Arts & Society

Mary Bird • September 12, 2013

Ambassador of Austria Hans Peter Manz was at the Arts Club of Washington May 23 as Anne Marie O’Connor received the seventh annual Marfield Prize, National Award for Arts Writing for “The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav’s Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.” The book chronicles the twisted tale of an emblematic portrait of a Jewish salon hostess stolen by the Nazis and the subject of eventual Supreme Court litigation. On a lighter note, dinner following the presentation was thanks to Arts Club Chef Ken Kievit. [gallery ids="119141,119129,119107,119099,119115,119122,119136,119147" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

Choreographer and artistic Director Dana Tai Soon Burgess was invited by the White House to participate in its Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month celebration May 28. Burgess spoke about his background as a Korean American, his creative process as a choreographer and his work as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. Katia Norri, a member of Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company, performed Burgess’s solo, “Dariush.” Journalist Lisa Ling was emcee of the event, which featured 2012 “American Idol” runner-up Jessica Sanchez and author Amy Tan.

Didi Cutler •

Evermay Estate held its first Easter Egg Hunt March 30 on its beautiful grounds for children who delighted in finding the eggs and decorating them — along with a piano concert. [gallery ids="101233,145464,145425,145460,145455,145433,145451,145439,145445" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Almost every biographical reference you can find on John Carter—the ones that don’t lead to the fellow who spent time on Mars—tend to lead off with a colorful, intriguing picture, as does the one in the program for his new play “I, Jack, am the Knave of Hearts,” which begins: “John Carter (playwright) is also a poet as well as a former merchant seaman, railroad man and wordsmith for hire who has ceased his wanderings and now lives out of sight with his wife and dogs.”

Somehow, the merchant seaman, railroad man and wordsmith are the grabbers. It’s resonant of the kind of creative types who live fully, breath smoke and traveling air, have seen and done things most of the rest of us mortals haven’t. All of this and the rest of the biography you may read is true and important. Yet it’s more like the beginning sentence of a novel, or better still, a play.

The dog part is true, and more importantly, the playwright and poet part are gloriously true. Carter is also an actor who’s played cops in films and on stage and has performed his poetry on stage in Washington in “various dives with the rock groups Eros and Luna and solo in more polite venues, including the Library of Congress.”

I met Carter in my D.C. neighborhood of Lanier Heights some time ago when we were walking our dogs. Carter looks a little like his biography—smallish, lean, blue jean jacket, a trademark wind-bitten Aussie hat. We met through Ruby, his brown, energetic poodle and my bichon Bailey, who has since passed away. Once our dogs were properly introduced, we discovered mutual interests and common experiences which we shared over coffee and over time. One of those interests was theater.

At the time, Carter was involved in staging an earlier play he had done (there have been four altogether), called “Lou,” a one-man play about Lou Salome, a dazzling woman, contrarian intellectual, muse, companion and sometimes lover to the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. “Lou” was staged in New York and at the Fringe Festival there. It was performed by Elena McGhee.

In many ways, “Lou” is a remarkable play because of the way it appears to get at the heart and soul of a remarkable woman—a daunting task for any male writer. “I tried to imagine everything that happened to her, everything she talked about from the standpoint of a woman,” Carter said, as if that’s the most natural thing for a male writer to do.

While Carter has written all of his life and been a poet for many years, playwriting is new to him. He is, after all, in his early eighties—82 years old, to be exact. For him, there is still a lot to do in this arena. From “Lou,” Carter tackled something a little different, which eventually became “I, Jack, am the Knave of Hearts.”

“ ‘Lou’ took a long time,” he said. “ ‘Jack’ practically came to me in a rush. It’s a work of the muse. I can’t explain it in any other way.”

Jack is Don Juan, or Don Giovanni, or perhaps all the great philanderers, womanizers of history rolled in one. He is time specific as played by D. Stanley, who is the artistic director of Theatre Du Jour and who also directs. All over Adams Morgan, these past few weeks, we’ve seen cards and posters, at bookstores or galleries or even a shoe repair shop for “Jack,” seen as a darkly-dressed, time-driven swaggering mystery man with a sword, whom you can see at the District of Columbia Arts Center on 18th Street.

The play closes this Saturday, April 6, and has been marked by a roller coaster ride that is a a lot about the life of Carter, the play itself, writers, and Adams Morgan. It’s also about the special qualities of the DCAC, which doubles as an art gallery and has seen the presence of many of Washington’s troubadour theater groups like Scena, Venus, the Landless Theatre Company, and the outrageous and lamented Cherry Red Productions, as well as appearances by burlesque and vaudeville performers.

“We’ve been reviewed twice,” Carter said. “Once negatively, which isn’t much fun, and once positively, which is gratifying. We’ve had good houses, and not so good houses—there was one time when the only people there were three kind of scruffy old guys, which made it difficult for Stanley, because the reaction of women in the house is important.”

“Jack” is a one-character play which sees Don Juan escaping from hell, in a bravado-like confusion, and trying to make sense of the life he led that landed him in hell, and the particular qualities of hell. He wears an open white gallant’s shirt, black boots of the striding kind and carries a spectacular sword and arrives with an attitude.

I saw the play on a night when Carter’s wife Julie Bondanza, a Jungian analyst, was there, seeing it performed “for the first time,” along with his daughter, assorted relatives, a member of the Playwright’s Forum to which Carter belongs, neighbors and walk-ins. The presence of a number of women in the audience seemed to invigorate Stanley, whose Jack was a man in search of his own identity, energetically striding the stage like an adventurer, looking over the fleshly highlights of his life, the death of his mother at the stake, the seduction of a woman and the murder of her father. On the simple, brightly lit, dark-background stage, the search seems to be the one we all march on, in our dreams, in those moments. “I begin to know myself,” Jack says and at another point, notes that “Hell is the end of hope.”

Carter didn’t attend rehearsals. “I like to be surprised,” he said. But he was sitting in the back listening and watching intently, laughing at the laugh lines as if discovering it again, like a true audience member, for the first time.

At play’s end, you walk into the gallery, where a reception for artist Joanne Kent’s amorphous works on the wall is in full swing and swagger. The crowds don’t part, they mix and talk and merge, art not so much imitating life as joining it.

The Knave of Hearts is surrounded by people. John Carter is surrounded by friends and family. The words still seem to be a part of the night, the cool air, hanging there… “A man back from the other side of hell, a man you hide your daughters from, a man with bloody hands. Am I that man?”

That night, he sure—as hell—was.

Georgetowner •

Into the building where President Abraham Lincoln was shot in 1865, gala-goers walked the red carpet June 2 to see former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and pro basketball great Bill Russell receive the Ford’s Theatre Lincoln Medal as well as to thank and honor emergency responders who tendered to the injured in Boston, Newtown, Conn., and West Texas. Among the audience: Vice President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., with wife Melodee, as well as Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., with his wife Abby, and Attorney General Eric Holder. Among the performers with the “Nashville” theme: Sam Palladio, Clare Bowen, Heidi Blickenstaff and Brian Stokes Mitchell. [gallery ids="101325,151396,151368,151392,151373,151388,151378,151383" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

Certified Angus Beef ® brand and Rodney Strong Vineyards of Sonoma County were featured at a dinner held at the National Press Club on May 21. Following the vineyard’s Charlotte’s Home Sauvignon Blanc 2012 with hors d’oeuvres, guests packed the Fourth Estate restaurant for multiple courses of beef and wine pairings created by Executive Chef Susan Delbert. Representatives gave informative between course insights into the certification of beef and the history of the “energy neutral” vineyard. Chef Susan urged guests to spread the world that the Fourth Estate is open to the public. [gallery ids="101326,151408,151393,151403,151399" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

When we think about the 2013 D.C. Jazz Festival, we can think about a lot of things—the essence and variety of jazz, the boundless talents of the performers, the vision of festival founder Charles Fishman, the way the festival has grown in size and venues.

All of that is well and good, but there’s been another constant through the history of this festival which is critical, and that’s the presence of Paquito D’Rivera in his role as co-artistic director, idea man, iconic figure of Latin jazz and performer.

In some form or another, he’s always there: we remember him from the New Orleans-themed festival several years ago in which he headlined a concert but managed to appear to be in several places at once. On a Sunday, with the bluesy, jazzy uniquely New Orleans sound being generated by Buckwheat Zydeco, there was D’Rivera in a shirt of many colors wailing with Zydeco and his group on the sax, blending and adding.

