‘Imagine’: André Wells as Drum Major and Other Cosplay on Halloween
• November 6, 2015

On Halloween, event planner André Wells hosted his fifth annual costume party. Each year, the who’s who of Washington, D.C., gather and dress up creatively for this highly anticipated party. Spilled Milk catering and Design Foundry provided a pop-art atmosphere and fine cuisine to complement the “Imagine” theme of this year’s fete in the Carnegie Library at Mount Vernon Square. Wells’s grand entrance included the entire Eastern High School marching band with him as the drum major bursting through the crowd with excitement, which parted like the Red Sea to let the parade through the building.
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‘The Raven’ and Other Spooky Stuff at Dumbarton Concerts
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The spirit of Halloween, situated as it is in the heart of fall, has a way of lingering amid the spidery white threads on bushes, the leaves falling and falling and piling up, the nights earlier and longer, the air a little damp and the vistas full of fading beauties everywhere.

It lingers also musically with the presence and presentation of choral and chamber music composer and performer Nicholas White and the Raven Consort, performing Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” and other poems as part of the Dumbarton Concerts series Saturday at 8 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 7, Dumbarton United Methodist Church in Georgetown.

The musical work, a chamber union of words by Poe and music by White, a noted conductor, composer, organist, pianist, is making its second appearance at the Dumbarton Concert Series being first presented in February,  2013.   White, who is a native of England,  is currently Chair of the Arts and Director of Chapel Music at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, as well as being the Music Director of the Boston Cecilia.  One Washington critic called the work “an evening of sheer heaven in an acoustically ideal performing space.”

“The atmospherics, the candlelight, the intimacy, and the spiritual feeling at Dumbarton is, I think, perfect for Poe,”  White said.  “’The Raven’” is also an ideal poem for performance as music, as choral music for voices and instruments—strings and piano.”

White is very much the modern composer, not in the sense that his work is modernist in an atonal way—listening to “The Raven” is to experience rushes of lyricism throughout.  “I think perhaps there’s too much made of what modern classical music should sound like in contemporary times,” he said.  “And in this setting, this very intimate place, what you’ve accomplishes echoers and lingers, just like the poem.”

While the concert deals with other Poe poems—“Annabel Lee” and “The Bells”—the main work is a cantata for ensemble performance, voices, string quartet and piano, likely a first for any poem by the great American poet and prince of poetic darkness, who died at age 40.

Dumbarton Concerts commissioned the work, which proved to be very popular when first performed.  “You know, I think what happens with Poe, there’s a romanticism associated with his melancholy, he was an unhappy man, haunted, and his work is haunting.  But the music doesn’t have to be as dark as Poe’s life. ‘The Raven’ is a very musical poem, it’s a man calling out his anguish, his hope and feelings, confronting an apparition.  I kind of doubt that he was as miserable as all that’s been made out.”

While White has written big works, in  the “The Raven,” he said,  “I wanted to evoke the idea of a Victorian parlor, which quite often is how most people in the 19th century received their entertainment, gatherings in homes, or in churches, by natural light, it was very social, but also very cultural.”

“I think Poe had a unique appeal. He was enigmatic, lonely, often alone. He had this dark side,  which was mystical. He was, by all accounts, self-destructive, but what he created, the poetry especially, but also his stories, they endure. They remain, in their own way, modern, and it’s material ideally suited for music.”

White is something of a prodigy in the sense that he held his first organist and choir master position at the age of 15 in England, and became Organ Scholar of Clare College in Cambridge.  After coming to the United States, he held positions in churches, colleges and schools, including Washington National Cathedral as assistant organist and choirmaster, the Cathedral Choral Society, as keyboard artist, and music  director of the Woodley Ensemble.   He is the founder of the Tiffany Consort, an acclaimed group of eight singers, whose first CD “O Magnum Mysterium” was nominated for a Grammy.

= Nicholas White and the Raven Consort, performing Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” and other poems as part of the Dumbarton Concerts series 8 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 7, Dumbarton United Methodist Church, 3133 Dumbarton St. NW; 202-333-7212.
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Ambitious, Risky Start for Ari Roth’s Mosaic Theater
• November 5, 2015

It was a dark and stormy Wednesday night on H Street at the Atlas Performing Arts Center — an entirely appropriate atmospheric background for Ari Roth, in the midst of the last tech rehearsals, one day from the first preview performance and five nights from the opening of “Unexplored Interior.” The play, a world premiere, is the first production of Roth’s new Mosaic Theater Company.
“It’s a little crazy, sure,” Roth said. “We’ve got 20 pages of tech to do tonight, then it’s the first light of day for the play tomorrow, and we’re getting more demand for tickets than anticipated for the opening — so you have to deal with that, and that takes time away from other things.”
The Mosaic Theater Company of DC was conceived as a theater with a serious and big-hearted and big-minded mission: a commitment to “making powerful, transformational, socially-relevant art.” Still, the inaugural offering, “Unexplored Interior (This is Rwanda: The Beginning and End of the Earth),” by the instantly recognizable actor but first-time playwright Jay O. Saunders, looks both hugely ambitious and very risky.

Roth didn’t bat an eye. “Sure, it is,” he said. “But what better way to open a new theater company in Washington than with a project like this, this wonderful, beautifully and dynamically written play that’s about a terribly important subject, about a genocide which the rest of the world tried hard to ignore.

“Let’s face something: without risk, you don’t have drama, you don’t have theater. Risk is a part of the brand and business plan and so it is with this play. I’m proud to start with this play. It’s a profound and welcome challenge, and it speaks exactly to who and what we are,” he said. “I see it as a kind of valentine to ourselves, an expression of our aspirations.”

Roth is not working completely without a net; there’s a great deal of participation from the D.C. theater community at large. Derek Goldman is directing the play and Serge Seiden, who is completing his work at Studio Theatre, has joined Mosaic as managing director and producer. In addition, Jennifer L. Nelson, formerly with the African Continuum Theatre and the Living Stage Theatre Company at Arena Stage, has signed on as Mosaic’s resident director.
Still, “Unexplored Interior” is, for Washington audiences, unexplored territory — a big play about a 1994 genocide with deep roots in African and colonial history that took place in a relatively short and awesomely brutal time. The subject and the play, in all of its gestating forms, took up parts of some 20 years of Sanders’s life. The result is a kind of birth and culmination, the way plays can be for playwrights, of readings, reading concerts, workshops, long talks (with his wife, actress Maryann Plunkett, featuring strongly as inspiration and sounding board) and a kind of spooky tenacity.

Sanders is a big presence when you meet him, and also a familiar one. “Jesus,” I said when he was introduced, “I just saw you last night.” That moment of recognition speaks to the overly familiar aspects of series television, network and cable both, where Sanders has displayed his considerable gifts in various “Law and Order” incarnations, “True Detective” and, most recently, a recurring role in “Blindspot,” the NBC network thriller about a mysterious girl discovered in New York with her body covered in tattoos.

An Arena Stage company member for a time, Sanders is familiar with the D.C. theater community, including Roth. He exudes warmth, passion and humor, a kind of intensity that doesn’t need a lot of noise. “My son James was born just a month or so before the genocide began, when I became aware of it, and how the world was responding — or not — to it. There was so much death. It was a horror, and I remember watching the news and the UN commander there, he looked so worn. And I think, the proximity of my son’s birth — he’s 21 now — awakened something in me and for years I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“So that’s 10 years. I read everything, I followed what happened and then at first I thought of it as a one-man thing. But you couldn’t tell the whole story that way. So it became something bigger, and you become aware how ignorant people have been about this. It was amazing and alarming how many people did not know about this. People can’t even find it on a map.”

The play eventually emerged, full-bodied, full of characters: the play that made its debut here last Monday. “It’s been a remarkable experience for me, being there, and also having the play performed as a concert reading to mark the 20-year commemoration of the genocide,” he said. “It was streamed live to an audience of survivors and students at the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda.”

Sanders went to Rwanda in 2004 to attend the 10-year commemoration and “bear witness to the land, the survivors and the remains of those who died. My goal in writing this play has been to honor the spirits of those we turned our backs on. To remember, to hear their voices, to recognize them as us.”

Irving Penn at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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In preparing to write a piece on a new exhibition, I often sit down with the catalogue after my visit and bookmark certain pages with cut-up bits of paper, on which I write little notes and reminders to myself. If someone were to stumble upon one of these marked-up catalogues, seeing it stuffed full of paper shreds with scribbled words — “Victor Hugo,” “divine bones,” “gothic horror!” — they might well believe its owner to have been a mild schizophrenic.

But if someone found my latest catalogue, from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s “Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty” (on view through March 20), they?d be staring down the barrel of something more akin to an art student?s nervous breakdown.

Irving Penn is one of the most iconic photographers of our time. Both a commercial and art­house sensation throughout a greater portion of the 20th century, he is among the rare breed of artists who successfully survived for his entire career in the narrow, highly combustible space between mainstream and critical popularity.

Penn began as an art student in 1930s Philadelphia. After working as a freelance designer, he did a brief stint in 1940 as the artistic director of Saks Fifth Avenue, before dropping it all to spend a year traveling and taking photographs around the United States and Mexico (some of these shots are included in this exhibition).

Returning to New York, Penn took a design position with Vogue magazine, where his director suggested he try working with photography. His first cover shot for Vogue hit the stands in October 1943. Penn was not quite 26 years old.

Over the next sixty years, Penn took some of the most unforgettable photos of our time, with a meticulous eye that redefined and obliterated the perceived limitations of photography as art. He ran the gamut of fashion photography, commercial and advertorial work, portraiture, photojournalism, formal studies of still lives and Romanesque nudes, and the lid-popping delirium of avant-garde experimentation.

He composed and lit every subject with equally compulsive attention, from Truman Capote and Alberto Giacometti to used cigarette butts that he had his assistants pick up off the street. He played with chemicals and exposures in the darkroom the way a painter experiments with glazing mediums, extenders and stabilizers. His tones were rich and warm, and his manipulation of light and atmosphere bore such lush and striking contrast that his subjects seem to flower from seeds of darkness.

As fine as his technique was, however, this isn?t what made Penn?s work so beloved and admired (any more than Picasso is remembered for his brushstrokes). There are a lot of technically talented photographers in the world. It is the spirit of what he captured through his lens, the ineffable artistic matter of both beauty and relevance, that left such an indelible mark across the ether of American iconography.

I suppose it is this that I am expected to decipher as a writer and an observer of fine art, but frankly I?m not sure that I can. So many artists attempt to do exactly what he did and fall short. To make work that is emotionally charged, aesthetically fresh, innovative and transfixing is a colossal achievement. To do it for over half a century is nearly supernatural.

Penn could maneuver so deftly through such vast stylistic ranges it is mind­boggling. In some cases, his still life studies — stacked marrow bones and steel blocks — are as buttery, geometric and tonally delicate as those painted by Giorgio Morandi. In others, such as in “Composition with Pitcher and Eau de Cologne” of 1979, they take on the overwrought bounty of 17th-century Dutch still-life traditions.

His studies of muddy gloves and cigarette boxes buzz with the textural amplitude of Chuck Close’s immense portraiture. His own portraits, however, range in style from nightmarish surrealism (“Two Rissani Women in Black with Bread”) to formal (his portrait of Giacometti is a master class in value study) to Winogrand-like cultural snapshots and smoky, dreamlike odes to women and haute couture (fashion has never looked better than through his lens).

If there is a shortcoming to Penn?s work, it is clear that he was better in a controlled studio setting, over which he could exercise his aesthetic governance, than the uncooperative, disorderly environment of the outside world. The few images within the exhibition of urban street scenes and natural environments — all of them from very early in his career — are oddly disconnected from their subjects.

There is a mystifying painterly essence to his photographs. Your eyes traverse his terrains of texture, gradation and tone not like a typical photographic image — where you seek to gather the necessary informational content of “what is it?” — but with the nervous curiosity of a painted abstraction, for which we have trained our minds to seize esoteric intellectual feelings as literally as physical ballasts.

In a nutshell, this is why my brain blew an art fuse. Not that I mind. In fact, it?s one of the greatest meltdowns I?ve ever experienced.

