The New Way to Lose Weight: Franco-American Drama

There are times when it's good to go into a cultural happening with a strong sense of what one's letting oneself in for and there are times when a lack of knowledge provides the best possible ammo.

I had no idea what to expect when I showed up on Friday evening at Z Space Theatre in San Francisco's Mission district for an event that the French consulate, which hosted the soiree, was calling "Un Bal Litteraire." I didn't bother to read much about it. The short description that Ivan Bertoux, the Deputy Cultural Attaché for the French consulate here in San Francisco, gave me a few weeks ago was enough to pique my interest: "It's a new play nightclub," Ivan simply said.

I had a ball at The Bal. It was one of the most unusual and gratifying arts experience I've had in a while, in fact. Why? Because the entire auditorium -- audience and performers alike -- danced. A lot.
Never has a night at the theatre been so communal...and so incredibly sweaty.

Here's how The Bal bounced:

Three French playwrights -- Marion Aubert, Nathalie Fillion and Samuel Gallet -- arrived in San Francisco earlier this week to take part in a Franco-American drama festival entitled Des Voix: Found in Translation. Productions of their plays are being produced in town this weekend.

The Bal was the kickoff event for the festival. To prepare for the happening, which has been produced several times in Europe in recent years but has never before now been experienced by US audiences, the playwrights participated in what might best be described as a "theatrical hackathon."

Six dramatists -- the three French visitors plus American playwrights Marcus Gardley, Octavio Solis and Liz Duffy Adams -- gathered on Wednesday afternoon with a bunch of their favorite songs at their disposal. They came up with a storyline involving San Francisco and a set-list of ten songs that they felt best described the story, and would encourage people to get up off their seats and boogie.

Then, over the next 24 hours, each playwright developed a section of the narrative. They reconvened to read the pieces out loud together. After that meeting, the French writers' pieces were sent off to a team of (caffeinated!) translators to be turned into English overnight. The translators included Dan Harder, Aubrey Gabel and Ivan Bertoux.

On Friday evening, a crowd of at least a hundred people showed up at Z Space for the Bal. A line of microphones had been set up on an otherwise empty stage. Some audience members sat in the regular seats out front. Others of us sat in chairs to the side of the stage, flanking the mics.

After introductions, the playwrights assembled on stage (as pictured above) and started doing a reading of the new play they'd just created. As soon as the first scene ended, the music started. A few people rushed the stage. With about 30 seconds, most of the audience was up on its feet, shaking around to the pop song that was booming through the theatre's the sound system.

When we sat down again and the dramatists returned to the microphones to continue with their reading, most of us didn't bother returning to our seats. We sat on stage.

The dance party occurred throughout the evening because each of the ten scenes in the play was interspersed with a song. The styles ranged from rock to pop to hip-hop and were all equally compelling to move to.* After the closing scene (which saw the protagonist, a young French woman, and her lesbian lover from San Francisco, going happily off together into the sunset) there was yet more dancing. And then we all repaired, breathless and happy, to a very sweaty reception in the Z Space lobby.

Not only was the incorporation of the dancing a wonderfully absurd addition to an evening of play-going and fitted well with the quirky, feelgood comedy being narrated on stage, but it also helped to break up the action and melt traditional barriers that usually separate the performers and audience members. Plus it was simply great to let off some steam.

One doesn't usually go to the theatre to lose weight. But burning calories is clearly a natural consequence of attending A Bal Litteraire.

*For some reason I'm having trouble recalling the song titles from the evening today. The Cyndi Lauper hit, "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" was one of the tracks. The rest will hopefully come back to me soon. Or I'll ask Ivan for the set-list and post that at some point...

Fin De Party

Carey Perloff's surprisingly astute production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame (or Fin De Partie in the original French) at the American Conservatory Theater ended with a game-like coda last night at San Francisco's Geary Theatre.

Killing My Lobster, a local sketch comedy troupe, came on stage at about 10.30pm and performed a bunch of skits inspired by the great Irish playwright and his dramas. The image above captures the crowd gathering drinks and taking their seats before the Lobsters took to the stage. It was quite a party.

This postlude was canny for a bunch of reasons:

 1) It brought a bunch of younger people into the Geary Theater (though I don't know how many of them had also come to see Endgame and Play, which acted as a prequel for the main drama.) Most of the white-haired ACT patrons vacated the premises after the curtain fell on the main show.

