: “Your goal is to execute these moves in any order, until you are doing this phrase in unison at the end.”

The unspoken goal is to make an interesting or pretty or compelling or watchable or thought-provoking or engaging dance along the way. Meghan is really good at asking me those “What are you really after?” questions. Otherwise, as she pointed out a couple of weeks ago, wouldn’t we all just do the phrase in unison right at the start and be done?

Because we were a big group, we got to watch medium-sized groups doing this. It’s really powerful when there are long stretches of almost-unison. The vocabulary is so limited that as a viewer you can take in the pattern and variation that occurs. Some of the watchers said it was really beautiful. We got better at ending together without talking about it.

I tried to make people articulate the group thinking/being/acting that occurs in improvisation, especially as there are some seasoned improvisers in the group. We agreed that you can see it, you can hear it, and in a much less tangible way you can feel it—it feels like a rippling effect maybe.

Tonight I’m heading into the studio and I’m going to bring research materials for both the solo and the group work. I’m looking for books on formal systems of gesture, e.g. sign language and elocution manuals. If anyone has any ideas I’m eager to hear them.

Actors Appreciate Student Audiences

posted by Christina Weakland, Director of Education

This Tuesday morning I came to work with a spring in my step. Student matinee show days are always like that—you can’t help but smile when you see a house full of schoolchildren excitedly anticipating the magic that awaits them onstage, listen to the buzz of their uncontained enthusiasm, and most of all hear the big “Ooooooooooh!” when the lights finally go down and that fantastic red curtain goes up. Over 43,000 children come through the Flynn doors every year for school-time matinees that cover topics as wide ranging as healthy body image to Shakespeare to the Underground Railroad, and I bet that the majority of our community doesn’t even know that such a program exists.

But this past Tuesday I learned something I didn’t know as well. I didn’t know that our Flynn school audiences were actually well-known within the community of touring theater companies for their rapt attention and engagement in performances! After this Tuesday’s 9:30 am performance of Color of Justice, a moving look at the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case that ultimately set the Civil Rights Movement on a winning course, I took a Flynn teaching artist down to the green room to chat with the actors from Theatreworks USA in between shows. Karen was teaching post-performance companion workshops in schools and wanted to ask a few questions in order to have an inside scoop for her classes.

The actors were as gracious as could be, giving us some of their precious downtime to talk about the touring experience. Not at all the “glamorous life” of lore, touring is tough on performers—keeping them far from friends and family for months at a time. But as they touched on some of the harder aspects of life on the road, one of the performers told us what a treat it is to know that they’re coming to the Flynn, where not only is there a highly-skilled technical crew to help them set up, run, and break down the show, but most importantly there are highly-prepared and highly-engaged audiences—who make the challenges of performing worthwhile. “We can TELL,” he said. “We can TELL when students have been prepped for a performance. In other cities it’s all…” [He and another actor broke into a mime of young audiences fidgeting, text messaging, and poking one another.] “But here, they’re alert, they’re attentive, and they GET it—we can tell.”

What a thrill, to hear that the work we care so much about—creating comprehensive study guides and developing classroom workshops to prep students for performances—makes such a notable difference to performers. We knew it mattered to teachers and kids, we hear that in evaluations all the time and it’s immensely gratifying. But to know that it’s palpable from the stage itself—that’s really saying something!

Kudos to Vermont’s students and teachers for holding live performance in the high regard it deserves as both an educational tool, and as a valuable life experience in its own right. I wish we could give YOU a hand as enthusiastic as the one that 3rd-8th graders gave the actors of Theatreworks USA this week!


Color of Justice photograph by Jean-Marie Guyaux

Hand Dances

posted by Flynn N.A.S.A. grant artist Selene Colburn, writing about her work-in-progress, The History of the Future Suite

I’m not sure exactly what to focus on at times when I’m working in the studio alone. It’s a trade off between building the small, gestural movements for my solo and pushing my semi-injured, post-childbirth body into recapturing a more expansive vocabulary through improvisation. I usually end up doing a little of this, a little of that. Last night I made two phrases that started from with the hands, but rippled through the body more than usual. I practiced handstands. I danced with reckless abandon to the musical stylings of my muse Chan Marshall, while someone peered through the window.

Sometime between last night and this morning, (post-Lost, pre-3 am nursing?) my brain started fitting a bunch of separate ideas together for the group work., beginning to get a picture of how one cohesive piece might emerge.

And while I was trekking from the car to my office, I got an idea for a fill in the blank writing exercise (“In the future….”) to generate material that might or might not be used as a score for the group piece.

photographs by Selene Colburn

Phenomenal Flamenco in FlynnSpace

Box Office Agent Chaim Rochester posts about flamenco guitar master Juan Carmona's performance on Friday, April 13.

Carmona was amazing. The music was beautiful, and the dancing percussionist [Manuel Gutierrez]? Out of this world. I mean, I'm sure there are better "dancers" out there, but it just completed the whole "We're a badass pack of brazen Spaniards" image so perfectly.



