Violentango at Argentinian Consulate

Violentango at the Argentinian Consulate, 5.5.15

On Monday night, at Valeria Solomonoff's consistently enjoyable Tango Playground Practica, I exhorted my partners to be present without ambivalence, misbehave and “milk it” - "it" being all the particularly delectable morsels of music and movement. I noticed that those born north of about 25-30° north latitude are often inhibited when it comes to this to-do list, and I myself, hailing all the way from 60° N, am no exception.

No such exhortations were needed on Tuesday evening at the Argentinian Consulate, where Violentango played a free concert. Whether or not their music has much to do with violence or with tango (although, at least according to Borges, tango has always something to do with fighting), these guys know how to go for it with a vengeance and not just play music, but play with the music of two generations before them – their grandfathers’ tango and rock music of their parents, plus a gamut of other voices and influences, – and make it all sound intriguing and contemporary. A little over a week ago, Astoria Tango Orchestra performed with Daniel Binelli, – and it was great to hear and dance to the traditional sound of orquesta tipica. The music of Violenango is not for keeping milongueros on their feet, but it is also traditional in the sense that it is made of the same ingredients: talent, skill, and inspiration of the players, with nothing canned or boxed other than some juice to amplify the sound of their instruments – two guitars, bandoneon, electric bass and percussion.

‘Tis a season for conversions in my artistic tastes: never a big fan of new tango music, I went to the Consulate with a pragmatic purpose – to scout out the space for a future event, – and was pleasantly surprised to discover Violentango and their unadorned sound. They played their own compositions as well as a couple of pieces by Piazzolla and a few oldies but goodies, such as Milonga de mis amores, which lends itself well to instrumental inventiveness and embellishment. Musically, these guys know how to misbehave and milk it for what it’s worth, with improvisation, ingenious sounds and quotes from a variety of styles, from jazz to folkloric, thrown in with cleverness, virtuosity and humor. It occurred to me that, unlike traditional tango, this music has the momentum to go somewhere, as it allows itself to be discontented and seek a way to escape its own status quo or upset it, out of its own abundance, boredom, mischief, or subversion – or just for the heck of it.

There are plenty of Violentango videos and recordings online, but they do not give you a sense of energy that these guys whip up while playing live. It is, quite simply, great fun to watch them make noise in front of you. There is indeed power in doing – not with 1s and 0s, but with one’s body and mind, – and seeing and understanding how music is being made by five people is quite entertaining. Plus, to be honest, as my own biological usefulness dwindles, my appreciation for good XY chromosomes only grows – and there was plenty of that on display. I was happy to see that the audience at the Consulate reacted to the music of Violentango with enthusiasm that was not immediately predictable – because most of the people in the room were old enough to be these guys’ parents.

Violentango plays four more concerts in NYC: May 6 – Shrine, May 7 – Silvana, May 8 – The Parkside Lounge, May 9 – The West End. Find the details on Violentango website and go see these guys play live for a dose of good music and terrific energy.

Violentango: Adrián Ruggiero (bandoneón), Juan Manuel López (guitar), Santiago Córdoba (percussion), Ricardo Jusid (bass), Camilo Córdoba (guitar)

Program: Le Petit Rhone y la Cigale; Fuga y misterio; Menos sol; Escape porteño; Milonga de mis amores; Napoleon; Barceluna; Milonga del Angel; Libertango

Tango and Babushkas

Mariana Parma and Leonardo Sardella in 2013 production of Recuerdo Tango.
Photo from Mariela Franganillo Dance Company website. 

Yesterday I spent half a day attending a production of Recuerdo Tango, a show by the Mariela Franganillo Dance Company, this time performed at Kingsborough Community College, in far, far Brooklyn. In my graduate school years, I used to live in Sheepshead Bay and thought nothing of commuting every day to NYU, but now, after a decade spent living in Queens, that part of Brooklyn has become almost a different planet. And it is on that planet of Brighton Beach pensioners (and a few of their grandkids), Mariela & Co. have decided to perform their show, as a residency at On Stage At Kingsborough supported by the CUNY Dance Initiative. This production model has its upsides and downsides: without these residencies, the show would most likely have never been staged, but as a residency, it is performed only once (or very few times) and does not bring the performers any returns except for a chance to be on stage and receive public and media attention.

