With many charming moments, memorable imagery, skilful acting and stagecraft all supported by artful scenic devices turning the black box Circle Theatre into a beach, a penthouse and later the uncertain banks of the River Styx, PacRep Theatre’s Eurydice remains an outline sketch of something that could be extraordinarily beautiful.

It’s safe to count on the acting with PacRep—and this play is ably-bodied.  Julian Lopez-Morillas as the Father is as safe and kind as any girl’d want her father to be, played with an affable naturalism that carries Lopez-Morilla through some scenes that demand nuanced physical acting and others requiring magician-like misdirection for their impact. Contrasting with his naturalism, Jennifer Le Blanc as Eurydice played everything big, chest-out aggressive—a forcefulness not entirely out of place for her role/s as a debutante bride then dead person. This assured energy sagged convincingly in response to her new status as the potential queen of the Underworld, but even the threat of her erasure within the River Styx held less poignancy than it should, for her character was never really touchingly alive. 

Not so Carl Holvick-Thomas as Orpheus, played with all the self-possession and insouciance of privilege that could as easily be attributed to a fair-haired rich boy as to a god—whatever—he is easy in his skin and fun to watch. We meet him and Eurydice chasing each other wearing swimsuits, throwing a beach ball and gamboling energetically and romantically, two golden youths, making plans.

Enter the villain, A Nasty Interesting Man/Lord of the Underworld played with baffling moustache-twirling (if he had a moustache) vamping camp by Michael Wiles.  His pivotal role as the driver of the plot, the archetypal vain, strutting spoiler of virgins and ruler of death is reduced to a level of ridiculousness that is at first amusing then just silly. 

Despite a wonderfully convincing scene in which the new bride Eurydice has spurned his advances and falls to her death, fabulously conveyed by lighting and the projections which provide the sense of place for the play’s set-less space, the director, Kenneth Kelleher here begins to lose control of the story.

Playwright Sarah Rule’s take on the myth of Orpheus and his lost love Eurydice emphasizes Eurydice’s journey through overworld and underworld instead of the myth’s usual focus on the heroic quest of Orpheus, the god of music, traveling through the underworld to bring back his bride from death.  Orpheus in this production just seems like a nice young man determined to find his bride—but the heroic quest never enters the picture; his defiance of death, his deal with the gods, his musical charms and mythical stance is never really conveyed, and thus the story never has power.

We are left with wonderful images—a dead father mailing letters to his daughter soon to be a bride; Eurydice encountering the denizens of the underworld—a Greek chorus voiced by three Stones played in garb reminiscent of the French Revolution—why?—doesn’t matter, they are curious but effective conveyers of the rules and regulations of the twighlight world Eurydice enters after her tragic escape from the clutches of the Nasty Interesting Man; an image: the long-dead father inducting his newly arrived daughter into the ways of the depths, creating for her a “house” of strings he pulls from above; Eurydice squatting in her familiar suitcase, under the umbrella she brought, in the string house her father drew from the darkness.  There are lovely, poignant and memorable moments, but the play tragically loses its power to affect the emotions because, whether we are involved with gods or humans, the audience needs to understand where we are journeying as we share the voyage through this dark and admittedly fascinating space.

(Source: pacrep.org)

103 black and white portraits hang with precise tastefulness at eye level, subtly-lit, meaningfully annotated and experientially revelatory. 103 squarish rectangles, mostly a little taller than wide, all of moderate size, modestly framed, offer few high-contrast shadows, melodramatic compositions or outlandish angles, but rather flatteringly-lit head-and-shoulder shots of people against a neutral background from a traditional perspective at middle distance: each subject’s head and chest occupies most of the rectangle. A few faces spill over the edges, shot achingly close. With Robert Mapplethorpe: Portraits, San Jose Museum of
Art deploys to perfection its well-designed gallery space in presenting this sequence of images in a syncopation that draws the viewer into one work, and then along from portrait to portrait in an ever-deepening appreciation.

Despite the consistency of size, tone and composition, each is a singular biography. In totality, Portraits illuminates a time and place—and the man behind the camera.

 
At first glance these images seem to fall within the glamour portrait tradition that helped create the star system of Hollywood’s  “golden age” in photographs by George Hurrell, Laszlo Willinger, Clarence Bull.  The subjects of those photographers, however, were not human. No, they were dramatically lit, fastidiously retouched icons eternally ready for a close-up. Mapplethorpe, too, aimed to flatter those who sat for his camera. His subjects were not products of a star factory but instead the determinedly individualistic denizens of the hectic and hard-edged world of celebrity and notoriety that was New York, the epicenter of the art world in the 1970s and 1980s. 

Actors and artists, socialites and sex workers, bankers and bikers: the objects of Mapplethorpe’s portraits were so used to being photographed that the camera seemed simply an extension of their ego. Perhaps in the course of the sitting, something in each of them moved toward and merged with the camera—the dumb witness to this performance of themselves to the world. The eyes that look out to the viewer are looking at a mirror, not posing but caught at an inbreath of recognition. After all, the man behind the lens was not a stranger, but one of them. 

An Irish Catholic boy from Queens propelled by an innate and relentless quest to create something distinctly his own, Mapplethorpe became the most extreme version of himself and lived hard on that shiny sharp edge within a world that exalted edginess and extremity. He died from complications of AIDS in 1989 at age 42.  His work had already been celebrated for over a decade.

On book covers, center spreads and billboards many of his portraits merged with the history of his subjects—a luminous Susan Sarandon with her daughter looking out with loving trust; a relaxed David Hockney sinking into his own composition; Annie Leibovitz uncomfortable on the other side of a camera; Andy Warhol, his white hands and trademark white fringe both shielding parts of himself. These images were familiar beyond the artworld, part of the published texture of the decade.

Within the more discreet milieu of galleries and museums, Mapplethorpe was celebrated also for his dramatic images of flowers and nudes—bodies of work exhibited worldwide and which sold for huge prices. Shortly after his death, however, Mapplethorpe became notorious when the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC refused to hang their scheduled National Endowment of the Arts-funded Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment due to the homoerotic and sado-masochistic content of the work.

The incident ignited an international scandal about publically-funded artwork, threatened the existence of the NEA and provoked countless public and private discussions of censorship and the line between pornography and art.

This is not the Mapplethorpe revealed in Portraits. Rather, curator Gordon Baldwin states, these portraits serve as Mapplethorpe’s most lasting legacy.  Robert Mapplethorpe: Portraits continues at San Jose Museum of Art through June 5.

(This article first appeared in the San Jose Metro)

The Exhibitionist is funded in part by a grant from the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County.

After a Friday immersed in Santa Cruz arts, particularly the riveting new work by Robynn Smith at Michaelangelo Gallery, some great sculpture in the Felix Kulpa ceramics show with several Coeleen Kiebert’s beautiful profundities (and to see Mattie Leeds all boyishly happy about the most exciting new development (gossip, gossip!) at his Bonnie Doon homestead) all topped off by a fun look at Cruzio’s new digs  (image of kids artmaking with the technological tools Cruzio provided)                                                                                                                                                                                                    it felt like I’d thoroughly delved into the arts currents of Santa Cruz and it was just the right time to get out of town. So after a morning at the Tannery Arts Center with a group forming as a collaborative printmakers’ studio—it’s going to be SUCH an amazing place to work—and a cheerful catch-up lunch with MAH curator Susan Hillhouse, learning about the changes in the museum world, I drove to San Francisco with the usual impossibly long list of things I wanted to do thought it was already midafternoon when I started.

On the road—280 is gorgeous after all the rains, with the mountains to the left and the Palo Alto hillsides to the right, dark-soaked earth and vivid new green and that stormy watercolorist sky—I eventually decided to forgo the Pacific Orchid Show (an annual tradition when I lived in SF and often since) and, sigh, to skip my ritual visit to a favorite salvage yard—Building Resources,  an art- and building-materials destination where  something precious always leaves with me. But I did get to the three art exhibits I had hoped to see.

Braunstein-Quay is a consistent art destination—more because I’ve learned to have high expectations of the gallery than to see a particular show (but somehow missed the Judy Pfaff exhibit there, even though I’d normally travel a distance to see that artist’s installations). In this case it was “Tethered”, works by Michael McConnell who plays on a viewer’s struggle between fond memories of stuffed toys, the cuteness of fake fur and the creepy fascination of taxidermy animals to elicit a wincing grin at his assemblages of stitched-together toy animal fur over a taxidermy form—the snouts or paws meticulously realistically-painted but obviously un-real—the animal ensnared in a rope usually in a very unnatural position. His acrylic vignettes of patient bears, cougar, raccoon, stag, all bound up or tied down, play on our familiarity with images that glorify the hunted animal, but here the animals are captive, and still unreally alive. I didn’t love the work—not one of the pieces would I want to spend further time with—but the concept was provocative. The gallery was buzzing with the energy of 30 or more mostly 30-something hipsters with a sprinkling of elders in full discussion mode on this dull afternoon in the City.  In the side gallery where the gallery hangs a selection of works by artists represented by the gallery, there was a huge Judy Pfaff plexi box, so all omens were good, not least the unbelievable luck (for SF!) of a parking spot right in front of the gallery’s alley-like Clementine Street.

I had read in the Chronicle about the effort to claim the no-man’s-land of San Francisco’s blighted mid-Market Street (between the Castro and Union Square area) by attracting known entrepreneurial change agents like the Intersection for the Arts ( for decades a powerful cultural pathmaker in the Mission District) some new art galleries.(What urban center has NOT recruited artists to act as pioneers in edgy central neighborhoods then stood back as their pioneers are priced out of existence by their own success?) and even former mayor, now Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom’s new offices—good move, Gavin. Looking for signs of change I made my way along the wide thoroughfare.  The neighborhood after Nordstrom’s plummeted a few thousand aesthetic degrees to become an expanse of war-zone-like barricaded windows, shouting hand-painted signs, liquor stores and animated street people. I didn’t stop (didn’t see what he was going to do— till he did it) to let a man who decided just a moment too late to walk in front of me against a red light so that I knew I wouldn’t hit him and drove past him slowly at just the right distance for him to leap forward and kick in the panel of my passenger side door as he shouted a hysterical epithet. The meter maid driving right behind me looked off literally the other way when I turned to her, so I just drove on, another big dent, dispirited. The times are rough, people are angry; those on the margins tottering off the edge.

A garish white marble and gilt(-looking) International Art Museum (not yet open) shines like a surreal pristine island amidst tattered dirty fast food restaurants, cigarette vendors and liquor stores, perhaps a harbinger of things to come.  I did eventually find the Market Street Gallery which had announced an opening that night. Near Franklin Street, a block from the Zuni Café, this part of Market in more prosperous times was a strollable street of antique stores and small furniture design outfits, but is now pretty much scarred, bummed and shuttered. A few galleries have risen and fallen over the years near here. W hen I found Market Street Gallery it looked kind of tepid like the most recent crop of unlikely hole-in-the-wall spaces, still closed this afternoon though theyre having an evening opening, so I drove on. I was headed back across Market Street toward the Mission District but since there was still time I turned north to Hayes Street and, as there was a parking spot (always an invitation to adventure) I decided to stop—for a coffee and a visit to one of my old faves in that neighborhood, Polanco Gallery with always friendly and knowledgeable owners and delightful objects mostly Mexican art. Hayes Street is always changing, but always manages to feel prosperous and expensively edgy in its mix of interior designers, designer-owned boutiques selling out there clothing, old bars and chic restaurants, (Or, not so chic but yummmmmmmy German restaurant, Suppenküche is nearby on Laguna), one-of-a-kind furniture and art gifts stores and, a Hayes Street institution you have to enjoy at least once, Marlena’s. But I just had coffee. A pop into Polanco and a block of window shopping, then it was time to make for SomArts.

SOMArts Cultural Center is a warehousey space with a quirky art landscape surrounding it, housing a theater, studios and a spacious gallery where “BREATHED…UNSAID…” was opening that night. Curator Katyta Min of Lumina Arts, in her statement wrote that the show “presents works forged in the exchanges between the geography of origin and places of arrival, bringing together artists who attempt to show how all of us can freely cross back and forth, regardless of these lingering borders, to create new spaces for understanding.’

          The cavernous space made a stunning impact upon entry:  a cube of silkscreened cotton banners dropped down from 11’ above the soaring ceiling, suspended from a grid, all the gentle almost transparent ribbons of cotton lapping around a child’s bed holding a giant sack of coffee in Tessie Barrera-Scharaga’s Malady of Third World Dreaming.  The banners soft drape, the dreamy transparency of the cotton belie the images silkscreened upon them of the labor—including children—intent upon producing it.  The coffee spills out upon the floor. There is a sense about it of a war hospital, blood spilled, the air of tragedy and mourning.

About 20’ from the entrance on the facing wall is an installation of several dozen giant photos—heads of people with script or cartoon drawings defacing them.  These people  have been detained.  The piece by Victor Cartagena Tatuajes de la Memoria (Tatoos of Memory) uses the close-up portraits of these very real people, the humanity of them, to bleed through the “tattoos”, perhaps an excerpt from trial transcripts as well as crude cartoon pictures which, the artist writes in his statement, is “a graphic image from the illustrated method book that was implemented under the direction of the School of the Americas in El Salvador in the 80s; forty different ways to inflict torture.”  Again, the beauty of the installation, these real people de-faced literally, is breathtaking.

Joel Tan & Nicholas Alexander Brinkley answered their own question in What is a (w)Hole?, in a piece that invites thought by variously interpreting the question in a huge wall sculpture literally depicting a hole in a spiraling space; below this, a bunker-type mechanic’s pit is sunken in the gallery floor, complete with steps down, shelves, café table, chairs and a kitchy cute feeling, but nevertheless summoning all the related associations of a bunker—hiding, surviving…The coup de grace is the installation of color photographs installed on the wall behind—photos of a military cemetery, perhaps in Colma, in which a landscape of white headstones rising above green grass becomes a pattern—with a number of vacant spots showing as a random pattern of green holes. The installation also has a random pattern in which there are missing photos.  I spoke to artist Nicholas Brinkley who said the “empty” spaces in the cemetery were kept for spouses.  I had no idea that spouses had any place in a military cemetery.  The idea expands the sense of senseless loss to the whole interlinked root system of human connectivity.  A member of the order of San Francisco’s Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence examined the work with Tan, who is also a member of that order, reminding me that, whatever our origins, we define ourselves by what we choose to do.

There were many thought-provoking works in this exhibition. Taraneh Hemami’s One Like No One neon sign in Iranian script reads in English:

Someone will come

Someone will come

Someone else

Someone better

…Calling for the hero…The artist believes, she writes, in “the possibility of heroism from every ordinary man and woman.”

Rarely does that hero come from outside: a case in point is the revolution in Egypt whose heroes found themselves standing in their own shoes.  Looking at a series of political cartoons within a glassed table near the entrance, I met a fascinating artist in Hassan Fedawy, a Professor of Fine Arts in Alexandrea University, a writer and cartoonist for the Rosa Al Youssef newspaper in Egypt and often for al Jazeera. He had been very active in the recent uprising in Egypt and just returned to San Francisco three days earlier.  Accompanied by a gorgeous bright daughter—I think she was 5, it was her birthday—he showed me his cartoon drawings published in the days leading up to the overthrow of the dictatorship and invited me to “friend” him on Facebook to read the weeks of his writings and images from the trenches, as it were.  Just the day before this I had interviewed Futzy Nutzle, an artist whose drawings and cartoons reflected and commented on life in America in such magazines as Rolling Stone.   The two artists share prodigious drawing skills and an ability to distill a complex concept within a telling image that packs a lot of Everyman punch.

There were several wonderful performances at the opening that night—a duo of dancers and singer-songwriter; a duo of violinist and spoken word artists.  Stan Welsh and Margitta Dietrich were there, adding to the friendly atmosphere. Quite a place, quite a show, quite an event.

I returned to the Market Street Gallery space to find it packed—I mean Packed to Overflowing as the crowd stood watching a performance within the tiny space. What I could see of the art looked pretty iffy but the atmosphere was exciting. I didn’t stay.

So, I picked up a little Imperial roll from my favorite Vietnamese hole-in-the-wall and set off back to Santa Cruz through a rainy night, happy with my visit to SF’s cosmopolitan culture, happy to go home dented, but not downed.

The Exhibitionist is funded in part by a grant from the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County.

Jon Drier

The first two weeks of January proved to be a tightly-wound springboard for a year of creative work for some 24 students, three artist-teachers and two studio volunteers at Cabrillo College Adult Education winter break Warm Glass/Lighting Workshop.  In an otherwise nearly empty campus, the bustling 3-D Studios of the Visual and Performing Arts campus seemed ready to take up the slack and replace the atmospheric quiet with the noise of saws and grinders, the roar of kilns and the repetitious ring of hammers striking metal as the foundry workshop, the 3-D classroom, tool room, wood studio and jewelry studio sprung into action in a frenzy of fabrication as students struggled to understand and work with new media in a short timeframe.  

