At the Darkhorse Theater
The Crucible
Elite Studio Works performed The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s play that is permanently on the nose in the best possible way, portraying the archetypal witch-hunt. Written in 1953 as a response to McCarthy’s anti-communist hysteria, it’s about the Salem Witch Trials. The play’s meaning is not limited to 1692 or 1953, but contains truths about hysteria, blame-shifting, and the willful blindness of authority, that are true in every place, age, and setting. It showcases individual and societal flaws and temptations that can break into damaging action when the situation presents itself. Sometimes the safety of external blame leads to a domino effect. Director E. G. Bailey’s note in the program said, “A play like The Crucible should put our society under a microscope. It should feel uncomfortably familiar, full of characters that feel recognizable in people you know, people you’ve seen on television, and maybe even in yourself. It should invite its audience to look introspectively and truly ask yourself what you would do in a situation like this. In this play, no one is the villain, yet everyone is the villain– from the protagonist to the by-standers.”
Elite Studio Works performed The Crucible October 13-21st at the Darkhorse Theatre. The location is quickly becoming a favorite of mine. Located in Sylvan Park, it’s a brief walk from tasty restaurants (my friend and I ate at M. L Rose just two blocks away) and has Richland Park’s parking lot right across the street. The theatre is small but comfortable and every seat has a good view. The tickets were $25 with general seating and the water bottles only cost $1.
This was the first performance of the Elite Studio Works I’ve seen, and I was highly impressed. Their acting is quality. This long, dense, emotionally fraught play was performed with such palpable emotion that they had me pressing my arm against the wooden armrest of my chair out of tension; my arm was sore the next day. Abigail Williams, the teenager who starts the blame game in an attempt to kill the wife of the man she loves, was played by Alaina Bozarth. I liked the way she portrayed the character; she didn’t try to act creepy the entire time, although she certainly was creepy by the end. She brought naive bad-girl vibes; the sort of high-schooler who brags about shoplifting, drinking, and flirting with teachers. She felt more selfish than malicious at the beginning, and that she was slowly shrinking into the role she had made for herself.
Audrey Venable played Mary Warren excellently. The nervous girl, always on the outskirts of the trouble, plagued by guilt and fear, and without the strength to be fully bad or fully good, felt so real, and her nervous trembling while being shouted at in the courtroom were tragically pitiful. John Proctor was played by Michael Adcock with exactly the character that Miller describes in the play: “He was the kind of man– powerful of body, even-tempered, and not easily led– who cannot refuse support to partisans without drawing their deepest resentment. In Proctor’s presence a fool felt his foolishness instantly…” His role, calling for a balance of guilt and rightful discernment, was played with excellent emotion and not a hint of self-pity. Dustin Davis played Reverend John Hale, and was my favorite character. The clergyman who comes to look for witchcraft had the delightful vibe of a pediatrician; the one who is hopeful, clear, but doesn’t lie and tells you when things will hurt. His growing distrust in the entire witchhunt, and his disillusionment and grief for the part he played in it were somehow the most emotional for me. Who hasn’t been very sure of the way things work, has acted accordingly, and then later realized the actions had only hurt people?
Adapted very slightly, Elite Studio Works’ performance was set in 2045, “where religion rules the law of the land. Democracy is now dystopia.” Paradoxically, this timeless play is very specifically dated. The language is Miller’s beautifully real-sounding old-timey speech, women are called “Goody,” men hold all the power, they live off of pre-industrial farming, mention battles with Native Americans, and are Puritans. This cannot be shifted to a different setting the way Shakespeare’s plays so easily (and often helpfully) are. The vaguely rustic dystopia felt more like it was set in the Fallout video game franchise: a metal trashcan held a fire, old tires leaned against a wall, with vintage objects and a record player. Like Fallout, the soundtrack was pre-1950’s music. That part I enjoyed; I assume most productions of this stick to heavy-handed ominous instrumental music. Costumes were slightly inconsistent; plain suits, John Proctor had a old-fashioned rustic look (rather like Daniel Day-Lewis’s costume in the movie adaptation), a few dresses, but most women dressed in high-waisted pants with crop tops. I think either Puritan attire or some more modern interpretation with drab uniformity would have more seamlessly integrated with the nature of the play, although some of the variety helped clue in people’s characteristics.
The only other aspect of the play that I think detracted was the casting of a woman for the role of Deputy Governor Danforth. The heavily patriarchal power dynamic of the Puritan town felt undone slightly; the vengeful use of the teen girls’ only taste (or hope) of power through using their bewitched condemnations of others seemed less plausible when the most powerful character in the play was a woman. Plus, they kept the script the same, so it felt a bit off when these Puritan fundamentalists kept calling the woman in heels “sir.” Lindsey Patrick-Wright, who played the role, did a fantastic job portraying a bureaucratic authoritarian who confuses her role with that of pure, abstract justice and refuses to even consider the possibility of mistake, condemning the suggestion as an affront against the notion of justice.
Elite Studio Works chose an ambitious play and pulled it off with spirit and skill. The most impressive thing about the performance for me was the consistent quality of their acting across the cast, and the way scenes were kept fraught with tension. The moment when all the girls feign that Mary Warren is cursing them in the courtroom was well done and genuinely creepy. I’m sad that I was only able to attend their penultimate performance; I wish I could encourage readers to attend this show. This was their final play for the year, but the back of the program announced 5 Women Wearing the Same Dress and Frost Nixon as their 2024 season. For more information, see Elite Studio Works.
The MCR Interview:
Fable Cry’s 9th Festival of Ghouls (Interview with Zach Ferrin)
As part of the MCR Interview series journalist Bethany Morgan asks Zach Ferrin about his upcoming performance at OZ Arts with his band Fable Cry, as part of the 9th Annual Festival of Ghouls celebration.
Review Essay:
“Strange Rituals” The Rite of Spring in the 21st Century
There are few pieces in any orchestra’s standard repertoire quite like Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Sure, there are other works with more recognizable public profiles. The types of pieces so famous, so synonymous with the whole of classical music itself, that it’s hard to imagine someone who doesn’t know at least some bit of them. Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet may not have that precise type of cultural saturation, but its name and reputation are clearly enough on their own to earn the kind of notoriety and admiration required to headline the opening concerts of a new Symphony season.
Unlike, say, a work like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, where its opening measures definitely belong to that “synonymous with Classical music itself” category, so much of The Rite of Spring’s importance comes from its now-legendary, apparently riot-inducing opening night at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris on May 29th, 1913. The piece’s daring use of complex textures, rhythms, timbres, and its largely static structural scheme were so daring and bold, the crowd quickly broke into a growing wave of boos and hisses that led to several arrests—or so you might hear in a high school Music Appreciation class. In reality, it wasn’t for at least another decade before accounts of the premiere began referring to the crowd’s strong negative reaction as a “riot,” and in any case, the causes of the disturbance during The Rite’s premiere probably had to do with much more than just Stravinsky’s score, bold and novel as it was. Without a doubt, Nicholas Roerich’s stylized, “primitive” stage designs and costumes and Vaslav Nijinsky’s experimental choreography, which incorporated angular, Cubist-adjacent poses and loud rhythmic stomping, were almost certainly contributing factors to whatever aesthetic grievances the audience had that night.
Of course, The Rite of Spring didn’t come out of nowhere. Nor was The Ballets Russes a stranger to controversy to begin with. Nijinsky’s overtly erotic, similarly angular choreography for a ballet version of Debussy’s The Afternoon of a Faun exactly a year-to-the-date before the premiere of The Rite of Spring provoked a similar reaction, if not one that played out more in the press than at the premiere itself. To say nothing of the musical changes happening all around Paris, and elsewhere, including Vienna, where Arnold Schoenberg was in the middle of developing his own radical atonal style. What this shows is that the now-legendary response to Stravinsky’s ballet almost certainly had less to do with any individual aesthetic concerns related to the piece itself than with a broader cultural shift happening in Paris (and much of the rest of the world) at the beginning of the 20th Century.
In his great book on Classical Music in the long 20th Century, The Rest Is Noise, the music critic Alex Ross points out, for example, that the fractured nature of the Ballets Russes’ audience itself made this type of conflict inevitable. The wealthier Parisians, sitting in the box seats, came to the ballet out of something like a kind of class obligation—intending to relish in the classical and formal elegance of French ballet as it has existed largely throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. But the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and the cutting-edge ambitions of its impresario Sergei Diaghilev also drew in a younger, artsier (although possibly in some cases no less wealthy) crowd, for whom the music of older generations of French cultural elites seemed more like outdated relics. Though the program of the 29th of May, 1913 included far more than Stravinsky’s ballet, and its inclusion of the Glazunov orchestration of Chopin’s Les Sylphides, selections from Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances, and Weber’s Le Spectre de la Rose suggests that Diaghilev and Nijinsky likely had this dual-audience in mind while preparing the program, it was ultimately not enough that night to keep the peace.
It might seem at first glance that this class/generational divide at the heart of the Ballets Russes’ audience was indeed playing out along lines of aesthetic disagreement, but I think that reading misses the point. The Rite of Spring, or The Afternoon of a Faun for that matter, needed nothing more than neither looking nor sounding like Swan Lake in order to provoke the response it did. The below passage from Thomas Forest Kelly’s chapter on The Rite of Spring in his popular book First Nights: Five Musical Premieres manages to capture an important distinction to be made in the reception of The Rite. Here he writes about the ballet in its context as ritual, as the piece’s title suggests.
Ritual music ought to reflect aspects of the rite: solemnity, well-understood tradition, a direct relation to the purpose. When the ritual we observe is familiar to us, the results are easy to judge: the proper actions are carried out, the appropriate words said, the deity invoked. The trouble arises with strange rituals: there we are observers, not participants, and we cannot really say whether the job is done properly.
Here I think he manages to frame the issue in an interesting way. The issue The Rite of Spring presented its audience wasn’t a musical one, per se. Its “problem” was that its music, its scenario, and its costumes were intended to fulfill a ritualized cultural practice rendered obsolete by its own underlying logic.
That is to say, the idea of the legacy of French ballet as held by the wealthy Parisians who frequented the performances of Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and other similar venues imparted onto the act of attending the ballet a particularly powerful type of social and cultural importance. In its reproduction across time and multiple generations, this social and cultural importance took the form of ritualized practice, of attending the ballet, as Kelly argues.
All human ritual practice must be reproduced across time. It simply can’t exist otherwise. Rituals critically rely on a certain degree of familiarity, and yet to exist they must change. In a way, I think the problems that arise from this contradiction are an inherent element of conservatism in general, but in the context of the early 20th Century, the contradictions between the aging ruling class of the 19th Century and the generation of high Modernists replacing it were especially centered on problems of ritual. Modernism, which had been responsible for the development of the Nation State and the nationalistic artistic practices without which there would be no French ballet to attend, also demanded the privileging of “pure aesthetics,” without which it’s hard to imagine the radical experimentation in the music of Debussy, Stravinsky, et al.
In other words, it only looks like a fight about aesthetics, because the aesthetics themselves symbolize the underlying cultural logic, which can’t possibly bear the weight of its own importance. Nevertheless, when we talk about The Rite of Spring today, it’s always about its music—almost always performed as an orchestral piece, completely separated from its dramatic context. It’s always about how radical Stravinsky’s music was, about how the audience in the quaint old days were simply unable to handle it. And importantly of course how we today are enlightened enough to appreciate its value.
There’s some paternalism present in this attitude, of course, not dissimilar to how one might talk about a physician in the Middle Ages writing about the four humors or something. But I think it more pressingly reflects how we’re still preoccupied with similar questions of aesthetics and music, while even still ignoring questions about music ritual.
For my own part, I can’t remember another concert I’ve attended recently where questions about classical music performance and ritual felt more relevant than the Nashville Symphony’s Classical Series opening night last month, and not just because the headline piece was The Rite of Spring. Take for starters the opening minutes of the concert. A few minutes after 7:30, Maestro Guerrero hurries onto the stage and up to his podium. He doesn’t say a word, but raises his baton, turns to the audience for a moment, then suddenly sweeps both hands outward, giving a long, slow upbeat. The orchestra begins a rather sudden performance of the National Anthem, not indicated anywhere in the program. A few members of the audience stand up almost instantly, as if by instinct, and turn their gaze to the American flag tucked away at the far back of the stage close to the door where Maestro Guerrero entered. A handful of people in the crowd even sing along. The concert carries on with Julia Perry’s A Short Piece for Orchestra without remark almost immediately afterwards.
It seems possible to me the performance was a late decision, perhaps in honor of the anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, but it nonetheless left me a bit puzzled. The whole time the anthem played, and maybe even well into the Perry, I found myself trying to remember if I had ever seen an orchestra concert begin with the National Anthem before. And this was puzzling not, I don’t think, because it struck me as a “strange ritual,” with no reference point. In fact, the opposite is true. It felt like every football game I’ve ever been to. I’m not so sure this is as much a problem or a crisis, as it is the first time I’ve ever noticed, to this extent anyways, that the ritual of Going to the Symphony had noticeably, meaningfully changed.
But the picture of this change is even more complicated, I think. Despite the fact that applause between movements is now almost a given, which I suppose might lead some conservative symphony goers to bemoan the death of decorum or something, the Classical Series remains fairly sharply delineated from other “pops” offerings from the NSO, whirlwind performances of the National Anthem notwithstanding. This is reflected not only in the repertoire itself, but also in how the Symphony frames its performances of these pieces and why it chooses the pieces it does.
For example, Guerrero has long been known for his practice of incorporating lesser-known works (and usually ones by living composers) alongside symphonic chestnuts, bragging that the Nashville Symphony has among “the most adventurous audience[s] in the world.” The inclusion of Perry’s A Short Piece for Orchestra on the program is clearly a part of this larger practice, though also related to another broader trend over the last several years largely centered on the so-called “reassessment” of the music of the brilliant Florence Price. Thomas May’s program notes point this connection to Price out directly. Others have written at length about the issues of this type of framing. I summarized this discussion in a review of a CD of Price’s music for the Music City Review last year, where I argue that much of this discourse is little other than marketing. Though I’m not interested in rehashing the entirety of that argument here, I think it’s important to reiterate that this “reassessment” narrative is completely ahistorical at best and profoundly offensive at worst.
On the subject of Perry’s “reassessment,” May’s program notes line out the “duty” of the symphony orchestra as follows:
Orchestras bring extraordinary imagination to making the great works of the past relevant for today’s audiences. But in addition to presenting the familiar repertoire…it is also an essential duty of performing arts institutions like the Nashville Symphony to rediscover music by composers who have been unjustly overlooked: “Pieces become part of the repertoire only because we play them and then let you, as the audience, decide on whether you’d like to hear them again.
I think that what’s interesting about this statement has relatively little to do with Perry, or any composer in particular at all. Rather, I think it’s easy to see here that the financialization of the symphony orchestra over the last several decades runs deeper than obliquely-racist reductions of a handful of composers into viral marketing. We’ve seemingly found ourselves in the midst of a completely “democratized” classical canon, where aesthetic value is nominally determined in the “natural” working out of various market pressures. Mind you, I don’t mourn the loss of “pure aesthetics” or some bologna as the main source of value for music. That idea was basically already dead, at least among younger cohorts of academics, by the 1970s. No, rather what troubles me is that I’m not really sure what kind of structural responses are even available to a problem like this.
On the one hand, it’s obviously better for everyone involved that our cultural institutions be subject to the same democratic principles we extend (to some extent anyways) to our bureaucratic ones. However, in the same way that economic democratization isn’t achieved and is in fact made more difficult in the face of an increasingly neo-liberalized economy, there is no rational basis for believing you can possibly hope to do the same on the cultural front. This is because the market forces of a Capitalist system are designed to funnel money, i.e. power, increasingly to the top, not to distribute it in anything like an efficient system, and because this is a consequence of the structural logic of Capital itself and not the result of any individual action within that system, given enough time, enough time for the practice to become ritualized and fixed, this inequality is effectively inevitable. At the moment, the wealthy benefactors of the Nashville Symphony are convinced of the potential profitability of Perry’s music, so it is able to be performed. What happens when that support dries up? Who is to hold the wealthiest to account in this “democratic” marketized system? Sure, we have replaced one form of brutal elitism, but at what cost?
Without meaningful, systematic public support for artistic institutions, in a world in which they’re subjected to the same economic forces as the Tennessee Titans, the options an organization like the Nashville Symphony faces are either to be crushed into nothing or to become indistinguishable from the Tennessee Titans. The problem with this outcome is not even just the loss of symphony orchestras as we’ve known them, but the transformation of even more of the variety of this world to the grey sludge of “Content.” This trend is already pretty much completely played out in the world of streaming TV and movies, but now as Netflix looks to move into setting up physical locations to offer audience “experiences,” it’s clear we’ll see this same trend move well beyond the boundaries of the digital world.
I suppose it’s not hard to see then why the Nashville Symphony (or any other ensemble of its size) has no option but to try and “sell” us Stravinsky as (and these are Guerrero’s own words here) “heavy metal” or as aesthetically radical. This is obviously an unhelpful framing if you’re trying to get a historical perspective on the piece, because it is neither metal nor ultimately anymore “aesthetically radical” than much of the rest of the music written in its immediate context. It’s simply that the way we have ritualized the performance of this piece is, in part, to tell ourselves stories about the transformation of musical aesthetics in the early 20th Century. Undoubtedly this piece was a part of that transformation, but it was not a moment of singular rupture, met with the riotous anger of an unenlightened audience. So, if it’s not historical, then, much like the issue with the music of Price and Perry, it’s simply a question of finding the right marketing gimmick to keep the piece alive. And I do genuinely believe that the people who run the Nashville Symphony find this music valuable and worth keeping around. Why else would they even bother trying to market it in the first place?
Much like Diaghilev, those putting together orchestral programs in the 21st Century seem to be running into issues of an audience at cross purposes. There’s a subtle identity crisis at the core of the symphonic repertoire, that I imagine will only become more pronounced in the coming decades. For plenty of good reasons, the older cultural paradigm of cultural elitism has, if not disappeared, largely gone out of fashion in the classical music world. Good riddance. I think if you’re someone who loves classical music, the task now is to find literally anything other than branding to replace it.
An Annual Music City Event
The International Black Film Festival
Perhaps one of the greatest hidden treasures of Music City, the annual International Black Film Festival (IBFF), is held on the last weekend of September (the same weekend as the Nashville Film Festival), and it just finished delivering another festival of amazing, cutting-edge cinema. Due to the presence of two festivals in one weekend, our indefatigable corps of journalists was spread quite thin. Of the IBFF, we were able to attend and review two Narrative Features (Four Walls, Million to One), a Marquis Documentary (Lead Belly: The Man Who Invented Rock & Roll), and one Collection of Shorts (Shorts Suite 4) which are always the most innovative collections. Along with the collection of two dozen long films and more short selections, the festival offered numerous industry panels on activism and the business, as well as after parties, and red carpets. As we said last year, next year we will cover more.
Four Walls, 2022 (Review by Angelica Trujillo)
What is the limit in the series of tactics that a woman must put into action for her survival? Why should she subject her essence to multiple incarnations of roles due to a rule of law that does not guarantee her protection? Four Walls, a South African film written and directed by Kgosana Monchusi, Menzi Mzimela, and Juvaiś Dunn, is the allegory of a consciousness that, imprisoned, does not sleep. It is the rumination contained between thoughts of anger, sadness, and nostalgia, but that simultaneously must execute a plan to jump to the next level of agony.
“Grace” (Enhle Mbali Mlotshwa), the main character of this drama, is a pendulum that swings in the middle of a masculine, violent, and criminal circle. This circle is made up of the man who in the past knew how to recognize diligence and charm in his wife, and who now wakes up bound and gagged in his bedroom. It is also made up of two criminals pursued by a police operation who seek refuge inside Grace’s home, and an “honest” and “gentlemanly” police officer who evades work to feed her adulterous desires. The plot unfolds in a tangle of suspense from the beginning to the end of the film. Grace’s house is the only visible setting for the development of events marked by anxiety.
