Spoleto 5: Jojking and epic.

If you are not familiar with jojk (or yoik) singing from Finnish Samiland, then you might have been just as surprised as many of the folks in the audience at the Westminster Choir concert at Spoleto at the sound of Veljo Tormis's setting of "Raua needmine" from the Kalevala.

Let me back up.

The Westminster Choir gave two concerts in St. Matthew's Lutheran Church, and we saw the second one. The program was mostly contemporary music from the Scandinavian and Baltic (read: diacritical-rich) region of Europe: pieces by Alfrēds Kalņiš, Jaakko Mäntyjärvi, Trond Kverno, Veljo Tormis, and (surprised?) Johannes Brahms. Mäntyjärvi's setting of "Ave Maria" was powerful, with the women's voices whispering prayers while the men sang. And Kverno's "Ave Maris Stella" seemed to gesture in sonically rich ways to chant traditions of early music. Beautiful stuff.

But it was Estonian composer Veljo Tormis' Raua needmine, or "Curse upon iron," was the real knock-out for me. He composed this piece in 1972 against the evils of war, and it was banned by the Soviet government. The piece opened with an abrupt "HWAET!" from the kamchatka, which was some kind of percussion instrument played with a large padded hammer. It scared the living daylights out of the people sitting in front of me, but trust me: it was one of the more suitable epic openings I have heard. Then a number of male voices began to jojk.

Saami folk music is called jojk and is a singing style where melody and verse are of equal importance. Jojk is improvised while singing and can express feelings of sorrow, hate or love. To sing jojk means deeply identifying yourself with someone or something.

Saami nåjd sang jojk and drummed to reach religious ecstasy. Consequently, the church looked on jojk as "the song of the Devil" and banned it well into the 1900s.

Today, Saami musicians still practice traditional jojk but with the accompaniment of instruments. Often their playing is flavored with influences from western music.

Jojk performed in a church! I first encountered this style of singing from Wimme Saari, who often records just as Wimme. His music has a striking combination of this very traditional form of singing with electronic music--and it is absolutely addictive.

All this to say: Tormis' setting of a piece of the Kalevala, usually considered the Finnish national epic, was fabulous. Listening to it, I started to understand in a way I had not before what it might have been like to listen to other epic poems--poems that gave people a sense of what it meant to be them. The words of "Curse upon iron" object to the metal as "You spiller of innocent blood!," telling the story of the ore's (mythic) origins, and how it is shaped by "the forge of death," "hammer[ing] anger into iron." It is epic at its best, and so modern (don't forget the Kalevala was compiled in the 19th century, and I am guessing this version may update it even further):

Brand-new and up-to-date technology,
The ultimate word in electronics
Ready to fly in any direction,
Stay undeflected on its course, hit the target
Paralyze, and knock out of action, obliterate,
Render helpless and defenseless,
Harm and hurt, cause unknowable loss,
And kill, kill with iron and with steel,
With chromium, titanium, uranium, plotonium,
And with a multitude of other elements.
Ohoy, villain! Evil iron!

If only my Beowulf students could have been there!

Spoleto 4: Dresser of curiosities

When Aurélia's Oratorio begins, there is a dresser on stage. Gradually, a hand emerges. Then a head, or later a leg. Or two arms at once that seem contortionist because they emerge from different drawers at remarkable angles. A hand pours wine into a glass held by another hand. A hand dresses a stocking over a foot--then adds a shoe. Amidst much opening and closing of drawers, two separate arms and two separate feet are visible--could they possibly be connected?

Perhaps this is less surprising once we know that the show draws its inspiration from medieval manuscript illuminations of inside-out and upside-down worlds.

The show goes on like that--well, like that if that can happen on stage curtains acting as trapezes or ladders, or if there is any likeness between a chest of drawers and a coat rack. There is a likeness: they both have become frightening alive, as has a coat and a pair of shoes, and the entire rigging of the stage curtains. Puppets watch a performance in a little puppet theatre, being put on by a human head. An old-fashioned chair-taxi (carried by a person at each end, the chair held to poles) enters stage right , but carried upside down. Soon a woman comes down from a "window" in the curtains and catches a ride--she is riding upside down. A man wrestles with a coat, and loses. A man pulls a spangly skirt upside down over his head and chest, holds a woman's shoes on his hands, and using those shoes and his own (on his feet of all places) he performs a beautiful ballroom dance (though there is literally nothing to see above either partner's waist). A man and a woman perform a remarkable dance of putting on and taking off the same coat, while gypsy jazz plays in the back. A woman opens a door in her voluminous hoop skirt to reveal a sort of hour glass, that seems to be consuming her legs and then her hips and then all of her and turning them into sand--which a man later collects with a dustban, dumps into a drawer, and the woman re-emerges. A woman with a whole in her middle enters a stage where a toy train is running on an elevated track, and using her own hole-y body, becomes a tunnel.

When you come out of the show, it is remarkable that the ground stays under your feet.

How then do you look at the woman in the pool the next day, swimming with a lithe body and a long braid of finally contained hair, and believe that she is affected by the elements as we are?

(Not exactly) Spoleto 3: Tropical Storm Barry.

I knew we were at the coast when I realized that the TV in our hotel room defaults to The Weather Channel. Not that I am complaining: I have been known to be a Weather Channel fan. Blame it on growing up in Tidewater Virginia, I suppose, where I learned early the importance of constantly watching hurricane tracks and projected paths, just in case.

