Tim Etchells & Theatre Replacement's That Night Follows Day

That Night Follows Day is a theater piece created by Tim Etchells, exploring the ways adults shape children by the things we say to them.

Etchells originally created this piece for a Flemish theater company, and this is the first time he has allowed an outside artistic company to remount his work. It was the US premiere.

That Night Follows Day has a large cast consisting only of children, and this production was directed by Vancouver's Theatre Replacement.

The set was simple and basic, a large piece of playground equipment. Most of the piece had some or all of the kids standing up at the front of the stage saying lots of various phrases that "You tell us..."

While this concept could have easily had a cutesy and contrived result, the kids, the script, and direction pulled it off in a way that ended up being quite powerful and thought provoking. While there were a few unavoidable "aww, cute" moments, by and large the experience was more of the sober "out of the mouths of babes" variety. Very few of the things said were things that kids would not have naturally said, leading me to wonder about the script creation process. Did Etchell sit down with kids and get their input in creating the script? Maybe by asking them a few questions, and then writing down what they said? Whatever the true source, the script certainly rang as genuine observations of kids on adult behavior and teachings, with blunt and often very funny honesty.

Chad said afterwards that he found himself throughout the show flipping back and forth from feeling like these kids' parent or uncle, to identifying directly with the kids themselves, depending on the particular subject matter. I had a very similar reaction, especially during the moments when they braved into the hurtful and identity-crushing sorts of statements that most of us have heard on numerous occasions by thoughtless or badly behaving adults who were supposed to be guiding us through our childhoods.

But ultimately the overall result of the piece was sweet, powerful and thoughtful, leaving the mostly adult audience with meaty food for thought about the significant impact our offhand words and actions can have on the malleable young people around us, whether those might be our own children, or just a young future citizen passing us by on the street.

Betrayal by Harold Pinter at The Seattle Rep

This is the first Pinter play that I have seen. That seems unusual to me because he is one of the most famous 20th century playwrights and I minored in theater in college. I had heard that his plays had a particular sparseness of dialogue with deliberate timing. After seeing the Rep's Betrayal, and I think it's representative, I believe I like Pinter's style. The sparseness and compactness (it's 74 minutes) have an efficiency that I enjoy.
The Rep's production was very good. The actors fit their parts well and the set was appropriate and subtly flexible.
The story is about adultery and the play is about memory, trust and people's histories with each other. The structure is unusual and magnifies the dramatic irony in a very satisfying way.

Los Angeles Guitar Quartet with Seattle Symphony

The LA Guitar Quartet is a group of guitar virtuosos that has been performing for 27 years. The show had two distinct halves. Before the intermission were performances with the symphony and after the intermissions were performances by just the quartet.

first half:
Manuel de Falla's Selections from El Armor Brujo Ballet
Sergio Assad's Interchange for Guitar Quartet and Orchestra
My most distinct recollection of these performances was that I didn't care for the guitar and orchestra together. I have this feeling in general about soloist/orchestra combinations with violin and piano soloists. Of the ones I have heard it is rare that the performance is enhanced by the combination rather than a fully integrated orchestra or a pure solo performance. In this case it was four guitarists and the orchestra and I thought the guitarists more than capable of carrying themselves without the orchestra. This includes the percussive knocking on the guitars and other alternate playing styles. The breaks as the compositions moved between the orchestra and guitars were abrupt and not well integrated.

second half:
various short works for guitar including Baden Powell's Samba Novo, Paulo Bellianati's A Furiosa, traditional's (;->) Shenandoah and Aaron Copland's Hoe-Down from Rodeo
I enjoyed the second have tremendously. The quarted demonstrated their flexibility, skill and overal pleasure of playing. The 5-song Imagens de Brazil section was especially enjoyable giving a selection of samba, basa nova and other styles.
There was also a section of American classic songs including a Sousa march, The Black Horse Troop! That was fun surprise.

Garden & Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur

From SAAM's literature:

"This groundbreaking exhibition of 58 artworks will present new facets of Indian painting that flourished in the royal courts of Rajasthan from the 17th to the 19th century. In addition to the exquisite narrative "miniatures" with which we are familiar, the exhibition will include breathtaking monumental images that convey an unsurpassed intensity of artistic vision and religious fervor. Produced for the Rajasthan nobles, these paintings have never been published; most have been seen by just a few scholars since their creation. This is the first time these paintings will be exhibited in the United States."

–Josh Yiu, Foster Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art

I have been looking forward to seeing this exhibit ever since it was first announced in the SAM calendar, and on the whole I was not disappointed. The exhibit had two main types of paintings, secular paintings of court life and politics, and religious paintings expressing mostly the Nath flavor of Yogic theology. While the secular paintings were a bit interesting from a historical perspective, allowing the viewer to see what court life looked like in that place and time, and were painted with the same artistic style as the devotional paintings, they didn't offer much after the first painting or two for anyone who is not a student of this particular historical period.