It’s noon and the woman seems to repeat her daily routine; In the kitchen, she prepares a meal marinated with tears, and a glass of a fresh beverage is transformed into what will be the end of the misfortune. This period is interrupted by the thunderous and insistent knock on the door, Grace rushes to hide the evidence of her already-decided plan. Now she must protect her life from two outlaws who invade her enclosure and her chameleon-like attitude adjusts to the threat. The monument to the misery of a man who has not spared physical and psychological humiliation against his wife is an alarm for criminals who no longer trust the fragility of the hostess.
The preamble to the climax of the film is a series of unethical actions on the part of each character, but whose purposes have an almost altruistic background. With the empty glass on the table and a cartridge on the floor, Grace remains innocent among the bodies of the intruders. What better scenario than to notify the police that her husband has been murdered, and he serving as a witness to an unappealable sentence? Enhle Mbali Mlotshwa says that it was not a difficult role to play, gender violence is so latent in society that there are more than enough stories that she was inspired by, so, I could suspect that the permanent pain on her face may not be just part of the performance.
Million to One, 2023 (Review by Stephen Turner)
If any of us were to find a perfect partner in life, could we get past it and move on if we were to unfortunately lose them? Who do we have to turn to after such loss? These are some of the questions writer/director Harold Jackson tries to walk us through in this film. Jackson’s Million to One (2023) tells a story centering on the strong bond between brothers Dre (Rob Gordon) and Isaac (Michael Patterson) Shaw. Dre, an urbanite and rising social media influencer—DreShawFoodGang Bang Bang!—visits his suburbanite brother, Isaac, since, at the last minute, the latter and his fiancé Monica (Ashley Rios) decide to finally tie the knot. More concerned with reaching one million followers, Dre comedically bemoans his impromptu summoning by Isaac, taking every opportunity to blast suburban life—until there was the lovely Tatiana (Briana Cortesiano), the gourmet chef hired for the weekend.
Million to One is an exciting amalgam of a serious drama and a romantic comedy. Like a cross between Adam Szymkowicz’s play Kodachrome (2019)—about a man struggling to love again after his wife’s death—and the rom-com My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997)—where the groom’s best friend must get a bride to the alter before it’s too late—Isaac in Million to One, still grieving the loss of first wife, Stacy, goes missing leaving Monica to wonder on the morning of their wedding.
A strong point of this film is how it explores family and generational trauma. The film’s central characters are forced to confront long-term effects stemming from their issues of abandonment, loss, and emotional abuse. One of the two standout scenes is of a tender moment between actors Gordon and Cortesiano; in a more personal moment, audiences finally get to see a more mature and transparent Dre, and they can adore Tatiana for her warmth and inner radiance as well as her outer beauty. The second scene is a tear-jerking moment with Patterson portraying Isaac lamenting over his late wife while sullenly poised by her grave’s headstone. Dre is shone in a new and unexpected light, lifting his brother up, giving him warm encouragement and support, convincing Isaac that Monica is “the one.” In a sudden turn of comedic hijinks, Dre rushes Isaac back to the alter to be reunited with Monica.
Million to One’s soundscape—supervised by The Taco Pimp—comprises contemporary tracks from budding artists, including Leon Laudenbach, Scootie Wop, WXLF, and Ollie Joseph. A score standout is during the opening credits with the group Aves crooning “Try So Hard,” a cusp-1960s/70s-style funk/soul track that harkens back to the sound of The Isley Brothers. Additionally, several music tracks from Miami-based artist Duce Williams are included. Williams’s music is self-described as pulling “from multiple influences” with roots from the Bahamas and time spent in Sydney, Australia (www.ducewilliams.com). Listen for Williams’s instrumental version of “I’m Seeing Stars” during Dre’s night-driving scene.
Personal crisis is inevitable, and those who lift us up, to ride through such storms are essential in our lives. The big takeaway from this entertaining film is how it expresses the importance of maintaining familial bonds, and it stresses the necessity of dealing with our past traumas in order to make a fulfilling life possible in the present.
Lead Belly: The Man Who Invented Rock & Roll, 2023 (Review by Joseph E. Morgan)
A recent release from Tennessee’s largest film and video production company, Film House, Lead Belly: The Man Who Invented Rock & Roll is a strong and intimate depiction of Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, a mainstay in the development of American Popular Music. The documentary is rich in stories given by famous folk, rock, and skiffle artists from the sixties and later, artists like Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Paul McCartney and others. Like many stories of African American music of the 20th Century, especially those set in the South, Lead Belly is replete with myths, but thankfully, Director Curt Hahn is careful to only try to dispel those that he can, leaving unanswered those that he can’t. The difficulties are those that he doesn’t mention.
The movie opens with a depiction of Lead Belly’s childhood as privileged for his time and place, describing the luck of coming up in a small nuclear family (as a comparison, Robert Johnson was the 11th of 11 children). It soon shifts to his incarcerations, focusing mainly on the two knife fights, allegedly started by jealous men, and ended by Lead Belly with a knife. Hahn has his onscreen informants (there is no narrator) challenge and discuss the legend that Lead Belly sang his way to a pardon to end both of his longer prison terms. No conclusion is arrived at, but a nuanced look at the intentions and agendas of all involved emerges quite successfully—this is historical documentary cinema at its best.
Similarly, his relationship with the Lomax family is investigated and an uncomfortable narrative is spun depicting Lead Belly’s subservient attitude toward John Lomax as well as Lomax’s appropriation of Lead Belly’s music by claiming authorial credit. This narrative culminates with Lead Belly pulling a knife on John Lomax in order to get the money that he was owed, unfortunately neglecting to point out that Lead Belly would eventually, legally and successfully, sue Lomax for what he was owed.
In constructing his position as the “Man Who Invented Rock & Roll,” as the title implies, and as if the genre still commands relevance, the film points mainly to influence, with the most detail going to the songs that Lonnie Donegan appropriated and translated to skiffle; songs and a genre which would then influence the Beatles. There is a direct line there, but with Lead Belly’s larger presence in the culture and a catalog containing songs like “Midnight Special,” “Black Betty,” “C.C. Rider,” “Goodnight Irene,” and many others, it seems forced and unnecessary.
A deeper investigation into his unique playing style as the “King of the 12 String Guitar” and the way he got such an amazing timbre (like a tack-piano at times) from that huge 12-string guitar was largely unexplored. It seems that it is in this intention to establish Lead Belly as a hero, as the “Man Who Invented Rock & Roll” the film is prevented from fully exploring other, especially more challenging facets of his career. His avoidance of taking a political stance is mentioned, but without critical thought. Was he choosing to avoid politics out of safety, or was it a business decision? How are we to believe he was simply uninterested or strangely ambivalent?
Related to this are Lead Belly’s failed attempts to find success in New York by performing in Harlem’s Apollo Theater at the height of the Harlem Renaissance (January, 1936). He performed a skit devised to recreate an earlier newsreel. A skit like this would have done quite well on Lomax’s white college lecture circuit; however, Lead Belly’s appearance in prison stripes (to match the newsreel) was too much for the Harlem audience, or perhaps it was his subservient relationship with the Lomaxes? This is an important investigative opportunity that is simply missed. Almost 20 years later, and 5 years after Leadbelly’s death, Langston Hughes would write a stinging essay titled Slavery and Leadbelly Are Gone, but the Old Songs Go Singing On. In it he stated:
Well, I guess you know there was once a singer named Leadbelly, and he was a penitentiary boy, and he sang his way free. I guess you know he got locked up again, but he got out singing. And he sang songs from here to yonder. He sang himself great. He sang himself famous. […] He died while other folks made money from his records.”
Lead Belly’s actions, and Langston Hughes’ words are, of course, contextualized and explained by the impossibly difficult-to-navigate racial/political circumstances of their lives; circumstances that would lead one of the greatest literary voices of the period (Hughes) to attack one of the greatest musical voices of the very same period (Ledbetter). This, especially for modern audiences, needs greater exposition.
Towards the last decade of his life, Ledbetter began to experience success on radio and was being recognized internationally. Tragically, he succumbed to Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) in 1949. In the 21st Century, in the mainstream media, he is having a bit of a resurgence, cited as having the first recorded instance of the command “stay woke.” He used the phrase almost a century ago in relation to African Americans in the South who needed to be aware of their surroundings to avoid lynching. The use of the term has brought the apolitical Leadbelly into a modern political discussion that he most certainly would have avoided in his own lifetime.
I hate to be the reviewer who talks about his subject and how it should be instead of how it is, but I think this also represents the goals of the filmmakers– to restore Lead Belly’s relevance and place in American Music. Lead Belly was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame over thirty years ago as an “Early Influencer,” and that influence has been unmistakable. His covers from that faded genre include its kings, from Led Zeppelin to Nirvana, from The Beach Boys to The White Stripes. To restore Lead Belly as the “Inventor of Rock & Roll” is one thing, but I think a greater success would be to restore his incredibly interesting life as a model for the current mainstream style of popular music: Hip-Hop. Nurturing a bad reputation to sell records, carefully balancing between political positions to avoid recriminations from either side, staying woke to systemic forces that will chill an artist’s success are all actions and hard lessons that many modern artists could use as a model for their own lives. His life is still quite relevant in that way.
And yet, his old songs, as Hughes noted, still “…go singing on.” My daughter, just a few years ago learned his “Bring Me a Little Water, Silvy” with Nashville’s wonderful Met Singers. The organization was created to provide “…children the opportunity to develop leadership skills, to enhance their education, and to grow artistically and professionally.” It is wonderful to see a group of diverse, elementary-age kids master the somewhat complex clapping pattern and sing together, flush with pride, confidence, and joy in the sound they are making. Whatever the narrative position and title scholars and documentarians put on Huddie Ledbetter probably won’t matter as much in the long run as his music, and that’s the way it should be.