As a musician myself, I was mesmerized by Carmona's seemingly effortless execution of technique, and impressed with his humble demeanor. A true master and clearly the leader of the group, he was also duly respectful of the form and allowed the other members to shine. The smoky impassioned vocals, spirited flute playing, and subtle anchor of the bass were all thouroughly complementary of one another, while underneath it all the percussion kept a smooth, lively rhythm that tied it all together.

I've had an interest and appreciation for flamenco since discovering my mother's old Carlos Montoya albums as a child and have seen live performances on several occasions. This was by far one of the most riveting, and I surely hope to see Carmona return to The Flynn in the future.

photograph of Juan Carmona is courtesy of the artist

Tricky Endings and Maggots

posted by Flynn N.A.S.A. grant artist Selene Colburn, writing about her work-in-progress, The History of the Future Suite

Another wonderful Sunday—this time there were nine of us.

We began with a brief warm-up, then quickly got into some walking improvisations, to loosen everyone up and start tapping into on-the-fly composing practices. Even in these simple exercises we got to a few moments of working collectively as a group, the whole organism making choices together. Exciting, and really kind of amazing, considering many of us had just met.

I taught everyone a simple gestural phrase of three movements—your arm reaches over your head, you cross your arms across your chest, you put your hands on your hips—and for the next hour or so, that was our vocabulary for the unison form (you can do any of those three movements in any order with stops; the end comes when everyone is doing the phrase in unison). We added some pivots into the mix to tweak the mostly frontal facing.

Our work in the form evolved very similarly to the week before with Rachel and Susan. The first couple of times the unison comes out of nowhere and it seems a little bit magical. As you start pushing the form, the ways the unison develops gets more complex. It can come on as a slow burn and everyone may not be in agreement about when it begins. So how to you know when to stop, without calling the ending verbally? Tricky. Actually, one of the most amazing improvisations of the day came from a group who was working really hard to get to an unspoken ending. The level of attention was incredible, which made people’s choices really fascinating. I need to think about the consensual end a bit more—there may be something else I can build into the form (or maybe building too much structure will dispel that zing that comes from the attention that’s currently required).

We closed by working on some of the early mechanics of what I’ve been thinking of in my head as “up and over” or “the great leap forward,” a continuously moving form consisting of a huge mass of bodies scrambling over one another like a wave. CeCe gave my image a good description: “It’s like maggots crawling over a pile of garbage.” For that moment we focused on getting one body over another, forgoing the fluidity and proximity of maggots (something to aspire to!). One person forms a stable base by kneeling on all fours; two supporters help take the weight of someone who walks over the kneeler as if they were a bridge.

Everyone was such a great sport, and so thoughtful and wise. I’m really enjoying seeing how the cast evolves.

photograph courtesy of Selene Colburn

Phishy Anniversary at the Flynn

It's a sweet anniversary for Phish Food—celebrating 10 years as one of Ben & Jerry's most popular ice cream flavors! The Vermont sweetailer debuted its decadent Phish Food—chock full of fudge fish in creamy marshmallows—at the Flynn during a sold-out 1997 Phish show, as the Burlington-based band rocked the MainStage. Were you there? Wish you were? Relive the jam-band's glory days with three free online downloads of the Flynn show, available now with the purchase of a Phish Shake at your local scoop shop.

Sweet tip: Today, April 17, is Free Cone Day! Visit your local scoop shop between 12 and 8 pm for a tasty treat!

The Sprout and the Bean

posted by Flynn N.A.S.A. grant artist Selene Colburn, writing about her work-in-progress, The History of the Future Suite

I spent last night working on some gestural phrases for the group and/or solo work. I like that there already seems to be a lot of overlap. I’m quite curious about what it looks like when a large group of people execute a very minimalist set of physical tasks and eager to play with that this weekend. How small is too small? How will the volume of bodies and the potency of unison offset the subtlety of a brief set of very simple movements confined to the hands?

I’m sure there is a parallel in visual art to this. Robert Smithson comes to mind (very simple concept, grand execution), but perhaps a better example would be someone who works in multiples. Michal Rovner? Carl Andre (who I hesitate to mention because of my love of Ana Mendieta, but the shoe does fit)?

Also, if you’re going to make gestural work, there’s no better mood music than Joanna Newsom. Talk about tiny but huge.

On further reflection Vanessa Beecroft, for whom I do confess a certain fascination, comes to mind, but I will not make anyone wear a thong. I promise you that!

The Progress of a Work-in-Progress

Greetings. I’m Selene Colburn, the current N.A.S.A. grant awardee. I’ll be blogging about my experiences developing improvisational movement forms for The History of the Future Suite here over the next few months.

I’m also looking for volunteers. A work-in-progress showing of The History of the Future Suite will take place on June 17th in Flynn Space. You may participate in the development of the work without performing, and you may perform without attending every session. We meet on Sundays from 2 to 4 pm. Email me at selene.colburn@uvm.edu if you think you might be interested and I’ll tell you how it works.

I’ve been working on my own between head colds for several weeks now, but I just started experimenting with the improvisational forms I’m developing for groups last Sunday. I worked with Rachel and Susan—two seasoned improvisers—which was a great way of testing the outer limits of what I’m calling the unison form. Basically, dancers are confined to the vocabulary of a short phrase, which they ultimately execute in unison. So we know the end, but how we get there is up for grabs.

