Performance

When Men . . .

January 4, 2019 - By Joshua L. Ishmon

(Originally Published January 7, 2017)

The summer of 2016 was filled with the deepest sense of empathy I had ever experienced. Sadly, I had considered myself almost numb to the constant tragedies permeating my community and the communities of people dear to me, but in the cases of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile as well as the Pulse massacre, my spirit was heavy with grief and frustration. The dance studio afforded me the space to share and cope, to create work that—one hopes—will allow others to do the same.

I needed to respond to these tragedies devastating my community. What does equality look like? What is the meaning of freedom? How do we resist? In a world that tries to make us something other, not men. . .

“Don’t give yourself to these unnatural men! Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You...

Making A Story Sing

January 3, 2019 - By Harley Erdman

(Originally Published December 7, 2016)

“My shame has escaped from that dark room.
What can I do but retreat once again
into the darkness corner of my heart,
into the coldest and remotest part
of the Dismal Chamber?”

So sings Newton Arvin in his opening aria in The Scarlet Professor. Publically outed as gay in small town New England in 1960, his secret life exposed, his face plastered across national newspapers—facing this disgrace and humiliation, he voluntarily commits himself to Northampton State Hospital to retreat from the circus that his world has become. “The Dismal Chamber,” our opera’s central verbal and musical motif, is at once many things: the room in Salem where Nathaniel Hawthorne...

Broken Sounds/Telephone Bach

January 2, 2019 - By Michael Markham

(Originally Published April 7, 2016)

This series is a good opportunity to wonder why so many of my most moving experiences listening to music have been moments involving imperfect, marred, or broken sounds. In classical music, in particular, a heavy emphasis is placed on ideal acoustic conditions when “listening correctly.” High fidelity recordings, as Colin Symes demonstrated in his 2004 book, Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Recording, have been sold on a faulty ontology: the possibility of perfect mimesis of perfect sounds born within a perfect sonic space. The goal of such recordings has been to replicate the experience of “the best seat in the house.” Beyond the implications for recordings themselves, that turn of phrase also assumes that there is such a thing as the perfect form of a sound. Concert halls are designed and...

Gerald Arpino's Light Rain

January 1, 2019 - By Nicole Duffy Robertson

(Originally Published March 7, 2016)

What does it mean when a ballet continues to ignite controversy decades after it was first performed? Unlike Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring, which caused riots at its premiere in 1913, but was revived seventy-five years later to standing ovations, Gerald Arpino’s ballet Light Rain (1981) continues to elicit a clear critical split: audiences tend to love it, critics less so (or more interestingly, feel guilty about liking it).1 Light Rain straddles the divide between high vs. popular art, in no small part because of its unabashed celebration of a very human impulse, one which is often a cause for discomfort or embarrassment: sexual attraction.

Arpino...