Shorts Suite 4 (Review by G. E. Tipton)
Shorts Suite 4, at the R. Milton and Denice Johnson Center at Belmont University showed five shorts. There was a well-planned variety in tone, length, budget, and production quality; I appreciated the openness of the festival to fun shorts, even when they only had access to small budgets. Often underrated, shorts are rarely seen in theaters (except perhaps before a Pixar movie), but I hope their success at festivals like the IBFF, the Nashville Film Festival, and everywhere online will change that.
The first short was Lettre La, where two West-Indian radio hosts respond to a letter in their advice segment, and you realize there’s more to the letter than meets the eye. It is funny and sincere with great production quality, well written and well acted. Unlike the other shorts, this has subtitles, which is probably unnecessary, but it was considerate of them to have them up for those who might struggle with understanding their accents.
Next was the Canadian entry Woman Meets Girl, a 17 minute LGBT drama, where a woman and her homeless houseguest share drinks, conversation, and possibly something more. The woman is in her forties and repressed, the girl is an 18 year old sex worker, and their opposing viewpoints on life and love are contrasted in their conversation. It was well shot, well acted, and the characters had good chemistry. Perhaps the relationship between the two women could be for the benefit of both, but it seemed that the adult woman had little wisdom to offer.
Just Food was the longest short, at 28 minutes, and is a humorous reflection by a man about his and his friends’ fear of commitment, settling for unhappy relationships that don’t challenge them. Some of the acting and production quality are uneven, but the writing is fun and funny, the message is solid, and the costuming is stylish.
That’s Our Time was the shortest of the lineup, at just under ten minutes. It is a cool, well executed idea: we sit in a mysterious man’s therapy session, where he talks about his dead-end job and his inability to bond with those around him. Its use of a digital timer beep as they talk about the shortness of life is effective, and the viewer’s sense of something sinister develops steadily. It left me wanting more.
One and Done, a local Nashville short, had members of the cast and crew present at the showing. A romantic comedy showcasing a terrible first date, the humor was goofy and slapstick, and my favorite bit was when the lead (played by Renard Hirsch) claimed that his car’s alternator was out of electrolytes. Michael McLendon, who wrote the screenplay, explained in the Q&A afterwards that he wrote this for school (he’s a recent graduate from Lipscomb) and that it is an amalgamation of several real-life experiences. The writing felt real, and Kimberly Jones’ portrayal of increasing hangriness was something everyone can relate to.
Having opened its doors in 2006, the IBFF’s mission is to “Encourage culturally accurate depictions of all people in film with special emphasis on providing a forum of access for underserved and unheard voices as well as to showcase the artistically rich creativity and diversity found around the globe.” To read more, and to join their mailing list (so you don’t miss next year’s festival) visit: https://www.ibffevents.com/aboutus
About Town
Nashville Film Festival
The Nashville Film Festival celebrated its 54th year this fall: six days of over 140 films; panel discussions and live performances; a competition; a conference; all held at eight different arts venues in Nashville, as well as online at the Nashfilm Virtual Cinema. Needless to say, we couldn’t possibly begin to cover everything shown at this Academy Award qualifying festival, especially as we also covered the International Black Film Festival, which occurred here in Nashville at the same time. Our writers did their best to divide and conquer. We saw shorts, documentaries, and dramas, attended red carpet events, and viewed the online catalog.
Black Barbie
Written and directed by Lagueria Davis, this 100 minute documentary details the creation of black Barbie while also delving into deeper issues of race and prejudice. Davis was inspired to tell this story by her aunt Beulah Mae Mitchell’s work at Mattel. Mitchell, a well-spoken and charismatic woman, makes the viewer feel as though they are in the room with her enjoying a cup of coffee and talking together. She explains that when she was child, there were no black dolls for her to play with. She recounts working for Mattel and meeting Kitty Black Perkins who designed the first black Barbie in 1980. Perkins is also interviewed in the documentary and she shares how she came up with idea for the design and the hair and how she felt as a woman of color in this company. Davis also interviews Stacy McBride-Irby who worked for Mattel under Perkins, and then later created the 30th anniversary black Barbie. She tells us how she really wanted to make dolls that looked like her daughter.
Intertwined with these interviews are interviews with people of color, exploring how childhood play helps to shape our current reality and what it feels like to never be the main character in their own story. Davis shows footage from a recent study, in which children were asked to look at a group of diverse Barbies and identify the “real” Barbie. They all choose the blonde, white Barbie. This study was inspired by the 1947 doll studies by Clark and Clark. Davis includes a heartbreaking clip from Kenneth B Clark describing how black children associate positive attributes with a white doll and negative attributes with a black doll. This study played a significant role in Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned state-sponsored segregation in the United States.
At the core of this documentary is a cry for change. While some real steps have been made toward equality, we are far from where we need to be. Davis points out that the 40th anniversary black Barbie was created by a white man. In a book created by Mattel that chronicles important moments over the years, they leave out the creation of black Barbie in the year 1980. The animated Barbie movies and show all focus on white Barbie who sometimes has a black friend. Mattel, and society needs to do better, to allow children of all colors to experience themselves as the heroes of their own story.
-B. Morgan
Music Video Shorts
The Music Videos shorts collection was an exhilarating experience from psychedelic to hardcore, to classical. The collection is marked, like the pop music genre it represents, by a combination of new and old, the innovative and the vintage.
“Minor Setback,” sets to film a 7” single by Aussie super-duo Ambrose Kenny-Smith (King Gizzard) and Jay Watson (of Tame Impala) which came out back on Record Store Day (April 24). The video features orange men in a museum with an abundance of hand-painted film and 3D animation, especially during the bridge. Jake Armstrong’s animation is spot on. The video is quite reminiscent of the Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” in its colors and affection for animation, and in that way it is strangely vintage and futuristic at the same time. For what it’s worth, “Minor Setback” is a much better song than “Money for Nothing.”
Thomas Nyffeler’s “Mio” features a naïve composer’s daydream of meeting a beautiful woman with similar interests and forming a relationship over the music. The cinemaphotography of the Swiss landscape is remarkable, and the dark, almost noir depiction places us in the context of a 20th century European War, but the music and the narrative lack any real emotional depth.
David Heatley’s “Mess” features naked, kickboxing, punk chicks on roller skates with a hardcore “4 on the snare” rhythm. The animation is bright, aggressive, almost as aggressive as the song—it’s like a big glass of tart orange juice. Similar in Vitamin C content, but different, is Lovejoy’s “Portrait of a Blank Slate.” Busy as hell and right on top of the beat, driving a strange, new wave sound not unrelated to the White Stripes that they’re calling “pop-punk” these days, is Mark Boardman on drums. The video is a delightful setting of mid-20th century sci-fi film (think Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, or The Twilight Zone).
Named after, one guesses, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, an influential and controversal “urbanist,” with “REM Koolhaus,” Kajo and his team of animators made me tangibly nostalgic for Liquid Television circa 1995; heck, it even includes a guitar-playing astronaut. The least derivative of the group, while it also deals with another love story (or better, a broken heart story) unlike Nyffeler’s “Mio,” “REM Koolhaus” encounters the challenges and emotional tribulations of “collapsing into the endless dark” of life, love and, perhaps, REM sleep. It’s a sweet, lovely video and composition.
The collection ends with the delightful “Broken Chain” by Midnight Mantra, filmed at the local Blockbuster. If Kajo was the least derivative, Cade Huseby’s is an etude on influence, taking us through a collage of turn-of-the-century (the most recent one!) blockbuster videos in which the lead character sees himself and his gal together. There is a lot of Quentin Terentino, but without the feet. It’s a cute entry, but not terribly memorable.
Overall, I think this was my favorite collection of shorts, and I’m certainly going to watch again next year!
-J.M.
Fingernails
I wasn’t sure what to expect from this unappealingly-named movie, but my lack of preconceptions didn’t prevent me from being surprised; it is a slightly dystopian sci-fi romance with a strong sense of humor. Where other sci-fi gets pompous, this gets silly.
Set in an alternate late 90’s, they reference the Spice Girls, have no wireless phones and an almost implausible scarcity of computers; besides a home TV and brief moment in a movie theater, only one screen features in the plot, part of a scientific machine. For a contemporary science fiction film, it is refreshing to avoid swooshy graphics, apps, and heavy-handed commentary on social media. It gives similar alternate-almost-present-day vibes as Apple’s Severance, and is more successful than it when it comes to costuming; I don’t want to live in the world of Fingernails, but I wouldn’t mind dressing as if I did.
The concept is fun: an objective third party can tell you if you and your partner are actually 100% in love. Have a fingernail removed, have your partner’s fingernail removed, and the machine can analyze them and give the results. The film is playful, but its point is clear: we as a society are all too ready to make drastic life decisions based off of new pop science, and are willing to submit to and suffer for ideas we haven’t fully considered. People sacrifice for duty and ideals, and we call that heroism. People sacrifice for their desires, and sometimes they’re praised and sometimes they’re condemned. What if people pay the experts to tell them what they feel, and sacrifice based on that?
The cast is marvelous. Everyone is fun to watch, not just because they’re attractive, but because they are charismatic and interesting. Jessie Buckley is charming as Anna, who starts working at the institute, partnered with Amir (played by Riz Ahmed), where they help prepare people for the test by putting them through days of exercises intended to boost their romantic connection. The exercises are comically corny: singing karaoke together in French (as Luke Wilson explains, French is the language of love), watching Hugh Grant movies, staring into each other’s eyes while underwater to prompt a feeling of connection and breathlessness. Jeremy Allen White as Ryan, Anna’s boyfriend, is excellent, and his portrayal of fatigue at the end of long days is incredibly relatable.
The movie is willing to be slow. Characters speak, think for a moment, then change their mind. This more realistic pacing makes for romantic tension while avoiding cloying tropes. The music helps with this, most of it diegetic, and each song well-chosen.
