Shamanism at the Asian

The extremely gifted Korean dancer-percussionist-singer Dohee Lee joined with a few friends for a shamanistic ritual at the Asian Art Museum on Thursday evening.



The scheduled piece, Mago, was performed in the second floor Samsung Hall at 8PM, but Lee started earlier in the evening in the North Lobby with a silent dance that complemented the black masking tape installation by Sun K. Kwak.



Later, at the other end of the lobby, she was joined by two musician friends, Adria Otte (center) and Suki O'Kane (right), and the trio played along with the mechanical ghost army created by Indonesian artist Jompot.



Also in the lobby was another friend of Lee's, the artist Sohyung Choi above, who was encouraging patrons to select postcard photos and to glue them on posterboard to create an instant mask for the evening's interactive ritual.



I was with a cranky partner who wanted to go home and watch the San Francisco Giants game, so we didn't stay for the main event in the Samsung room though I did make an amusing mask with Choi's assistance. It's probably for the best that we didn't stay since we probably would have invoked malevolent demons, but according to a friend's account, I missed an extraordinary performance. Her account is below.



"I'm not usually a fan of performance art because it always seems so self-aggrandizing, but last night I think I finally saw something absolutely brilliant. Dohee Lee invoked the traditional movements of Korean dance and drumming, infusing it with electronic music and western cymbals to create a full sensory experience that transported me and the audience into another dimension. Her dance movements channeled the power of Korean shamans, sometimes seeming otherworldly, and her voice was reminiscent of the Sufi singer Nusrat, one of the greatest vocalists of all time. (Photo above is by Pak Han and the photo below is by Jennifer Yin.)



Lee performed continuously for an hour, playing instruments, dancing, singing, and beckoning the audience to join her. The juxtaposition of thunderous drumming with quieter, spirited singing created a range of emotions so vast that it seemed I saw my entire life pass before my eyes. Maybe it was death. Maybe I did go to the other side for a moment."

Bye Bye to the Berkeley Art Museum Building

Designed by the San Francisco modernist architect Mario J. Ciampi in the 1960s, the 1970 Berkeley Art Museum on Bancroft Street closed its doors as a public museum on Sunday with a free admission day of "revels" and ceremonial final performances.



Though the cast-concrete building has always been a bit brutalist for my taste, the place was very important. Besides its decades of art exhibits, the building also hosted the original home of the Pacific Film Archive which burst on the scene in the early 1970s as an equal to the Paris Cinematheque.



The list of creative live performances by musicians, dancers and artists will soon become historic legend, and some UC Berkeley PhD candidate should get to work now interviewing and cataloguing the enormous range of performers and performances held in the space, with its fabulous sightlines and weird acoustics. A good place to start would be Joan La Barbara who recorded a live album in the building in 1976 and returned for a farewell concert earlier this year.



Those interviews should also include the pianist and concert "curator" Sarah Cahill who has been hosting Friday night concerts for years with the enthusiastic collaboration of Museum Director Larry Rinder above.



Their final collaboration in the building was a performance of György Ligeti's 1962 Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes. Composers, musicians, museum staff, donors, friends and patrons were recruited for this final musical gesture with about 50 people divided among the 100 metronomes.



A friend, Patrick Vaz, jokingly asked me if the performance used "original instruments," and the serious answer was "yes, the piece is going to become rarer and rarer because wind-up metronomes are going the way of the slide rule on account of digital technology."



After a short rehearsal with our metronomes, we fled an overamplified dance performance for the safety of the Durant Hotel bar across the street, and returned for the extraordinary composer and performance artist Dohee Lee's leaving the building ritual.



"This is imporTANT!" she instructed. "You must feel the floor with your feet before you leave it, stomp on the floor with the beat and really grasp it," and the audience surrounding her did just that.



After a few mercifully short speeches from a trio of museum directors, the metronome volunteers including myself assembled at our various tables. My table was under the direction of UCB Chorus Director Marika Kuzma above, with her former student James Parr roped in at the last minute.



Sarah Cahill gave a short explanation of the piece to the audience, turned to the assembled throng of performers and cued our ritualistic winding of the microphones (three full-turns or six half-turns), finally giving us the signal to unleash the phasing cacophony which wound down to a single metronome 28 minutes later. For a video of the entire performance by Tony Hurd, click here.

The Izzies 1: Honoring Local Dance

Most arts awards ceremonies are expensive, ponderous affairs, filled with dreary speeches, and costing nominees and friends lots of money to attend. A major exception to that rule is the annual Isadora Duncan Dance Awards, known as The Izzies, which are short, free, and open to the public.



On Tuesday evening, the 24th annual version of the Izzies were presented in the basement of the San Fracisco Public Library's Koret Auditorium, honoring dancers, choroeographers, designers, composers and musicians who have contributed to the Bay Area dance scene. A few of the awards were for "sustained achievement" by a group, such as the woman above receiving an Izzie for Berkeley's Ashkenaz Music & Dance Community Center for its 35 years of world music and dance.



There were also a few special awards, such as the one to Dohee Lee (above), the "dancer/musician/vocalist" who seems to work with every interesting performance group in the Bay Area. She was a guest performer at the "Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners" last October at Yerba Buena Center, and just about stole the entire show.



Also receiving a specal nod was Jo Kreiter (above) who recently created a dance about female bridge builders at SOMArts that created a sensation.



The program also featured Academy Awards style competition among five nominees in various categories, with the winners leaping onto the stage for short thank you speeches. In the "Outstanding Achievement in Individual Performance" during the the period between September 1, 2008 and August 31, 2009, Ramon Moreno Acanda (above) from Ballet San Jose tied for the award with Laura Elaine Ellis (below) from Dimensions Dance Theatre.



For a full listing of winners, you can click here to get to The Izzies website.



The legendary local choreographer Carlos Carvajal (above) gave out the final award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography. Carvajal has been the co-artistic director of the SF Ethnic Dance Festival for the last four years, and the maturation of that group was reflected by the seven nominations it received this year against heavyweights like the San Francisco Ballet.



The auditions for the Ethnic Dance Festival at the Palace of Fine Arts are continuing this weekend and next, and the public is invited to the all-day affairs for $10 with in-and-out privileges. For more information, click here.



Carlos prefaced the naming of the choreography winner with, "Well, this is a surprise," as he announced that Scott Wells' contact improvisation piece, "What Men Want," had snagged the award. The dancer/choreographer arrived at the podium with babe in arms, who looked perfectly content to be in the spotlight.

Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners

The coolest music concert of the year was held last Friday evening at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Entitled "Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners," it was part historical recreation of an Italian Futurist concert from 1913, and also a leap into the present with contemporary composers creating music for 16 reconstructed "intonarumori."



According to a short, interesting Wikipedia entry, "Each instrument was constructed of a parallelepiped wooden sound box with a metal radiating horn on its front side. Inside the box was a wheel that, when turned by means of a crank or electric button, caused a catgut or metal string to vibrate.



The wheel could be made of either metal or wood, and the shape and diameter of the wheel varied depending on the model. At one end of the string there was a drumhead that transmits the vibrations to the speaker. The pitch of the vibrating string was controlled by both the speed that the wheel was cranked and by the tension of the string, which was controlled by a lever on top of the box. The lever allowed the performer to play glissandos or specific notes, and also allowed the performer to change the pitch by small intervals. The intonarumori often had a range of more than an octave."



Futurism was a short-lived, wildly influential art movement of the early twentieth century which flourished in Italy before the advent of World War One. The poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote the infamous Futurist Manifesto in 1909, which among other things, "rejected the past, celebrated speed, machinery, violence, youth and industry; and sought the modernisation and cultural rejuvenation of Italy." His musical equivalent was Luigi Russolo who wrote a manifesto in 1913 called "L'arte dei Rumori," or "The Art of Noises" which is an amazingly prescient work that anticipates the ideas of John Cage among many others.

Here's another excerpt from Wikipedia: "Russolo claims that music has reached a point that no longer has the power to excite or inspire. Even when it is new, he argues, it still sounds old and familiar, leaving the audience "waiting for the extraordinary sensation that never comes." He urges musicians to explore the city with "ears more sensitive than eyes," listening to the wide array of noises that are often taken for granted, yet (potentially) musical in nature. He feels these noises can be given pitched and "regulated harmonically," while still preserving their irregularity and character, even if it requires assigning multiple pitches to certain noises."



The period holds a fascination for many people, particularly RoseLee Goldberg (above), who wrote a book in 1979 called "Performance Art from Futurism to the Present," which is still in print in its third edition. After a career as a curator in London and New York, principally at The Kitchen in the latter city, she created a biennial arts festival six years ago in New York City called PERFORMA, which is having its third edition this November. The theme this year is Futurism on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Marinetti's Manifesto.



