The Big Gay Polish Show?

The title of the show is really:

Radosław Rychcik
Stefan Zeromski Theatre
In the Solitude of Cotton Fields

… but I call it The Gay Polish Show as a way to frame my experience. I attended the Thursday, January 13th performance in Seattle co-presented by On the Boards and Polish Cultural Institute of New York. The show features two handsome men in black suits with microphones on stands + a backup house/punk/techno band called the Natural Born Chillers. So why The Big Gay Polish Show rather than RR/SZT/In the Solitude of Cotton Fields?

Show
In the Solitude of Cotton Fields is presentational. Most of the performance features two actors (Tomasz Nosinski and Wojciech Niemczyk) who face the audience and speak into microphones or move through expressionist poses. Occasionally, there are dance interludes sometimes with a strobing light. The band, in striped sailor t-shirts and white pants, rock out on drums, laptop, keyboards, electric guitar and bass. The action shows the inner thoughts of the two men through still and contorted faces and bodies + text spoken in Polish and projected as supertitles in English. Ergo, a show.

Polish
When I was in Warsaw, I stayed with the mother of a musician. This elderly lady seemed to be the picture-perfect image of an old Polish woman. She kept her grey hair in a tight bun and wore a large hand-knit sweater. Her flat was a concrete block of socialist architecture with a dark stairwell that led to two rooms. The living room had a drape that covered one wall and corner. There was a wooden table in the center of the room where we ate. We had canned pineapple for every meal perhaps because I was a guest from outside Poland? The room felt correct and austere until she pulled me closer to the corner.

(Polish continued…)
Behind the heavy drapes was an elaborate altar. Photographs of the Dalai Lama, beads, flowers, incense and pamphlets decorated her secret space. She told me that she was a Tibetan buddhist at heart ready to reincarnate so she could be closer to her teacher. In the Solitude of Cotton Fields similarly allows the audience a peek into a secretive life. Beginning with suited men dancing to techno music, eventually the smoke from the fog machine dissipates to reveal the time when men align with beasts. The brilliance of Rychcik’s direction of the play by Bernard-Maria Koltes is that the danger zone is for the most part imagined. Striking moments are when “difference” becomes a placeholder for “injustice” and the idea that a successful exchange between men should not actually fulfill desire but rather have desire continue to grip.

Gay
The lipstick, nudity and kiss place the work within the rhetoric of the closet. Gayness here becomes a symbol of transgression from a suffocating normality, in this case an implied heterosexuality signaled by the wedding band. The work grounds itself in the uncomfortable reality of keeping secrets for the sake of appearances showing how gay continues to be relevant even with queer and transgender performance making the rounds.

Big
The show is loud. I wore earplugs all the way through. The show has to be bigger than life. What better way to share secrets than to yell accompanied by a rock band? Whenever I am in solitude I scream the loudest. It must be really awesome in the cotton fields. Moreover, there’s an intense slideshow with images like a bleeding star knifed into the flesh around a belly button. During this slideshow, text appears saying “words are useless.”

… so The Big Gay Polish Show or In the Solitude of Cotton Fields?

When I was in Europe, I was told that Americans were sentimental, yet I feel that there is a crying out to behold with this work. Or perhaps it is because I am American that I feel moved by the intensity of emotion felt between the men on stage last night. Or perhaps, in America, it would become The Big Gay Polish Show because as an American I have become immune to laughing at people who shame themselves so I need a tongue-in-cheek title to entice me to attend. Or perhaps it is a way to discredit the potential of a performance to probe uncomfortable territory.

Whatever the reasons, I am thankful for big gay Polish cotton fields where I can hang out and watch the angst of other men and their desires in what becomes more than a sound-byte exchange. In the Solitude of Cotton Fields continues for two more performances at On the Boards tonight and tomorrow night at 8PM.

 

Empire of Illusion and Gloria’s Cause

“… in a sound-bite society, reality no longer matters.”
Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion

Recently, there have been two elegies about America that encourage me to continue asking questions. Last Sunday, I attended a revision of Dayna Hanson’s performance inquiry into how the gritty reality of America’s founding fathers intersects with America’s current struggles. Last night, I finished reading Chris Hedges’ diatribe about the collapse of the American Empire. Rather than a review, this is a reflection and a call to lay to rest a dysfunctional America.

