Performance: Twist Pulls Off His Own Twist on Puppetry
• May 3, 2012

Everywhere you read or hear about Basil Twist—the New Yorker, the Post, YouTube (highly recommended) — he’s described as a puppeteer, or third-generation puppeteer, or world-renowned puppeteer.
 
The third-generation thing is stretching things, the world-renowned is dead on, but puppeteer … Well, it’s just not enough. It’s like calling Schubert a songwriter and leaving it at that.
 
Geppetto was a puppeteer. Basil Twist is something else.
 
Just what Twist is and does should become fairly clear to Washingtonians — or maybe not — during the course of the next nearly two months, a time frame which amounts to a Basil Twist festival of four of his works at four different venues.  All of them are different from each other — naturally, as Twist might say, because he is forever exploring the form, trying new ways of creating puppetry, standing the form on its head, leaving shiny welts.
 
Twist, who is only 42, is becoming a one-man buzz, noteworthy, praiseworthy and just plain worthy at a time when puppetry itself is becoming prominent, especially on the nation’s stages, but also in the special-effects laden world of film. 
 
Think of puppets, and you do think of Geppetto and Pinocchio, the puppet who became a boy and similar children’s stories that work well with characters manipulated by sticks and strings.
 
What Twist does is honor the primal past, the classic form, listens to the music in his head and outside of it and marries it to things never done before. He collaborates with someone like Joey Arias, described as “drag chanteuse extraordinaire” to come up with a production the likes of which you’ve never seen before.          
 
The Twist festival amounts to four theatrical events literally beyond category.  At the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Lansburgh Theatre, there’s a stunningly beautiful production of “Petrushka,” which is puppetry about puppets, a classic tale from the world of ballet about three puppets at a Russian carnival, a kind of love triangle about puppets aided and abetted by Stravinsky’s original ballet score in a two-piano version played by pianists Julia and Irina Elkina.   The style of puppetry is gorgeous in the Japanese and Czech manner and runs through March 26.

At the Studio Theatre, Twist resurrects what amounts to a nearly lost art and form of puppetry of “Dogugaeshi,” a production involving sliding doors and original Shamisan compositions performed by master musician Yumiko Tanaka. (April 11 through 22)

Going farther afield and under water brings you to a Swift classic, a production of “Symphonie Fantastique” at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland.  An abstract work set to the music of Hector Berlioz is performed in a 1,000-gallon water tank, “using mirrors, slides, dyes, blacklight, overhead projections, air bubbles, latex fishing lures and other sundry material. (March 29 through 31)

Finally, there’s “Arias with a Twist” at the Woolly Mammoth Theater, April 4 through May 6, in which the aforementioned Joey Arias and Twist collaborate on a magical-mystery tour of music, dancing, singing, with the Garden of Eden, a space lab and just about anything else you can imagine thrown in.
 
Twist in a phone interview said that “I’m fascinated by the use of music, by all the other forms of puppetry that go back practically to the cave man. Puppets have always been with us. They’re primal.

In his program notes for “Petrushka”, Twist states the case and his reason for being simply. “Puppets are magic,” he writes. “The mystery of a bundle of cloth coming to life and inspiring emotion in an audience is what has kept me captivated by this art.

By animating puppets—including puppet forms, inanimate objects and characters—he makes magic.  When he talks about how puppet is animated not only by him but by the audience, he’s talking about the essence of performance art, of theater and dance. “Puppets are often thought of as belonging to children,” Twist said.  “That’s great and partly true, that’s where everything starts, but I’m trying to move things to move constantly forward.” He is to puppetry what Joyce and Beckett where to literature, making abstractions come to life.

But he shares one thing with Geppetto, and maybe with Doctor Frankenstein as well and that’s the urge to bring something that’s inanimate, lifeless to life.
 
“Think about that, it’s so awesome to me to be able to do this,” Twist said. “And we’re talking about shapes, things themselves, not just characters in a story.”
 
“It’s true I grew up with puppets,”  he said. “My mother did puppet shows. As far as that third-generation thing, I had a grandfather who was a big band leader. He had puppets that looked like band leaders of the time. “
 
Arias had his own puppets, but he did not become serious about the form until he attended and graduated from the Ecole Superieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mezieres in France.
 
It’s fair to say that Twist is a transformative figure in an art form that is beginning to loom large, beyond the boundaries of carnivals and children’s shows.  He created puppets for the Broadway musical “The Addams Family,” and he’s listed in the credits as underwater puppet consultant for the last Harry Potter show.

If, like Duke Ellington, his work seems to be beyond category, you do know exactly where it’s headed. It’s in the direction of making the heart, the head and the soul of puppetry larger.