The flaw in this movie is that Anna, the main character, is rather unlikable when you think through her actions. If you ignore how endearing Jessie Buckely is, you see someone who tells a huge lie without plausible justification. To be fair, I have a hard time enjoying infidelity romances: as the film progresses, Anna’s attraction to Amir causes her to doubt her relationship with her boyfriend, and whether to trust her perception of her feelings, or the machine’s. Riz Ahmed as Amir is handsome and intelligent and adorably lonely (the attraction is obvious), but Ryan, her Mr. Wrong, doesn’t seem wrong. I appreciate that they avoid the typical rom-com tropes showing his unsuitability (usually displayed by liking sports or having a personal social life), but his only faults seem to be being tired after work and being a little stuck in routine. Maybe that could be enough, except he’s also shown to be forgiving and kind. Perhaps Jeremy Allen White is just too likable, or I’ve just been married long enough to know that there is romance in the mundane.
Despite its flaws, though, it is funny, has a great point, and is a pleasure to watch. I’ll watch it again when it comes out on Apple TV+ on November 3, and recommend you do so too.
-G. E. Tipton
Graveyard Shift Shorts
Murder Camp
Written by Will Lagos & Jeremy Radin, this dark comedy was my favorite of the Graveyard Shift Shorts. Cleverly written and well acted, the idea of a serial killer having an existential crisis is surprisingly fun. As he tries to convince a fellow serial killer that there might be more to life than killing, the argument gets heated. A college student taking psychology classes (and a potential victim) comes upon them and counsels them, later finding out that she identifies with them more than she thought. The ending is perfect for this silly slasher!
The Jennifer Meyers Story
This mock true-crime episode really impressed me with its ability to blend dark humor with some genuinely creepy moments. The interviews in the mock crime episode are interspersed with reenactments with crudely-made mini models. Some of the interviews have little pieces of humor and the mini models are sometimes silly. It becomes a bit meta as the woman operating the mini models packs them all up and goes home and we see that she is being watched. The dark, bloody ending is shown in mini model form.
Get Away
Three girlfriends vacation in the middle of nowhere: a classic start to a horror story. The characters are aware of this and joke that they are staying in a “murder house.” There’s no wifi and no cable, but the women find a VCR player and a tape and choose to watch that for their entertainment that night. The horror begins when they start interacting with the characters on the television and soon a static-y creature appears on the TV. As with any good scary movie, you’re rooting for the characters and yelling at them to get out. A good, although a bit predictable, twist makes for a horrifying ending.
Are You Awake?
In some alternate universe, a woman named Dale makes a living by waking up strangers. It is never explained why this is a job, and she must go into these people’s homes and make sure that they are awake. After an unsettling experience with a client who is plagued by nightmares, Dale also finds it hard to wake up. The actress, Ellyn Jameson, does very well with this character. You feel her boredom in the monotony of her job, and then her unease with her last client, and finally her terror as she navigates her own nightmares. While unsettling, the overall message of the short was a bit unclear, perhaps intentionally so, to allow the viewer to form their own conclusions.
Paragon
After an MIT student realizes the computer program he created not only can give him current facts, but also predict the future, he learns that there are forces that influence the future, and they are not to be messed with. The short begins as a psychologically scary film, as the student realizes his program is sentient and powerful. As it comes to a close, it changes to a monster type of horror as a creature comes to destroy the program. While the juxtaposition of these is a bit strange, it is very effective. The creature itself is scary enough to make you shiver!
-B. Morgan
The Unraveling
Darkly disturbing, Kd Amond’s horror/psychological thriller The Unraveling tells the story of Mary Dunn (Sarah Zanotti) after enduring a car crash that left her with a traumatic brain injury. The accident left her with an inability to recognize faces and look others in the eye. This film is remarkable in many ways, but perhaps most of all because of its efficiency. With a very small main cast of four people and a shadowy manifestation, the movie explores a gambit of emotions and concepts including paranoia, grief, sorrow, love (maternal and romantic), friendship, facial disassociation, and disability. Sam Brooks’ character Grayson is just likeable and charismatic enough so that you think you should trust him, except that you are watching a horror movie—from Mary’s perspective, the doubted authenticity of his character is the rub and the sine non qua of the movie.
Seth Dunlap’s cinematography is remarkable. The confining spaces Mary finds herself in, a visual for her psychological condition, and the arresting use of white in a non-positive way (a lá The Shining) contributes subtly and substantially to the film’s success and is well juxtaposed with the tar that haunts Mary. The jump scares are exquisite, and there are several of them, prepared well by David Lim’s sound design.
Exposition and character development are achieved through visits to a therapist, as Mary’s sense that everyone around her is an imposter grows. The final reveal is strong and surprising if a little predictable in that you know a reveal is coming throughout the movie. The setting, a large, old house, in which you can never really get your bearings, adds to the movie’s haunt, and is just another attribute of Amond’s economy. In a film festival that was remarkable for many independent films, this was the film that felt as though it was mainstream, and not art-house. One wonders what Amond will be able to accomplish with a Hollywood budget.
-J.M.
Comedy Shorts
Baseball With Dad
This is a cute story of a father and son connecting over baseball. The son proclaims that he hates baseball and his father insists that it’s in his blood and he will love it. Once the son hears how his grandpa used his special bat to knock a tornado away, he starts to gain an appreciation for the sport. It ends with the son grown up, now playing with his own son. Although the situation itself wasn’t particularly funny, I did chuckle at Cody McHan’s clever writing.
Eat It
This short follows a woman after a breakup as she interacts with her coworkers at a bowling alley. Feeling empty and sad, she fills the void by eating anything and everything she can, including: her engagement ring, carnations, and a live goldfish. She even enters a pie eating contest only to realize afterwards that she doesn’t need to eat to make herself feel better. The acting in Eat It was the best of all the comedy shorts. Shannon Woodward really made you empathize with her character and root for her to find healing after her breakup, all while making you laugh. The writing was creative and quirky in a way that made me want more than just 10 minutes. I could watch a whole movie devoted to the employees at the bowling alley.
Wake up
This little short is only 3 minutes, but it was still full of laughs. A robber breaks into a woman’s house only to realize that she is an amputee. After he sees that she only has one leg and a prosthetic leg stands at the edge of the room, he tries to leave without taking anything, only for the woman to protest that he is being discriminatory. The concept was unique and the writing by Sally Jane Pitts was clever and humorous. Despite it being the shortest of all the comedy shorts, it was my favorite.
Lac-Date
On a date in a restaurant that only serves milk-based products, a girl realizes she is out of her lactose medicine and enlists the help of her best friend. This over-the-top comedy is full of physical and slapstick humor. The best friend has to literally fight someone at the store for the last bottle of lactose medicine (my favorite part) and she arrives at the restaurant with a black eye. She then has to sneak around to try to give her friend the medicine covertly, only for the date to pull out a bottle and announce that he needs to take his lactose medicine. Lac-Date was such a wonderful, silly romp!
Horny Kid – A film essay
This short is a video of a conversation between director/writer Josh Whiteman and his mother. She is recounting some of his behavior as a child, like his desire for a life-sized Barbie and kissing Victoria’s Secret magazines. He asks his mother at one point if she thinks that he’s single because he never got that life-sized Barbie that he wanted. Because of his solemn demeanor, it is really difficult to tell if he was joking with this question. He then asks if she feels guilty for not getting him the Barbie. Again, he is so somber that it really seems like a serious question. I found his character unlikable and this was my least favorite of the shorts.
Sympathy for the Devil
In a new twist on an old tale, a man makes a deal with the devil in this short. The devil sits down with the man in a booth at a bar and asks if the McRib is back at McDonald’s. The devil offers to give him anything he wants only for the man to drone on and on about how he doesn’t know what he wants. The devil offers to let him take over as the devil, in a bargain that benefits them both. It ends with the devil enjoying a McRib. The writing by Michael Bentley and Corbin Eaton was quite good; a great blend of witty and silly. While the acting, also by Michael Bentley and Corbin Eaton, wasn’t quite as good as the writing, it was still a very enjoyable watch.
-B. Morgan
Time Bomb Y2K
Documentaries and based-on-a-true-story movies usually focus on things that happened, disasters or achievements. This documentary is about something that didn’t happen. I looked forward to seeing it because I was there for the event but was too young to remember it. For readers younger than me, the year 2000 problem, or Y2K, refers to the potential computer errors that could have brought down worldwide infrastructures because of a simple calendar data formatting system; years were stored as only two digits, making 2000 and 1900 indistinguishable. I had a nebulous understanding of this before seeing the documentary and was excited to actually learn about the whole non-event.
What makes the film especially interesting and impactful is that it is told entirely through archival footage; besides the fun animated opening credits, ending credits, and year markers, it’s all news footage, movie footage, even home video from donors (some of whom attended the Nashville Film Festival showing) and the Center for Home Movies. In a delightful Q&A after the viewing (the best I’ve ever been in: the host asked excellent questions and the audience asked through true interest and not a desire to perform) co-director Brian Becker explained that they had gone through over 700 hours of footage. The film took three years to make, beginning as a side project until getting grants and eventually ending up with HBO, where it will air in December. Sticking with pure archival footage brought difficulties; Becker said that it was difficult to find new pieces with introspection or emotion instead of straight delivery, and it would have been much easier to have a narrator than to hunt for the perfect line, but it paid off. I certainly agree; watching it is immersion in the times, and it avoids some of the tropes of typical documentary narration.
Becker said that he and co-director Marley McDonald were interested in American subcultures orienting themselves around existential threats, aligning Y2K with their belief systems and expanding upon it. In the film we see survivalists; militias; strange religious groups; entrepreneurs; Clinton’s President’s Council on the Year 2000 Conversion; mainstream talk shows; Matt Damon in an interview; and street interviews with everyday people. It feels balanced in its telling. Becker said the film was shaped by their research and that they didn’t set limits to it, but looked for stories that resonate with us today. Besides going through the footage, they interviewed many of the people who featured in the film: the only thing he and McDonald knew they wanted to do, going into the project, was have it climax at New Years Eve, which they both have childhood memories of.