On the phone, he sounds a little bit like he plays—hard-driving, direct, untethered and not a little unfiltered, boisterous, funny, adventuresome. You think of him immediately as a man who’s comfortable with ideas and appetites, all sorts of people and all sorts of music. He is the pied piper and exemplar in some ways of the marriage of forms and genres. He’s an embracer. He’s speaking from New York, but it feels as if he’s in the room with you.

This year the Cuban-born D’Rivera and his PanAmericana Ensemble headline another special feature of the festival in “Jazz Meets the Latin Classics,” which comes after last year’s Jazz Meets the Classics I in a concert at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater June 14.

“It continues the theme of jazz and classical music, only this time the emphasis is on Latin classical music,” d’Rivera said. “The music will be tackling compositions and works by people like Piazzolla, Lecuona, Rodrigo, Villa Lobos and some of my work.” On hand will be soprano Brenda Feliciano and guitarist Berta Rojas in arrangements and improvisations, along with Alex Brown, Oscar Stagnaro, Yotam Silberstein, Edmar Castañeda, Hector del Curto, Diego Urcola, Michael Philip Mossman, Mark Walker and Pernell Saturnino. Brenda Feliciano is D’Rivera’s wife.

“We explored the classics with jazz musicians and jazz style last year,” D’Rivera said.

“This is a continuation along the same lines but in a Latin vein. I think we’re seeing bridges trying to be built that bring musical forms together, lead to new innovation and the like. A lot of it is coming from the classical end, trying to expand the horizons and audiences. I think on the whole that’s a good thing, the idea of fusion. But, just like in fusion cuisine, you’ve got to be careful of how you go about doing it, otherwise you end up with something like putting together black beans and sushi, which tastes awful.”
“I have to tell you,” he said. “Charlie got this festival done. This is a great city, a city with a jazz history. It’s supposed to be the capital of jazz. It should have a major jazz festival. If not here, where, you know. And Charlie got that done. He’s been a great friend, and so was Dizzy Gillespie, which is how I got here to begin with. But my job here—I think it’s to keep Charlie calm. Seriously, I am so proud of being a part of the festival as much as I have.”

D’Rivera is a multi-tasker, a multi-excellent talent and leader, an innovator. You can see the strains of where his music often goes in his compositions and by the people he plays with and collaborates with, building bridges. He has the stellar, huge reputation that allows him to make major inroads into cross-pollination of musical genres and styles—he has won six Latin Grammy Awards and four Grammy Awards and plays the saxophone, clarinet and soprano sax and flute. He’s won a Gramny for classical music. That may be an influence from his father Tito Rivera, who was a noted classical saxophonist and conductor in Cuba. In a way, D’Rivera’s presence, his association with jazz giants, his own major star status adds to the festival’s luster.

No question, he is also Cuban, through and through. In his colorful autobiography “My Sax Life,” that comes through in anecdotes and pictures and a vibrant, pungent story-telling gift. But you can also tell he’s a serious man, who can improvise with the best of them—he’s a Charlie Parker fan—but insists upon the notion that musicians ought to be able to read music.The book itself is a jazz history of sorts—meeting with men he admired and respected, and probably loved, Gillespie among them. I mentioned that Gillespie used to go to Harold’s Deli in Georgetown for coffee back when he played in town frequently. “Maybe we can have coffee there,” he said. Sadly, Harold’s is no longer around.

He left Cuba in the 1980s and has never returned not even to visit, citing the visa and passport restrictions and a serious lack of love for the Castro regime. “Some people make a hero out of Che Guevera,” D’Rivera said. “Not me.”

He is a jazz man but much more than that. Not by any means is he an elder statesman—he’s in his mid-sixties—but he carries the earned weight of honors, a string of multi-faceted recordings that are mountain-sized. “I’m not crazy about rock and roll,” he said. “The noise, it’s loud. But then you look at the Beatles, those guys they expanded the form.”

That’s what Paquito D’Rivera does with jazz and, one suspects, with life its own self. He expands the form.

Jazz Festival’s Roll Call of Heavy Hitters

With its many venues—especially with the offerings all over town in the Jazz in the ‘Hoods series as well as more high profile venues such as the Jazz at the Hamilton Live series—the 2013 D.C. Jazz Festival, running June 5 through 16, represents a treasure trove of talent on Washington stage.

To paraphrase what people say about theater—with the jazz festival the players are the thing and so we’re presenting a few of the names, the music, the players who are the stars of the festival, including Paquito D’Rivera, the Latin Jazz king who’s also the co-artistic director of the festival.

