Month: September 2009

Be Transported: The 2009 Navaratri Festival

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I graduated from Wesleyan in 1984 and, while a student here, attended a Navaratri performance of South Indian vocal music by T. Viswanathan. I was completely seduced by the rhythms, the soaring heights and the visceral lows of his voice. I felt that in one evening I was transported out of my student existence into a culture that was new to me–one where both the pleasures of deep listening as a means to spiritual transcendence and the virtuosic capacity of the human voice were celebrated. Viswa founded the Indian music program at Wesleyan, and I had the great pleasure of working with him in my early years as CFA director (Viswa died in 2002). He taught me so much about his music, his negotiating skills, and his belief that this festival should annually give people on our campus and in our community an opportunity to see some of the finest Indian musicians and dancers working today.

Music faculty members B. Balasubrahmaniyan (Balu) and David Nelson (on mridangam) will open the Festival on Thursday night. I spoke with Balu in between classes today and he told me that in 1990 he was one of only eight students selected to learn Viswa’s family tradition in a six-month workshop in Chennai. Seizing on Balu’s talents, Viswa regularly invited Balu to perform with him on tours in India. Balu now leads our South Indian vocal program at Wesleyan. He has a truly “extra” ordinary voice — sometimes when I close my eyes, I think I’m hearing Viswa.

Friday night brings North Indian music on the sarod, a beautiful guitar-like instrument, performed by rising star Alam Khan. Alam is the twenty-seven year old son of the legendary Ali Akbar Khan, who was widely recognized as one of the leading musicians to introduce Indian music to the West. On Saturday, you can attend free workshops in South Indian dance and in ghatam, a clay pot instrument with a rich, distinctive sound. Also, Avon, Connecticut resident and filmmaker Gita Desai will show excerpts of her new film Raga Unveiled, giving audiences a fascinating window into the world of North Indian Hindustani music. And on Saturday night, the CFA welcomes Karnatak music giant Kadri Golpanath, one of the few players of this tradition on the saxophone. “It’s extraordinary how he is able to play the nuances of this music on a keyed instrument,” Balu said. “He has led a whole generation of musicians who are attempting to play this traditional music on new instruments. We are lucky to have him.”

Finally, on Sunday, A.V. Srinivasan, a great friend of the CFA’s, will lead a Hindu Puja, a religious service celebrating the victory of good over evil, followed by a performance of a work entitled “TriShakti” by Chicago’s acclaimed Natya Dance Theatre, a young vibrant group of classical dancers that are some of the best practitioners of Bharata Natyam working in our country today. I had the pleasure of seeing them in New York and I was taken by their energy, their beguiling facial expressions and the joy in their dance.

So please join us for this year’s Navaratri Festival. You will be transported.

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

The Awesome Transience of Weather: Stephen Petronio Company

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Stephen Petronio is known for his collaborative interactions with pop culture, high art, contemporary music and fashion. So, it’s no wonder he was able to attract trailblazing photographer Cindy Sherman and genre-crossing composer Nico Muhly, among other artists, into the creative process of building his latest work, I Drink the Air Before Me, which comes to Wesleyan’s CFA Theater this weekend. When I spoke with Stephen yesterday, he was heading out of rehearsal and he reminisced about the last time he was at Wesleyan. It was the Spring of 1998 and he brought NOT GARDEN with music by Bach, Gounod and Sheila Chandra.

His newest work is a “meditation on the speed and power of weather in all its awesome transience.” Wesleyan is in the middle of this year’s Feet to the Fire initiative–an exploration of water in both its power and scarcity. When I heard that Stephen was creating a work that would evoke the movement of water, wind and weather events on stage, it seemed to me that we could offer our audiences a visceral experience of this precious element.

The title of the piece comes from Ariel’s line in Act V of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In his program notes, Petronio explains that he was struck by “Ariel’s desire to hurl himself through a raging storm, with unthinkable speed and utter certainty, in pursuit of his goal” and that the work was inspired by “the whirling, unpredictable, threatening, and thrilling forces of nature that overwhelm us.”

When I asked Stephen what audiences should look for as they watch the work, he said: “Don’t work hard to find literal meanings in the work: look at how the movement is built…I’m an abstract artist that makes ideas in the body, not in the mind.”

Stephen is a hugely charismatic leader in the American contemporary dance scene. He began to dance at Hampshire College in 1974 and went on to become the first male dancer of the Trisha Brown Dance Company (1979-1986). Founding his own company in 1984, the Stephen Petronio Company is celebrating its 25th Season and has performed in 26 countries around the world. He is noted for works of breathtaking speed, heart-wrenching stillness and great sensuality. He is interested in making compelling contemporary dance that resonates with the moment and culture in which it is made. While he often features pop or rock music in his works, for I Drink the Air Before Me, he turned to composer, Nico Muhly. “Nico is his late twenties; a wildly creative classical composer with an electronic music edge,” states Petronio.

Muhly also wrote sections of the score to be performed by a youth chorus recruited at each tour site. I had just heard Michael Gosselin’s Chamber Choir from Middletown High School perform as a part of Wesleyan Music Professor Neely Bruce’s Ives Vocal Marathon, and it seemed a wonderful way to showcase the high caliber of music education we have in Middletown.