The documentary is successful in its storytelling. It starts off in the early 90s and each year is a countdown to the Millennium, keeping the chronology clear and adding tension to the pacing. The music, done by Nathan Micay, sometimes feels a little heavy, but that’s the point: Becker said that they wanted to have an electronic 90’s sci fi/disaster movie sound. It’s easy to see what caused so many people worry; having experts warn of nuclear malfunctions because of computer glitches isn’t something most of us easily shrug off.
The film is comforting in an odd way. It’s easy to relate to people worrying about a much-touted potential collapse caused by technology, even when a lot of the footage is tragically funny, and many of the people are outrageous. Besides being a historical event that shapes our current culture, I think teens especially should watch this to give them some perspective on cultural fears and the fallibility of “expert” opinions. The film shows some of the baselessness of some Y2K fears, as well as what can be solved by concerted actions of competent people. The big fear was no big deal, but we are shown the difficulty of seeing that at the time, leading to empathy for the people who anxiously awaited the Millennium.
Timebomb Y2K is a good reminder that we forget the successes of life because bad news always marches to the front of our minds. We forget that the WHO eradicated smallpox in 1980, saving a potential 150-200 million lives since then. According to the UN, more than a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty since 1990. While we have many existential threats ahead of us, this film is a reminder that humanity has solved problems, even the ones we have caused ourselves.
-G. E. Tipton
Animated Shorts
27
I had some difficulty with this film as there were no subtitles and it was not in English, but the beautiful animation made up for that. The short follows a girl who has turned 27 and still lives at home. The audience watches as she dreams of escaping her current life. After crashing her bike, she has a sexual awakening that could be real or imagined (the subtitles may have made that clearer). Viewer be warned: it is explicit! Because of the language issue, I was really able to just enjoy the art. The large team of animators did a wonderful job: the art is vibrant and beautiful.
Christopher at Sea
Aptly named, this short tells the story of a young man who embarks on a transatlantic voyage as a passenger on a cargo ship. The trip is one of self discovery as Christopher forms a one-sided attachment to one of the workers on the ship. His attraction to the man borders on obsession as he covertly watches him through his camera, mirrors, and windows, imagining he can feel a connection with him through walls. The short ends tragically as Christopher goes out to the edge of the deck in a vicious storm, allowing the sea to embrace him, imagining he is in the arms of his unrequited love. The art in this short was so stunning, especially the way the artists conveyed the wind moving through the characters’ hair and clothes, and the way the waves jostled the ship.
Eeva
The audience follows a woman on the worst day of her life: the funeral of her husband. There is no dialogue, only the art and music to tell the story. There are moments of strange dark humor throughout the film. For example, a funeral attendant uses an umbrella to squash a woodpecker that has landed on her husband’s coffin. The wife is the only woman present in the story and it is clear that the sorrow of the day affects her differently than all the others. She doesn’t openly weep, but stands or sits stone-faced until she lets out her rage, throwing things and later setting fire to her own apartment. The art is unique and quirky: a muted palette of blacks, grays and browns, with pops of vibrant red, the red perhaps symbolizing her anger and passion.
Spring Roll Dream
This was my favorite of the six animated shorts, and not just because it had subtitles for both the English and Vietnamese dialogue. It tells the story of a Vietnamese woman who has made a home in America and is struggling with her desire to be American as her father tries to connect her back to her roots. Her father has made spring rolls, but she insists that she is making mac-n-cheese and the she and her son won’t like the Vietnamese food. In a heartwarming ending, she tries and enjoys the spring rolls, and her son does too, putting ketchup on them. Her father even tries the ketchup spring rolls. Mai Vu is the sole animator, director, and editor. She does a phenomenal job, especially considering many of these shorts have a whole team of animators. A sweet story about the blending of culture, Spring Roll Dream leaves you with the warm fuzzies and a hankering for spring rolls.
Tomato Kitchen
Tomato Kitchen is an episode from the online animated series called Capsule Project, presented by Bilibili. This is a surprisingly dark short, in which the tomatoes in the restaurant are actually sentient beings that are being slaughtered for consumption. The past of the main character as a tomato that has carved himself to look like a person is revealed as he attempts to save others and destroy the kitchen. Taken at face value, the story is horrifying enough. A possible more terrifying meaning is that we all carve ourselves up, slicing off bits of our identity to fit in with society. The art is wonderful, mostly muted blues except for the bright red of the tomatoes and blood/tomato juice. Junyi Xiao does a phenomenal job fulfilling many of the roles for this film including: director, writer, lead animator, cast, and production designer.
Zidane Roulette
This is a sweet short about how soccer brings together a young boy and an adult who lives in the apartment above where he practices. After going out on the town for an unfulfilling night, the man takes out and fixes up his old cleats and ball, and practices, forming a friendship with the young boy. The art is very contemporary, and reminds me of something that might be on Adult Swim. Incredibly, Emy Mirel Ivasca fulfills every role in the making of this film, with the exception of sound design. I really enjoyed this endearing film about soccer and friendship.
-B. Morgan
Sound Stars in the Tuba Thieves.
Alison O’Daniel’s The Tuba Thieves brings together loosely connected scenarios through the unifying feature of tuba robberies, crimes that actually occurred in Los Angeles schools between 2011 and 2013. However, the movie isn’t about tuba theft, or sousaphones for that matter. Instead, it is a beautiful, if long winded, essay on, in, outside of, and around sound. The movie starts with a number of actors portraying deaf people, but after a piece, it draws your senses in when you begin to recognize the heightened role that sound plays in the movie.
As such, several aspects of the film were quite thought provoking. A
group of deaf people are shown describing an airplane breaking the sound barrier. Later in the movie, we see images of a plane actually breaking the sound barrier (a white cloud is formed by decreased air pressure and temperature around the tail of the aircraft).
However, during the conversation, the diegetic sound (birds, traffic, the gestures of sign language) becomes rather distracting, and, although obvious, it becomes readily apparent that conversation for deaf people occurs outside of sound. Yet the power of sound is also emphasized. For example, the impact of a new airport has on a neighborhood (houses are eventually demolished).
The film’s open captions (open captions because you can’t turn them off) particularly, are much more detailed than usual, and seem to shift with the character of the music (there are three cited composers of this film’s excellent soundtrack—Christine Sun Kim, Ethan Frederick Greene, Steve Roden). They describe the sound, the emotion of the sound, and even the length, as well as comments on the sound. In a world where captions can seem so negligent, or poor in their characterization of aural events, this alone should lead to an artistic revisioning of the caption as a long-neglected opportunity for expression in the cinematic experience. There are other overtly experimental aspects—at one point the plants begin to vibrate with the non-diagetic music. For once the aural becomes the source of the expression and the visual relegated to mimicry.
Other remarkable scenes include a reenactment of the premiere of John Cage’s 4’33 in August of 1952, at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock New York. In the scene you see the pianist start a stopwatch, sit down in front of the piano and close the lid (4’33 is a piece that requires the performer to not play a single note). An audience member (the irritated man, Norman Aaronson) ducks out and wanders into the woods where he removes his shoes and seems to have a sylvan epiphany. Another scene documents (the artist formerly known as) Prince’s performance at the famous Gallaudet University (a university for the deaf) at the height of his career.
There are a couple of parallel narratives that are unwound across the film that are rather difficult to follow or see how they relate. Nyeisha Prince’s character “Nyke” is a deaf person who is interested in percussion, and Prince plays her character with no short measure of charisma and grace. Russell Harvard’s “Nature Boy” is a character with a bit more depth and is played with a strong clarity. His reading of visual poetry, even symbolist poetry, in ASL was remarkable. Geovanny Marroquin brought a youthful resilience to the film and Manuel Castandeda played a pretty realistic band director (probably because he is one). Another aspect of the film that was hard to follow were all the messages on the high school signs.
O’Daniel, who is deaf herself, seems to have placed a lifetime worth of experiences and revelations regarding sound into the movie. They reveal, quite powerfully at moments, things that are otherwise taken for granted. I am quite interested to see her work on a topic not quite so personally connected to her own life. In all, The Tuba Thieves is a thought-provoking piece that challenges the viewer. It is an important and an intriguing view, but it certainly isn’t light.
-J.M.
Conclusion
This is just a taste of what the Nashville Film Festival had available this year, not only to filmmakers competing in hopes of getting their Academy Award consideration, or for aspiring and working filmmakers to attend showings and events to learn from their heroes and peers, but for the general public. Cinephiles and regular people who love going to the theater but are tired of superhero movies can get access to rarer titles, or see films long before they’re posted to some streaming platform requiring a new subscription. We at Music City Review enjoyed our coverage and are looking forward to next year’s festival!
At the Schermerhorn
Ruth Reinhardt’s Debut at the Nashville Symphony
This past Sunday afternoon the Nashville Symphony gave a concert that waffled between breathtaking moments and another average night at the symphony. As the audience settled into their seats, a recording of Béla Fleck asked us to turn off our cellphones in this “sacred” space. The word “sacred” seemed, to me, an interesting choice. As I looked around the half empty concert hall, (or was it half full?), I did not feel a particular religious weight to the moment, but I was hoping that the music would be able to wash away the stresses of the week.
On paper, this concert program looked intriguing:
Grażyna Bacewicz: Partita for Orchestra
J.S. Bach: Keyboard Concerto in A Major
Jessie Montgomery: Rounds for Piano and String Orchestra
Johannes Brahms: Symphony No. 1
The first three pieces, which had never been played by the Nashville Symphony before, were each about 15 minutes in length, and the Bach and Montgomery featured Awadagin Pratt on piano. What stuck out to me about this program was that it featured pieces from the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Instead of a single large concerto, we would hear Pratt in the oldest and newest pieces. In reality, the program came off as a little stiff with no real unifying structure.
Bacewicz’s Partita for Orchestra was the most intriguing and perplexing piece on the concert. It is laid out in a compact four movements – each with a conventional title: “Preludium”, “Toccata”, “Intermezzo”, and “Rondo”. To me each movement felt like someone had dropped the needle on a record into the middle of a full symphony. Ideas started and ended quickly, with little time for development. Like eating a multi-course meal in a matter of minutes, I wish the piece was longer so that I could savor each moment as it came. The Nashville ensemble gave a fine reading of the piece under conductor Ruth Reinhardt, although it was new to them. The years of playing and recording new music made reading this piece not a challenge, but I wanted a bit more musicality out of it. Was that the fault of the piece or the performance?