I will use Hedges’ Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle as a way to delve into Hanson’s performance about America. Empire of Illusion tackles the cry that America is at the end of an empire. I’ve heard this before, but Hedges writes with an in-depth intensity that makes me comprehend the urgency of this death-knell. His book is neatly laid out with five simply titled chapters that cover the illusion of literacy, love, wisdom, happiness and America.

This was the third time I have experienced Hanson’s Gloria’s Cause. The first was a rehearsal preview last summer. The second was a workshop performance at the TBA Festival in Portland last September. In the most recent version at On the Boards in Seattle, the costumes and set were no-nonsense. The cast wore tailored business suits with occasional costume changes to represent the American bald eagle, George Washington, troops at Valley Forge and so forth. Musicians Maggie Brown, Paul Moore, Dave Proscia and others with trap set, electric guitars and bass, vocal mics, keyboard and trombone perform atop a scalloped platform and carpeted stage.

Likewise, Hedge’s no-nonsense Empire of Illusion begins directly with a chapter on literacy that starts with a description of the World Wrestling Entertainment Tour and continues through other media circuses: “This cult of distraction… masks the real disintegration of culture… It deflects the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequities, costly imperial wars, economic collapse and political corruption… The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is destined to keep us from fighting back.” (38) Throughout Gloria’s Cause, questions are raised about the foundations on which America is built. Bodies hunch over and contort. Characters speak at the blue carpet or through a Benjamin Franklin doll or sing incomplete songs through hand-held mics. The fragmented text shows a literacy fractured through the onslaught of entertainment created to distract.

In his second chapter on love, Hedges attacks the debilitating effects of the porn industry: “Porn is about reducing women to corpses. It is about necrophilia.” (82) This chapter goes into terrifyingly dehumanizing places to show how sexual violence brings about a numbness for audiences and performers who consume and are consumed. In Gloria’s Cause, Hanson contrasts an opening of two suited men performed by Pol Rosenthal seated facing the audience and Wade Madsen standing in profile. Two nude female bodies dance in unison, faceless and de-sexualized. The opening contrast of suits with lack-of-suits, speaking with non-speaking, eating with not-being-eaten causes a numbness that is broken by a recess where the entire cast rocks out in an American popular dance show-stopper.

The performance continues to include memorable moments such as Peggy Piacenza’s American bald eagle existential monologue and Madsen’s hip-hop-poppin’ animatronic George Washington. Both characters ultimately break down through movement to offer a glimpse into another reality. Riffing off of the “inverted totalitarianism” that Sheldon S. Wolin proposes, where the corporate state has an anonymous grip on every citizen’s livelihood, Hedges writes that “corporate media control nearly everything we read, watch or hear. It imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. It diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip.” Gloria’s Cause upends the diversion with the painful reality of the iconic American bald eagle and robotic George Washington becoming debilitated. Revered symbols have no power when people starve. Hedges writes “as the government squanders taxpayer money in fruitless schemes to prop up insolvent banks and investment houses, citizens are thrown into the streets without work, a place to live, or enough food. There are now 36.2 million Americans who cope daily with hunger.” (161) Trivia and gossip leave empty stomachs which show a lost eagle and hollow first president. In the performance, the eagle ends with a dance of death and Washington, who has run out of steam, can only sigh when prodded with a rifle.

New performance moments include a drunk Washington fighting with troops from Valley Forge (played by Jim Kent and Jessie Smith) at a Jerry Springer-like talk show. In a rousing tirade, Kent yells that even soldier uniforms were neglected to where shredded pants showed the “penis dangling out and balls shrunken up.” This was in the late 1700s, during the American Revolutionary War. In the past 70 years, the federal government has squandered more than half of tax payers money on the military. Yet, when I turn on the radio, I don’t hear of the $700 billion dollars the Pentagon received for their 2010 budget. Rather, I hear a sobbing father who remembers his son, a returning soldier who has committed suicide before being sent back to war. Hedges writes that “the U.S. military spends more than all other militaries on earth combined.” (144) This has led to a debt that is more than $11 trillion dollars. Hedges calculates this at over $36k per person: “The bill is now due. America’s most dangerous enemies are not Islamic radicals but those who sold us the perverted ideology of free-market capitalism and globalization. They have dynamited the foundations of our society.” (151)

Aspects of Gloria’s Cause are deliberately obtuse. Conformist corporate outfits hide the truth, so I know to search for clues elsewhere. By having the cast in suits rather than a red Coca-Cola t-shirt or a Daniel Boone coon-tail cap, I relied more on what the performers told me through movement and pauses. Even the media, according to Hedges, hides the truth: “Television journalism is largely a farce. Celebrity reporters, masquerading as journalists, make millions a year and give a platform to the powerful and the famous so they can spin, equivocate and lie…. No journalist has a comfortable, cozy relationship with the powerful. No journalist believes that serving the powerful is a primary part of his or her calling. Those in power fear and dislike journalists.” (169) Similarly, performers like those who perform at On the Boards, are oftentimes jarring and uncomfortable, because the platform, in the set of Gloria’s Cause, is actually not stable even though the carpet may be thick. Nonetheless, the performers at On the Boards reveal the uncozy truths of reality.

In chapter three, Illusion of Wisdom, Hedges shows how academia has sold out to corporate interests: “Any form of learning not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools abolished. Students are steered away from asking the broad, disturbing questions that challenge the assumptions of the power elite. They do not know how to interrogate or examine an economic system that serves the corporate state. This has led many bright graduates directly into the arms of corporate entities.” (108-109) Hedges notes that business majors are now 21.7 percent of the graduating population and that education majors have fallen from 21 percent to 8.2 percent (108). Even more surprising for me was learning that the highest paid employee at the University of California at Berkeley is the football coach: “He makes about $3 million,” writes Hedges (94). Berkeley, which was at one time the bastion of student radicalism and social justice in America, has sold out, most horrifyingly in the bankrupt state of California. Hedges admonishes that “a culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” (103) How can we navigate through morality and power to create values that result in a compassionate world? Hanson and her cast attempt at providing insight into the morass that has become America.

In my search, I read a lot of non-fiction with my guilty pleasure being self-help books. Now, I realize how easily these books lead to self-delusion. Hedges’ chapter on the illusion of happiness tackles positive psychology. Hedges writes that “there is a dark, insidious quality to the ideology promoted by the positive psychologists… They strangle creativity and moral autonomy… Its false promise of harmony and happiness only increases internal anxiety and feelings of inadequacy.” (138) Hedges uses the example of how corporations train employees to provide a “positive customer service experience” (137). Employees must act happy or risk losing their job and join the one in six Americans who live in poverty. In Gloria’s Cause, the American bald eagle monologue/dance-of-death unravels this illusion of happiness to show the truthful pain of confusion and loneliness within many Americans.

While it was difficult to experience Gloria’s Cause and read Hedges’ Empire of Illusion, I appreciated many insightful moments. In the performance, there was a slide show that juxtaposed aspects of America from Elvis to cigarettes to civil rights to prison cells. For me, this showed the greatness and ugliness of America, but most significantly I came away with the sense that individuals have overcome oppression. Hedges’ writes personally in his final chapter, the Illusion of America: “The country I live in today uses the same civic, patriotic and historical language to describe itself, the same symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. The America we celebrate is an illusion…. Our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations and a narrow, selfish, political and economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs, and often steals, on behalf of moneyed interests.” (142) Gloria’s Cause shows the private moments of an earlier elite in America. How they floundered. How they confused. How they had their own self-interest in mind. Hedges continues in his writing about current Americans in power: “This elite, in the name of patriotism and democracy… has systematically destroyed our manufacturing sector, looted the treasury, corrupted our democracy and trashed the financial system.” (142)

It is difficult to listen to the truth. It is more difficult to live within the truth. Hedges unravels illusions. Hanson and her cast show ways to reconsider the foundation of America. I offer my thoughts as a way to continue to question in a certain way, to put aside the why and gather courage for the how. Rather than why is America at the end of an empire, I ask how can I continue to live as an American? Informed by reading Empire of Illusion and experiencing Gloria’s Cause, I am initially cautious. What keeps me going is the knowledge that every end signals a beginning.

 

The Way of Taiko

“Taiko is more than a loud drum,” says Masato Baba.