I will also note that this work will open the 10th anniversary of the Breaking Ground Dance Series at Wesleyan’s CFA. To our dance-loving patrons who have returned year after year to see new works by established artists like Bill T. Jones and Trisha Brown or artists you may never have seen before, such as Brian Brooks and Rubberbandance, we thank you for taking this journey with us and look forward to celebrating this season with you.

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

Christine Balfa and a Bowl of Gumbo

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I had a wonderful conversation with Christine Balfa yesterday… Christine is the youngest of four daughters of the legendary Dewey Balfa of the Balfa Brothers, largely responsible for giving rise to the popularity of Cajun music in this country. Christine and her group, Balfa Toujours, will open the Crowell Series on Friday night.

When I talked with her, she told me she’s getting used to a new schedule because her two daughters are back in school after being home-schooled for a year, and they are all adjusting. She found she couldn’t keep up with everything since Dirk Powell, her husband and accordianist for Balfa Toujours, has been on the road so much with Joan Baez, and she’s been working not only with Balfa Toujours but also with the all-women Cajun band, Bonsoir Catin (catin means “my dear” in Cajun French, she tells me). She’s excited about coming to Wesleyan this Friday…she’s heard all about it from Kevin Wimmer ’85, bass player for the group. Unfortunately, Kevin had a prior engagement that conflicts with our date, so he’ll be replaced by Yvette Landry, the bass player from Bonsoir Catin. Courtney Granger, great-nephew of the Balfa Brothers, will round out the group.

“I always knew music would be a part of my life,” she said. She’d appeared playing the triangle alongside her Dad as a child, and then, in the summer of 1991, never having written a song before, she wrote nine. “It was my way of dealing with his loss; I could still feel his presence if I was making music.” She found out her older sister, Nalda, twenty years her senior, had also written songs for the first time that summer, and the two of them made a cassette recording and took it to a local music producer who wanted to record them. Eighteen years later, Balfa Toujours is touring the world.

“When you play traditional music, you face a lot of differing opinions,” Christine said. “There are the folklorists who feel you should play the songs exactly as they were first played and others who set out to intentionally change the music and make it contemporary. In both of those cases, people are looking at it through their heads…they think about it too much. But if artists think about things too much, they aren’t open to being creative. There’s a place for all of these opinions, but in Balfa Toujours, we play what we feel. We play what’s in our hearts.”

As an added bonus, this Saturday, September 19 at 4pm, the CFA will screen the documentary film, Dewey Balfa: Tribute Concert, directed by Middletown’s own Ed McKeon. I spoke with Ed last spring at a meal hosted by Barry Chernoff at his home. Barry is the Director of Wesleyan’s Environmental Studies Program and the dinner was in honor of the company of Stan’s Cafe (remember the Rice Show?) Barry and Ed decided to give our British visitors a Cajun meal. Barry cooked the gumbo and Ed, the jambalaya. I mentioned to Ed that we’d be bringing Balfa Toujours this fall, and he told me about the documentary. The film features a tribute concert performed a month before Dewey died. A local radio station broadcasted it live so that Dewey could hear it in his hospital room. Christine told me: “I didn’t know Ed that well, but soon we knew he had the sensitivity and spirit to make this production happen. We were all going through such a tough time.”

See you this weekend, and please write and let us know what you think of the concert!

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

Welcome to the new CFA blog

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Welcome to the new CFA blog and to the opening of our 2009-2010 Season. We are hosting this blog to further connect the campus and community with the work on our stages and in our galleries. For those of you who come to the CFA from outside the campus, we feel that there should be some “value-added” in subscribing to/attending events on a college campus. So we’ll invite you to enter into stimulating dialogue about the works we present by reading the thoughts of some of our faculty, students and visiting artists. You’ll see interviews with some of the artists who are coming to campus and reviews of work that has toured here and has gone on to other cities. You’ll catch up with news of artists who have made the CFA their artistic home over the past few years, read about what our faculty and students are doing on and off-campus, hear about continuing connections between our students and visiting artists, etc. Please send us your comments and suggestions as this is a new venture for us!

My office overlooks the CFA courtyard, and as I write, the Emergency Response Studio has just arrived. Yes, an artist’s studio will be parked in our courtyard until November 8. The artist is Paul Villinski, and he has brought this completely sustainable, off-the-grid trailer to Wesleyan as the core installation of curator Nina Felshin’s upcoming exhibition, Emergency Response Studio, which opens this Friday, September 11 from 5 to 7pm. Inspired by what he found in post-Katrina New Orleans, he transformed a FEMA-type trailer into an artist’s studio/living space. It has a bedroom, a bathroom with a shower, an eat-in kitchen and a workspace. Villinski believes that artists should have the opportunity to “embed” themselves in post-disaster settings and be able to make works that respond to the setting so that the artist’s voice is heard. Nina had heard about the premiere of the exhibition at Rice University, and then happened to have dinner with the interior designer of the bedroom space who told her she had to see it. What she found was an installation that is every bit as beautiful as it is functional…an exhibit that has a great deal to say to those of us interested in living sustainably without sacrificing aesthetics. The exhibition also ties into Wesleyan’s Feet to the Fire program about climate change, which continues this year with a focus on the water crisis and the availability of clean freshwater. I do hope you’ll join us for the opening on Friday and have the opportunity to meet Paul and take a peek at this magnificent trailer.

Best wishes for the new academic year,
Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts