Backstage Tour of the Met Opera

Met Opera, main staircase.
Photo: Konstantine Sofer 

This past September, I got to visit the American Museum of Natural History after hours and thoroughly enjoyed the feeling of being where and when I was not supposed to be. I decided to relive the experience by taking a backstage tour of the Met Opera.

On Sunday morning, about twenty visitors gathered in the Met lobby and were divided into two groups, each led by a volunteer guide. Our guide was Hillary, a former dancer and now a theater genie in a Christmas sweater, bright red eyeglasses, and with her hair dyed a vibrant shade of red.

The tour started with a brief introduction on the main staircase, after which we proceeded into the auditorium and sat in the front rows to listen to an overview of the Met history. The auditorium, not yet cleaned after the Saturday night performance, was permeated with the characteristic and not unpleasant Met smell and looked like it was resting.

The place is truly enormous. The theater has 3800 seats, placed in a staggered pattern for the best sight lines. The width and spacing between the seats varies, which gives me comfort, because on several occasions I anxiously noted that I was fitting too snugly into my seat. The auditorium is isolated from the outside noise and vibration and has no right angles for optimal acoustics. The walls are covered with African rosewood veneer that came from a single tree, so the entire auditorium responds to sound like a gigantic musical instrument with uniform resonance properties. I recall how during one performance, when I was sitting at the very end of the row, I placed my palm on the wall and felt how the veneer vibrated with the sound from the stage. I found this sensation strangely moving: it felt as though the house was being animated by the music.

How I Chose My First Dance School

When four years ago I decided to start dancing tango and needed to find the right place to learn, I sampled several dance schools in Chelsea – NYU area. Triangulo and Dance Manhattan provided fabulous moments of low comedy, but were not a good fit and were thus rejected. Next on my trial-and-error list was Sandra Cameron Dance Center, which at the time rented space at 440 Lafayette Studios. When I arrived at the 440 Studios for an introductory class, the first thing I saw after stepping out of the elevator was a large sign written on the wall: THE ROBERT MOSS THEATER. It was a much bolder and rougher affair than the sleek, but anemic version installed since then and pictured above. My fate was sealed. I decided to follow Robert’s skillful way of navigating by coincidences, everyday oracles, and personal symbols, and chose to interpret the writing on the wall as a sign that any place where a Robert Moss runs the show was the place for me. For the next three years, I reaped generous rewards of this decision.

But "Where are they now?" Dance Manhattan closed in November 2014 (see DM RIP on Robert Bononno’s excellent blog Tango High and Low). Sandra Cameron closed her studio in the summer of 2013. Triangulo is still alive and kicking. Jeni Breen, who used to lead the tango program at Sandra’s studio, formed her own Jeni Breen Tango Academy and is still teaching at 440 Studios, under the newly gentrified glass sign of the Robert Moss Theater.

The Noguchi Museum

Illusion of the Fifth Stone (1970)

The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City was opened in 1985 to display the works of Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) in a former industrial building across from the sculptor's studio. The garden wall is currently under renovation. Below is a series of 26 photos from a visit to the museum in the summer of 2013.

Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery

National Gallery, London. Image from Wikipedia.

Halfway through Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, a new documentary about the celebrated fine arts museum in London, I fell asleep. A combination of information overload, darkness, warmth, and staying up late the night before carried me off to the land of Morpheus, until twenty minutes later I was awakened by an animated discussion of some obscure technicality. By the end of the film, which runs three hours, I wanted both to escape from the movie theater and stay in the Gallery for another hour or two.

National Gallery immerses the viewer in a high-density stream of images of museum rooms, paintings, and workshops as well as excerpts from talks and lectures and even scenes from staff meetings. The film shows the Gallery as a gigantic enterprise, a complex and perennially busy household in which the work is never done, a magic palace filled with untold riches and populated by a host of curators, scientists, conservators, construction workers, performers, and visitors from all over the world. I noted with pleasure that the visitors and staff were shown sympathetically, with appreciation of their eccentricities and respect, which does not always happen in films about public places. Wiseman keeps the pace leisurely and information quantity high and provides no commentary or titles. At first sight the director appears to be completely detached from what is happening on screen, until you realize how effectively he manipulates the viewer’s perception through the choice of footage and clever editing.