2) There's a compelling link between Perloff's grimly humorous, clown-centric production which stars one of this country's best physical comedians, Bill Irwin, and Killing My Lobster's absurdist approach to sketch comedy. In other words, bringing KML in to the Geary made artistic sense. It was also a refreshing thing to see a big, traditionally-inclined company collaborating with a smaller, more irreverent one.

3) The "three-act" structure of the evening made for a wonderful night out. First we warmed up (if that's the right expression) with a suitably terse take on Beckett's sepulchral Play performed by Rene Augesen, Anthony Fusco and Annie Purcell. Then we watched Bill Irwin as a vivacious, wheelchair-bound Hamm go at Nick Gabriel's youthful-forceful Clov with busy-bodied, facially mobile energy in Endgame. Finally, the Lobsters gave us something to brighten and reinforce the loony darkness of Beckett's worldview with about 40 minutes of comedic skits.

4) The Killing My Lobster part of the evening was bumpy in some places but mostly came off brilliantly. My favorite section was a wonderfully bonkers skit entitled "Cooking with Clov" in which the Endgame character attempts to make recipes from Beckett's play -- sugarplums and pap -- with the help of an aged Katharine Hepburn. There are of course no ingredients to cook with, so the whole project takes on a hilariously - and appropriately - nihilistic bent. Other notable sketches included the inspired "Waiting for Godot to Leave," in which a randy couple wishes Beckett's most famous non-appearing character would get out of their house so they can have sex, and "Clov Letters," in which Hamm and Clov exchange missives about their relationship, a feat made all the most bizarre by the fact that Hamm is blind and can' actually read the letters Clov sends him.

5) The final skit of the evening featured Bill Irwin, an unexpected coup. Irwin spent his time on stage sitting in Hamm's dark glasses and reading a braille magazine while a young woman and aspiring theatrical clown sat next to him completely star-struck and wondering how she might possibly pluck up the courage to talk to her hero. Irwin ended up with his hands all over the woman's breasts. The whole thing was ridiculously crude, but somehow it seemed like a fitting ending to an evening of Beckett, a playwright who managed to marry vulgarity and poetry into a seamless whole.

PS Here's Terry Teachout's review of Endgame in The Wall Street Journal. We more or less share the same opinion of the show.

What Puts People Off When They Should Be On On On

A visit to the Brick and Mortar Music Hall in San Francisco a couple of nights ago provided some hints at the sorts of things that concertgoers will and will not tolerate.

I  asked a bunch of friends to join me for an appearance by the Seattle-based band Hey Marseilles (pictured.)

I had heard the group at the SXSW festival in Austin, TX in March and was rather taken by its loose, fluid melodic style and gypsy-jazz tinged instrumentation as well as the lead singer's husky-wholesome, folksy voice. 

I personally had a great time. Hey Marseilles did not disappoint: The musicians looked entirely happy to be with us in the room (especially the cute cellist who kept smiling a secret smile,) the music chugged along with energy and I could have kept bobbing around to the Hey Marseilles sound all night.

My friends, however, bailed before the band had even played its first note.

The two main reasons for the exodus had nothing to do with the band's talent. The main issues were to do with timing and one of the supporting acts.

There were two bands that preempted the headliners. The first was pretty great -- two young women with silky yet powerful voices playing keyboards and backed up by an astute group of musicians. Their mainly indie rock sound had melodic and rhythmic drive to it.

The second, however, was a complete disaster. Again, two women were involved.  But this time with no band behind them. The music the women played was utterly drab. Its dirginess lacked any kind of melodic or harmonic direction. All the rhythmic joy of the first group dissipated when the second act came on stage and we were stuck with them for what seemed like an eternity.

By the time this terrible twosome left the stage, it was about 11pm. My friends had had enough. The music sucked and it was a Tuesday night with an early start for them the following morning. They left without even bothering to listen to a single track by Hey Marseilles.

My friends weren't the only people driven away by the awful music of the second supporting band. When I looked around, it seemed that the room had emptied considerably. The first group of musicians had brought in the crowds. Those that followed them managed to empty the space, leaving the headline act to perform in front of an unnecessarily modest crowd. 

A third and perhaps less important factor that seemed to put my friends off was the website of Hey Marseilles. The home page is basically a merchandise page. The band shoves things to buy down visitors' throats when it should foreground its music. (Merchandise may make the band more money than music at this point, but that's not a reason to focus on commercialism on the website.) This fact alone nearly put my friends off buying tickets and coming out at all. But they liked what they heard of the band on YouTube and changed their minds.