Following the Partita came an unintended semi-intermission: the audience lights are brought half up and the conductor’s podium descends into the depths of the Laura Turner Concert Hall to remerge with the piano. The whole process takes several awkward minutes, and it always kills the energy in the hall. Eventually, the orchestra meandered back onto the stage and Awadagin Pratt emerged to start the Bach.
Bach, one of the Mt. Rushmore composers, is always interestingly played by a modern orchestra. Originally written for a small string ensemble and a harpsichord, this performance featured Mr. Pratt on a Steinway 9-foot Concert Grand Piano and most of the symphony’s string section. It is hard to strike the right balance of style on modern instruments, but the playing was quite magnificent throughout. The slow middle movement was the closest we got to something sacrosanct all afternoon. Pratt’s playing was sensitive and light in all the right spots. There were a few spots that Pratt wanted to add some nuance to the music that I feel did not completely come out, making those moments feel less like communal chamber music and more like a struggle between the soloist and ensemble.
Following the Bach was Jessie Montgomery’s Rounds for Piano and String Orchestra. This was originally written for Pratt as the soloist. Pratt served as a commissioner of six works for orchestra and piano that was assembled into an album called “STILLPOINT”, with the Montgomery serving as the opening track on the album. Rounds is aptly structed as a rondo, where the opening music cycles back multiple times in between episodes of varying music. Pratt’s pianistic ability was better on display in this piece – the jazzy main theme danced under his fingers and every time it returned I was more entranced by it. Pratt made music magic in the middle section of this piece. It is an extended section for only the piano with some parts that call for improvisation. Pratt showed off the full range of colors in his playing, including a section where he stood and stroked the wires inside of the lid of the piano while one hand still played on the keyboard. Extended techniques like this can sometimes come off as a parlor trick, but not here. The effect was both musical and added to the richness of the piece.
After the intermission the full orchestra came out for Brahms’ First Symphony. What is not to love with this piece? Here both Reinhardt and the Nashville Symphony seemed most at home. The strength of the famous opening was terrifying in Reinhardt’s hands and yet the second movement was deliciously sweet. Based just off the quality of the sound that the group was able to make, this was some of the finest playing that I have heard from the Nashville Symphony in a while. It never ceases to amaze me that a piece like this that is over 150 years old can still seem so fresh and relevant. But when you have a conductor and an orchestra aligned in their vision so clearly, well written music will always have that effect. That effect was not there for the first half of the concert, but it was in full force for the Brahms.
The Nashville Symphony is back at the end of the month Giancarlo Guerrero conducting a live recording of John Corigliano’s Triathlon and Respighi’s Pines of Rome. For more information and tickets please visit NashvilleSymphony.org
MCR Profiles:
Stanley Yates, Guitar
How did a working-class boy from a twelfth-century town, who survived an early life of personal and parental illness and foster homes, end up with stunning accolades for international performances, for over twenty published works, and with a decorated doctorate from a university in Texas? And how did a largely self-taught young man from the North of England end up here, a highly accomplished hidden treasure in the South of the United States? On a Sunday afternoon in September, guitarist Stanley Yates and I had a delightful and far-ranging conversation.
Technical perfection, tonal purity and a considered objectivity are all
perfectly placed
(Den Bosch, The Netherlands)
Stanley Yates chose the guitar at the age of twelve for the loftiest of reasons: his best friend got one, so he got one, too. As an asthmatic child, he often missed school, but his early education in music and movement and singing in school assemblies fused with memories of seeing the Beatles from nearby Liverpool on TV, watching Disney’s iconic Fantasia, and listening to classical music on radio and in motion pictures, enhanced his musical foundations.
His skill on the guitar progressed so quickly that he was already in the midst of the first stage of his performance career when he entered university in Liverpool. Liverpool is often painted as a bleak backwater port town, but Yates remembers it as a vibrant city with its own bohemian section, a city that had acknowledged and moved forward from its history as a slave-trading post and its historical relationship with Yates’ home in Preston, Lancashire, which once housed cotton mills.
He started his university education with an eye toward a physics major, but his blossoming music career urged him on in the city where he met his wife. On and on he performed, delighting in the opportunity to share his zeal for music with audiences all over Europe.
...instinct and brilliant technique with the most refined musical and
musicological preparation
(Milan, Italy)
Once, during a set of performances in the U.S., his wife’s birthplace, Yates performed in Dallas. The head of the guitar program at what is now known as the University of North Texas was in the audience. Afterwards, Yates—then in his thirties and beginning a family—began to discuss a more stable existence than as journeyman recitalist. The head invited him to consider the doctoral program with a full fellowship. And at that, the second half of his life began.
Putting performance on the back burner, he completed his studies, and was hired as a professor at Austin Peay. Financial necessity initiated the second stage of his performance career, the stage he refers to as “super professional”: doing lots of concerts in lots of venues to earn lots of money. Combining experiences from his travels with his teaching, he began to amass notebooks of ideas filling hundreds of pages. Those notebooks, compiled approximately ten years ago, launched the third stage of his career as pedagogue, because he has always enjoyed “getting ideas down in a comprehensible fashion.”
He sticks to the grade better than any other anthology I know …. includes a lot of
less well-known repertoire … [that] are a real pleasure to play.
(Classical Guitar Delcamp)
Performing, though still an active part of Yates’ life, became more selective. Two of the most memorable venues were in Brazil, with own its rich history of guitar music, and Bangladesh, where Western music was virtually unknown. During this period, he thoughtfully alternated between publishing arrangements of music in great demand, like Bach and Vivaldi, with editions of lesser-known historical figures (Francesco Carulli) and anthologies of modern composers (Štěpán Rak). He sees his highly regarded two-volume set, Classical Guitar Technique from Foundation to Virtuosity as writing “letters for myself when I was 16.” As we dug deeper into his motivation, it became clear that Yates takes great satisfaction in advocating for his instrument and its repertoire. “We don’t have 32 Beethoven sonatas,” he notes, but points out the guitar’s greater breadth of strong repertoire with virtuoso pieces dating from the 16th-century, long before the piano existed.
…a phenomenal achievement, a worthy successor to the great methodological authors
of the guitar.
(Graham Wade, Classical Guitar Magazine)
As a parallel to his own three-stage career, Yates categorizes the guitar’s evolutionary stages as starting in the Renaissance when plucked string pieces were written by players, to the “second Renaissance” of the guitar when non-guitarist composers with strong reputations like Manuel de Falla and Igor Stravinsky began to write for the guitar. Now, one of his most recent anthologies features the third Renaissance where respected performers like Leo Brouwer, who are also highly trained as composers have raised guitar repertoire to new heights.
It is nice to have music from contemporary guitarist[s]… it is fun to try new ideas…
I am very glad I got this.
(Amazon)
In his upcoming program, Yates traces guitar history from a lasting figure of the English Renaissance, John Dowland. Dowland, whose melancholy demeanor led to the epigraph: semper Dowland, semper dolens [Dowland is always down], was a loyal proponent of Catholicism in opposition to the Church of England, founded by King Henry VIII. It’s interesting that Preston, Yate’s hometown, also fought to maintain its Catholic roots, becoming one of the last holdouts to the C of E. These days, Preston is better known for its soccer stadium, the world’s oldest in continuous use.
Dowland’s famed Lachrymae [“Flow my Tears”], a slow dance known as a “pavan,” survives as one of the greatest hits of its day continuing its influence on musicians like 20-century composer, Benjamin Britten, who quoted the tune; as recently as 2006, a British electronica group did as well.
Yates’ musical memoir of pivotal moments in guitar history will feature works by de Falla, Villa Lobos, Brouwer, complemented by two works by innovative Czech guitarist-composer, Štěpán Rak. He also plans to play Fernando Sor’s last solo guitar work, Fantaisie élégiaque in E major, one of his perennial favorites. This extended multisectional work includes a funeral march dedicated to Charlotte de Beslay, one of Sor’s students whose talent had attracted the attentions of such luminaries as opera composer Gioachino Rossini. Sadly, she died in childbirth.
Since Yates sees his career as a performer winding down, this elegy may be symbolic of more than just the mourning of a valued student. Everyone is encouraged to enjoy this internationally acclaimed artist at the historic First Presbyterian Church (213 Main St) in Clarksville TN at 3 pm on October 22, 2023. The concert is sponsored by the Clarksville Arts and Heritage Council. Admission and parking are free. For more information, contact: Laurina Lyle at Laurina@Laurina.co or ahdc@artsandheritage.us.
From Nashville Opera
Pagliacci’s Suffering and Guilt
On September 21 Nashville Opera presented a wonderful performance of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s verismo masterpiece Pagliacci at Jackson Hall in the Tennessee Performing Arts Center. A reprise of the company’s staging from a decade ago, the performance and production were as fresh as ever and a delightful way to start the new season.
H. Auden once wrote of Pagliacci: “No dramatist ever believed in real life that the poor did not suffer, but, if the dramatic function of suffering is to indicate moral guilt, then the relatively innocent cannot be shown to be suffering.” Here, I think Auden is close to the point of verismo opera, directing us to the relationship between a character’s guilt and suffering, however, he seems to miss the aspect that makes these works so powerful. The suffering humanizes each character and mitigates or at least balances their moral guilt; it is what makes these works so darkly tragic and heartbreaking. This is the measure of a good production of verismo opera, not through the recognition of each character as “antagonist” or “protagonist” but an understanding of each character’s actions as explained by their suffering.
Take, for example, Canio, the central character with practically zero agency, and played wonderfully by tenor Jonathan Burton. Canio is depicted at the outset as a loving but jealous man who rescued Nedda from the gutter. His horrid, murderous crimes at the end are a result, not just of his own jealousy, but of the machinations of the monstrous Tonio. The central aria, the most beautiful moment, perhaps in all of verismo opera, is his aria to end the first act, “Vesti la giubba.” A man, dignity destroyed, honor lost, is forced to play the clown: “Laugh, Pagliaccio, your love is broken, Laugh of the pain, that poisons your heart.”