The devotional paintings, however, were an entirely different experience altogether. I am glad that by chance I happened to enter the exhibit the wrong way round, viewing all of the devotional paintings first before getting to the court paintings, which were placed at the front of the exhibit.

While all of these paintings were the work of dedicated artists in the court atelier, most of the paintings did hold a purpose other than simple expression, and that is to be shown at court along with stories and discussion as visual illustrations to assist the education of those present. Due to that, many of them are part of a series of paintings in a storytelling series, or are within the painting themselves presenting an elaborate story, much like a good graphic novel without words.

Even if I didn't already have spiritual leanings towards India, I would have found most of these paintings to be very interesting. Anyone who knows anything about Indian theologies knows there's some pretty good stories there, especially from a graphic perspective. Take this image on the right for example, from the Tulsidas Ramayana. I mean, anyone who isn't interested in a picture showing the adventures of a royal, a guard, a blue guy and a couple of monkey men crossing the land in search of a kidnapped lady in distress just plain doesn't know anything about good stories! And this is of course to say nothing for the actual art itself, which is so rich, colorful, inspired and wildly creative I'm not sure how you couldn't fall in love with it at first sight.

There were many such large story paintings telling various stories and explaining various geographies and characters of well-known devotional stories. Among the most breathtaking of these was a huge 3-panel set of paintings telling the story of Krishna Lila, which tells of young Krishna unwittingly luring a bunch of female cowherds into the woods, causing them all to become inspired with a longing for divine love. After luring them from their home lives, a multiplicity of Krishnas peek out and play with the gopis among a huge and amazingly lush forest, until he leaves them searching among the trees for his hopeful return. The delicate beauty of the detail of the painted forest with all of its tiny flowers and creatures is one I could probably sit and look at all day without tiring of.

Apart from the lush and comic-book like paintings of all the various stories and characters, there were two full rooms depicting stories of the most cosmic order. According to the exhibit text, many of these depicted concepts and images are not known to have been painted anywhere else (as opposed to the devotional paintings of the stories, which like our Western tradition of depicting biblical scenes, is a widespread and often-repeated topic for devotional artists). These paintings made the brave attempt to depict the nothingness and allness that is god/the universe itself.

One such painting, depicting the universe before any corporeal forms were taken, is simply a canvas of varying shades of shimmering gold paint with various textures. These paintings too were intended to be shown in sequential order, depicting first the absolute nothingness/allness and gradually the progression of lesser godly forms that were assumed out of this none-ness to create the corporeal world we exist in today. The image from the beginning of this post shows the middle part of the progression, when Spirit (left) and Matter (right) emerged from the nothingness (the gold background). I found this room of paintings in particular to be very riveting, even though the actual paintings themselves were much simpler in graphic detail than all of the other paintings in the exhibit. I almost wished I could just stay in that room all day.

You can read more about the show, and see a slide show of images from the exhibit here.
You can see the book that goes along with the exhibit here.

Faure's Requiem, Op. 48

The perfomance we saw was guest-conducted by JoAnn Falletta with the SSO. The SSO was joined by the Seattle Symphony Chorale and soloists Joyce Guyer and Michael Anthony McGee. The piece also used SSO's pipe organ.

Faure originally composed this piece in 1886-87; it was first performed in 1900 in Paris.

The program promised that this Requiem would be different in tone than many others, and having heard a few (can't remember which), we both agreed. As Faure himself said of the piece, "it is gentle in character, like myself." There was no fire and brimstone anywhere to be felt, which was really nice. It was meant to be more of a consoling piece for the mourners than other Requiems I have heard.

The result was quite beautiful. I was engaged with it throughout, and was moved to tears during many moments, especially during the beautiful solos of McGee. It was for me a definite musical success in that it seemed to truly communicate through music the feelings & experience it was intended to convey.

Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 1 in F-sharp minor, Op. 1

We saw this piece guest-conducted by JoAnn Falletta with the SSO. The piano soloist was Nikolai Luganski.

This 3-movement concerto was originally composed in 1891 and revised in 1917. It was originally performed while Rachmaninov was still a student at the Moscow Conservatory. He was dissatisfied with the original, but was pleased with his final 1917 revision. It never attained the popularity of his other Concertos, and remains the least known of his works for piano and orchestra.

The piano part was somewhat interesting, obviously required alot of skill, and seemed to move some of the audience members sitting near us. However, it didn't do much for me and I ended up being pretty bored by the end. I liked the energetic first movement the best of the three movements.

There was a fair amount of woodwinds, but hardly any percussion to speak of.

Ravel's La Valse

We saw this piece guest-conducted by JoAnn Falletta with the SSO.

It's a piece we've heard before, used for a Balanchine ballet of the same name. (While Ravel originally planned the piece years before he worked on it in full, he ended up completing it in 1920 as a commission for a ballet that was never performed for Sergei Diaghilev.)

This is an interesting & engaging waltz. It's heavy on woodwinds.

Ravel described La Valse as an "apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, which was linked in my mind with an impression of a fantastic whirl of destiny leading to death." The program says it "proclaims its arrival as surely the most stridently modern work of its day."