             I wrote about the class in The Exhibitionist column in Santa Cruz Weekly this week. My camera was one of many casualties (Denise Vivar’s exquisite fused piece, Deborah Ikeda’s lovely circle of clear glass holes, Jay Latta’s koi mosaic—now held together with stained glass techniques—and several bones in Mary J. Luke’s hand…but who’s counting?) that fell within the two weeks, so thanks to Deborah Ikeda and Sandra Frank for the use of their great photos here.  

                       Steve and Mariah Hum

What an extraordinary two weeks. So much productivity, so much fun. Enrollment has begun for the Spring semester at Cabrillo. Lots of great arts classes in the community. Check out the possibilities!

Janet Fine                     Jay Latta->

The Exhibitionist is funded in part by the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County.

Unlike paintings that hang in frames on walls and are treated with care as precious artworks, murals painted on walls outdoors or even inside public spaces often deteriorate because of weather or graffit or are “painted over” or abused because buildings change hands and walls take on new uses.  Since I began to look for these lost murals I have discovered how much meaning some of these public artworks have for their community members.  I’ve learned of an Our Lady of Guadalupe mural painted overnight that became a gathering point for reverent people, no longer there…of the sadness with which people see the deterioration of the Poet and Patriot mural and the wonderful painting on the grocery store at Laurel and Mission…and Marta Gaines works in Watsonville. 

Please share your own memories (and photos?) of Santa Cruz County murals by commenting on this post or by contacting me at exhibitionist.kusp@gmail.com.

Thank you!  This research is funded in part by a James Doulkos Award from the History Forum of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. 

The Exhibitionist is funded in part by the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County.

The face of a gigantic clock marks the place as well as the time of the action and plays an important role in a marvelous production of the updated Dickens’ classic, Scrooge, at Cabrillo Stage. From the first rousing greeting by a stage full of caroling Victorian Londoners to the exhilarating full-throated conclusion, there is not a lagging moment. Even the “Bah Humbug! Tired of Christmas” audience members just have to give in and grin.

Based on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—a tale almost as familiar as the Christmas story itself—the musical Scrooge began as a 1970 film starring Albert Finney for which composer Leslie Bricusse won an Academy Award. Bricusse’s stage musical opened in 1992 and has been in constant production since. Cabrillo presented Scrooge in a sold out run in 2009 with a favorite local actor in the lead role. Yet the 2010 Scrooge is as fresh as a newborn idea. 

Everything is crisp, from the diction of the omnitalented cast to the fabulous footwork. The evocative set has a just-washed-in-the-rain look, indicating the stone streets of old London or the interiors of homes and offices—all overseen by the backlit face of Big Ben, ticking the hours till midnight.  The components of Skip Epperson’s set are changed onstage by cast members in costume sweeping the snow off a street as the space  becomes a dining room, or twirling the podium desk of the money-counting Scrooge, making the object part of the choreography; a few ghouls spin the disturbed man’s fourposter bed in a physical evocation of his mental state, requiring the character to twirl around while singing, it’s all very clever and well-done.

The principals are outstanding.  Tony Panighetti is a convincing and charmingly irascible Scrooge who sings with a bold strong baritone. Scrooge’s deceased partner, Jacob Marley, emerges from the depths of the flickering underworld, dragging chains and a few ghosts behind him to sing in a resonant basso provocative warnings of a wasted life. Eleanor Hunter’s Ghost of Christmas Present is indeed larger than (this) life presence, singing in a full-throated alto, flinging her ersatz red fur and ermine-cloaked whole self into an oft-quaffing “I Like Life.”

Charming ensemble pieces make the most of the prodigious dancing and singing talents of a chorus of young people. Geoffrey Ward does an enchanting job as a button-popping merry Mr. Fezziwig leading a merry dance to “December the 25th”.  Matt Dunn has a remarkable stage presence and clear voice as The Nephew, leading an infectious ensemble piece “The Minister’s Cat.”

The Cratchits, those poor but decent folk, are headed by a convincing Nicholas Ceglio as Bob—a self-effacing employee of Scrooge and a loving and playful head of household and father to the iconic figure of Tiny Tim.  The Cratchit household is peopled by fine but somewhat mismatched singers with Ginger Hurley a strong clear soprano as Tiny Tim. 

There seemed to be no missed cues or cheap shots in this production that filled the stage with a cast of 40 ranging in ages from eight years (Hurley) to middle-aged with only one Equity Actor (Panighetti) but centuries of stage experience.