In Petrushka”, probably the most accessible of the four works in the festival, he uses non-traditional and traditional tools to bring alive a classic tale. It’s startling, gorgeous it swims around in your head afterwards. After the show, beaming like a young kid, he explained some of the tricks of the process, without every once negating the magic and mystery of it all.

Making the puppets, the shapes, the detailed work is probably a herculean, detailed effort.  But behind it is a vision, not so precise, but clear. “More than anything,” he says. “I have to think and feel that it’s good. “

Now there’s a Twist. [gallery ids="100595,100596" nav="thumbs"]

AFAC Benefit Reception
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Arlington Food Assistance Center’s 2012 Benefit Reception focused on raising support for their Annual Fund while celebrating the successful conclusion of AFAC’s Permanent Home Campaign. The goal for this year’s gala was $135,000, and the funds raised at this event will allow AFAC to continue meeting the growing demand for food assistance in Arlington. Photos by Aaro Keipi, (http://www.aarograph.com)[www.aarography.com] [gallery ids="100608,100609,100610,100611,100612" nav="thumbs"]

Hungary Wins Embassy Chef Challenge
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Chef Viktor Merényi of the Embassy of Hungary took top honors at the fourth annual Embassy Chef Challenge held March 8 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. Merényi served slow-cooked beef with transitional Hungarian accompaniments for 600 guests and a panel of celebrity judges. The annual event benefits Cultural Tourism DC, an independent coalition of more than 230 community-based organizations which showcases the city’s rich and diverse culture and heritage. [gallery ids="100613,100624,100623,100622,100621,100620,100619,100618,100617,100616,100615,100614,100625" nav="thumbs"]

Latino Student Fund Gala
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Ambassador of Costa Rica Muni Figueres, the honorary patron at the Latino Student Fund’s 12th Annual Gala at the Organization of American States, lauded the fund on March 14 as a fantastic vehicle for the vindication of the Latin spirit. This year’s theme “Color Caribe” highlighted Costa Rica with its Latin music, cocktails and food. Festivities benefitted the LSF’s mission to provide academic opportunities for students of Hispanic/Latino descent from pre-Kindergarten to 12th grade and to promote higher education and professional leadership. [gallery ids="100626,100627,100628,100629,100630,100631,100632,100633" nav="thumbs"]

A Toast to Pierre L’Enfant at Dumbarton House
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In 1791, Pierre-Charles L’Enfant arrived in Georgetown on the evening of March 9 to begin work on the soon-to be nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. The Mayor of Georgetown had not gotten the memo, and L’Enfant felt less than welcomed and complained to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. In recent decades, Washingtonians have been making up for that with an ongoing annual “Welcome, Pierre!” reception. Friends and history lovers raised a toast the city’s designer March 9 at Dumbarton House, headquarters for The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America.

Bonhams Previews Asia Week at Its Georgetown Salon
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In tune with D.C.’s cherry blossoms, Bonhams Auctioneers and Appraisers held a preview of some of the art, ranging from Japan and China to Southeast Asia, being shown at Asia Week in New York at its Washington office on M Street in Georgetown March 8. Martin Gammon, who heads up the D.C. and Mid-Atlantic division, welcomed art lovers and a few Sackler Gallery trustees to the first highlights preview and reception at his Bonhams office. [gallery ids="100634,100635" nav="thumbs"]

Theater Shorts: Shakespeare, Sinatra, O’Neill and Twist
• April 19, 2012

Two Shrews, a mock Shakespeare trial, Sinatra and a tango or two, O’Neill still running strong and Arias with a Twist. That’s a few of the things on stage or on tap in Washington’s performing arts scene.

Here’s a look:

SINATRA AND THARP — Tony Award winner and American choreographer and legend Twyla Tharp feels a move coming on as she marries dance to the music of Frank Sinatra, arguably one of the country’s greatest interpreters of the American Songbook in “Come Fly Away.”

The production, now at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater through April 29, marries the vocals of Sinatra, with a live on-stage big band and 24 of the world’s finest dancers.

“Come Fly Away” hit Broadway on the heels of Tharp’s successful theater homage to the music of Billy Joel in “Movin’ Out.” In “Come Fly With Me,” four couples fall in and out of love during the course of one night at a nightclub saturated with Sinatra’s love songs, ballads and rueful takes on loving and losing. The show’s score combines familiar hits, such as “My Way” and “That’s Life,” with newly discovered vocal performances from the Sinatra archives.

THE SHREW, TWICE TAMED, LOUDLY AND IN SILENCE — There’s still a chance to see Synetic Theater’s singular and silent take on “Taming of the Shrew,” part of its Shakespeare without words effort through April 22 at the Lansburgh Theater. But if you want some words to go with the battling Petruchio and Kate, there’s a more traditional, if no less visceral, version coming to the Folger’s Elizabethan Theater on May 6, directed by Aaron Posner.