I spend a lot of time in theatres and music venues and I have some understanding of what it's like to be a performer. So my tolerance for the things mentioned above is perhaps higher than most. But there are lessons to be learned here both for presenting venues and for bands:

1) Venues should more carefully monitor supporting acts. They need to be strong.
2) On weeknights, particularly early in the week, it might be a good thing to only have one supporting act. Or if there must be two, make sure both acts and particularly the second one is very compelling.
3) Don't make the homepage of your band's website a storefront. It puts people off.

A Few Things, Mostly Musical

A weekend of musical adventures in the Bay Area. Some quick thoughts about a few things I came across...

1) Berkeley Symphony Gala: The best one I've attended yet. The reason? The Symphony featured short chamber pieces by a bunch of great composers such as Gabriela Lena Frank and Paul Dresher. In between courses of the dinner, Berkeley Symphony players as well as guest soloists like pianist Sarah Cahill performed the pieces in alcoves around the room.  In between courses of the dinner, Berkeley Symphony players as well as guest soloists like pianist Sarah Cahill performed the pieces around the room. Sometimes the musicians were just a couple of feet away from the audience members. These intimate musical vignettes were so much more seamlessly integrated into the fabric of the orchestral fundraiser than the usual thing you find at such events -- a random performer playing in a corner whom most people pay scant attention to -- because they were a true celebration of the talents of musicians and composer.

2) John Chen and Ely Karr in recital: I've been living across the street from a church which calls itself "San Francisco's Church of the Arts!" for the past three years but only managed to catch a concert there for the first time on Sunday. I wandered in for 30 minutes between returning from a weekend trip to Sonoma for a friend's 40th birthday party and heading off to another event in the Twin Peaks neighborhood, and caught violinist Ely Karr giving a very determined and rather workmanlike rendition of J S Bach's Capriccio in B flat Major followed by John Chen playing an extremely dense work by Joseph Nicolas Pancrace Royer on the harpsichord entitled Le Vertigo. I found the piece to be more schizophrenic than vertiginous with its thumping, repeated block chord passages that would suddenly collapse into a scrambled melee of notes and then revert back again without any warning. Weird and wonderful stuff from a not-very-well-known composer who was born 20 years after Bach.

3) Two Road Trip CD Recommendations: I often listen to the CDs I get sent in the mail from promoters on long car journeys. In the batch I took with me to Sonoma this past weekend, two recordings came up trumps. The first was 13 Ways of Looking at The Goldberg: Bach Reimagined featuring the luminous young pianist Lara Downes (pictured above.) Downes follows a sensitive performance of Aria, from Goldberg Variations with a chocolate-box of short pieces inspired by Bach's masterwork. There is so much variety of mood and texture on the CD. I love in particular the whispy pointillism of Fred Lerdahl's Chasing Goldberg and the off-kilter humor of C. Curtis-Smith's Rube Goldberg Variation. The other CD which blew me away was jazz singer Barbara Dane's On My Way. The recording was made in 1961. I had never heard of Danes until an acquaintance thrust the CD in my hand at the radio station the other day. Her voice has flexibility and a casual ease. There is a lot of depth to it too. Danes sings standards without too much adornment. But she makes me focus intensely. Never has Pete Seeger's crusty old Hammer Song sounded so new.

Hair of the Dog

Wednesday night saw the inauguration of VoiceBox's live event series.

I am choosing to call it the inauguration of a series because it came off stupendously well and I am gagging to this again. And again.

The basic premise for the series was to find a way to create truly immersive, interactive live experiences for VoiceBox listeners as a way to create a more engaged sense of community around the weekly, syndicated public radio and podcast series that I host and produce, as well as potentially forge a revenue stream.

I believe Drinking/Songs: A Night Of Beer and The Music That Goes With It succeeded on both counts.

The venue, 50 Mason Social House in downtown San Francisco, was packed and there was a line out the door and around the block at 7.45pm. We had to turn folks away. (As Katy Newton's photo above illustrates.)

The audience got to taste seven beers inspired by seven different global brewing traditions from Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Delaware (e.g. a Chinese beer, a Finnish beer, a Scottish beer, a Belgian beer etc...) and join in with the six-member professional vocal ensemble (we dubbed the group The Fill A Steins) on a few of the drinking songs that the singers paired with the beers throughout the evening.

We had a discussion led by a beer cicerone (Sayre Piotrkowski) and the singers about the ancient, global link between ale and song. And we recorded the whole thing for radio and podcast. An edited version of the show will be available starting next Friday night on KALW (and a few other radio stations) and iTunes.

It was an incredible thing to see 200 people crammed into a Tenderloin bar all swinging beer glasses and singing along with the refrain of a raucous Finnish drinking song. And when the singers performed the melancholy Chinese drinking song, the room was entirely hushed. You could have heard a maltworm creep.

Also, the event also generated a decent profit and a lot of goodwill. Plus it was a lot of fun, albeit a lot of work, to put together.

Cheers and on to the next.

(Un)Harmony Sweepstakes...and a word about the NY Phil's appearance at Davies

One of the things that the a cappella world prides itself on is how stylistically all-encompassing its remit is. In a cappella concerts and competitions, anything (supposedly) goes, from barbershop and jazz to instrumental rock music imitations and quasi-choral art pieces. At least, that was how the articulate a cappella performer, arranger and producer Deke Sharon put it in an interview I did with him and a few other a cappella mavens for VoiceBox the other day.

So it was interesting on Saturday night when I served as a judge for the 2012 National Finals of the Harmony Sweepstakes A Cappella Competition at the Marin Center in San Rafael,  to witness how challenging this compellingly broad theory actually is in reality.

The competition featured an array of different styles of performance. There were barbershop groups -- Rooftop Rhythm (Chicago), Foreign Exchange (Boston); jazz ensembles -- Sing Theory (San Francisco), GQ (Mid-Atlantic); rock outfits -- Six Appeal (Pacific Northwest -- pictured above), Audiofeels (New York City) and one group, Down 4 The Count (Los Angeles) that put out an amalgam of several of these styles.

But the different musical genres didn't really sit well together in competition.

The basic problem is that it's very hard to compare a group of nine youths in tight jeans, sneakers and skinny ties all jumping about and doing beat-box versions of pop favorites with a group of middle-aged men and women singing  jazz-inflected arrangements of quaint old songs. It's like trying to judge a pianist and symphony orchestra playing a Beethoven concerto against a jazz trio doing a take on a Keith Jarrett piece.

The other palpable thing is that the singers themselves seemed seemed a little disgruntled at having to pit their skills against other groups that come from such radically different vocal music genres. Many times, the hosts of the event -- last year's winning team, the Da Capo barbershop group -- made fun of other genres and enthused wildly over the barbershop ensembles on the program. This was all done in a lighthearted fashion, of course, but I sensed an undercurrent of seriousness beneath the fun.

And I even heard a couple of the judges complain about having to compare rock style groups with the barbershop ones. "I just don't think of barbershop as true a cappella," one judge said during the intermission.

Still, even though the genres chafe against each other and evaluating them side by side is, as the old saying goes, like comparing apples with oranges, the competition was a lot of fun. The 3,000 seat auditorium was packed. People loved the music and the energy of the performers. And for me personally, as someone who finds genres in music to be an impediment to enjoyment, I quite liked all the different style bunged into a program together.

PS On a completely different note: I attended The New York Philharmonic's concert at Davies Symphony Hall last night. Besides smoldering billows of piano brilliance from Yefim Bronfman in the performance of Magnus Lindberg's Piano Concerto No. 2, some lovely woodwind solos in the second movement of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony and the slouchy insouciance of Bernstein's Lonely Town: Pas de deux from On the Town (which was played as the encore), I found the whole thing to be rather underwhelming.

String Quartet Synesthesia

The Kronos Quartet rounded out its year-long residency at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this weekend with a concert featuring the music of a bunch of incredible women composers and vocalists.

From the hushed, sepulchral creepings of Laurie Anderson's "Flow," sensitively arranged by Jacob Garchik, to the strident, mystical incantations of Van-Anh Vanessa Vo's "All Clear," the music was consistently inventive and emotionally panoramic.

It was also visually stunning.

One thing you rarely want to do during a Kronos concert is close your eyes. I often several minutes at concerts with my eyelids down, just to get a pure taste of sound through deprivation of the more primary sense of sight.

But if you so much as blink at a Kronos gig, you risk missing a magical, humorous or bizarre visual moment.

This concert was no exception.

Watching the players ceremonially walk across the stage to beat hanging gongs, stick pacifier-like objects in their mouths and then emit kazoo-esque parps, or pass sand through their fingers into a concave "drum" the size of a small satellite dish, was an immersive experience.