Producer/Artistic Director Jon Nordgren and Director Andrew Ceglio have done a wonderful job of “keeping Christmas in our hearts” at Cabrillo Stage.  Let’s hope it’s a Christmas family tradition.

Photo caption: Tony Panighetti is a Scrumptious Scrooge for Cabrillo Stage.



The Exhibitionist is funded in part by the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County.

Kuumbwa audiences do love a great song-storyteller, and Kim Nalley filled the bill beautifully on a Kuumbwa Monday night when this singer known for her compelling performance/history of the songs, the life and times of Billie Holiday, brought a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald to the welcoming crowd.  I saw Nalley several years ago, presiding over the San Francisco jazz institution, Jazz at Pearl’s, which Nalley and her partner stepped in to renovate and re-open after the originator and long-time operator closed its doors.  Now that Pearl’s is closed again, Nalley has been singing more in festivals and clubs around the country, based in San Francisco in intimate spots like the Plush Room and the Rrazz Room as well as the big venues. She said she was happy to return to Kuumbwa. Indeed, the Cedar Street atmosphere is conducive to her warm and confiding stage persona.

The night opened with several dazzling tunes by the Tammy Brown Band, always a thrill to hear Brown whose musicianship and driving interpretation keep her onstage as bandleader, soloist and accompanist. After the band took charge of the room Kim Nalley appeared, more voluminous but younger-looking than I remember, and immediately strode into the groove the band had set and with a little patter, a little stage business, a big white flower in her hair slid into Swing Brother Swing peppering the full swing with a scatter of scat and moved right into a story about Ella Fitzgerald and the tough time she had as a kid and how she broke into the Harlem jazz scene. Nalley’s range, not only from soprano to deep alto, but also the shape of the notes she sings she seems ready to hurt herself perhaps by hardening those pipes to make the brassy bluesy high notes, clamping down in the throat, then in seconds she’s open throttle and resonating down at the bottom of the scale.

Ella classics like one of my favorites First You Say You Do and Then You Don’t she swung in a high timbre, Hall jammed on the piano with a fast percussive almost stride style sometimes, sometimes rolling out a real honky tonk trill; in this and all the tunes,  the interplay between the musicians built up the excitement. Throughout the Ella portion of the program, the music was woven with history and sophisticatedly folksy yarns. Nalley did right by If I Didn’t Care and Tisket a Tasket, showing off that marvelous range and the final Stompin’ at the Savoy she took as a slow ballad, really dancing around in its gutsy heart, finishing with a very fast scat version.

The second part of the night was a freewheeling program of Billie Holiday, like Crazy They Call Me. Nobody has Billie’s nor Ella’s timbre, but Nally captures the mood, the phrasing and has enviable pipes of her own. In a melodramatic but oh what the hell You Can Have Him I Don’t Want Him she wielded her theatrical powers while Tammy Hall and her band created a marvelously lush texture. I loved her rendition of Careless Love following a bare baseline joined by some vampy piano work. 

The holiday portion of the program—who would have expected it?  Apparently all who attended her performance a year ago at Kuumbwa, as Santa Baby appeared by request and her sexy Eartha Kitt/Betty Boop take on it was a great hit, as was a hysterical Hanukkah in Santa Monica. Ending with—who could resist it—Put a Spell On You. 

From Big Band Swing of the 40s to Hanukkah in Santa Monica is quite a span for one night, but Nalley’s focused stage presence and the musicianship of singer and all the band made this a fine Kuumbwa Monday.
 


The Exhibitionist is funded in part by a grant from the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County.

The generosity of Monterey Bay artists is one thing nonprofits have depended on for years. Currently Monterey Museum of Art exhibits their annual Miniatures show, which is a museum-full of small works donated by artists in support of the cause.

 Each work is displayed with a wee box underneath it; a wee box with a wee slot into which raffle tickets are placed. In early January the tix collected for each box are put in a bag and a member of the public (not connected with the museum) draws the winning ticket. Tickets are $5 each or 7 for $30. In that way one might be the insanely lucky winner of a breathtaking little landscape by David Ligare or a gorgeous encaustic by Tracey Adams, a metal wall piece by Stefani Esta, a splendid antique-looking oil painting by Doane Hoag, an acrylic by Chris Winfield or Johnny Apodaca. A sweet watercolor of Big Sur pines by the late Rollin Pickford (may his sweet spirit linger for all whom he touched), or works by Barryt Masteller, Robynn Smith, Andrea Johnson, Claire Lerner, Judy Royee and a few hundred others. 

