Arts & Society

Gary Tischler • May 3, 2012

On a windy, cold Friday night in Southwest Washington, a mostly bald middle-aged man and a young, wiry, slight younger man came out of the Arena Stage doors, dwarfed by the glass and wood edifice. Watching them from a distance they were like longtime friends, coming off from a long day’s work, walking within the halo of a weary and mutual satisfaction.

The two men were the actors Edward Gero and Patrick Andrews, who had spent the latter part of the night battling back and forth as the American abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko and a fictionalized young assistant. They yelled at each other, splattering red paint, arguing passionately about art and life in the play “Red,” in what often seems like a life-or-death struggle before an appreciative audience. I couldn’t hear what they were saying and soon their voices receded and they moved from view.

But their voices stayed with me nonetheless, and sometimes I hear them still—the debates about art, the volatility of passionate gobs of words amid flying gobs of paint.

“Yeah, it’s a little like that,” said Gero over coffee at Politics and Prose a few days later. “We’re close, we’re friends. We’ve been doing this a while now, here and in the Goodman Theatre run in Chicago.”

“But it’s still surprising. It’s still remarkably challenging to do this for both of us, and we’re still learning about each other.” Gero said. “Every night is a new experience with theater, but that’s rarely as true as it is in this play. It’s even more true now that we’re here at Arena. Here the audience is in the studio practically, because of the intimacy of the space, which really raises the level of intensity. And with a show like this, it can be exhausting.”

“One night I kicked a bucket of paint over accidentally,” Gero recalled.

When I asked him how he handled the situation onstage he said: “What Rothko would have done. I told him to clean it up.” You think—and more importantly, feel—that this happened, these feelings were expressed, the words unleashed.

And when Rothko and Ken grab paint brushes and buckets and commence to apply a load of red base paint on a mighty blank canvas, tossing paint around like giant swaths of wet spitballs, moving over and under one another, it’s thrilling. You get a real sense of the physicality of the creative process.

“The whole thing is choreographed,” Gero said. “But it’s never the same, it’s tricky, it’s tough, it’s musical and exhausting, it’s sexual. It was my idea to smoke the cigarette afterwards. People get it right away, it’s like a punctuation.”

What the intimacy of Arena’s Kreeger theater creates is a kind of stillness and respect in the audience, because you believe in the reality of the people—and how can you not, with the red and black battling on the canvases, with the elevated, painful verbal arguments.

Not to mention, Washington is something of a Rothko town: the National Gallery installed the Seagram murals in 2010 that figure so strongly in the art-commerce battles of the play, and the Phillips Collection has their famous Rothko room, designed by the actual artist himself to facilitate his meditative, tragic and aggressive paintings.

One of the reasons that Washington is such a great theater town is actors like Gero, who has worked almost nonstop for decades in most of the area’s venues, from the Shakespeare Theatre Company—where he’s been a company mainstay—to Arena, Ford’s, Studio and a host of others. Gero joins a thespian host that includes the likes of Ted van Gruythiesen, Nancy Robinette, Holly Twyford, Rick Foucheoux and others, who have all scaled the heights in DC theater with uncommon versatility and talent over the years.

“It is not easy, but it’s what I love,” he says. “My wife has been an elementary and special education teacher in the DC School District and it’s her love, too. You have to have something you love to do in addition to the family you love, the people you love.”

Family is central in his life. Upon winning a Helen Hayes Award for playing Bolingbroke in “Richard II”—he’s won four Helen Hayes Awards and been nominated 14 times—he dedicated the award to “my father, Sal of Jersey,” in reference to the show’s aging father figure, John of Gaunt. “My dad had passed away that year,” Gero recalled.

“I’ve got nothing on the plate after this right now, which is unusual,” he said. “But I’d love to do ‘Waiting for Godot’ with Stacey Keach somewhere down the line.”

Somewhere, down the line, you suspect he’ll also be visiting the Rothko Room at the Phillips, and spot a daub of red in some shirt he’s wearing.

“Red” has been extended through March 11 at Arena Stage. For more information visit ArenaStage.org

Mary Bird •

Cherished pets knew it was a special evening as they escorted their two footers to the 11th Annual Sugar & Champagne Affair hosted by chef Todd and Ellen Gray and sponsored by Trade Center Management Associates at the Ronald Reagan Building on Feb. 1 to benefit the Washington Humane Society (WHS). Radio host Tommy McFly of 94.7 Fresh FM radio emceed, as guests enjoyed a VIP chef’s Tasting Room with savory bites from such leading restaurants as the Grays’ Equinox and Watershed as well as Restaurant Eve, The Source Brasserie Beck and Kushi. The general reception showcased desserts and champagne. The evening honors WHS law enforcement officers, animal control officers, humane educators and community humane heroes.
[gallery ids="100488,117421,117414,117408,117400,117393,117385,117378,117436,117370,117441,117363,117447,117453,117429" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

The dress code for the 42nd Annual Russian New Year’s Ball, held in the Grand Ball Room at the Mayflower Hotel Jan. 13, was “white or black tie/Russian costume.” Princess Selene Obolensky led the way in the traditional “boyar” pearl-encrusted gala headdress. The evening included entertainment by The Washington Balalaika Society and Sydney’s Orchestra and The Russian Dance troupe. Noting that it was “not Fabergé but very close,” Princess Obolensky presented an award to Raisa Scriabine as a leading “defender of the child.” In thanking everyone who made the evening possible to benefit the “Children of Berezichi,” residing at the Boarding Schools for Special Children in Ulianova and Sosenskaya, Russian Federation, she happily welcomed the fifth generation of family to attend the ball, two-year-old great grandnephew Ronan Obolensky. [gallery ids="102432,121576,121569,121547,121563,121539,121519,121511,121556,121528,121587,121582" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

The 55th Annual International Red Cross Ball drew ambassadors, politicians, military and the very well-heeled to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club Jan. 28. Mary Ourisman, former U.S. ambassador to Barbados, was event chair. Jewelry and medals blazed on the dance floor and in the halls with table designs by Bryan Rafanelli — and music from a Marine Corps quartet and Peter Duchin and his Orchestra. A Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Michele Kessler, three-time chair of the Red Cross Ball. Good sport Trump, by the way, donated $50,000 to the Red Cross, and his hotel group is slated to convert the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue into a luxury hotel and conference center. [gallery ids="100489,117469,117443,117462,117449,117457" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post •

By the door of the entrance into “Pilgrimage,” a new exhibition of photographs by Annie Leibovitz at the American Art Museum, hangs a photograph of the messiest workshop you’ve ever seen. Blanketed in the green, swampy light of an old fluorescent bulb, wires, saws, copper pipes, oil canisters, paint cans, pruning shears, and drills are crammed within every dimension of a wooden worktable, built into the wall against a peeling, dust-caked window. Chairs are covered in such clutter that they are only recognizable by the legs that stretch toward a ground. This is Pete Seeger’s workshop, just off from the log cabin that he built for his family’s home in Cold Spring, New York, in 1949. He has lived there ever since.

But Pete Seeger is conspicuously absent from the photograph. And for Annie Leibovitz to take a picture of a renowned icon without the presence of the individual is, if nothing else, unprecedented.

Throughout “Pilgrimage,” the audience is in the presence of important figures and icons, tied loosely but surely to a collective American-European consciousness. But the figures all lie just beyond the lens. We see a doorway. It is the entrance into Georgia O’Keefe’s New Mexico studio. We see a wicker bed frame. This is the bed that Thoreau slept on at Walden Pond. We see a windowless room bathed in red light. This was Ansel Adams’ darkroom in Carmel, California, where he developed his photographs in the last twenty years of his life. We don’t get but a haunting of Leibovitz’s subjects—all of whom are dead, save Seeger—yet there their presence is engrained deeply within the images, connecting us to the past not through nostalgia, but within the context of our present.

Annie Leibovitz was 21 years old and still in school when her portrait of John Lennon ran on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in January of 1971. By 1973, she was the magazine’s chief photographer. Almost over night, she became a photojournalism sensation, and through the years her camera has captured some of the most recognizable and iconic portraits of our time, revealing her to be among the foremost documentarians of the American social landscape. Her most famous photograph is arguably that of a nude John Lennon cocooned around a black-clad Yoko in 1980—taken five hours before Lennon was shot and killed.