Last time Recuerdo Tango was performed in 2013 at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University, which, besides being a much more accessible location, has long traditions, such as Inside the Actors Studio, a deliciously addictive and insightful series of interviews with well-known actors. You can watch Recuerdo Tango taped at Pace online: Act 1 and Act 2.

Yesterday’s production was performed by (almost) the same cast as in 2013: Leah Barsky, Hernan Brizuela, Carlos Cañedo, Ana Padron, Mariana Parma, Walter Perez, Leonardo Sardella, and Yaisuri Salamanca, with LA-based Marcos Questas stepping in as a guest artist to replace Diego Blanco. Four women and five men – and there lies the hook of the story, which features a series of vignettes about a love triangle unfolding over several decades against the backdrop of the New York City life. From office cubicles to a glitzy ballroom to a subway brawl, a bar fight or a domestic quarrel, to a shabby old café, a dark city street, or Central Park, the story flows with knowledge and humor through familiar city scenes. These scenes unfold both onstage and in video segments in the background, accentuated by the powerful performances of singer Sofia Tosello and accompanied by live music of piano, bandoneon, violin, and bass, which add another layer of complexity to the production.

Until recently I had been convinced that tango does not lend itself to a longer form than a ten-minute tanda or a three-minute exhibition. Too much of a good thing is not great, I thought, especially considering all those tropes and clichés with which stage tango has overgrown like an old ship with barnacles. But after seeing a recent production of “milonga” at the New York City Center, a wonderfully imaginative dance show based on tango choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, and then Recuerdo Tango, I converted, noting with surprise that an hour-and-a half tango show can indeed successfully and pleasantly hold my attention.

Yesterday’s performance was thoroughly enjoyable, although it felt a touch more measured and calculated than the 2013 production, which was performed with delightful abandon. One big difference between the two shows was the audience: in the 2013 video, you can hear the audience at Pace applaud at appropriate moments, but good luck getting the Brighton Beach retirees to clap mid-show! On my way out of the theater I heard a couple of them say to each other, “Very pretty dancing, but I didn’t understand anything!” Oh well. Elderly Russian-speaking Jews are perhaps the most receptive audience for the guts-on-the-floor emotions of tango, but a dance trio on a subway train may be a little outside of their comfort zone. The babushkas were pleased though, judging by the vigorous applause after the show.

For me, this was yet another occasion to remind myself of the great good luck of having access to the concentration of talent and professionalism that the New York City tango performers and teachers have to offer. I wonder why this city cannot take them up on this offer more frequently and enjoy more of such shows and performances. It is also always fascinating to observe a transformation that occurs onstage to people you know: Yaisuri was the person who taught me my very first tango steps, Walter and Leonardo are my current teachers, Ana and Diego host the practica that I used to frequent, Mariela is a long-time host of another old haunt, and a few friends study or studied with Mariana, Hernan and Carlos.

On the bus on the way back, I overheard a creaky voice of an old woman speaking Russian: “We old folks ought to kiss every pebble here. I haven’t done anything for this country, but it gives me so much: SSI, cheap apartment, food stamps, Medicare, everything I need!” Wow, I thought, on Brighton Beach this is decidedly a minority view. I also doubt that anybody from my generation is in any danger of ever receiving the goodies from that bus philosopher's list. And I also reflected on my lean, yet somewhat structured existence as an office worker compared to the complete unpredictability and lack of security of a life as a dance performer. Perhaps it was not by accident that as I left my building on my way to the show, I saw on the ground a book with a missing cover and a title: Among the Brave. To brave folks then – and to the good memories of New York City!

Pre-show sidewalk oracle near my building.

Credits:

Recuerdo Tango, The Mariela Franganillo Company, May 2, 2015

Directors: Mariela Franganillo and Bob McAndrew

Assistant Choreographer: Cecilia Saia

Music Director: Pedro Giraudo

Musicians: Emilio Teubal (piano), Juan Pablo Jofre (bandoneon), Nick Danielson (violin)

Vocalist: Sofia Tosello

Dancers: Leah Barsky, Hernan Brizuela, Carlos Cañedo, Ana Padron, Mariana Parma, Walter Perez, Leonardo Sardella, Yaisuri Salamanca 

Guest Artist: Marcos Questas

Design: Barry Steele
Lighting: Jimmi Lawlor

Production Manager: Calvin Anderson

Children's Books at the Grolier Club

The Grolier Club, the oldest active bibliophilic club in the US, was founded in 1884 by a small group of book lovers headed by Robert Hoe III, a manufacturer of printing press machinery and an avid book collector, and was named after Jean Grolier, a statesman, diplomat, and book lover in 16th-century France.