Not that my enduring attention to all things weather makes me prepared. For instance, even after a discussion with the PP about packing rain jackets, did I pack mine? (Do I really have to answer that question?) Luckily, a certain outdoor store became the store where I dropped the most money. We called it the store we visited every day, because the first time we bought sunscreen, the second time my (fabulous) new rain jacket, and the third time lots of brightly-colored ankle socks to wear with my sandals. I even spent more money there than at knit! (I must admit that this is partly because I have bought so much yarn elsewhere of late, and I was trying to be restrained....)

Anyway, the PP and I woke up the morning after our arrival to find ourselves socked in. If you have ever lived at the coast you know what I mean: about 98% humidity, no breeze, spitting rain, gray everywhere you look. We realized then that we needed to get that replacement raincoat right away, and hurricane expert Dr. Lyons confirmed our concern that the weather would only get worse. I never got that distinct low pressure headache that Yarngineer described (I have before, and yow they are intense), but as the day went on, the wind picked up.

We could not help but laugh, though, because the night before we had seen The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht number I had been eager to see ever since I heard Ute Lemper sing songs from it. (Do you know "Alabama Song," which was covered by The Doors? It is from this show.) Anyway, the opera has as a sizable plot device a hurricane, and so we had spent some time during the turn from Acts I to II (I think) watching the storm come in, destroy a city, and then barely miss the city of Mahagonny.

So as we watched the Weather Channel, with its little arrows, they looked for all the world like the arrows on the primitive maps in the show.

But Barry was no hurricane. I realized the difference between people used to coastal storms and those not in watching reactions to the storm. Should we evacuate? asked the PP.

All scoffing aside, the wind was pretty intense, not in a destroying buildings kind of way, but in a way that made umbrellas everywhere fear for their skeletal systems, and it did quite a job on one of the Spoleto banners hanging near our hotel. (That thing being whipped around was like gunfinre.) And we just got used to having the hems of our pants and skirts soaked.

At least now I have an awesome new raincoat.

Spoleto 2: O body swayed to music, O brightening glance.

When Shen Wei writes in his program materials that "I wasn't taught the arts separately, so I don't separate them in my work," he means it.

At first I took this to mean an intimate link between the music and the dance. I buy that: sometimes the music dictates the movement in a way that goes beyond mere choreography.

But he meant more than that, because a ways into the performance of Connect Transfer, it dawned on me (and maybe suddenly on the others in the audience, too) that the large white fabric laid over the stage was not just to allow a contrast with the dancers' costumes. It was a canvas, or a scroll.

The bulk of the movement in this performance was performed on the floor, but it did not look like tumbling so much as dancing horizontally. The movements were circular--not just in the sense of roundness of pattern but also of repetition. Yet this was not dervishness so much as fluidity--as often a gentle motion as a furious one.

When the dancer wearing a mitten dipped in black paint or ink started her pattern, the floor turned into an enormous scroll of running style calligraphy, made not by a brush but a body, or a body and a brush, or a body become a brush. When other dancers appeared with red and then blue and green and yellow and purple--sometimes on their mittens, others on socks or on their backs--the stage had become a brilliant jumble of significant nonsense, and all the while watching it appear on the page was like watching Jackson Pollock paint--if he could really dance.
Makes you rethink textuality.

And the music--written by Kevin Volans, Iannis Xenakis, György Lineti--was a knock out.

Spoleto 1: And that is the longing, and this is the book.

Will you work with me for a moment? I had intended to write a bit about the Spoleto Festival while the PP and I were in Charleston, but my access to teh internets was not what I had hoped. So, if you do not mind, I am going to pretend it is last week. Can you do that with me?

The first time that we ran into Philip Glass on the terrazza of the Holiday Inn (are you still working with me here?), I figured it was not really him, because given that his show, being an American premiere and all, was kind of the headliner for the festival, would he be staying at the Holiday Inn? And besides, everywhere you looked, there he was on a poster or a t-shirt or a coffee mug or another poster or a gigantic banner on Gaillard Auditorium.

See?

So the afternoon before we went to the first performance of Book of Longing, I assumed my eyes were tricking me when I saw him talking on his cellphone in a t-shirt and jeans, and kind of pacing around.

But then after we saw the show, and him on stage--and us in the front row (friends, it pays to think ahead)--then, when we saw him a couple days later, I knew it was him, and felt bad for poo-pooing the PP's sense that we had seen him.

And of course I thought about telling him that for reasons I still cannot quite get a handle on, his piece moved me to tears. Was it just Leonard Cohen lyrics? Or that wonderful relentlessness of his music? Or the intimacy of seeing the performers so close? Or the way the intimate "I" of the poetry shifted in and out of the bodies of tenor, bass-baritone, soprano, and mezzo? Or the weird disparity between the super-erotic lyrics and Leonard Cohen's own self-sketches (rendered into a multimodal array), very much about seeing his own face look old?

But I feel dumb saying such things to someone who obviously knows that his work is important, so I never go up to famous people.

Still, what I really wanted, absolutely desperately wanted to ask him was: What is it like to see your own face, stylized into a portrait made of thumbprints, and of about 30 years ago, plastered everywhere you look?