You cannot help but notice in this film a surprising number of people appearing with crossed arms, expressing a range of attitudes from not knowing what to do with one’s body to calm contemplation to stern opposition. In one of the opening scenes, a curator cautiously suggests to the Director of the Gallery, Nicholas Penny, that the museum could probably try a bit harder to make its exhibitions and marketing more accessible to the general public. The Director, with his arms tightly knotted in front of his chest, exudes palpable distaste for the mere idea of pandering to the masses. Eventually he arranges his face into a polite grimace – and firmly says that he refuses to “bring everything down to the lowest common denominator”. This makes you want to cheer, at least until you read that Dr. Penny is planning to resign in 2015. In another segment, filmed during a staff meeting, the curators discuss whether the Gallery can benefit from the upcoming marathon whose finish line will be positioned right in front of the museum. On the one hand, millions of viewers will be watching the event on TV, but on the other hand, as the Director points out, the crowds will completely block the entrance to the museum, – and this is coming from the man who staged a massively successful exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci, for which the lines formed overnight, winding around several neighboring blocks.

The film takes you through a series of excerpts from talks for the general public, schoolchildren, people with disabilities, and a privileged group of patrons. Although these talks focus mainly on the “greatest hits” in the collection, some of them provide interesting technical and historical facts and draw your attention to unusual details of some paintings – or to the whims of art experts. A powerful scene early in the movie shows a class for the visually impaired people, during which they examine raised relief prints of Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre at Night while listening to a curator’s commentary. Addressing a group of schoolchildren, a curator talks about Bellini’s Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr, in which woodcutters continue working in the background, completely oblivious to the drama unfolding in the foreground, where St. Peter and his companion are being ambushed by knife-wielding attackers. In another scene, a group of scientists debate with amusing seriousness whether the musical score in Watteau’s The Scale of Love is real guitar music or not. A guide speaks of how George Stubbs, who was trained as an anatomist, spent eighteen months studying horse anatomy by buying carcasses, suspending them from meat hooks in a barn, and cutting off the flesh layer by layer and studying each layer in minute detail, until only the skeleton remained. Another guide discusses Hans Holbein’s double portrait, The Ambassadors, with its symbolic objects and an anamorphic skull on the floor – a distorted image that can be viewed correctly only from a certain angle. No such enigmas are to be found in Holbein’s other well-known portrait, of Christina of Denmark, whose hand in marriage Henry VIII sought - without success, because the lady had enough common sense and self-preservation instinct. Rubens’ Samson and Delilah reveals the secrets of its lighting, when a guide describes how it was painted in situ, in the patron’s room. Yet another curator explains how the pattern on the frame of the Rembrandt's late self-portrait was formed by scraping ebony with a sharp tool, which left behind a groove with wavy edges. None of these talks contain groundbreaking revelations, but it feels good and healthful to be confined in front of a screen, to withdraw your mind from the mundane and instead to focus it on the details of these marvelous paintings while listening to the high-brow murmurings of the erudite and dedicated museum staff.

Several fascinating segments show the work of the conservators who clean, restore and retouch paintings. Larry Keith (whose title is the Head of Conservation Department and Keeper) talks about restoration work of a Rembrandt painting of a nobleman on horseback. An X-ray image of the picture reveals another male figure underneath the image of the horseman, rotated ninety degrees clockwise. As the oil paints grow more transparent over time, the original image becomes more and more visible through the layers of paint. Another segment shows how the lighting of a Renaissance altarpiece triptych is adjusted by trial and error. In another scene, two experts discuss the new arrangement of paintings in the room and agree that Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks may not be in the best spot: “Downstairs it sang, but here it does not sing.”

Towards the end of the movie, Dr. Penny makes another appearance, this time as a guide and art expert, a role which he obviously enjoys more than that of an administrator. With a twinkle in his eye and an expression of a cat that ate the canary, he talks about Nicolas Poussin’s “sculptural” paintings that were intended to appeal to the most sophisticated taste and the most informed audience. He shares inside stories in front of the two Titian paintings (Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto), which he acquired for the museum during his tenure as the Director. His speech is witty and his manner is reserved, yet they cannot quite conceal the satisfaction of a successful hunt radiating from the owl-like Director.

While watching National Gallery, I longed for a “pause” button, because many of its scenes invite you to do research, look things up, learn more or refresh your memory. But if you get hold of this button (e.g., while viewing the film at home), you may lose the author’s narrative and the feeling of being immersed in the atmosphere of the Gallery and having an intimate, seemingly real-time view of its inner workings. The screening on Thanksgiving afternoon at Film Forum was surprisingly well attended, and although like me, my fellow viewers occasionally drifted off to sleep, the film was worth every minute and every effort.

