VOLUME 10, ISSUE 1
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GABRIEL KAHANE AT HOME IN LOS ANGELES, BROOKLYN, AND CHAPEL HILL
A L S O I N T HI S I S S U E • Emil Unplugged: The Best of Britten • Lessons of World War I • Michelle Dorrance: Chapel Hill’s Queen of Rhythm • Fall Arts Luncheon with Ian Bostridge
CAROLINA PERFORMING ARTS C R E AT E | P R E S E N T | C O N N E C T
Photo by John Goleman
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wo years ago, Emil also convinced Kang of the Kang was attending a festival project’s importance. “He in Manchester, England, is so talented. If anyone when he was approached by can immerse us in the representatives from London’s role of a madwoman in an Barbican Centre. The largest opera, it is Ian Bostridge,” performing arts facility in says Kang, who has Europe, the Barbican wanted wanted to work with to bring their upcoming Bostridge since his last production of Benjamin performance at Memorial Britten’s Curlew River to Hall in September 2005. Chapel Hill. It would be The affection was mutual. an ambitious reimagining of Kang recalls how much a classic oratorio, featuring Bostridge enjoyed his multimedia projections last visit in Chapel Hill. by installation artists “Ian loves this town and “ We knew from t he b eg inning t hat and renowned tenor Ian especially loves to wander the ar ti s t s involve d repre s ente d t he b e s t Bostridge. Only a few through our bookstores.” of the Bri t ten interpreter s .” venues in the world would be Netia Jones, the invited to take on such a project. “The fact that we were asked production’s director and an accomplished video artist, brings to participate says a lot about Carolina Performing Arts’ global a unique sensibility to Britten’s work. She creates soaring reputation,” explains Kang. images of birds and a glittering white river around the actors The first of three church parables by Britten, Curlew River as they struggle through darkness and light, loss and recovery. features elements of the medieval mystery play and the Japanese Kang admires Jones’s eagerness to inject a classic work with Noh tradition, which Britten was inspired by during his travels new artistic ideas—a challenge that resonates with Carolina to Asia in 1956. Curlew River tells the story of a madwoman Performing Arts’ larger exploration of how artists reinterpret who has lost her child and wanders the land searching for her classics. “This work fits into an arc of presenting classical works lost boy. When she comes to the fictional Curlew River, the in different ways,” Kang points out. “Like The Rite of Spring nearby community realizes that the child who died there a year and Pictures Reframed, we think it’s important to work with ago was, in fact, the madwoman’s son. The result is a dramatic artists who are creating unusual representations of the classical story of grief and redemption—powerful themes that challenge repertoire.” every actor who takes on the production. The courage and creativity to take on these large-scale The quality of the Barbican performers immediately projects has furthered CPA’s global image, and Kang sees excited Kang. “We knew from the beginning that the artists Curlew River as representative of a continued commitment to involved represented the best of the Britten interpreters,” says innovative performances. “This is a project that we should Kang. The production features the world-renowned Britten be doing,” Kang comments, “a project that speaks to our Sinfonia and Britten Sinfonia Voices along with an outstanding relevance and to the global relationships that we now have.” cast of soloists. The involvement of luminous tenor Bostridge — Aaron Shackelford • E x p e r i e n c e t h e u n f o r g e t t a b l e s t o r y o f B r i t t e n’s C u r l e w Ri v e r o n N o v e m b e r 6 a n d 7. F o r t i c ke t s , c o n t a c t t h e M e m o r i a l H a l l B ox O f f i c e a t 91 9/8 4 3 - 3 3 3 3 o r v i s i t c a r o l i n a p e r f o r m i n g a r t s . o r g . •
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ARTS@THECORE
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At Home in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and Chapel Hill King verdict. “One of the things I appreciate about CPA is developing relationships with faculty and students on these early visits and knowing that these relationships are going to deepen over time,” explains Kahane. Kahane’s partnership with CPA and the broader Carolina campus will extend beyond his October 22 performance. He will be back in the spring for another residency to meet with more students and faculty about his work Gabriel’s Guide to the 48 States and future projects. By coincidence, his visit will overlap with that of another musical group wellknown for their engagement with the campus—the string quartet Brooklyn Rider. “The first time I came to CPA was on a program with Brooklyn Rider,” Kahane recalls. “The members are my friends, my neighbors, and musical soulmates.” Kahane, who collaborated with the group on their November 2012 program for The Rite of Spring at 100, remembers their warm reception in Chapel Hill. “I was astonished in that first encounter that Memorial Hall was full for an incredibly ambitious and diverse program.” CPA patrons will also recognize the director of The Ambassador, John Tiffany. Tiffany directed The National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Black Watch, a Josh Goleman
abriel Kahane’s The Ambassador has already been described as “one of the year’s very best albums” by Rolling Stone. A love letter to the myths and realities of Los Angeles, where Kahane was born, the album is inspired by ten buildings across the city and features powerful songs that delve into music, movies, literature, and architecture as well as the political and racially charged history of Southern California. The Ambassador is “a guidebook to Los Angeles,” says Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, “a map marking just ten locations but expansive enough to accommodate the great, telling distances between them.” This October, Kahane will bring this guidebook to Memorial Hall for the world premiere of the multimedia stage production of The Ambassador. The performance is the product of an indepth creative process for Kahane, part of which took place in Chapel Hill during a residency with Carolina Performing Arts (CPA). Over the past year, Kahane has visited UNC’s campus to discuss his ideas for the work with students and faculty in departments ranging from American Studies to Communication Studies and Dramatic Art. The connections Kahane made at Carolina can be seen throughout The Ambassador, whose credits include a thankyou to Heidi Kim, assistant professor of English and comparative literature and CPA’s new curatorial fellow. She helped direct Kahane towards research that led to the central song on the album, “Empire Liquor Mart,” which explores racial tension in the wake of the Rodney
“ O n e o f t h e t hi n g s I ap p r e c i a te ab o u t C PA i s d ev e l o p i n g r e l a t i o n s hi p s w i t h f a c u l t y an d s tu d e nt s o n t h e s e e ar l y v i s i t s an d k n ow i n g t h a t t h e s e r e l a t i o n s hi p s ar e g o i n g to d e e p e n ov e r t i m e .” — GABRIEL K AHANE
mesmerizing story of the Iraq War, which CPA presented in 2011. Kahane is eager to return to Chapel Hill with Tiffany and to reignite the conversations that began during his last visit. For Kahane, it’s these opportunities for artists to engage in meaningful ways with students, faculty, and community members that sets CPA apart from other venues. “This country is full of extraordinary performing arts presenters that are attached to universities,” Kahane notes, “but I don’t think I’ve encountered any other campus performing arts center that has done quite as much to integrate its presentations into the broader community and campus.” — Aaron Shackelford
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ABOVE, BELOW: Dorrance Dance performs The Blues Project.
Photos by Christopher Duggan
Queen of Rhythm ichelle Dorrance has been tap dancing since she was barely old enough to read or ride a bike. “There’s not a time that I can remember when I wasn’t in love with tap dance,” says Michelle, whose company Dorrance Dance will perform at Memorial Hall this September. “There wasn’t a moment or turning point where I decided this is what I wanted to do. I was always in love with it.” Michelle’s sincere passion and respect for this uniquely American art form is apparent each time she steps on the stage, and she has quickly captured the attention of audiences and critics around the world. Since founding Dorrance Dance in early 2011, she has been honored with a Bessie Award, a
Princess Grace Award, and the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award. In a laudatory review of her latest work ETM: The Initial Approach, which debuted at Jacob’s Pillow this July, dance critic Brian Seibert of The New York Times called Michelle “the brightest choreographer in tap today.” A Chapel Hill native, Michelle was first introduced to dance by her mother M’Liss, a former professional ballet dancer and founder of the Ballet School of Chapel Hill. Michelle studied ballet at her mother’s studio beginning at age three and then discovered tap at age four in a class with Gene Medler, the trailblazer behind the North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble (NCYTE). M’Liss remembers taking the young Michelle to audition for Medler’s company in the late 1980s. At the end of the audition, Medler, who would became one of Michelle’s greatest mentors, asked all the children to improvise, a fundamental element of tap. “Everyone was blown away,” says M’Liss of her daughter’s performance. “We knew she had something special even though she’d had very little training at that point.” Michelle went on to perform and tour with NCYTE for the next decade. Even as a teenager, her immense talent was already apparent. She served as the youngest cultural ambassador
• D o r r a n c e D a n c e w i l l p e r f o r m T h e B l u e s P r o j e c t o n S e p t e m b e r 25 a n d 26 a t M e m o r i al H al l . F o r t i c ke t s , c o n t a c t t h e M e m o r i a l H a l l B ox O f f i c e a t 91 9/8 4 3 - 3 3 3 3 o r v i s i t c a r o l i n a p e r f o r m i n g a r t s . o r g . •
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to Saratov, Russia, Chapel Hill’s sister coach of UNC’s storied women’s soccer city, and was invited to dance with team. “She appreciates her roots and the popular swing revival band the comes back here every single year.” Squirrel Nut Zippers. After high Michelle’s next visit home will be school, Michelle moved to New York to perform her work The Blues Project City to attend New York University’s as part of Carolina Performing Arts’ prestigious Gallatin School where tenth anniversary season. Featuring she studied political science, history, live music by one of Michelle’s favorite and literature. While in New musicians Toshi Reagon and her band York, she began performing with BIGLovely, the piece explores the some of her biggest idols, including rich, intertwining histories of tap and Savion Glover, and spent four years blues while forging new rhythmic in the Off Broadway sensation and aesthetic possibilities for tap ABOVE: Ballet icon Wendy Whelan, CPA Director Emil STOMP. (Michelle’s first Memorial