Who knows what the chances are…why calculate what you can’t control…even by filling one box with hundreds of tickets (which might be about worth it for some of these lovelies)?  So if you are so moved, check out the Monterey Museum even just for a dip into what local artists do when they work small. 

In Santa Cruz, the MAH currently exhibits the works donated in support of MAH’s vital arts programs.  I haven’t seen this show yet, but STARS this year has a Moroccan theme and should be a great party. In contrast to the work donated to MMA, the artists here have donated a major piece. A big gift that shows a big appreciation of MAH’s increasing interest in including local artists within the art exhibition schedule, an interest that seems to have sparked to life with the arrival of curator Susan Hillhouse several years ago. It’s an important role for a small museum, one that MAH fulfills splendidly. So, STARS takes place this Saturday December 11. It’s a big party for an important cause.
 


The Exhibitionist is funded in part by a grant from the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County.

It’s elemental, the way a body moves: the shape of it, the shape it creates in space, the shape its rhythm creates, its exquisite naturalness and unnaturalness. The way two three four more bodies move together: harmony…unison…opposition…a deaux? Is this a story? Or a movement that is simply the story of itself? In Diaspora, Food For Thought, Artist-in-Residence Cat Willis serves up the fruits of six months residency at The 418 Project, a Santa Cruz cultural center and performance space that offers classes, workshops and performances with an emphasis on multicultures and families.

In this highly original production, Willis offers neither a story nor an abstraction but rather a perfectly layered feast in three courses representing aspects of the African Diaspora: Roots, Ritual and Re-imagined. Rather than a prosaic series of vignettes to represent aspects of the theme, Willis constructed a program within which the historical and sociological content is layered with subtle refinements of contrast and connectivity in three sections each with several dances.

The dancers—mostly performing in ensemble pieces rather than as soloists—were remarkable for their lack of individual grandstanding, instead performing at the same—very even, very high—level. The powerful ensemble included well-known soloists and choreographers, some with their own companies like Mandjou Kone, Donna Von Joo-Tornell, Julia Tsitsi Chigamba and Ronnie Daliyo and such respected soloists as Micha Scott and Shawn Merriman-Roberts. They seemed unconcerned about being the focus of attention but rather just danced their socks off, together.

A wall of drummers stirred up the intensity under the lead of Salif Kone and David Helvey. The audience of widely diverse ages, colors, textures, cultures, noise levels, seemed connected by an air of kindness, not of the kind of cliquish exclusion that some events engender. Children were stretched out full, unbounded, on soft bags of beans laid out for such purpose. “I’ve known rivers…ancient, dusky rivers…my soul has grown deep…” the program begins with “roots” in two dances connecting as one fascinating dreamlike poem arising from deep rhythms of racial memory as well as acute pain of shared history.

The rousing opening piece draws on traditional dance, choreographed by Mandjou Kone with drums led by Salif Kone. This flowed easily into Cat Willis’ moving pas de deux “Ancestor” that made me catch my breath. Danced by Shawn Merriman-Roberts and Melissa C. Wiley the piece is spare and fluid, an interesting contrast between Merriman-Roberts, so easy in his skin, and the sober sharpness of Wiley.

The second section “Ritual” takes us from a searing solo performed by Wiley bringing in themes of color, striving, disease, ritual and then she is joined by the ensemble. Seeing these dancers in full extension, their athleticism sheathed in intensity summons thoughts of Alvin Ailey’s grace, power and weighty content. The third section, “Re-Imagined” opens with a very clever “Trio for Many” about hair, particularly high-volume nappy long hair, or as the voiceover taunts, “this tangled multicultural masterpiece.”

Willis performs her enchanting work with Mia Birdsong and Micha Scott, each contributing her own brand of cheeky and wise physical humor. I see this dance destined for long life as a subtley pointed program sorbet with hefty message embedded in crisp modern movement propelled by a funny text about hair and race and friendship—so natural, mundane, juvenile and authentic.

The finale is a rousing ensemble piece to the text of Robert F. Kennedy’s “The Mindless Menace of Violence” melding into hip-hop and African drumming with dancers taking solo turns and at the end, “I was standing at the beginning of time…”

The program built steadily, sometimes lingering to create another layer, to this conclusion where not only bodies moved together in space but deep spirit moved within this night of dance.



The Exhibitionist is funded in part by the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County.