We speak about Heidi Varian’s book The Way of Taiko, published by Stone Bridge Press. Varian is a disciple of Seiichi Tanaka, who founded San Francisco Taiko Dojo in 1968. She was a runway model from Iceland who started studying at Taiko Dojo in the 1980s. Her book is influenced by Tanaka’s austere form of training.

Inside the book cover is an ad for The Spirit of Taiko DVD, which features three generations of North American taiko performers: Tanaka, Kenny Endo and Baba.

Baba sits shotgun while Shoji Kameda drives. Kristofer Bergstrom sleeps in back.

“We had a late start,” Baba laughs.

They are on I-5 heading north from Los Angeles to the Bay Area to rehearse with Kelvin Underwood in preparation for a show by their quartet On Ensemble at The Triple Door in Seattle.

Speaking with them by telephone, I thumb through The Way of Taiko looking for photos of On Ensemble, but find none.

“The book should be called A Way of Taiko rather than The Way of Taiko,” says Kameda. “Tanaka-sensei’s training is old school in the best possible way. He felt pressure to represent a rigid mindset.”

Varian continues this mindset by tracing the path of taiko as an “ancient sacred practice in Japan” to her martial arts style training at Taiko Dojo. Her appealing, glossy, square-shaped book fits easily between my palms.

As I read, the book’s construction starts to come apart at the seams. Pages fall out and I worry that I will lose the correct order of taiko immersion that Varian describes.

Baba interrupts my fumbling, “The path of my parents (drummer Jeanne Aiko Mercer and saxophone musician Russel Baba) was very different than what they learned from Tanaka-sensei.”

“Jeanne and Russel took taiko and made it their own way back in the day.” Kameda explains.

After studying with Tanaka, Mercer and Baba moved to Mt Shasta in the 1970s. Along with raising their son, they started Shasta Taiko. Kameda, Baba’s next-door neighbor, started playing taiko with them at age eight.

“When I first started taiko, I was not into fusion at all. I thought taiko was a fixed tradition that had been around for thousands of years.” Kameda says.

Bergstrom, now awake, adds, “I had this naive Karate Kid image of taiko. When I went to Japan, there was no ‘wax on, wax off’ training.”

On Ensemble’s sound is an ongoing re-imagining of taiko music with their personal mix of indie rock, electronica, jazz, hip-hop, and other influences.

“This is the way identity and culture really work.” Kameda comments. “When reinvention stops happening the art becomes stagnant.”

Baba continues, “I want to make the best music I can. At school shows we ask the kids ‘What does taiko mean?’ Before, they’d answer ‘drums’. Now, they say ‘music’.”

Originally published in the International Examiner (PDF) page 13.

 

Toru Takemitsu

“Submitting to a rich, dignified passion of sound”

The joy of music, ultimately, seems connected to sadness. The sadness is that of existence. The more you are filled with the pure happiness of music making, the deeper the sadness is.
- Toru Takemitsu

Japan’s foremost composer, Toru Takemitsu, will be in Seattle from April 9-18, as the Seattle Spring Festival of Contemporary Music’s composer-in-residence. Takemitsu is best known as the composer for the Akira Kurasawa film “Ran,” which won him the 1987 Los Angeles Film Critics Award for best music score.

Born in Tokyo in 1930, Takemitsu experienced early adulthood in post World War II Japan. Having grown up with his aunt who was a koto player, traditional Japanese music brought Takemitsu bitter memories of the war years. Understandably, Takemitsu initially turned towards an international avant-garde style. His “Requiem” for string orchestra (1957) is an example of this musical idiom. Igor Stravinsky praised the work after hearing it, by chance, during a visit to a Japanese radio station.

Takemitsu first heard Western music while working as a busboy in an American Officer’s mess hall. Later, he would listen to the American Armed Forces Radio and go to American films. Takemitsu is still an ardent film goer and has also composed over 90 film scores.

Having organized and worked in the ”Experimental Workshop” in the early 1950′s, Takemitsu did not begin to appreciate Japanese music until he happened upon a bunraku puppet theater. The lone quality and timbre of the futazao shamisen moved him. After this fortuitous discovery of his own culture, Takemitsu began to experiment with pieces for traditional Japanese instruments. Most notably the biwa and shakuhachi. Seiji Ozawa, after hearing a tape of this music, brought it to Leonard Bernstein. From this came the commissioned work “November Steps” (1967) to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic.