Player drum roll:

The Roots—If any group exemplifies just how big a shadow jazz casts and how many kinds of music and musicians perform under its big tent, it’s probably the Roots, the Grammy Award-winning hip hop and soul band founded by Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter and Abmir “Questlove” Thompson in 1987 in Philadelphia. Their music is jazzy, and eclectic, and with its wide reach, man
ages to maintain a broad audience, with no small thanks to its role as the house band for the perpetually hip and cool Jimmy Fallon Show.

Although ranked among the top hip hop bands ever, the group with 10 albums under its belt, two EPs and collaborations with many artists. It’s the festival’s signature event, a concert at Kastles Stadium at the Wharf June 15, with doors opening at 3 pm.

Arturo O’Farrill, is a pianist and the son of Latin jazz musician Chico O’Farill who’s performing with his own band, the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, in a concert at the Sixth and I Street Synagogue June 9 , being billed as “From Bagels to Bongos.”

Pharoah Sanders—The legendary saxophonist came out of the John Coltrane bands and made himself known for his “overblowing, harmonic, and multiphonic techniques” which were totally new. At the Bohemian Caverns, June 14.

John McLaughlin—The South Yorkshire, England, native who is called Mahavishnu John McLaughlin is a guitarist, bandleader and composer who mixes jazz with rock and Indian music. No less an authority than rock guitarist Jeff Beck has called him “the best guitarist alive.” At the Howard Theater June 16.

Terri Lyne Carrington—Carrington is a multi-talented force as a jazz drummer, composer, producer and entrepreneur who has played with Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry and Herbie Hancock. She’s performing her “Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue” at the Hamilton Live June 8.

The Brubeck Brothers Quartet—The quartet, made of Dave Brubeck sons Chris on bass and trombone and Dan on drums as well as Mike DeMicco on Guitar and Chuck Lamb on piano are presenting a Tribute to Dave Brubeck June 14, also at the Hamilton.

Hilary Kole—Only in her twenties, she heads and sings with the Hilary Kole quartet which has played at Birdland. She’ll be at the Embassy of Turkey June 10.

Ron Carter—Carter—owner of a lifetime DCJF award, is a living legend, a double-bassist who has also played the cello and has appeared on more than 2,500 albums and played in Miles Davis’s second quintet in the early 1960s, a group that included Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams. Carter and his Golden Striker Quartet will be the Hamilton June 13. [gallery ids="99246,104157" nav="thumbs"]

Robert Devaney •

Tudor Place’s 21st annual Spring Garden Party on May 22 had a youthful feel to it. Of course, its longtime stalwarts were also there to help raise more $250,000 for the historic house and garden on 31st Street.

The party’s added zest was not doubt thanks to the work of event co-chairs, Page Evans and Colman Rackley Riddell, who kept things moving, drinks flowing and food abundant. The happy vibe mixed the serious purposes of preservation and philanthropy with a crowd of 450 simply glad to see each other.

The evening’s honoree was Phillips S. Peter, descendant of Major George Peter, brother of Thomas Peter who built Tudor Place. Ten years ago, Peter was president of Tudor Place’s board of trustee and is recognized for his extraordinary commitment to Georgetown’s national treasure. “I salute you for keeping Tudor Place alive and well,” Peter told the party-goers. “With your support, the best is yet to come.” Along with family and friends, Peter, who was a vice president General Electric, also brought his grandson, Phillips Peter III, who works for LinkedIn Corporation.

Ari Post •

It is important to believe that something significant can be born out of us, because we ourselves are significant. We are an active part of our environment, and so we absorb and affect both its landscape and its ephemera. When we create something, even while fiddling absentmindedly with one odd distraction or another, we intuit the possibility for a greater conclusion to come of it, pulled out from the life which courses through us. To be really pedantic about it: Asserting the natural filter of consciousness is important to the pursuit of things like abstraction, which depends on the ability to communicate something that is inherently not communicable. A different way to think about it might be: Our heads are overloaded with great and often untellable stuff, and if we are lucky we will someday find a way to get it out in the open.

In a unique and refreshing manner, mixed media in art brings the artist’s misplaced ideas and subconscious thoughts together with the very objects and materials of their world. It goes beyond painting or sculpture, wherein an artist creates every shape, line and color to reach their conclusion. With mixed media the content already exists, waiting to be assembled. The art form is quite new, co-invented in the early 20th century by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. According to the Guggenheim Foundation, the glued-on patches of wood, cloth and other materials that they added to their canvases offered a new perspective when they “collided with the surface plane of the painting.” The practice was discovered by many artists to be a useful new manner of visual communication that interacts directly with the surrounding environment.