dance. CPA Executive and Artistic Kang, and Michelle Dorrance Hall performance was as a member of Director Emil Kang, who has known STOMP’s North American tour.) “It’s Michelle since 2010, is eager to present a show I still love and support,” says Michelle. “In fact, they call the company at Memorial Hall for the first time. “Michelle has me to fill in from time to time.” long been known in the tap world as one of the world’s greatest Though still based in New York, Michelle makes regular at her craft. However, her genius comes from her vision and visits to Chapel Hill to teach and perform at the North Carolina desire to go beyond what has already been done. She’s creating Rhythm Tap Festival and to mentor the next generation of a compelling future for generations of dancers and audiences to students in the NCYTE. Her parents are especially proud of come.” That future is one where the music of tap is as central Michelle’s commitment to giving back to the community where to the dance as the steps themselves. The intrinsic connection she got her start. “What I really admire about Michelle is that between dance and music is what has always attracted Michelle to none of this has gone to her head,” explains her father Anson tap: “To be able to be a musician and a dancer at the same time. Dorrance, who knows quite a bit about success himself as the Who doesn’t want to do that?” — Rachel Ash
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Matthew Murphy
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D O N ’ T M I S S C PA’ S 10TH ANNIVERSARY GALA WITH DORRANCE DANCE AND TOSHI REAGON
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 • 6:30 P.M. Join us on stage at Memorial Hall for an unforgettable evening as we toast ten years of performances. Tickets are $500 per person ($250 is tax-deductible). Tables of ten are $5,000 ($2,500 is tax-deductible). For reservations, contact 919/843-1869 or rachel_ash@unc.edu.
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FA C U LT Y P E R S P E C T I V E
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ompared to the Civil War and World War II, the First World War does not figure prominently in the American national imagination. The United States entered the war late, and American troops were only active in the last six months of a war that lasted over four years, from August 1914 to November 1918. But for Europeans, especially for the British, this conflict is still the “Great War.” Twice as many English soldiers and six times as many French soldiers died in World War I as did in World War II. Go to any village in England today and you will see the memorial to those who died in the Great War, just as you will find a similar memorial to the Civil War in almost every town in North Carolina. The length of the list in those small English villages never fails to be both moving and shocking. Americans have many reasons today, on the 100th anniversary of the war’s outbreak, to consider its impact. Most immediately, the current map of the Middle East is a direct result of the war. Iraq, as a country, was invented in the war’s aftermath; and the war also precipitated the first official recognition of a Jewish presence in Palestine. More grandly, the First World War was the end of the nineteenth century and the onset of the twentieth. Modernism in the arts predated the war by a few years. Futurism and cubism, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and the first great modernist literary works by writers such as Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein burst on the scene in the ten years before the war began. But the war made it absolutely clear that there was no going back, that the optimistic outlook grounded in a belief in progress,
which characterized the late 19th century, had been lost forever. The dangerous and bloody twentieth century was upon us. Psychologically, the war’s destruction of any self-satisfied confidence in modernity as progress was based on two overwhelming realizations. The first was that the technological advances on which the most “advanced” nations prided themselves also meant humans could kill humans with more efficiency than ever before. The casualty rates of the war’s great battles were staggering. And it was all so impersonal, so disconnected from any notion of heroic valor. Instead, men were just mowed down by machine guns. Even more devastating was the fact that it was the supposedly most “civilized” nations in the world that were engaged in this slaughter. Yet not only could these same nations offer no plausible reason for this battle among themselves, but they also could find no way to end the bloody stalemate even when it was obvious neither side could defeat the other. The Great War’s lessons get translated into modern art every time an artist shows that beneath the veneer of civilization lurks an unrelenting savagery, or every time temporal continuity is disrupted by sudden catastrophe, or when the platitudes of the respectable are mercilessly mocked. The Great War spawned a loss of faith, a bitterness, and an ironic alienation from the benefits of modernity that manifests itself again and again in the masterpieces of modern art. — John McGowan, Director of Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature and Ruel C. Tyson Distinguished Term Professor
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WWI CENTENARY PROJECT J o in C ar o l i n a P e r fo r mi n g A r t s a s we m ar k t h e c e n t e nni al o f Wo r l d War I w i t h t h e s e s p e c i al p r o g r am s . • OCT 1 & 2 / Taylor Mac / 1910s, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music • JAN. 29-31 / Combat Paper Project / Installation work in Gerrard Hall • FEB 12 / Kronos Quartet / Prelude to a Black Hole, Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 • MAR 5 / Christine Goerke, Anthony Dean Griffey, and Nathan Gunn with the UNC Symphony Orchestra and The Carolina Choir / Britten’s War Requiem, Op. 66 • APR 11 & 12 / Hotel Modern and Arthur Sauer / The Great War