Join Us for a Cultural Leadership Breakfast Nov. 5
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Julian Raby, the Dame Jillian Sackler Director of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian’s museums of Asian art, is the November speaker in Georgetown Media Group’s Cultural Leadership Breakfast Series. Born in London, Dr. Raby earned his doctorate in Oriental Studies from Magdalen College at the University of Oxford, where he was series founder and series editor of Oxford Studies in Islamic Art. He became director of the Freer-Sackler in 2002.

Tickets for the breakfast are $20 ($15 for George Town Club members). RSVP to Richard@Georgetowner.com. George Town Club, 1530 Wisconsin Ave. NW.

RSVP by November 3, 2015 by emailing Richard@georgetowner.com

Trish and George Vradenburg Honored at Arts for the Aging 27th Annual Gala
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“Creating New Horizons” was the theme of AFTA’s Oct. 27 event, hosted at the Society of the Cincinnati’s Anderson House. The late Lolo Sarnoff, a Swiss-German artist, scientist, entrepreneur and philanthropist, founded AFTA to bring the arts and provide life-enhancing and innovative experiences to impaired, vulnerable and isolated older adults. Olga and Bob Ryan co-chaired the evening. The Phillips Collection Director Dorothy Kosinski presented the seventh Annual Sarnoff Award to Trish and George Vradenburg for their dedication to addressing the impact of Alzheimer’s disease and their lifelong engagement in the arts. AFTA teaching artists provided entertainment. [gallery ids="102343,125569,125558,125564" nav="thumbs"]

Mayor’s Awards Go to Smith, Cafritz, Kuno and Ueno
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The 30th Annual Mayor’s Arts Awards were held Oct. 29 at the Historic Lincoln Theatre. D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities chair Kay Kendall and interim director Lisa Richards Toney presented the first award for Impact on Culture and Humanities to Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith, who said, “This city is the juice that carries me forward.” Georgetowners and doctors Sachiko Kuno and Ryuji Ueno were awarded for Visionary Leadership. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bower presented the Award for Lifetime Achievement to the tireless Peggy Cooper Cafritz, who enthused, “The mayor has had the vision and has executed my dreams.” Young tap dancer Luke Spring received a standing ovation. [gallery ids="102342,125571,125565" nav="thumbs"]

The Salvation Army Women’s Auxiliary of Washington, D.C. Fashion Show Luncheon
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The Salvation Army Women’s Auxiliary of Washington, D.C., held its 66th annual event at the Ritz-Carlton at Tysons Corners Nov. 30. Tony Perkins and Sue Palka of Fox 5 News were returning emcees for the elegant, loyal supporters of programs that include Turning Point Center, which meets the needs of young homeless mothers and their children, as well as Camp Happyland, where children from low-income families can flourish. Outgoing SAWA President Debra Push expressed her appreciation to so many and especially Associate Area Commander Major Jacqulyn Reckline. Stylist Barbara McConaghy Johnson outfitted the stunning models with the latest fashions from Bloomingdale’s. [gallery ids="102341,125572" nav="thumbs"]

Touchdown for Lombardi Gala
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The 29th Annual Lombardi Gala to benefit Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center was held at the Washington Hilton Oct. 24. The evening began with a cocktail reception and silent auction followed by dinner, raffle, award presentations and dancing. The Margaret L. Hodges Leadership Award, named for the gala’s founder, was presented to Washington Area Lexus Dealers for their generous support, including this year’s raffle of a new 2015 Lexus RC 350 F Sport with proceeds to benefit cancer research. The 2015 NFL Players Association Georgetown Lombardi Award went to Cincinnati Bengals player Devon Still for his dedication to and support of his daughter Leah, who is fighting neuroblastoma. [gallery ids="102340,125578,125574" nav="thumbs"]

Bowling for—and Hope for Henry
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Hope for Henry—a non-profit set up to offer children with cancer a more normal living situation (with fun and games, too) at Children’s National Medical Center and MedStar Georgetown University Hospital—held a Oct. 27 bowling benefit at Pinstripes on Wisconsin Avenue. Along with VIPs and the Georgetown Cupcake sisters, newcomer Sid Mashburn pitched in, too—and everyone had fun and great food. [gallery ids="102339,125582,125599,125606,125589,125594" nav="thumbs"]