In fact, the visuals were so well incorporated into the rich and diverse sonic landscape that I felt like I was experiencing temporary synesthesia. My senses of sight and hearing merged into one.

No matter how well they play, few string quartets are capable of transforming people in this way.

Hidden Gem

It was few months ago that I first heard about The Frost Amphitheatre. If I hadn't been told about this outdoor concert venue smack bang in the middle of the Stanford campus, I would have never suspected that the site, with its grassy seating tiers shrouded in redwood and oak trees, existed. That's crazy when you think about the fact that the venue can accommodate some 6,000 people.

Many members of the Stanford community are unaware of the venue's presence even though they cycle, walk and drive by it every day. But for many years, the Frost Amphitheatre hosted legendary concerts by groups like The Grateful Dead. But it's pretty much fallen into disuse owing to inadequate bathroom facilities, a lack of electricity and nothing in the way of ADA compliance.

According to Stanford's Institute for Creativity in the Arts, the last time Stanford looked at upgrading the facility, the price tag was estimated to be somewhere in the region of $12 million. These days, if the university wants to put on an event there (which it currently only does sporadically, though the band Modest Mouse is performing there on May 19 in a program billed as "Frost Revival") it costs around $400,000 in portaloos, electrics, shuttle buses and other peripherals to make the venue serviceable for an evening's entertainment. 

Earlier today, I was delighted to take a tour of the Frost Amphitheatre. I went with a small group and was gobsmacked by the expansive simplicity and beauty of the space. Our group (a Stanford Design School project team exploring ideas to reinvent the theatre experience for new audiences) is looking at a variety of different spaces on and off campus as potential sites for staging unusual theatrical experiences. One idea we floated today, inspired by the gentle grassy slopes of the Frost, is an event which we might call "Potential Energy." It will involve people inventing interesting vehicles in which to propel themselves down the hill towards the stage. Sort of grass toboganning meets Cirque du Soleil.

On a final note, I was surprised by how unadorned the Frost is. There is no shell structure above or around the bare stage. And virtually the only walls on the premises are natural barriers created by trees. This makes the space extremely open.

I wondered what the acoustics might be like given the sparsity of the architecture. When I stood on stage (see a photo of one of my colleagues which I took from this vantage point, above) I felt like my voice couldn't project very far. Classical amphitheatres, on the other hand, are built so that sound of the unamplified human voice carries to the very corners. There are very few if any vertical surfaces at the Frost for sound to bounce off. And yet the reviews I've read about the venue on Yelp say that the acoustics are great. I guess amplified music works well in this natural environment. But I can't imagine actors trying to project their voices there without amplification.

Simultaneous Opera Translation

Douglas von Blumenthal, a radiologist who listens to VoiceBox, my weekly public radio and podcast series about the human voice, was inspired to share his interesting ideas about simultaneous opera translation having recently listened to a show I aired on the subject of translating operas into English. 


I asked Dr. von Blumenthal if I could publish his thoughts on my blog as a guest blog post and he sweetly agreed. Here they are...

In an ideal world, a translation system for the audience would be optional for each person, unobtrusive, low cost, simple to use, would not distract the audience or performer, and would not require the user to shift focus from the performer to written text. 

These requirements reminded me of a system used at my favorite art museum, The Norton Simon, located in Pasadena, California.  For a small fee, visitors can rent a recorded audio "tour" discussing works of art as they move through the collections at their own pace, listening by means of a lightweight head set. 

Newscasters on TV wear an earpiece on one side which is quite small and hardly visible, through which they can be given verbal information, cues, etc. 

Wireless Bluetooth "earpieces" for handsfree use of cell phones have been around for a while.  These and commonly seen devices such as iPod earphones allow the wearers to carry on a conversation and hear ambient sounds with little distortion or interference while they listen privately, and are not loud enough to disturb or distract people quite near to them. 

Although I am a radiologist and not an audio engineer or electronic communication expert, it seems to me that the technology may already exist in one form or another to give a member of an opera audience the benefit of "on-the-fly" translation.  This would be analogous to the UN official listening in real time to an expert near-verbatim translation of a speech being given in another language. 

Transmitted information may not be limited to lyrics and dialogue.  For example, a couple weeks ago you broadcast a show featuring a very skilled and experienced "professional translator" of opera scores as your guest.  He pointed out that the best translations preserve the cadence and flow of the original language, combined with the very difficult communication of idiomatic speech. 