The challenge of the aria is, I think, in the delivery. It sets fairly well within a tenor’s range and a singer might be tempted to take it through its paces belting the highest notes, but the character is singing through tears as he watches his happiness and sanity flee. The notes need to be hit clearly and brassy, but with a gentle delicacy that Richard Wagner never understood about Italian opera, a nuance that Caruso found over 100 years ago. On Saturday, Burton was right there. Perfect intonation and a gentle vibrato that expanded as the emotions kicked in, and dropping the power as his character’s dreams were dashed and he succumbed to his fate. It was a characteristic stroke of genius for Director Hoomes to leave Burton onstage, weeping, and in character without curtain as the lights went up and intermission began. The audience was transfixed in their applause.
Suffering from her own binary of guilt and suffering, Keri Alkema as Nedda was beautiful. Alkema made serious waves as Tosca before the pandemic; another tragic heroine, and here she has found another excellent vehicle for her acting and singing talents. When she rips into the monstrous Tonio at the beginning, it is authentic enough that you feel for him (she is the cause of his suffering). The timbre of her instrument was well controlled, leavening Nedda’s anguish with a hope that lasted until the final moments of her character’s life—a gentle nuance let the audience know that when she sang “A stanotte, e per sempre io sarò tua”(until tonight, and I shall be yours forever) to Beppe as Arlecchino, she was really singing to Silvio-rendering the ingenious blocking of Silvio and Beppe almost obvious.
Overall, Pam Lisenby’s costume design was wonderful, but perhaps Nedda’s onstage costume and makeup were too much Raggedy Ann and not enough Columbina? Silvio’s polo was also a bit anachronistic but it did make him stand apart from the rest of the cast. Speaking of anachronisms, and you can call me a hypocrite, because it was delightfully fun to see Silvio’s lute done up as Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstrat.
From the perspective of acting, Andrew Manea’s Tonio stole the show. His voice was in fine form, and his matter-of-fact presence at the prologue was perfect, while his character’s arch of sympathetic-until-rapey progression in the first act cinched the tragedy. The production was wise to break with custom and assign Tonio the final line, the sneering “La Commedia è finite!” The decision makes Tonio a really evil puppet master, and with an actor like Manea, who could resist?
Joseph Lim’s Silvio, came off well as an innocent victim, although I do wonder if audiences in the past haven’t seen him as an antagonist for his role as the other man. Anthony Ciaramitaro’s Beppe was excellent too, with a strikingly beautiful, shiny tenor. Dean Williamson’s orchestra and Stephen Carey’s chorus performed with the brilliance that has come to be the expectation in Nashville. Finally, JaVonte’ Marquez and Joi Ware’s dances, at several points, provided an excellent levity that gave bright, joyous contrast to this heart-breaking tragedy—it was a wonderful night! Nashville Opera returns in November with The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
The MCR Interview
Conductor Ruth Reinhardt on Brahms, Montgomery and her Upcoming Visit to Nashville
As part of the MCR Interview series, Journalist Daniel Krenz interviews Conductor Ruth Reinhardt about her upcoming visit to the Nashville Symphony. This series is funded in part by Metro Arts Nashville.
From Nashville Ballet
Ups and Downs: The Nashville Ballet Tackles Mourning, Rabbits, and Stravinsky
The filmed introductions provided an attractive opening to the Nashville Ballet program this past weekend (Sept 22–25). Each intro featured someone deeply engaged in each of the three works. In the case of Jiří Kilyán’s, Un Ballo, this was Shirley Esseboom, his assistant or repétiteur (the person who rehearses the dancers in place of the choreographer); for Justin Peck’s Year of the Rabbit, stager Michael Breeden praised the NB’s athleticism and their youthful “go for broke” spirit; for the featured work, Firebird, Director Emeritus, Paul Vasterling, introduced his own work.
These personalized touches gave the audience more intimate glances into the process of preparing for ballet performances. However, one remaining issue is the fact that none of the soloists or duo dancers are identified. All the orchestra members are named by instrument, so if there is a good bassoon solo, like that in the “Berceuse” section of Firebird, I can congratulate Julia Harguindey for the poignant bewitching beauty of that solo. However, if I want to spotlight the pas de deux couple in the fifth part of Year of the Rabbit? Out of luck.
That distancing undermines the intimacy. For those who appreciate the company and want to share in the journey of its growth, it’s only fair to keep the names with the quality of work. As the dancers evolve in technique and interpretation, how can we track that evolution if they are not identified? Just a thought.
***
The dark, bare stage was lit from above by strands of evenly spaced lights. In a glancing touch at mourning, women in black camisole tops with full skirts, men in black pants and dark grey vests, danced, one couple after another, to the somber prelude from Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin. This music was written as an homage (a tombeau is a memorial work) not just to the great French baroque composer, François Couperin, but to those French soldiers who died during World War I.
The second, larger part of Un Ballo, used another Ravel homage, Pavane pour une infante defunte [Pavane for a dead princess], a work thought to be inspired by Diego Velásquez’ “Las Meninas,” a painting that includes Princess Margarita as a child. She later died in childbirth at the age of 22. The pavane, a processional dance for long rows of couples, was popular throughout Europe throughout the 16th- and early 17th-century. In fact, some graduation processions still use a version of it.
In this work, Kilyán, internationally recognized director of the Nederlands Dans Theatre and winner of the Edinburgh Critics Award, uses couples doing identical, albeit modern, steps, suggesting a subtle reference to the original pavane. These sections, though, exposed a continuing discontinuity in the Nashville Ballet corps. When steps are identical, there seems to be no agreement on where the beat might be. It seems clear the choreographer intended that some gestures, like slowly raising one arm upward should reach the apex at the same time. Here, as in other works featuring the corps, the movements suggest the dancers have learned the count, but are not actually hearing the music. The coordination of the corps de ballet deserves more attention.
Interestingly, two lovely aspects of the choreography paired with the costuming shone through. In one, the women raise their skirts to form a backdrop, much as one might see in Kabuki drama. Such an imaginative move focuses audience attention on the individual dancers. Another had the dancers lifting their partners upside down. The women’s skirts draped over the men, rendering them invisible, as each woman’s legs slowly pointed heavenward, with one positioned a bit to the fore, creating an elegant piece of choreographic sculpture.
This concept, one Breeden identifies as “architectural design,” is also found in Justin Peck’s choreography, Year of the Rabbit. With music by rock electronica artist Sufjan Stevens, skillfully arranged for string orchestra by Michael Atkinson, Peck’s work was able to hit the sweet spot in the Nashville Ballet’s technique. Tony Award winner and resident choreographer for the New York City Ballet, Peck’s work sparkled as brightly as the playful, though sometimes intense, sounds from the strings.
The attractive well-executed male solo in the second section, the section that ends with the sculpture of some dancers upright, while other dancers descend into slow splits and, in some spots, accurately placing gestures with the appropriate musical accents. This shows that the company can connect with the musical rhythm under the right circumstances. Perhaps the driving rock rhythms contributed to this successful connection. After the corps scampers away, the sixth section features ritualized dancing that may pay homage to Stravinsky’s Sacre de Printemps [Rite of Spring], except in Peck’s world, the frenetic quickness and deft skill, traits associated with the Chinese Year of the Rabbit, exude dance, not of death, but of delight.
Firebird
I came prepared to enjoy this work more than any other, having seen this music performed last in 2014 when the New York City Ballet revived the original Balanchine/Stravinsky/Chagall production of 1972. I understood that Vasterling would be re-envisioning the classic tale known in Russian, Czech, Armenian, and Iranian cultures, but still, this was a disappointment on many fronts. And, with a few exceptions like the principal bassoon and percussion, even the orchestra felt below its usual energy level.
The opening seemed static, sluggish, until evil takes the stage. The intention of turning this well-traveled tale into a morality play where the original Prince Ivan becomes Everyman, torn between good (Firebird) and evil (Mr. K, known in the original as the demon Katschei) is a valid one. And even making good and evil apparently equal in power made sense, but pairing them at the end with a narrative that suggests romantic attraction didn’t work. In fact, it seemed constructed to give the Mr. K character a more prominent role than the narrative supports.
In fact, more focus and choreographic pacing seemed to go into the evil K-crew than the magic of the eponymous Firebird, giving much of the best work to the bad guys. Both their costumes and their choreography were much more dynamic. For example, it was exceedingly clever to dress Mr. K in a business suit with slicked-back, con-man hair, accompanied by his sidekicks Miss P and Mr. D in equally deceptive costumes of the poisonous pretty girl and child-snatching ice cream man, respectively. Dressing the rest of the demon gang in a beach scene as Stepford wives in red polka dots and husbands in 1920s-style striped blazers was delightfully thought-provoking, and appropriately eerie as these dancers in “people” clothes often made reptilian movements, like quick jerkings of the head or undulating the spine.
But that’s what made the Firebird costuming so disappointing. It was not only lackluster in bland green with the panels of glittery material, but looked cheap, lacking the magic of a fairy tale whose popularity has traveled half the globe. I kept thinking of the years of ballet recitals I attended for a young relative.
The bare set and the plain costumes of the good guys undermined the magic of the tale, although the opening with Mr. K on a dark stage with the purple-hued diamond spotlight was one effective moment. The ending was also partly effective with all dancers dressed in beautiful sheer tunics with floral appliqués as the sun rises triumphantly, but again the equal prominence given the Firebird and Mr. K seemed misplaced.
The sizeable audience at the Polk Theater in TPAC was an appreciative one, which this generally fine program deserved. With more specific program information indicating the overall timing and sections of the works, perhaps the audience’s enthusiasm could be better channeled so that multipartite choreographies would not suffer from interruptions by misplaced applause. Next up for Nashville Ballet is the annual, can’t-miss holiday event, the Nutcracker, beginning December 8. More information is available here: https://www.nashvilleballet.com/nashvilles-nutcracker-2023