TWIST AND O’NEILL FESTIVALS NOT OVER YET — There’s still a chance to catch the unique, one-of-a-kind sensibilities of puppet master Basil Twist in two locations. His magnificent showcasing of the ancient art of Japanese puppetry, “Dogugaeshi,” remains at the Studio Theatre through April 22. “Arias with a Twist,” his hip and wild, abundantly inventive collaboration with Joey Arias, described as a “trippy, madcap, musical fantasia of ecstatic and eye-popping enchantments,” remains at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre through May 4.

Meanwhile, two key parts of Arena Stage’s Eugene O’Neill Festival remain on stage and provide an opportunity to see the master American playwright’s most ambitious plays. That would be “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” O’Neill’s through-the-sharp-looking-glass autobiographical play about the Tyrone family at Arena’s Kreeger Theater, directed by Robin Phillips through May 6. At the Shakespeare Theater, Michael Kahn provides his take on O’Neill’s challenging “Strange Interlude” through April 29.

A MOCK TRIAL: CLAUDIO V. HERO — In “Ado, I Do, Adieu: Claudio V. Hero,” the high court of Messina will gather at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Sidney Harman Hall April 30 with a dinner, followed by a trial, as it should be.

Hearing the case: quite an all-star bench cast, with Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg (presiding), Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan along with other judges: Merrick Garland, Douglas Ginsburg, Brett Kavanaugh and David Tatel.

The case—another in a series of mock trials on Shakespearean issues and themes which began in 1994—centers around the young lovers of “Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio and Hero, in which Hero is seeking divorce from her husband Claudio, he being no hero after disavowing his bethrothed based solely on rumors and false charges.

PLAYING POKER WITH THE DEVIL, IRISH-STYLE — “The Seafarer,” Conor McPherson’s rich, language-driven comedy-drama gets the Scena Theatre and Robert McNamara treatment at the H Street Playhouse through May 20 at 1365 H St., NE.

The play is a gathering of verbose Irish have-nots, full of the blarney and battling for the soul of one of their own in a drawn-out, drunken poker game, which is fueled by Sasheen, a potent form of Irish whiskey that might even addle Satan.

A BIG MEAL — For foodies and theater folk, “The Bit Meal” by Dan LeFranc is a family saga that follows five generations from the vantage point of a single restaurant table.

LeFranc wrote the Studio Theatre 2nd Stage Hit, “Sixty Miles to Silver Lake,” which was performed in 2010. So, it’s fitting that “The Big Meal,” directed by Johanna Gruenhut, will be a part of the 2nd Stage season at the Studio Theater this year, running April 25 through May 20.

House Tour 2012
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House 1
1688 31st Street, N.W.

This dignified, three-story Victorian, built around 1800, was the home of Sen. Robert Taft (R-Ohio) from 1941 until his death in 1953. Taft is best known as co-sponsor of the federal Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
The house’s most prominent features are its high ceilings and many tall windows.  In the early 1960’s, the owners added a spacious living room.  Double sets of doors lead from the living room to a walled garden and pool. Off the large entrance hall are a striking library with a wet bar and a fireplace, a kitchen, an elegant powder room, a dining room and finally the living room.

House 2
3007 Q Street, N.W.

This large post-Civil War, semi-detached residence is one of eight “villas” built beginning in 1868 by Henry J. Cooke for his 12 children.  Cooke was the first territorial governor of the District of Columbia and brother of Jay Cooke, a financier and close friend of President Ulysses S. Grant. The exuberant design by Starkweather & Plowman combined aspects of the Italianate villa with elements of Second Empire style. Built on what was then the edge of Georgetown, these houses were shunned at first by the public as being rather too ornate and grandiose for their time during the post-Civil War era.

In 1932, the family of L.P. Shippen purchased the house, and it became the venue for her celebrated dance academy. The current owners have recently undertaken a painstaking two-year renovation, retaining original architectural details, such as the seemingly free-floating spiral staircase.

House 3
1352 28th Street, N.W.

Built around 1810 and first recorded in 1818 (when it was owned by William Lipscomb, a post office clerk, and assessed at $2,000), this red-brick house was originally a two-story building in the Federal style with two dormer windows facing the street. The house has changed hands many times over 200 years.  Its modern aspect, though, is attributable to changes made for a client in 1968 by the renowned architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen.

Jacobsen removed much of the non-original construction and built a new living room and library with several bedrooms upstairs, leaving the dining room and the stair hall as the only “old” rooms. A glass façade was installed leading from the living room onto the small garden forecourt, which was walled in. This façade affords abundant light to the living room as well as a garden view.  

House 4
3106 P Street, N.W.

This substantial residence was built in 1877.  In 1938, it was acquired by Marcella Comès Winslow, a painter, with her husband, Col. William Randolph Winslow.  Marcella wrote “Brushes with the Literary, Letters of a Washington Artist 1943-1959,” a book in which she described life in Georgetown and the literary figures with whom she socialized. Among other positions, Winslow served as Portraitist to the Poetry Chair of the Library of Congress.