The club regularly mounts exhibitions on literary and bookmaking topics. The current offerings are One Hundred Books Famous in Children’s Literature (until February 7) displayed in the ground floor hall and Quotations of Chairman Mao (until January 10) in the second floor rare book room (free admission).

Grolier Club entrance.

Since 1917 the club occupies a small building on East 60^th Street between Madison and Park Avenues, designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, who was also the author of the iconic California Tower in Balboa Park in San Diego. Currently a large-scale construction is going on next door, where a 51-story building is being constructed, using air rights acquired from the Groiler Club and a neighboring church. The facade of No. 47 is also obscured by scaffolding.

One Hundred Books Famous in Children's Literature.
Groiler Club, ground floor hall

The place is charming and the exhibitions are attractive and well attended. The children’s books exhibit is the sixth in the series of “the Grolier Hundreds”, after previous exhibitions focused on English literature (1903), American literature (1946), science (1958), medicine (1994), and fine printed books (1999). The selection of the “most famous 100” can be debated, but the most significant works are represented by delectable old editions going as far back as 17th century. Many of these books come from the Morgan Library and large university libraries. The oldest book on display appears to be Johann Amos Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Visible World in Pictures), an illustrated encyclopedia published in London in 1659, an influential early book in children’s education. Curiously, a number of older books on display are really tiny, as if made for the children’s small hands rather than for their parents’ and grandparents’ presbyopic eyes.

A first edition of Charles Perrault's Histoires ou Contes du tempts passe (left) published in 1697 was illustrated with engravings by Antoine Clouzier (from the Princeton University collection). The French edition is open on the first page of Puss in Boots and the English translation lists The Little Red Riding Hood as the very first tale in the table of contents. 

Another famous forest-roaming Hood - Robin Hood - is represented by the 1883 collection of stories, retold for children and illustrated by Howard Pyle (UCLA collection).

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!

Cello at Carnegie Hall: Isserlis & St. Luke's

Breguet Clock in Carnegie Hall lobby. Photo: LB

The cello music theme has captured my attention since the recent Bargemusic concert. After that performance I remembered how during my brief sojourn in Seattle in 2004 I was lucky to hear two major cellists – Mstislav Rostropovich and Steven Isserlis – at the acoustically excellent Benaroya Hall. 

I was still reminiscing about the Seattle performances, when I discovered that Isserlis was about to play in New York City with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s on June 1. Originally this concert was supposed to be held on November 1, 2012, but at that time the area around Carnegie Hall was threatened by the dangling arm of the construction crane damaged by Hurricane Sandy and the concert was postponed. This was too much of a coincidence and too good a story to be missed, so I marched to Carnegie Hall.

Sesto Will Make It: Giulio Cesare at the Met

Photo: Marty Sohl/Met Opera

“What do you think, will Sesto make it?” – “Of course, he will. It’s Baroque, only the bad guys die.”

I overheard this conversation in the ladies’ room of the Met Opera after the first act of Handel’s Giulio Cesare on Tuesday (5/7/13). Indeed, in 18th century operas the body count is low and the casualties are suffered mostly by the villains. But when the opera is four and a half hours long, the pertinent question is whether the audience will make it to the end!

Shakespeare in Africa

Photo: Richard Temine/BAM

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky to see Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in a new production by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).

When I arrived at the picturesquely shabby Harvey Theater, the party was already underway: as the auditorium was filling up, on stage a group of actors in African garb were dancing to the music played by a small band. Even though I had seen posters for this production in the city, only then did I realize that this Caesar would be radically transplanted onto a very foreign soil.

This was a big gamble, and so I promised myself that I would leave as soon as I hear the buzz of Shakespeare spinning in his grave. However, not ten minutes into the performance, I completely forgot about my escape plans, because the RSC has won me over with their craft.