After doing it only a couple of times our sense of what constituted an ending (even when the results were predetermined) became more nuanced and muddy. This is completely concurrent with reading I’ve been doing in the field of psychology about how we imagine our futures. As humans, we’re not very good at it. We leave out the messy stuff in our minds, so that by the time we get where we’re going it looks nothing like what we thought it would. Or it fails to make us happy in the ways we expected.

Tonight I’ll be heading into the studio again to work on setting the phrase for the unison form (because I’m a control freak!) in preparation for this Sunday’s group work. I’ll also be working on a solo that layers simple gestures, footwork, and spoken text—a kind of patting your head while rubbing your belly sort of exercise (the only virtuosity that’s left to me at this point!).

Want to know more? Check out this Seven Days article.

Op-Ed Recounts Racial Profiling of Flynn Guest Artists

The Flynn Center recently hosted Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Company with their original work Scourge, addressing issues of Haitian-American identity and racism through the media of dance, music, and spoken word performance. A week's worth of residency activities around the county culminated in a standing ovation for the cast of this remarkable MainStage performance.

On April 8, the Burlington Free Press printed Erhard Mahnke's op-ed about another part of the Scourge performers' experience in Vermont. Mahnke, a community member and friend of one of the performers, was driving some of the cast members back to their hotel and was stopped by the police while driving through Winooski. Visit this link to read about his experience.


Special thanks to the Burlington Free Press for extending the availability of this story on-line.

Read All About It!

posted by Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup
Programming Manager for the Flynn Center

As a newbie staff member at the Flynn Center, I inherited a lot of cool projects that were begun by other Flynn folks—one of which is a partnership with the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington that connects works of great literature with our on-stage performances.

This is the second year of The Flynn Center/Fletcher Free Library Book Club and it's been a wonderful success, helping people to learn more about the artists that they will be seeing on our stages and also giving people in the community an opportunity to put their performing arts experience into context with other works of art. Sometimes the books that we read are direct analogs to the performance. For example, in February, the book club read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in preparation for the stage adaptation produced by The Acting Company. At other times, we might read work that is from the same geographic region as the performing artists, or work which has in some way influenced or inspired the artists that are coming to the Flynn. The most recent book club read Edwidge Danticat's Farming of Bones, about the ethnic cleansing of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic in the 1930s. This book, by a Haitian-American immigrant, deals with similar issues of identity and racism to fellow Haitian-American Marc Bamuthi Joseph's presentation of his spoken-word/hip-hop/theater piece Scourge, on the Flynn MainStage Friday, March 23 at 8 pm.


There are two more Flynn Center Book Club Meetings this year and we encourage you to attend them! Here are the details:

Wednesday, March 21 at 7 pm
in the Fletcher Free Library Community Room
The Works of Dr. Seuss

Remember Horton the Elephant and how he worked so hard to save the Who's down in Whoville? We'll be taking an adult look at three of Dr. Seuss' best loved works in the context of contemporary issues of war and society. This book club discussion connects to our family presentation of the musical Seussical! on Sunday, March 25 at 3 pm.

Reading List:

• Horton Hears a Who
• Horton Hatches the Egg
• Gertrude McFuzz

Wednesday, April 11 at 7:30 pm
in the Fletcher Free Library Local History Room
The Works of W.B. Yeats

Yeats, one of the best-loved and most important poets of the early 20th-century, has been enormously influential in the realms of performing arts, literary criticism, psychology, political science and other fields. This discussion relates to Waters of Immortality and Other Works, the MainStage performance of dancer Maureen Fleming whose slow, sculptural, and stunning dance choreography was influenced by Yeat's work on the archetype of the sacred feminine.

Reading List:

• At The Hawk's Well (1917)—play script

Poems:

• Adam's Curse
• The Second Coming
• Leda and the Swan
• Lapis Lazuli
• Long Legged Fly
• The Circus Animals' Desertion
• Under Ben Bulben
• Byzantium
• Vacillation I
• In Tara's Halls
• A Dialogue of Self and Soul
• To a Child Dancing in the Wind
• The Cap and Bells
• and, by Yeats' contemporary, W.H. Auden, the poem In Memory of W.B. Yeats
  

Copies of the readings for both book clubs are available at the library from Barbara Shatara in the Outreach Department. And, finally, if you go to the book club you can buy tickets to the related performances at a 20% discount. For more information on The Flynn Center/Fletcher Free Library Book Club, or to register, please call the library at 802-865-7211.


book cover credit: Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss (Random House Books for Young Readers, 1954)

New Steinway is Grand!

The Flynn Center and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra (VSO) have collaborated to purchase a new 9-foot Steinway grand piano. The concert piano made its Flynn MainStage debut on March 10, when acclaimed pianist Joseph Kalichstein (the artistic advisor for chamber music to Washington, DC's Kennedy Center and artistic director of its Fortas Chamber Music Concerts) performed Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor with the VSO.