The organization is attempting to branch out to other cities and institutions, so that this year there was a week-long symposium at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art called "Metal + Machine + Manifesto = Futurism's First 100 Years," with Friday's concert at the Novellus Theatre the obvious highlight. Goldberg was extremely fortunate to partner up with the Berkeley-based Italian composer, scholar, conductor and performer Luciano Chessa (above) who has also been fascinated by the period all his life. He not only wrote a doctoral dissertation at UC Davis on Russolo, but has just finished the upcoming UC Press book, "Luigi Russolo Futurista. Noise, Visual Arts and the Occult."



Chessa, directing instrument builder Keith Cary with additional help from Dna Hoover, recreated the whole set of 16 intonarumori for the first time in history since their destruction in World War Two, a process which required a lot of detective work. "A major breakthrough was realizing one of Russolo's primary sources was the set of Leonardo da Vinci's noisemakers," Chessa states in the program.



I went to the concert fearing it would be painfully loud but instead the opposite was true. As Chessa wrote to me when I asked if there had been any amplification used at the concert:

"Absolutely no amplification of any sort for anything, including voices, etc., not even a subtle reinforcement. It was all 100% acoustic. These instruments were originally built for Italian opera houses. It's not that they are soft (we had to run rehearsals in the evening because, in the place where they were housed, the neighboring 9 to 5 offices complained!) but of course they are not as loud as stadium amp towers. I quickly realized playing them in large spaces, instead of being an issue, offered my project another angle: I decide to embrace their features. There is plenty of ear-popping loud music out there. Why couldn't this project be different? Not weaker: just softer and subtler? This was not about blasting loud noises, was not about power: it ought to be about the depth of the grain of noises. More than simply aural education, it was about sustainable, organic, gourmet noises..."

The concert started with a reconstruction of a 1916 piece by one of the original Futurist composers, Paolo Buzzi, called "Pioggia nel pineto antidannunziana." It began with Luciano striding onto the stage with a megaphone, loudly declaiming a parody written by the composer of a famous poem (La pioggia nel pineto) by Gabriele d'Annunzio, "who the futurists hated because he was too traditional and neoclassical (later, d'Annunzio became the main poet for Mussolini's regime). It's a surreal abrasive poem about pine needles, with a chemical formula of an acid, and a reference to Turpentine, etc..."



Chessa then turned around and conducted San Francisco's Magik*Magik Orchestra, who were playing the various intonarumori with skill and evident delight, evoking Russolo's "six families of noise":
1. Roars, Thunderings, Explosions, Hissing roars, Bangs, Booms
2. Whistling, Hissing, Puffing
3. Whispers, Murmurs, Mumbling, Muttering, Gurgling
4. Screeching, Creaking, Rustling, Humming, Crackling, Rubbing
5. Noises obtained by beating on metals, woods, skins, stones, pottery, etc.
6. Voices of animals and people, Shouts, Screams, Shrieks, Wails, Hoots, Howls, Death rattles, Sobs



Thirteen pieces written expressly for this concert by a range of composers followed, with varying success. A few of the pieces were dull and self-indulgent (I'm looking at you, "Text of Light") while a few others sounded like instant classics. The most successful for me were pieces that integrated the intonarumori orchestra with traditional instruments, such as John Butcher's "penny wands and native string" featuring the composer on saxophone, Elliott Sharp's "Then Go" with the Korean singer/dancer Dohee Lee giving a mesmerizing performance, and conductor/curator/composer Luciano Chessa's "L'acoustique ivresse (Les bruits de la Paix)" which was a beautiful song for bass (Richard Mix, above left) and noise intoners set to a poem by Buzzi called "Russolo."



My favorite piece that used the orchestra of intonarumori alone was by Mike Patton, a former rock star with the groups Faith No More and Mr. Bungle. Entitled KOSTNICE, the music was strange and exquisite.



You only have two more chances to see this concert, once at Town Hall in New York City in November as part of the Performa 09 festival, and again in Milan in December. San Francisco's Magik*Magik orchestra will be traveling to Manhattan for the concert, but reportedly not to Italy, which is too bad. There were a few funny moments when some of the young performers, furiously cranking their wooden box instruments, looked like they were in one of Wilhelm Reich's infamous orgone boxes. I'd love to see what they look like when even more expert on their various noise intoners.