Her Georgetown home was an informal literary salon for such authors as Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty. Porter was a boarder at the home. Winslow knew many famous authors, including T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and Dylan Thomas, many of whom sat for her portraits. Today’s owners transformed the house by adding the eat-in kitchen in the back and connecting the garden to the house through a series of repeating arch designs that bridge the space seamlessly from interior to exterior.  

House 5
3104 P  Street, N.W.

This is one of four townhouses built in 1877 as a unit now comprising 3100-3106 P Street. Together, they form a fine example of the post-Civil War Victorian housing that drew many middle-class families to Georgetown.  Originally, each house had a completely separate garden, but recently two of the houses were joined by gates allowing free access for neighbors to visit.

The original floor plan was modified in 1998. A ground-floor guest bathroom was added, and the kitchen was enlarged to accommodate a dining space.  Steps link the new kitchen to the garden designed by Clarke Associates of London.  The sculpted wisteria was created by Husband and Clark, another English firm. Back inside, an unpretentious, European-infused aesthetic prevails.  

House 6
3141 P  Street, N.W.

This home is a Second Empire-style brick row house constructed around 1876 as one of a subdivision of three houses (3141-3145 P Street), owned by Joseph L. Simms. Adjacent to the property, east and north, is the historic Bowie-Sevier estate.

Its most recent renovation occurred in 2011 to accommodate all eight members of a blended family in a relaxed, family-friendly environment.  The current owners merged three separate rooms on the first floor into an open floor-plan, renovated the lower level to feature a new family room for teenagers and added a seventh bedroom. The kitchen is particularly remarkable and has a nautical feel.  

House 7
1416 34th Street, N.W.

This Italianate-style house, known as the Wetzel-Graves home, was built in 1876 by John Wetzel, a butter merchant, and sold in 1907 to Charles Graves, who ran his coal business from the home until the 1940s and whose family owned it after his death until the 1960s.  It is a perfect example of Georgetown’s middle-Victorian period architecture.  

Working with local architect Dale Overmyer, the current owners have renovated the house extensively, while taking care to preserve its historic properties.

House 8
1413 35th Street, N.W.

Built in the 1830s as a Federal frame house, this semi-detached house was converted in the 1940s by decorator Margaret Weller into a flat-front English Regency-style house.  An English basement entry was carved out of the front yard to replace the original stoop entry.

In 2005, architect Christian Zapatka renovated the house. Preserving the 1940s street façade, he gutted the interior and reconfigured the garden façade. The new side-oriented staircase leads up to the “piano nobile” (the main floor).  The living room across the back of the house leads directly to a limestone terrace through three sets of tall French doors.  Beyond the terrace is a stepped garden in the Italian style. Towering overhead is a 250-year-old Osage orange tree, one of the largest in the area.

House 9
1505 35th Street, N.W.

This attractive, spacious townhouse with five bedrooms and five-and-a-half baths is relatively new by Georgetown standards, having been built in 1964 on land (possibly the site of a former stable) that was subdivided from the next door property, a brick mansion that dates from 1852.

Working with Chryssa Wolfe of Hanlon Design Build, the owners have put a bright, airy California stamp on the interior of the house. They painted the plain red-brick exterior a soft almond-bisque color, while keeping the shutters grey.  The former solarium became a cozy family room. [gallery ids="100739,121551,121546,121513,121540,121521,121534,121529" nav="thumbs"]

Hope Connections for Cancer Celebrates Fifth Birthday
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Hope Connections for Cancer Support marked its fifth anniversary at its Celebration of Hope Gala at the World Bank.  Founding board member Bob Fleshner was presented with the Celebration of Hope Award and Louis Weiner, M.D., director of the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, received the Partnership Award. Hope Connections for Cancer Support opened in 2007 in Bethesda as the Wellness Community–Greater Washington, D.C.  It has since had more than 25,000 visits from cancer patients and caregivers who have participated in free support groups, educational workshops, mind/body classes and community programs.  [gallery ids="100741,121554" nav="thumbs"]

Mexican Embassy Hosts Noche de Pasión 2012 Supporters
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As Ambassador and Mrs. Sarukhan hosted supporters of Noche de Pasión 2012 at a special evening for the Washington Ballet’s final program of the season at their residence on Apr. 3, the ambassador cautioned, “Practice your Spanish.” The event co-chaired by Pilar Frank-O’Leary and Isabel de la Cruz Ernst on May 11 will benefit the Hispanic artists and community engagement programs of the Washington Ballet. The ambassador said that giving back to the community was a “no brainer.” [gallery ids="102444,121348,121341,121366,121355,121359" nav="thumbs"]