Pianist/bandleader Bill Charlap gives the debut jazz performance on the Flynn’s new Steinway grand piano on Saturday, April 21 at 8 pm. Charlap, widely hailed as one of the great contemporary jazz pianists for his elegant arrangements of standards from the Great American Songbook and jazz classics, will perform in a fantastic jazz double-bill with Kurt Elling, DownBeat magazine's Male Jazz Vocalist of the Year many times over.

The piano—the 577,721st built by New York's Steinway & Sons company—will be housed at the Flynn for use by both organizations; it will also be available for use by other organizations.

Raising funds for the purchase of such an outstanding instrument was a challenge for the two non-profit arts organizations, both of which are also raising ongoing funds for operations. The Flynn and the VSO were fortunate to secure generous assistance: the State of Vermont provided funding to the VSO through a special appropriation and, more recently, the Flynn has sought gifts from several donors and will be asking others to help complete payment on the instrument by June 30. (To help, contact Andrea Rogers, executive director of the Flynn Center: 802-652-4504 or arogers@flynncenter.org.)

Arrangements for the sale of the new piano were made through Frederick Johnson Pianos of White River Junction, the exclusive dealer for Steinway & Sons pianos in Vermont. On Tuesday, February 27, Dale Howe of Frederick Johnson Pianos and Alan Jordan met renowned concert pianists Jonathan Biss and Benjamin Hochman (both of whom have appeared with the VSO, and were recommended by VSO Music Director Jaime Laredo) at the Steinway factory in Astoria, NY.

Five brand new instruments were arranged in the selection room, and for the next 75 minutes, the two pianists tested each piano. Moving from one instrument to the next, they played excerpts from their vast piano repertoire. One would listen while the other played. At other times, they’d sit at two different keyboards and play to each other. The choices were narrowed. In the end, number 577721 was selected. It was the most recently completed piano of the five, finished just two days earlier, according to Steinway technician Dirk Dickten.

Even with the arduous selection process, there’s still a little bit of chance involved. A brand new piano is "raw" and it will take several years for it to settle in. Over time, the instrument will develop more depth in its sound, and will stabilize so that its tuning and regulation will be sustained longer. Right now, it’s a really good piano. In another two or three years, it should be a truly great piano.

The Flynn and the VSO thank the State of Vermont, Amy Tarrant, and an anonymous friend for helping make the down payment needed so the piano could be available for the inaugural performance and future use.


The VSO’s 7-foot Steinway grand piano is available for sale. The 1892 instrument was purchased and fully restored by the VSO in 1992 and should make an excellent instrument for a smaller performance venue, a school, or a church. Inquiries should be directed to Alan Jordan, executive director of the VSO: 802-864-5741, ext. 15, or alanj@vso.org.


photographs courtesy of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra

Mark Bamuthi Joseph on "Scourge"

Essays and poems by Marc Bamuthi Joseph
All photographs by Gabriella Marks

Haitian-American performance artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph and a cast of spoken-word artists, dancers, and musicians ignite the Flynn MainStage in Scourge on Friday, March 23, shining a passionate light on questions of identity, cultural legacy, history, and assimilation.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a National Poetry Slam champion, Broadway veteran, recipient of 2002 and 2004 National Performance Network Creation commissions, a USA Rockefeller Fellow in Theater Arts, and a veteran of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. He is also the artistic director of Youth Speaks—the premier youth poetry, spoken word, and creative writing program in the country.


In Scourge—an exorcism and re-imagination of traditional theatrical genres—Marc Bamuthi Joseph offers a powerful, political and revolutionary look at Haiti in its 200th year as a sovereign nation. Still languishing as the poorest country in the hemisphere—plagued by crumbling infrastructure and unimaginable debt—Haiti suffers politically and socially from massive prejudice and misperception. Scourge grew out of Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s desire to re-imagine his native country through the medium of performance art in order to create a new and more accurate history which addresses not only political events, but the people, places, and context that created them. Through an explosive fusion of hip-hop, Afro-Caribbean dance and music, and spoken-word poetry, Marc Bamuthi Joseph and his cast explore the narrow space between history, myth, and speculation—bursting the boundaries of racism and ignorance and bringing to light the importance of preserving our cultural legacies in an increasingly global world.

The following essays and poems are by, and courtesy of, Marc Bamuthi Joseph:

HISTORICAL NOTE
After a successful revolt from 1797 to 1804, upstart slaves led by Toussaint L’Ouverture defeated Naploean’s army and Haiti established itself as the first Black republic in the post-Columbian New World on January 1, 1804. Western Europe instated sanctions against Haiti and, in addition to this economic blow, France demanded “reparations” to former slaveholders in 1825, amounting to 90 million gold francs (equivalent to $21.7 billion today). Haiti continued to make payments to France until the 1950s, but has since become the poorest country in the Western hemisphere—and has been plagued by political violence and corrupt dictators for most of its history.