“Over Under Next, Experiments in Mixed Media, 1913 – Present,” an exhibition at the Hirshhorn through Sept. 8, explores this medium from its creation in the early 20th century through today, demonstrating how artists continue to deal with their rapidly expanding world in beautiful new ways.

The first room in the exhibit is a trove of delicate and forgotten artifacts of modern art—an appropriate tone to set the direction of the show. There is of course a Braque, a 1913 painting collage of a violin and sheet music, which resonates as the catalyst for the ensuing journey. There is also a large-scale 1959 work by Robert Rauschenberg, perhaps the most renowned mixed media artist of all time. His innovative “Combines” of the 1950s employed non-traditional materials and objects, from photomechanical reproductions, to cloth and metal on canvas.

These works bookend some smaller compositions by a handful of highly influential, if lesser known, artists of the early 20th century: Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch, Joseph Stella, Man Ray and George Grosz, among others.

Born in Germany in 1913, Schwitters incorporated refuse that he scavenged from the streets into paintings, collages and even poems. Merz, Schwitters’s one-man art movement, was rooted in a desire to create connections between all things, using printed ephemera, rubbish, and found materials. In “Milwaukee” (1937), his complex design combines elements of nonsense and chance from the Dada art movement with unusually strong design properties. Leaving Germany in 1937 due to the deteriorating political situation, his work was radical enough to earn censure as “degenerate art” by the Nazi regime.

World War II ends up playing a supporting role in this exhibition, as the political landscape and accompanying propaganda of the Nazi party became inescapable fodder for mid-century European and American artists. Höch and Grosz were German contemporaries of Schwitters and members of the Dada movement, who employed collages to respond to their country’s societal upheaval. Grosz’s brutally comic “Clock-Faced Woman” (1953), with its assemblage of human facial features forming a devastating frown on a clock face with pinup girl legs, is reminiscent of his savage caricatures and political cartoons of German political machinations.

Hans Richter’s heavily political “Stalingrad (Victory in the East)” (1943 – 1944) is a large-scale panoramic collage that functions as a timeline of the war. Richter used English newspaper clippings with headlines like, “Nazi Lines Ripped At Stalingrad Front,” arranged in a playful composition of organic shapes and primary colors that recalls Alexander Calder’s mobile structures. Calder’s work is in fact displayed alongside “Stalingrad.”

An entire room is devoted to the work of Joseph Cornell, whose modern cabinets of curiosity act like dreamy funnels for displaced memories, desires and histories. The myriad works are so rife with subject matter of bygone eras that they feel like the diagrammed mind of an Alzheimer’s patient whose old memories resurface to displace the ones it has lost, intermingling with the static of the present. One piece shows us a map of the equator lining a shadowbox, with miniature glass goblets holding pearls inside and metal rings hanging from the top. Like much of the show, this is a body of work that must be experienced to fully understand. But then that is the beauty of art, and the significance of mixed media. It exists nowhere but in its own time and space, offering us a chance to understand our world in ways that escape us at the tips of our tongues.

“Over Under Next” will be on display at the Hirshhorn through Sept. 8.
For more information, visit Hirshhorn.si.edu. [gallery ids="119177,119179" nav="thumbs"]

Kelley Hudak •

The Seventh Annual Children’s Ball was held at the National Building Museum May 11 with more than 800 guests, all to benefit Children’s National Medical Center, one of the best pediatric hospitals in the U.S. Emcees were Bret Baier of Fox News and Norah O’Donnell of CBS News. Baier and his wife Amy are especially committed to Children’s National Medical Center as their son Paul was born with five congenital heart defects and has had more than dozen surgeries as a result.

For the first time, two awards were presented at the program: first, the Children’s Innovation Award given to GE Healthcare and accepted by Richard Hausmann, M.D., president and CEO of GE’s Magnetic Resonance. The second honor was the Children’s Advocacy Award, received by House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer.

The event raised more than any other Children’s Ball and significantly surpassed last year’s total of $1.3 million to hit a whopping $2 million dollars. [gallery ids="119169,119174" nav="thumbs"]