He demonstrated this by a soft voice-over in English while we listened to singing in the language native to the opera.  The effect was stunningly beautiful and poetic, immediately opening up a whole world of information allowing neophyte listeners like me a much richer opera experience.  This would only be enhanced by very brief plot summaries or commentaries which could theoretically be interwoven with the translation. 

I believe that through the earpiece the listener would be able to maintain almost total focus and concentration on what prompted the ticket purchase in the first place.  As word spread, in an ideal world opera attendance would increase, attracting new people who were interested but heretofore intimidated.

In short, development of a technological audio real-time translation system would yield a great deal on more than one level. 

NB To listen to a podcast version of VoiceBox show mentioned in Dr. von Blumenthal's text, please click here.

A Sense of Place

A work of art that evokes a sense of place can be a powerful thing. It brings up all kinds of memories and yearnings. Dickens was good at it and JMW Turner, but its' not an easy goal to achieve.

One of the biggest pitfalls facing The Cutting Ball Theater Company with its world premiere production of Tenderloin, a play about the neighborhood that surrounds the company's theatre on Taylor Street in downtown San Francisco, is creating a lasting impression of The Tenderloin without falling into cliche.

The first ten minutes of the show, which is full of beautifully detailed performances from the ensemble cast, are worrying in this regard. We see a bunch of bedraggled characters shuffling about in a state of mental or financial depravity or both and then we move to a bar where we're told by various residents about how rich and vibrant the area is and how it doesn't deserve its bad name.

For those of you that don't know, The Tenderloin is one of San Francisco most drug-trafficked and destitute inner city areas. The tourist guides tell readers to avoid it. But it's also transforming. There are quite a few small arts companies in the vicinity as well as trendy restaurants, bars and galleries. It's really quite an interesting, architecturally lovely and fairly safe 29 block stretch of the city and most people who attend The Cutting Ball's productions feel positively enough about it to render the non-stop positive messaging in playwright/director Annie Elias' production completely redundant.

That being said, the rest of the show, which is the result of many interviews of Tenderloin residents, has seem startling moments. My favorite story was that of a 60-something ex-soldier -- a confirmed bachelor who lives on his own in the neighborhood -- who through a dint of fate, ends up becoming the primary care giver to a newborn baby. (The infant's mother, a friend, asked the man to take care of her child when she was about to go to prison.) Not only is the story utterly compelling, but Michael Uy Kelly's "gentle giant" approach to the character warms the heart.

Also compelling are the scenes enacted by the promising young actress Rebecca Frank and Cutting Ball veteran David Sinaiko (pictured.) The pair plays an elderly couple who run a hotel in The Tenderloin. Frank, who's barely out of her teenage years, plays the old man, while Sinaiko, a greying dude known best for gruffly masculine roles like Hamm in Beckett's Endgame, essays the role of the wife. Both pull the unusual casting off so seamlessly and believably that I stopped thinking I was essentially watching a drag act.

On the downside, the play could have been an hour shorter. At two hours, the length of Tenderloin only serves to dilute the strong sense of place that comes across during the first half of the show.

Sign of the Times

No arts organization can or should live forever, no matter how revered and well-funded it might be.

Stil, the possible demise of an amateur wind ensemble (which used to give public performances but is now a reading oriented pickup group) that's been around in the Bay Area since the 1970s and with which I've been loosely associated over the last few years has made me pause with some regret and think about the various reasons why this is happening and if anything might be done to prevent it from ceasing to exist.

The main problem is one of attendance decline:

"Participation in the group has markedly declined," the group's administrator wrote in an email yesterday. "In the last 13 months, we've met 16 times in 56 weeks, about 29%. This year, from January through April, we've met 6 times in 16 weeks, about 38%. Last year, from March through December 2011, we had 5 dectets, 4 quintets and 2 quartets. This year we've had 3 quintets, 1 quartet, and 2 trios."

The ensemble tried to accommodate members' commitments by changing the meeting time from a Wednesday to a Thursday evening. But that plan didn't stick.

And now the Oakland church that has provided free space for the group to rehearse in every week for many years wants it to pay $100 a month to use the facilities.

The financial burden isn't really the issue -- if people really wanted to play, the group would find a way to self-finance or raise money some other way. I'm sure the church wouldn't beyond negotiating a preferred rate. Or musicians could host get-togethers in their homes or find another venue.