Rather than focusing on her subject’s face, or having them pose with the banal glam of your typical high-profile photo shoot, Leibovitz is known for photographing her subject’s full self, from head to toe, engaged in something beyond the camera, frequently posed amidst objects from their lives.

Herein is perhaps the lead-in to “Pilgrimage.” Leibovitz has divested herself of her subjects all together, to tell their stories with only their significant surroundings. The subjects of her photographs, as with the Pete Seger workshop, are only shown in absence. From a busted television to a hat (Elvis and Lincoln, respectively), from a concert gown to a bedroom wall (Marian Anderson, Virginia Woolf), we only see these people through the objects and places tied to their lives.

The focus of these photographs is still celebrity, in a way. Perhaps “persons of significance” is a better way to say it—you won’t see George Clooney’s liquor cabinet or Angelina’s dirty laundry in this show. You will see Sigmund Freud’s bookshelf, Elvis Presley’s busted television (he had a habit of breaking them, with apparent force), Emily Dickinson’s nightgown, her only surviving dress, and Yosemite Valley, from the same location that Ansel Adams took his archetypal photographs of the landscape throughout the early 20th century.

Leibovitz’s own pilgrimage, which led to this exhibit, began by accident. “I started the project at a difficult time in my life,” she said at a tour of the exhibit on Jan. 24. Two years ago, she explains, she was in the middle of some financial and personal hardships. “I took the kids to Niagra Falls as a day trip. As they were leaning on the rail, I walked up behind them and snapped a photo. It’s a photo that anyone could take—an American snapshot.”

This photo hangs in the exhibition, marking a jumping off point for the journey to come. “I hope that what anyone can get out of this is that we are in a great country, and there is so much to see if you just hit the road. That’s what happened to me.”

Through her exploration, Leibovitz revisited locations repeatedly, letting them lead her to new ones, like a subconscious scavenger hunt. Concord, Massachusetts, for example, was a particularly rich area of discovery. First going there to photograph Walden Pond, she was drawn into the world of Thoreau, which led to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott and her father Bronson. All these figures are represented in some way in the exhibition. One of the Alcott sisters was a mentor to Daniel Chester French, the sculptor who created the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. Leibovitz followed the trail, winding up in French’s studio in western MA, which led her to the National archives, where she found a rare multiple-lens glass pate of a Lincoln portrait. The National Archives led to Gettysburg. This led to Matthew Brady’s studio. And so on.

“I was trying to find a reason to live, places to be inspired,” Leibovitz said. “This is the kind of project that doesn’t end. The show went up, but that doesn’t mean it’s over. I did this to feed my portrait work, to save it. And it did. But there’s no reason I can’t return to this later.”

She also discussed the significance of children to this work: “Hanging this show, I saw children running around the museum. I loved it. So I hung everything low, cluttered the rooms with pictures, for children. The book [accompanying the exhibition] is dedicated to my children. I can’t wait to see a classroom in here, to see what the children think.”

Equally significant to the show are two technical facts regarding Leibovitz’s process. Unlike the work that made her into the presence she is today, none of this work was commissioned. This is Leibovitz’s first personal assignment since she was a student. This is also her first foray into digital photography. She used an array of cameras, starting with a cheap digital number that fit in her pocket, and eventually upgrading to a wide-angle lens with tripod.

“Pilgrimage” is significantly smaller and more intimate than almost anything Leibovitz has ever done. And its audience of museum goers is comparatively more modest than the national and international syndication of the magazines she works with. But Leibovitz is thrilled with the outcome and location of her project. “The Smithsonian is popping right now,” she said. “Doing a lot of great things. I feel very cool being here, so steeped in history.”

“We think we know who people are,” Leibovitz said. “But when you try to really understand someone, you find out how much there is to know,” and perhaps how much we can never know. Through her explorations, however, Leibovitz doesn’t seem to be worried about how well she knows her subjects. Her understanding is on a different level—an interpersonal one, tied to her intellectual roots, her heritage, her family and her sense of self. To put a face to self-discovery is no small feat, especially for someone who has lived her life behind the public spotlight, not in front. This show offers a portrait of a portrait artist and, as it turns out, there is not a face to be seen—just the essence of various selves.