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hen Aaron Shackelford first visited Chapel Hill as a prospective Ph.D. student in 2004, he was struck by one particular sight on campus: “Some folks in the department were taking me to lunch on Franklin Street, and we walked past this building with the back wall torn out and construction everywhere. ‘That’s the performing arts center,’ one of them commented. It was my first glimmer of what a major transformation was underway.” Today, Aaron plays a role in the next phase of transforming the arts at Carolina. As the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for Carolina Performing Arts (CPA), he coordinates many of the activities for Arts@ TheCore, the initiative to deepen academic integration with the performing arts. He works closely with Joy Kasson, CPA’s Mellon Distinguished Scholar, to build relationships ABOVE: Aaron with faculty members in fields as diverse as chemistry and social work. “Our vision is for the performing arts to play a role in the teaching, professional training, and research that happens all over campus. CPA is a tremendous resource for every department. My job is to help faculty find ways to use this resource.” It is a job that requires both creativity and flexible thinking. “One day I’ll talk to faculty from the School of Medicine about how Curlew River addresses issues of grief and loss, and then I’ll stop for coffee and talk about Batsheva and Israeli dance
traditions with faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences. It’s the challenge and the joy of this job.” Aaron cites two campus-wide surveys that show faculty are eager to integrate the performing arts into their work but are unsure about what that integration looks like. “That’s where we come in. It’s my job to sit down with faculty, discuss the possibilities, and help design programs that will benefit them and their students.” Before joining CPA, Aaron received his Ph.D. in English and, at the same time, worked at Honors Carolina. Among the programs he helped establish were opportunities for Honors students to attend CPA performances and talk with the artists afterwards. “I watched students majoring in biology or sociology sit for hours and talk about contemporary Shackelford dance or South African music, and I was convinced that the arts were giving our Honors students something unique and valuable.” He continued to build the program until 2013 when he officially joined the CPA staff to work on Arts@TheCore. As he plans for CPA’s tenth season, Aaron is enjoying the challenge of creating new connections around campus. “My job is to connect brilliant faculty with the work of world-class artists. It’s incredibly inspiring.” Looking back on that first campus tour, he never imagined his studies would lead him to Memorial Hall. “It’s the nexus of all I do, and I love it.”
Mark Allan and Barbican
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SATURDAY, NOV. 8 AT NOON GLASSHALFULL
The tenor Ian Bostridge is our special guest for this year’s CPA Fall Arts Luncheon. Join us for an illuminating conversation about Britten’s Curlew River with one of the most acclaimed performers of our time. Tickets for the luncheon are $45 per person. For reservations, contact 919/843-2231 or jennifer_cox@unc.edu. CAROLINAPERFORMINGARTS.ORG
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Campus Box 3233 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3233
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October 1 & 2 at 7:30 p.m.
TAYLOR MAC
his fall, the captivating theater artist Taylor Mac will transport audiences to the 1910s with his new work devoted to this pivotal decade in world history. Mac explores the music and Zeitgeist of the time in a three-act song cycle that follows the years leading up to World War I, the war itself, and the post-war period. A Carolina Performing Arts’ commission, the piece will have its world premiere at Memorial Hall on October 1 and 2 in connection with our year-long commemoration of the centenary of the Great War. Chapel Hill audiences will recognize Mac as the consummate emcee from PlayMakers’ spring 2013 production of Cabaret. A master storyteller with a captivating stage-presence, Mac has received critical acclaim as an actor, playwright, and director, including a 2010 Obie Award and a Helen Merril Playwriting Award. In a 2013 article about his role in Brecht’s Good Person of Szechwan, a critic for The New York Times said of Mac: “Fabulousness can come in many forms, and Taylor Mac seems intent on assuming every one of them.” The 1910s is part of Mac’s epic creative undertaking to survey the last twentyfour decades of popular music. In 2015, Mac will stitch together each of the decade performances he has created into a day-long extravaganza in New York City. CPA patrons will have the opportunity to see this landmark project in the making with a performance that will shed light not just on the 1910s, but on who we are today.
Ves Pitts
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1910s: A 24-DECADE HISTORY OF POPULAR MUSIC
CALL THE BOX OFFICE (919/843-3333) TO RESERVE YOUR SEATS FOR THIS “DON’T-MISS” PERFORMANCE.
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Carolina Performing Arts / The Porthole Building / 134 East Franklin St. / CB 3233 / Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3233 / carolinaperformingarts.org