“November Steps” scored for biwa, shakuhachi and orchestra confronts the differences in Western and Eastern conceptions of sound with uneven success. Half of the piece is a biwa/shakuhachi cadenza which is a strain on the structure as well as lhe listener. Takemitsu realized this after the New York premiere. “If I reconstruct the language of our traditional art. I will always remain alien to the hislorical cause. Conversely, if I westernize the original sound incantation, I would divest it of all emotional power.”

Since “November Steps,” Takemitsu has further refined the distinguishing sounds of his inherited musical cultures. “My music is very influenced by the Japanese tradition, especially the Japanese garden in color, spacing, form. At the same time, it is very influenced by Messiaen, Debussy and Schoenberg.”

Takemitsu has furthered this Western/Eastern music meld to something very personal. His music compels the listener to submit to a rich, dignified passion of sound. His new and unique form of expressive and intellectual communication is a positive product of our modern world.

“As our ‘machine civilization’ develops, especially through advances in communication technology, diverse cultures are increasingly drawn together in a most intimate exchange. I believe that, in time, cultures born of diverse peoples will be merged into a synthesis, that human beings will come to have one culture, immense and on a global scale.”

Originally published in the International Examiner (PDF) page 11.

 

Brenda Wong Aoki

Sharing stories that ‘begged to come out’

Brenda Wong Aoki is a natural story-teller. She is as energetic and insightful in person as she is on stage. Her concern for humanity, which once showed itself in her activism and teaching, emerges now in her performance art. For Wong Aoki, the Northwest Asian American Theatre’s recent production of “The Queen’s Garden” was a story that “begged to come out.”

“It’s easy to keep telling folk tales. I wanted to start telling issues that created the morass we’re in now,” she said.

Her solo performances in NWAAT’s Jan.17-19 production, exposed the reality of gang violence, misunderstood youth and racism. In “The Queen’s Garden,” Wong Aoki confronts experiences from her early life in the poorer west side of LA County. This sophisticated, politically progressive piece is a departure from her previous family-oriented, mainstream pieces like “Dreams and Illusions: Tales of the Pacific Rim” and “Obake!”

Wong Aoki’s personal form of storytelling is potent because she doesn’t believe in lecturing or torturing her audience: “Performances which do that are well-intended, but they offend or leave one feeling guilty,” she warned. “They are not empowering. They presuppose a savior out there, rather than one that’s from within.”

In the 1960s, Wong Aoki started doing piano/voice/dance performances. “When I was dancing, I would want to make music and when I was making music, I would want to talk. People told me to focus, but in all ancient art forms everybody did it together. Look at the ancient Japanese, Chinese and Greeks,” she laughed. Trying to suppress her artistic talents, Wong Aoki worked in social service. She spent 15 years as a teacher and community organizer in the poorer areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Later, realizing that she was an artist, Wong Aoki returned to performance art.

With the recent rise in anti-Asian sentiment, Wong Aoki has been sent three times as an emissary of peace to Michigan where Asian children are being beaten up by their classmates and hospitalized. On a return flight from a performance in Cleveland, Ohio, the airplane steward kicked her baggage under the seat without speaking to her. When she addressed him directly about the problem, he apologized, telling her “‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that you spoke such good English.’” Because of this incident, Wong Aoki said that she feels compassion for newly-arrived Asian immigrants in the United States.

In retrospect, Wong Aoki sees her open-hearted Chinese father with his “that could be you there” philosophy as her biggest influence. As a child, Wong Aoki scorned her father’s kindness because he was accommodating to the homeless people that came into his pharmacy. But after the pharmacy closed down, she saw two homeless people who use to frequent her father’s business on the streets and realized why he was so compelled to help them.

Coming from a Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and Scottish background, Wong Aoki believes that people who are of mixed heritage sometimes feel that they don’t fit in, so they overcompensate. “It’s easiest to find a niche and hide,” she said. Understanding the nuances of her varied backgrounds wasn’t easy for Wong Aoki, so she decided to embrace them all. By accepting herself, as an artist and as a person, Wong Aoki is able to look on life with humor and humanity.

Originally published in the International Examiner (PDF) page 7.