I due Foscari

Placido Domingo as the Doge in I due Foscari
in the 2014 production of the Royal Opera House.

“It’s sad that if a man wants to project authority, he wears a dress,” – once said Robbert Dijkgraaf, a prominent mathematical physicist, science communicator and the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study, referring to judges, priests, and academics, – “[But] wearing your full robes is not that convincing anymore…” – he added and went on to describe how his three children fell off of the couch laughing when they first saw him in full academic regalia.

In the Royal Opera House (ROH) production of Verdi’s I due Foscari, which is currently shown on film in movie theaters, men of power do wear dresses, and although their scarlet robes with sculptured sleeves are only partially convincing, nobody is laughing. I due Foscari (based on Byron’s play The Two Foscari) is a dark story of grief, loss, and despair, from which nothing provides respite. The red-robed men are the Council of Ten, i Dieci, the rulers of Venice, who are locked in uneasy truce with the Doge, Francesco Foscari. The Ten try the Doge’s son, Jacopo, for murder and sentence him to exile, which would force him to leave behind his wife, Lucrezia, and three children. Lucrezia pleads with the Doge to save her husband, who is innocent, but the Doge chooses duty and political convenience over familial ties and does nothing, which results in an obligatory pile of bodies in the finale. And that is the whole story.

A script in which all action is over before the curtain rises for the first time is a shaky foundation for an opera, but it did not seem to daunt Verdi. In 1844, when he composed I due Foscari, Verdi was thirty one years old and already the author of five operas, among them hugely popular Nabucco and Ernani, – but also a widower and a father who had lost two young children. That year Verdi started collaborating with Francesco Maria Piave, who wrote the librettos for Ernani and I due Foscari and over the following two decades provided librettos for eight more Verdi's operas. But in the early days, both Verdi and Piave were still honing their skills and negotiating the balance of power between them, and the results of these experiments were at times unwieldy.

The music of I due Foscari is dark, too: despite being easily recognizable, it is dotted with unusual in Verdi's later creations moments when the music is throttled. It fails, stumbles, falls apart, disappears, fades. The overture begins with a boastful march, which abruptly crashes against a mournful clarinet solo, briefly revives as a cavalry attack – and dies again. The chorus first creeps in with ominous sotto voce “Silenzio… mistero…” and proceeds in the same furtive and menacing tones. The melancholy clarinet again announces the doomed Jacopo and his aria. [Great was my surprise when I heard Pavarotti sing a couple of falsetto notes in an old recording of Jacopo’s cabaletta.] The Doge appears preceded by a handful of hopping and limping notes that make several timid attempts to gain a steady footing – and give up. Nervous strings usher in the stormy Lucrezia who bursts into the Doge’s chamber to plead on behalf of her husband.

Verdi rarely used character themes in his later operas, but a duet of baritone and soprano became one of his trademark numbers. In Foscari, there is a powerful scene of the Doge and Lucrezia, which plays out like a case of Stockholm syndrome, in which the two characters take turns being the captor and the captive. If in Simon Boccanegra (1857), a story also written by Piave about another Doge – of Genoa, it is the men who are duking it out among themselves, in Foscari, the main conflict is between the father and the daughter-in-law. Even in the guts-on-the-floor terzetto in Act 2, another high drama ensemble, the fire is fed by the Doge and Lucrezia, and Jacopo seems to be thrown into the mix almost by accident, so we may be tempted to think that the titular two Foscari are not the Doge and his son, but the Doge and "l'illustre dama Foscari".

The ROH production has a split personality. The three lead singers deliver excellent vocals and Antonio Pappano's conducting is clever and tactful. Placido Domingo sings the Doge: at 73 he is hedging his bets against the unkindness of age to the tenor voice and goes back to where he started – as a baritone. His voice is too light and bright for the part of the octogenarian Doge, his vocal production appears to be strained, and his singing sensibilities are those of a dashing leading man, not of an old crook, but his musicianship, commitment to the role, and stage presence are formidable. Maria Agresta as Lucrezia and Francesco Meli as Jacopo almost convinced me that Verdi should be left exclusively to the Italian signers. The rest of the cast melded into a faceless wall of menace and hostility, but sounded convincing.