It's a sad sign of the times though, that a group with as low a commitment threshold as this one should collapse through lack of interest or the mere reality of modern, over-scheduled life. I, for one, haven't played with it for a while for two main reasons: I am indeed over-scheduled and schlepping to the dark depths of Oakland to play music for 90 minutes on a Wednesday evening just isn't a priority for me right now.

I'm not exactly Heinz Holliger on the oboe, but I have to admit that the other issue that keeps me away from the group is the overall lack of musicianship skills. Many of the core musicians are extremely old and don't have as good a sense of hearing and seeing as they used to have, though I can only dream of playing as well as they do at the age of 85! I don't feel all that satisfied by hacking my way poorly through an evening of music. If the musical standards were higher, I'd probably feel more inspired to attend. Ironically, it's probably the low-commitment aspect that's ultimately keeping me (and perhaps others like me) away.

That being said, some people have been playing with that group since its inception, and losing it will be very hard on them. Beyond the loss of a great and rare pickup playing opportunity for wind instrumentalists in the Bay Area, the demise of the group presents another challenge: What to do with the amazing collection of wind ensemble music which it has amassed over the years. The repertoire in the organization's collection ranges from the Baroque to the brand new. It's an enviable stash that any university or conservatory archive would salivate at the thought of acquiring.

So here's what I think should happen: The music should be offered as a gift to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music or Mills College or some other venerable music institution. Music students will drool over the stuff. In exchange, the receiving organization should provide a room once a week for free to the donating wind ensemble to play in as well as access to the music. Not only will the group benefit from the ongoing free space, but it will also hopefully receive an injection of new musical blood in the form of talented music students. THat should go a long way towards renewing the energy and raising the level of musicianship.

Boo to Encores

I often hear people in this country complaining about how pointless the standing ovation has become in a performance setting. Here in the States, an artist need only walk on stage, belch, and walk off again to witness an audience jump to its feet in rapturous applause.

But audiences aren't the only party involved in a public performance that's to blame for overdoing things that might be better left underdone. I'm thinking specifically about the tradition of the end-of-show encore in a musical performance: Few shows merit one, and yet the habit is ubiquitous.

Last night, I had a conversation with a music journalist friend of mine, Matt, about how annoying and often unnecessary encores can often be. Generosity is as lovely trait in any artist. But a musical performer shouldn't always, or indeed ever, feel compelled to provide a "musical chaser." The encore is as ingrained in the concert-going experience as waiting in line for the ladies loo. But I don't think audiences really want them in most cases. This is true regardless of the quality of the performance.

Best case scenario: The concert has been meticulously planned like a delicious meal and is fantastic. When a chef gets it right, we're often sated when we get to coffee and mints. The same goes for the concert experience. It's the "One more wafer thin mint," as the saying from the famous Monty Python skit, that sends us over the edge.

Worst case scenario: If the performer is not really delivering, we're more than ready to get out once the main set is over. Having to sit through an extra track turns an OK concert into something more memorable for its mediocrity.

 At the end of the day, it's always better to "leave 'em wanting more." An encore should always be a pleasant and unlikely surprise, only to be pulled out on rare occasions in the heat and inspiration of the moment in response to the specific vibe in the room. It should never be expected and endured.

Opposite Ends of the Interactivity Spectrum

Interactivity is so much the rage these days both in journalism and in the arts that it's starting to make things like the business of going to see a traditional play or ballet look really old-fashioned.

It's a sign of the times that two out of the three just-announced Knight/NEA Community Arts Journalism Challenge awards are going to organizations that source content from members of the public. (The third is a university-based project, and therefore also distinct from the regular media setup.)

And events in which audience members are actively involved (like the one I'm planning around Drinking Songs on May 16 under the auspices of VoiceBox in downtown San Francisco) are springing up all over the place.

Take the Feast of Words: Literary Potluck event which I attended at SOMArts Cultural Center a couple of nights ago for instance. These monthly events, in which esteemed local literary figures and chefs partner to present a meal and a reading around a particular theme, are now a regular part of the SOMArts Calendar and are selling out.

The theme of Tuesday's event was "Leap of Faith," and it involved a reading from writer Beth Lisick and a meal created by chef John Ingle.

I personally have never much enjoyed attending author readings -- just because someone can write well, it doesn't mean they can read well in public, and not all literary works lend themselves to being read aloud.

So what was great about the Literary Potluck was that the highlighted author reading was only a small part of the overall proceedings.