ARTIST’S NOTES
Amidst a back drop of political chaos, Haiti celebrated its 200th year as an independent nation in January 2004. This tenure ranks second only to the United States in the post-Columbian “new world.” And yet while the U.S. is clearly the planet’s most powerful nation, Haiti languishes as the poorest country in the hemisphere, plagued by a crumbling infrastructure, political turmoil, and unimaginable debt. How could two countries born of the same revolutionary spirit spiral so dramatically in opposite directions? Drawing from this point of inquiry and inspired by artists ranging from Maya Deren to Katherine Dunham to Ntozake Shange, Scourge advances our dialogue about the historical impulses that have left a great nation far behind its peers. It is the natural progression from the Living Word Project’s last work, wherein we move from one voice to five, and autobiography to allegory.

By examining the social history of Haiti through a full-length work of hip-hop theater, Scourge is a highly relevant work both artistically and politically. The invocation of Haiti as a microcosmic illustration for post-colonial malaise is a timely and insurgent point of focus, and I truly believe that the execution of this piece, particularly its intersection of poetry and movement, replete with Def Poets and Urban Bush Women, will become a standard bearer for artists who use hip-hop as a means of folkloric re-invention.

This piece is the quintessential American story: the conflict of securing “old world” family tradition and history in a country fed by McDonald’s and clothed by the Gap. Our narrative specifically addresses this quandary in a Haitian family, but the audience for this piece listens to hip-hop AND folklore, reads Emerson AND Danticat, speaks English AND Créole. Through a fusion of spoken word, live music, and dance, the piece suggests a series of historical factors that led to Haiti’s present-day situation. Jumping between significant markers in Haiti’s past, blurring history with speculation, we believe that the truth dies with us—unless we tuck its meaning in myth, media, and gospel.

Thank you for being open.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph

__________________________________


I am the daughter of a small Caribbean country
My mother on her deathbed
She’s wasting away daily

but before I tell you of our legacy
you must be of strong stomach
discerning ear
distilling truth
there is no correct answer
no corruption without good intent somewhere

my heritage is a wilting mother’s body
on a hospital bed
The tips of her hands blue, and a trail of maroon in slow exude
from a mouth she over stuffed corruption into
force fed death by the imperial west
maman is leaving us too soon

And she ripples like our flag today
Wavering between family and country
Au Caille and the other side, over yonder
She has a frame built for touch
None of these places ever eased her Enuf
She stays divided
—arguing amongst herselves
Like the national pastime
Not sure if she could do right
by no means heroic—
But what does heroism buy

of the third world us females
grown accustomed to the snap
of skeletons crunching under bare foot

you ain’t heard what happened
down there
her mothers before her toting guns and steel
they slit master’s throat
smelled like revolt
bled themselves clean

But Non. My legacy is birthright in epithet
I will not call her St. Domingue
Christophe, Toussaint, or Dessaline
Please call her by her given name
My mother: ayiti
protect her of her mountainous flesh.
Ayiti is for sure a woman
sickly or no
1804 gurgling in her throat
my legacy is what happened
ain’t you heard what happened

and not a moment too soon.

__________________________________


Two brown boys
Too poor
To prosper
Two nations
Too proud
To conquer
Two take refuge on makeshift boats
Two prayers ascend dear god make her float
To U.S. soil
To holy land
Too rough the waters
Two boys descend
To join the sand at the bottom of the sea
Where too many African bodies be
Too upset
Their spirits are set
Underneath the water
Where two boys get a push up
To breathe
To heave
To clutch
To hold on to pieces of shattered boat
Like intact dreams they loved so much
They left the countries they loved so much
To escape
To defect from nothing left
But the farming of bones and death

Two brown boys divided by sea
Two brown boys both could be on tv
Ask a rich man exactly what do he see
Rich man say both look like niggas to me
The year is present day
two thousand and few
two stories ignored by the five o clock news
and who’s up in Paris lockdown at curfew
and who’s up in Brooklyn ridin the A train to school
and who’s in Darfur among skulls and refuse?
And who sits in Guantanamo without any food
And who’s still on rooftops waiting for rescue?
And who
And who

__________________________________


Learn more about Haiti and its people in a FREE pre-performance lecture on Friday, March 23 at 6:30 pm in the Flynn's Amy E. Tarrant Gallery. Local artists and scholars with deep ties to Haiti will discuss some of the relationships between Haiti and the United States and speak about how the small island nation’s cultural and artistic life has flourished despite its long and troubled history.

FlynnArts will also offer two workshops by March Bamuthi Joseph: Living the Spoken Word on Saturday, March 24 from 1 to 3 pm and, later that same day, Haitian Dance from 3:30 to 5 pm.

Read more about it! The Flynn Center/Fletcher Free Library Book Club will meet in the library on Wednesday, March 14 at 7:30 pm for a FREE discussion of Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones, a powerful novel about Haiti and its neighboring Dominican Republic. Call the library for information and registeration: 802-865-7211.

Stretching Bodies and Boundaries with Maureen Fleming

posted by Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup
Programming Manager for the Flynn Center

Acclaimed New York City choreographer and dancer Maureen Fleming spent a week at the Flynn in late February—the first of two week-long residencies this year, culminating in her MainStage performance Waters of Immortality on Friday, April 20. Christopher shares his reflections on Maureen Fleming’s community workshop with the Awareness Theater Company, a program of VSA Vermont. The participants were actors with disabilities; the director of the company, Emily Anderson; and some other people with disabilities and their caregivers from the Howard Center.


We arrived while Emily and her team of actors were rehearsing a new show about the Parallel Justice program, which helps people who have been victims of crime to get restitution or assistance. We introduced ourselves and watched the rehearsal for about 15 minutes. One of the actors performed her short one-woman show for us. It was a fabulous little monologue with original artwork illustrating her relationship with her hamster. Her pet hamster wanted change in his life and she helped him change—the first step towards change was offering him beer (yummy!) instead of water in his water bottle. He also got a toothbrush to get the seeds out of his teeth and a treadmill instead of a spinning wheel for exercise.

Maureen introduced herself to the group after the Hamster Love show and we started with some exercises we could do while seated. This was important as not everyone was able to stand. We breathed together, did some visualizations about water balloons and steam heat, and then learned about how to massage our hands to improve our flexibility. Maureen talked about how the hands are connected to the whole body, and if your hands are more flexible your whole body will move more easily. Many people in the room had difficulty moving or controlling their muscles, so this was a great exercise. After this, we practiced more breathing exercises. We learned to make sounds while breathing to learn about how the breath is connected with our ability to vocalize and be good actors, poetry readers and speakers. Finally, we paired up and did some back and neck massage work.

Maureen worked individually with each participant to help them feel the difference that good posture and breathing makes in our ability to speak clearly and deeply. The people in the workshop were deeply engaged and excited to feel the difference in their bodies and voices with the changes that Maureen encouraged.

At the end, Maureen did two additional visualizations to get people out of their chairs and moving around the room. In the first, we envisioned angels tying strings on our bodies and moving us around the room very gently. In the second, we imagined butterflies inside of our skin helping us to move. Everyone participated, even the people in wheelchairs. It was very moving.

Finally, we announced the preview performance [of Waters of Immortality] and the performance in April. People are hoping to organize a group outing to come and see the April performance.

This was a great way to move me out of my "wrong side of the bed" morning into a better place.



Maureen Fleming also held a six-day Dancing the Internal Body: Deep Movement Core Intensive Workshop in FlynnSpace, in which she shared regenerative dance and body-stretching techniques she developed in response to a childhood car accident. Her original deep-movement “Elastics” techniques promote independence and freedom in movement as applied to other movement disciplines and in daily life. At the end of the workshop week, she and some of the participants demonstrated Fleming's regenerative dance techniques in a FlynnSpace performance. (Click on images to enlarge.)

workshop and performance photographs by Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup and Lani Stack

DANCE iCON iNCORPORATES iPODS

posted by Arnie Malina
Artistic Director for the Flynn Center


It is always a thrill to welcome the Merce Cunningham Dance Company back to the Flynn. For me, personally, seeing his dancers reminds me of my first modern dance experience as an audience member, 40 years ago, experiencing a fresh language that was totally surprising, even intoxicating. Seeing Cunningham’s choreography then was to luxuriate in following movement that seemed impossible—often done at a speed that was incalculable, the mind and the senses working overtime, connecting dots that weren’t necessarily meant to be connected—and the athletic, larger-than-life dancer. How could they move that way? How did they do that? They are still doing that, one move more remarkable than the last. This is what I remember of that first contact; my first modern dance experience, which was also my first Merce Cunningham experience.

Merce, now 87, is still known as an experimenter, taking chances on new technology, making new moves generated by computers. He no longer dances on stage, but his mind is still working overtime—still, he says, fascinated by movement and what the body can do. When you see the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on the Flynn MainStage on March 16, you’ll see a wide range of his choreography, including revivals of Sounddance (1975)—known for its high speed and complex torso and foot movements, giving the impression of bodies observed under a microscope—and Crises (1960), a work whose atmosphere John Cage called “harsh and erotic” to his newest work, eyeSpace (2006).

In eyeSpace, Merce will give each audience member the ability to participate in creation of the sound score of the piece. You are encouraged to bring your own iPod—with music downloaded from Mikel Rouse's International Cloud Atlas—inspired by John Cage, Cunningham’s long-time collaborator and partner. (Instructions for free downloads of Rouse's score will be provided to ticket buyers.) Or, if you don’t have an iPod, you can borrow an iPod Shuffle at the Flynn, provided by the company courtesy of Apple Computers—or, failing that, you can watch the dance to another soundscore piped into the theatre). When eyeSpace begins, you will be able to shuffle the music and create your own soundscore for the work.

This experience is in the tradition of one of Cunningham’s major contributions to dance (Mikhail Baryshnikov said that “Cunningham reinvented dance”), that is, declaring dance's independence from music. Merce’s dancers often rehearsed to silence—so as to deeply learn the steps, to focus on the movement independent of the music. Sometimes the dancers didn’t hear the music until days before they were to perform the piece. And sometimes Cunningham turned the tables and changed the score they would dance to without notice. His music, set, and costume collaborators were also encouraged to create independently. He trusted that the outcome would produce a new way of seeing things; he believed in the mystery of chance. It was a modern view and he helped to define a modern sensibility. He trusted the vision of other artists he worked with and eagerly awaited to see how the various pieces would fit together.

Merce talked about the power of chance. He said the natural sequence in movement might go something like this: walk, skip, jump, and fall. But if you invert or reverse or move that sequence around, and change it again, dancers will use their bodies in unexpected ways, and audiences will see things they haven’t seen before. In teaching dancers to try the impossible, he developed a technique that has influenced dancers, choreographers, and audiences all over the world.


Other Flynn / Merce Cunningham Dance Company will include a masterclass with the company on the MainStage and A Day of Dance for high school students, both on the day of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performance, March 16.

Prior to the performance, at 6:30 pm, the Flynn will host a FREE pre-performance lecture with David Vaughan, long-time archivist for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, in the Flynn's Hoehl Studio Lab. Vaughan will discuss the company's illustrious history, the Cunningham technique, and the influence of the choreographer on the development of contemporary art in America.

above center: Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the Joyce Theater in the first iteration of eyeSpace, with décor by Henry Samelson and music by Mikel Rouse. Photograph by Tony Dougherty.

Meet Cellist Matt Haimovitz

posted by Tom Ayres
Marketing Director for the Flynn Center

Born in Israel in 1970, Matt Haimovitz is now based in the United States and Canada, where he is a professor of music at McGill University in Montreal. Haimovitz is known worldwide not only for his outstanding technical and musical skill, but also for his highly unusual concert career and repertoire choices. He is as likely to be found playing Bach at a coffee house, jazz or rock club throughout North America as he is in one of the world's most prestigious concert halls. He is also as likely to be playing a piece by Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, or Frank Zappa as he is to be playing Bach or Bartók.

This celebrated cello virtuoso and innovator brings his eight-cello ensemble U-Cello and turntablist DJ Olive to FlynnSpace for a special matinee performance on Sunday, March 18 at 4 pm. (The evening show at 7 pm previously announced by the Flynn is sold out.) We recently spoke with Matt Haimovitz about his career, his repertoire, and the music he, U-Cello, and DJ Olive will be sharing with FlynnSpace audiences in March. The transcript of our interview follows.

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FLYNN CENTER: You grew up in what you’ve called a “fairly sheltered classical music family,” living in Israel and here in the United States. How did you first come to adopt the cello as your instrument of expression? How did you learn and ultimately master the instrument?

MATT HAIMOVITZ: I discovered the cello as a solo instrument when I was about seven years old and my family was living in California. I had been exposed to a lot of classical music, particularly piano because my mother was a pianist. At 12, I took up studies with the great artist and teacher, Leonard Rose, at Julliard and that led to my being a soloist performing with the Israel Philharmonic in 1985. I toured America with conductor Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic in 1986.

FLYNN CENTER: In recent years, you’ve gained renown for taking the cello into some fairly unconventional venues, including the solo tour of rock clubs that you first did a number of years ago. What led you to take your music into those unconventional realms? Did you tailor your repertoire any in the process?

HAIMOVITZ: It was two-fold for me. One, I wasn’t seeing my generation come to the concert hall and they weren’t coming to hear me. I was feeling somewhat restricted by the repertoire parameters of what was acceptable in the traditional classical canon. By taking some things out of the concert hall—I started with Bach, playing coffee houses with Bach solos—and then the Anthem CD, playing contemporary American composers, I was taking a kind of fringe-of-the-fringe approach. Classical music is already such a fringe part of our culture and contemporary classical music is even further removed in a way. My hypothesis is that this was music that has as much raw energy and visceral appeal as anything in the rock-and-roll world and I just had to go and take it to people and make it accessible and sell it.

And that’s what I did: I just went on the road rock-and-roll-style, playing every night, in all 50 states—and it proved to be very rewarding and confirmed my belief that this music does have a life in today’s world. It’s very much about keeping the tradition of classical music alive and relevant to today’s society.

FLYNN CENTER: How would you characterize the audiences for your performances in those venues? Were they respectful and attentive and did they get what you were trying to accomplish?

HAIMOVITZ: Yes, for the most part they were very respectful. It was so great to see younger and younger audiences as I went out there. There was a mix: there were shows in Seattle, Minneapolis, Boise, Idaho, and of course New York, where it felt like a rock-and-roll concert. Here I was as a solo cellist playing some of the most abstract, serial music you could imagine, and people were really into all of the different sounds and characters that the cello could take on, and how it could sustain an evening like that.

The pieces themselves were very short, five- to seven-minute rock-and-roll length, and so it gave people exposure to a wide variety of what is going on in classical music in America today. Of course, this was during the election period, so I ended the shows playing Jimi Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner” in the year of the blue states and the red states to celebrate the living musical tradition that we have and the diversity and power of it. It was a way of saying, “With everything else that is going on in the world, just take a few moments to focus in on this art.” You saw 60-somethings sitting next to 20-somethings and not being told how to sit or when to clap or what to wear, but just to go directly to the music and experience an art form directly.

FLYNN CENTER: Once you came back from this foray into unconventional venues for your music, how did that have an impact when you returned to more traditional concert settings? How did this rock-and-roll experience change your relationship to your instrument and to the more traditional concert performances?