Regrettably, an unappealing production by American director Thaddeus Strassberger does this fragile story no favors. The director tries to show Venice as a place that is rotten to the core, but lacks Jodorowsky’s aesthetic shrewdness required to create a disturbing world about which the viewer would still care. The sets are dark and shambolic, awkward and restrictive, and resemble a dungeon or a collapsed mine. The visuals are overloaded with the latest scenographic clichés, including images and text projected on scrims. Physical direction is abysmal, too (of the "park-and-bark" variety, as one reviewer wittily described it): while the principals go through a set of stock operatic gestures not seen on stage for thirty years, the rest of the cast stands motionlessly and glares at them. Jacopo sings his aria from a cage suspended above the stage, on which people are beaten, tortured, and mutilated for most of Act 1 (w h y???). The costumes – designed according to the principle of “Women are from Mars and men are from The Game of Thrones”– offset this misery with color and inventiveness, but the production visually never comes together. But if the staging does not please the eye, vintage Verdi still delights the ear.

Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain

The Holy Mountain (1973).
Movie poster from Wikipedia.
No copyright infringement intended.

When in early October I found myself in front of Bosch’s paintings at the Museo del Prado, I had two questions: “What did he sniff (smoke/ingest/inject)?” and “Why didn’t the church burn him at the stake?” Although I had seen and studied the reproductions of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” and other works many times before, nothing prepared me for the impact of Bosch’s psychedelia in its full size and vibrancy of the five-hundred-year-old pigments. I am still mystified by El Bosco’s visions and his long and respectable life, but if the same two questions were asked about Alejandro Jodorowsky and his 1973 film The Holy Mountain, I would have ready answers. By the 1970s, persecution of heretics has become far less exothermic than in the Middle Ages, and rumor has it that Jodorowsky and his crew consumed mushrooms and dropped acid while making the movie – and the movie does nothing at all to dispel this rumor (see for yourself).

The screening was offered by the Rubin Museum of Art, a place where fearsome Tibetan gods do perfectly balanced double ganchos while celebrating their freedom from attachment, and where the Cabaret Cinema offers the darnedest selection of films. The audience was youthful and well hydrated, as the price of admission was $10 spent at the bar or at the gift shop. An offering to Bacchus was a wise choice, because for the first half hour I regretted being too sober.

Few months ago, I saw Jodorowsky’s 2013 opus, The Dance of Reality, which has little to do with dancing and even less to do with reality, but which instead contemplates what happens if you cross the East European Jewish craziness with the Latin American craziness. In the forty years that separate The Dance from The Mountain, Jodorowsky has grown wiser – and sadder. He is still fond of in-your-face and over-the-top, though carefully calculated and staged visuals: blood, death, nudity, sex, torture, blasphemy, mutilation, intoxication, debauchery, and every imaginable vice, – anything to shock the viewer. These grotesque images remind me of Maslenitsa (or carnival), a week before Lent when pagan and Christian traditions fuse and when things that are forbidden at other times are briefly allowed and celebrated. But with Jodorowsky, it’s the rites of spring all year round, at full volume, absurdity, exhibitionism, and flamboyance, so much so that their shock value undermines itself, which, I suspect, is exactly how the director wants it.

There are three saving graces to Jodorowsky excesses. The first is humor: whenever the story waxes solemn and philosophical, you can trust Jodorowsky to mock himself and his own creation mercilessly and in the next frame smash his own pedestal with endearing gusto. I believe that this self-mockery was more effective in The Mountain than in The Dance and it is this irreverent humor that saves the older film from being a superficial exercise in fungi-induced quasi-spirituality. The second grace is aesthetics: Jodorowsky always makes sure that his stories are artful and at least somewhat beautiful, even when they are scary, revolting, or bizarre. And the third grace is Jodorowsky’s talent and intelligence. No matter how broad his expressive means are, they are always informed by the author’s connection to the sources of true knowledge and for the most part avoid being vacuous, manipulative, and self-serving (although it is said that George Harrison turned down the role in The Mountain when he realized that the script required the camera to stare at him where the sun doesn't shine).

The Mountain follows a predictable chain of trials and initiations with as much pomp and depth as The Magic Flute and which is familiar to anybody who ever engaged in a spiritual practice. Jodorowsky (in marvelous platform boots) plays the Alchemist, the emcee or the puppeteer of the entire story. The most entertaining part of the film is a gallery of utterly unwholesome characters, one for each planet (when Pluto was still a planet - but then one character drowns) and every one a “thief”, depicted in broad satire. The miscreants come to the Alchemist in search of immortality and embark on a quest for enlightenment, which seems to be somewhat less exciting and certainly less pleasant than their past iniquities.