The rest of the evening was taken up with eating Chef Ingle's yummy meal (consisting of kale, shrimp and various other healthful ingredients), sampling potluck treats which audience members contributed to the event in exchange for a reduced entry fee, meeting fellow attendees at the big family style dining tables that had been set up in SOMArts main gallery space and participating in writing exercises. Some audience members even got to share their work with the group.

Though the soiree was low-key and felt at moments a bit like playtime at kindergarten, it was a lovely blend of activity, creativity and socializing.

This was all very different in feel from last night's performance of an adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men at Theatreworks in Mountain View. A traditional theatre experience requiring audiences to sit quietly in the dark and applaud at the end, Robert Kelley's production would be deemed utterly unfashionable by today's crowd-sourced approach to cultural product.

Yet by my estimation, the experience was equally worthwhile. What I valued most was what the staging of Steinbeck's famous 1937 novel about people eking out an existence on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder in rural California revealed about the story.

Although the use of Latino accents for Lenny and George didn't quite work in terms of creating a parallel between 1930s rural workers and today's workforce (more of the other farmhands would have needed to be Latino to make the conceit make sense) Kelley's production enabled the status and power games between the characters to seem all the more pronounced and moving. That the ensemble cast managed to draw us deeply into Steinbeck's narrative was what I valued most about it.

In a sense, experiences like this production of Of Mice and Men are interactive, at least to a degree: While audience members don't get to jump up on stage, they are transported to a different world which forces them to negotiate between the one being portrayed before their eyes and their own. That's a kind of interactivity.

To conclude: I'm not going to write off the more traditional arts experiences just because they don't involve theatergoers swinging from the chandeliers. But I'm interested in ways in which interactivity can be explored.

The Kitchen Sisters’ Storytelling Confidential

The Kitchen Sisters – a.k.a. National Public Radio producers Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva -- tell extraordinary stories about ordinary people.

Thousands of listeners have tuned in over the years to hear the Sisters’ careening explorations of subjects as diverse as the daily lives of Vietnamese nail salon workers, the history of the country’s first all-female radio station and the myriad ways people interact with their George Foreman Grills.
The Kitchen Sisters met in Santa Cruz in 1979 and soon began collaborating on a weekly radio show about California culture for a local radio station.

“From the very start, our live radio show in Santa Cruz grew out of the oral history tradition. After all this time, so much of this is still in our bones,” said Nikki Silva. “We listen to people for hours and then work to consolidate what they’ve said in a true and honest way.”

Since then, they’ve produced more than 200 stories for public broadcast, collaborated on several hugely popular series about the flotsam and jetsam of our diverse cultural landscape, worked with the likes of Frances Ford Coppola, Paul Auster, Tina Fey and Willie Nelson, and won a slew of accolades including two Peabody Awards, the DuPont-Columbia Award and three Audies.

During an afternoon seminar at the Knight Fellowship Lounge at Stanford, these master storytellers played excerpts from some of their favorite radio pieces and shared tips on the art of storytelling.
What’s perhaps most striking about The Kitchen Sisters’ ideas about how to get interview subjects to open up and tell great stories, is how much their thoughts apply to conducting interviews across any medium in journalism. What works for radio, pretty much works across the board.

Forthwith, a rundown of The Kitchen Sisters’ top interviewing techniques:

• When we first meet people, we often ask them to sing a song, talk about their favorite food or share a story from their childhood. These memory trigger topics make people feel comfortable right from the start.
• Once we are ready to start the formal interview, the most common first question we ask is, “What did you have for breakfast?” People are relieved because it’s an easy question to answer and it frees them up.
• The second thing we usually do is ask interviewees to introduce themselves – to say their name, where they grew up, what they do etc.
• About 10 questions before the end of the interview, we sometimes say, “I have one more question to ask you…” The subject often relaxes even more at this point because they think the interview is over and start to provide really great answers. They don’t even notice that we go on to ask a bunch more questions.
• We usually ask people at the end of an interview if there is anything else they would like to add.
• The advantage of working together on an interview is that we can both ask the same question in a different way to get the best possible answer.
• We often uses phrases like “Could you talk a little bit more about…” or “Tell me more about…” in order to get people to expand on shorter answers.
• Sometimes we’ll encourage people to go deeper into their story by acting surprised by the things they say. We interject phrases like, “Are you kidding?!” and “No way!” The trick is to be interested and amazed.
• We only ask open-ended questions.
• We believe in the freshness of telling and hearing a story for the first time. That’s why we don’t do pre-interviews. If interviewee invites us out for coffee before we get them on tape, we politely decline.