HAIMOVITZ: It definitely honed my performance skills. I felt ready for anything! When I go into a rock-and-roll club, I always try to uphold the standards of a concert hall. I don’t play any differently at CBGB than I do at Carnegie Hall, but when I go back to Carnegie Hall I feel like what I have acquired is a sense of connection with my audience and also a community that I’ve built since I’ve been doing this the past seven years. I see how loyal some of my audience has been. They are following me wherever I may go. The project after “Anthem” was “Goulash,” going into Transylvanian folk music, Bartók, Ligeti and some of the new generation of composers. And now this project that I am bringing to the Flynn is heading in another kind of direction, bridging the '60s to the future, to the 21st century, through the lens of many cellos. (Laughs.) I’m bringing eight celli with me and DJ Olive. With each of these projects, it’s not like I am creating one sound and going with that and giving my audience the same thing for the next 20 years—I feel really fortunate that the kind of audience I’ve built is ready for the next musical adventure. We go on it together and it just keeps everything really fresh.

FLYNN CENTER: Talk a bit more about the project you are bringing here to the Flynn with U-Cello and DJ Olive, and the flavor of the music you are going to be performing.

HAIMOVITZ: Well, flavor-wise, few people have ever heard anything like it! (Laughs.) It’s a lot of brand new music. Montreal is a hotbed for emerging electro-acoustic composers. The '60s is very much alive here—it’s one of the few places in the world that is still like that. There are a few places that are doing some cutting-edge electronics with cello—the MIT Media Lab in Boston is one of them, Tod Machover for one, and the Center for Contemporary Music and Technology, which was set up in Paris by Pierre Boulez.

What I am doing (at the Flynn) is taking some of these three centers—Paris, Boston, and Montreal—and featuring some of the composers. Tod Machover is writing a brand new piece that is going to be premiered in Burlington and New York that weekend: its called “Vinyl Cello” and it’s a piece for cello and DJ with a whole new vinyl score that DJ Olive is going to use with some improvisations, but it is essentially a concerto for cello and DJ. One of the composed pieces on the program is going to be a masterpiece by Pierre Boulez for seven celli—solo cello and six celli, where the six celli sort of amplify what I’m doing and it sounds like all the sound is coming from one cello. It just surrounds you. It’s really rock-and-roll, very driving.

And we’re than going to do a piece by the Parisian composer Matalon that’s completely wild—eight cellos sounding like eight elephants going to Mars and let’s see what happens. (Laughs.) There will also be some new arrangements of avant-garde rock-and-rollers: Frank Zappa’s “Zombie Wolf” and my own arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun,” which I think is one of the great war songs ever. I’ve made an arrangement for eight cellos. There are a couple of solo electro-acoustic pieces, too, where my sound gets processed and it sounds like a whole symphony of cellos, but it’s just me playing. This will all weave itself through the program. It should really take people to another place—I suspect many will never have heard the cello quite like this. It’s very exciting.

FLYNN CENTER: How did the relationship with DJ Olive evolve? Is that specific to this tour or is that relationship one that has been developing for you over a period of time?

HAIMOVITZ: It has actually been developing for a couple of years now. He recorded with me on “Goulash.” On the title cut he uses some of Bartók’s archival material from the field to jam with me and uses other folkloric material, too.

I actually met DJ Olive on a rock-and-roll tour of the West Coast, where every night we were improvising with different musicians—Charlie Hunter and Bobby Previte, a lot of jazz musicians and rockers—and I just felt very at home with him and the way he listens and contributes. It’s very much like playing chamber music when you’re improvising with him. He joined us last year in Montreal and New York for improvised shows and then the two of us went off for a tour through Texas together where every night we jammed on Bartók’s Romanian dances. It was just a revelation to me—coming from a classical tradition where you’re always playing to the score—to not have a score and every night was different, depending upon who the audience was and where the venue was. We just had a lot of wild experiences. It was a blast. This project that’s coming to the Flynn is another new project for us.

FLYNN CENTER: I’m curious about the current generation of students you are seeing and teaching at the university level. Are they showing a similar passion for the kind of eclecticism that you have embraced as your career has moved forward?

HAIMOVITZ: Each one of my students is so individual and they all have their individual strengths. Some love playing in an orchestra and I could see them going into a section with a major symphony orchestra. Others love chamber music. One thing for sure when you are in my studio: you are definitely exposed to current trends in music. The seven cellists that I’m bringing (in U-Cello) to the Flynn are my seven top students at McGill and it’s very exciting to see their talent and enthusiasm. I wasn’t doing what they’re doing at that age: I came to this music a lot later. Their ability to absorb such complex rhythms and microtones and extended technique on the cello just expands their whole range. For me it’s really important when you play Beethoven and Bach that you use your entire imagination and not put yourself in a straightjacket.

FLYNN CENTER: Are there any other thoughts you’d like to share about your upcoming Vermont performances with U-Cello and DJ Olive?

HAIMOVITZ: I think it’s great to be coming there. We’re very excited and we’ll be working hard over the next month because it is difficult music to learn. (Laughs.) It’s all coming together and we are very excited to be bringing it to Burlington.


photograph of Matt Haimovitz by Bette Marshall