Another memorable scene is a remarkable sequence of reptile circus depicting the conquest of Mexico. The Aztecs are portrayed by chameleons in colorful outfits and the conquistadors by rather revolting toads in monks' hoods. In the end, - not unexpectedly - the entire set is blown to smithereens and bathed in rivers of blood. Jodorowsky certainly knows a thing or two about the pleasures of destruction.

Yet another scene, in which the Alchemist turns the Fool’s excrement into gold, reminded me of a dream that I had on April Fool’s Day last year:

YK, my frequent dance partner, takes me to a lab run by his mentor, a short, energetic woman. The woman sits me down, attaches wires to the fattest parts of my thighs, and plugs the other ends of the wires into something like an amplifier. The amplifier is attached to another machine that has a large glass jar on top. The woman turns the machine on, the machine starts buzzing, and the jar gradually fills up with stuff, as though signals from my body are transformed into matter. The woman shows me the gooey substance in the jar: it’s brownish and utterly disgusting. I exclaim recoiling in revulsion: “Is that my true essence?! I cannot believe I am made of shit!” The woman pats me on the back reassuringly and says with a half-smile: “Don’t worry, hon. Everybody looks like that when distilled!”

I woke up before I could turn my essence into anything that could help to boost my bank account, but I felt great satisfaction when I saw a scene from my own dream committed to celluloid forty years earlier. And I did not even need mushrooms or acid!

Dear Doctor

Dr. Grigory Simkin
9.12.1940 - 11.15.2007

Dear Doctor was an old sinner, 

Fond of the bottle and artery-busting food,

Having been around a few blocks, 

Not all of them in good neighborhoods. 

He was an untidy old bird,

Neither politically nor spiritually correct, 

Hopeless with money or anything practical,  

Bad at following rules, instructions, and beaten tracks,

And instead treading crooked paths 

That no one sane and sober would ever choose.

He hoarded books – on the shelves, on his desk, 

On the chairs, the bed, the floor, and in his memory –

And cited them with gusto. 

He loved playing with knowledge and with his cat 

That smelled of his cologne.

He watched mind-numbing action flicks and wept over Mozart.

He told blue stories and cracked salty jokes 

That would keep you chuckling for days

And that you could carry around with you 

Like medicine against gloom and respectability.

He could be a character in his own off-color anecdotes,

Unable to resist making people laugh even at his own funeral… 

Every now and then he was wrong and confused, 

He did absurd and exasperating things

And bumped against life’s sharp corners  

Too often to be called a wise man. 

And he could certainly use a few of his own therapy sessions.

Dear Doctor was a righteous man.

He spent himself with suicidal generosity 

Helping, healing, and giving comfort and peace. 

He was real and knew what was truly important 

And could see through the veil. 

He could make a sacred feast out of bread and vodka

And any day a holy day. 

He knew how to become a deity that rejoices in imagination, 

A playful god who exhales, creating the worlds.

He knew how to travel through the unknown,

Grasping at the filigree web of hypotheses 

And weaving your own myth.

Wounded and bruised, his heart in tatters 

From his many sorrows, but never bitter, 

He chose to love what was difficult to love

And see the good in both the good and the rotten. 

He wielded an exquisite arsenal of soul-healing tools,

With an occasional sidelong glance at Papa Freud on the wall, 

And did magic with his energy.

He helped people to become unafraid 

Of their formidable true Self 

And of their mothers-in-law. 

My unwavering advocate, he would say, 

“You are goodness and light,” – 

Until the many pieces of me 

Didn't want to fly apart anymore.

He let me take my own breath away 

Every time I discovered a new reality,

Filling twelve notebooks with extraordinary dreams 

And the thirteenth one with my thesis.

He walked me through my many battles, 

My clunky weaponry and my love of destruction,

And helped me make peace with the mirror.

He would guide me in flights 

Into the realms from which I come, 

To meet my kin and foe and gather their teaching stories

To make living in this world more tolerable 

Until one o’clock next Wednesday...

As a young man, he once saw Nevsky Prospect 

Set ablaze by the new sun

And decided that forever reaching toward a distant light 

Was how he wanted to live.

Wherever a band of other holy satyrs 

Is now roaring with laughter at his impious tales

Of interstellar mischief,

Here, his wish has come true.