For more information visit [AmericanArt.si.edu](http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2012/leibovitz/)
[gallery ids="100469,115888" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post •

Post-Impressionism is a movement that often diverges the innovations of the collective whole among its individual artists. The painters are known and respected— Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Seurat—but their styles varied wildly and their directions were individually effusive and disparate. They also thrived in the precarious decades between Impressionism and Cubism (roughly 1890 – 1910), two of the most profound, loud and influential art movements of the past 300 years. As such, they are frequently and easily unhinged from their art historical parameters in museum settings.

“Snapshots: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard,” the newest exhibit at The Phillips Collection, deals extensively with the Post-Impressionists, rethinking the movement and redefining everything in its wake. It not only solidifies the distinct and long-term influence of Post-Impressionism, but illuminates the profound artistic impact of a landmark technical innovation from 1888: the Kodak handheld camera.

The amateur camera made it possible for a broader public to capture daily life in snapshots, and in the hands of painters the door was opened to an entirely new understanding of composition, value and spatial relationships that reenergized the artists’ methods and creative vision. “Snapshots” presents works by seven of the first artists to experiment in photography: Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Félix Vallotton, George Hendrik Breitner, Henri Evenepoel and Henri Reviére.

This exhibition is the first of its kind, presenting over 200 photographs along with about 70 paintings, prints and drawings by the artists who took them. We are brought into the world of photography at its inception, and through these artists we see how the Kodak altered the perspective of our cultural lens. Even without a single work by Picasso, Braque or Duchamp, the urgency of cubism to resuscitate the future of painting becomes pertinently clear. We feel just why fine art began moving so quickly, without ever stopping to look back.

Entering the exhibition, you come upon a handful of small paintings by Bonnard. One is a portrait of the artist’s sister and brother-in-law. They sit smoking in a sharp, stark light, and at the bottom of the canvas is a large hand holding a pipe. It comes from outside the canvas, presumably belonging to the artist.

Immediately, we get an understanding of a photo-influenced composition. The figures act as compositional devices rather than subjects. As in a Rothko painting, Bonnard’s family members become strategically placed shapes that support an abstract harmony.

The perspective of the artist’s own hand and pipe is not a view Bonnard would ever have had before his canvas, but only if he put his hand before the camera lens. There is also radical foreshortening of the figures in space, making the painting almost graphic, illustrative or claustrophobic—we are contained in the space with them. This is the cropping and lighting of a photograph.

Sure enough, Bonnard primarily photographed his family and immediate circle of friends at home or during summer days in the countryside, examples of which abound in the exhibit, many strikingly similar to the scene in the painting. The eye of the camera, as it seems, is a contagious and invasive visual filter. It didn’t take even a decade to alter artists’ sense of space.

Walking through the exhibit, these moments reoccur and overlap: we see photographs that look like studies for paintings, paintings that bring together surrounding photographs, sketches and prints filtered through a camera lens. To these artists, photography was still a mimetic medium, used to better understand their paintings—to clarify a perspective, to study the shape of a figure or the dimensional accuracy of a mirror’s reflection.

Photography was initially frowned upon by critics, which made the artist’s reserved about revealing their work with it, which is perhaps why most of these photographs have never before been on exhibit. It is interesting, though, that even within this exhibition we start to see a certain superfluity of the paintings, not the photographs. However beautiful the paintings are, the act of painting what is captured in the photograph becomes redundant.

Breitner’s photographs, among the others in the show, are in fact more compelling than his paintings. A pioneer of street photography, he focused on the city as a visual resource: his street scenes of carriages, canals, sand carters and mill workers, construction and urban bustle, are some of the most moving images on display.

In the work of Vuillard, the marriage of painting and early photography becomes almost seamless. His photographs of family and friends, posing in the mundane theater of quiet existence, sit alongside his paintings of domestic moments. They inform one another, communicating to its audience the artist’s world and vision. The works in this room serve also as nice companions to similar Vuillards currently on view in the National Gallery of Art’s “Small French Paintings” exhibit.

“Snapshots” comes at a unique time, as Kodak files for bankruptcy and digital photography poises to monopolize the industry, leaving traditional film with almost no place in contemporary culture. But just as oil paints took the place of tempera and egg-based paints in the 15th century, the takeover of digital photography does not negate the impact of the precedent set by film. The introduction of photography altered our perceptions of our surroundings, but it took a group of painters to reveal the potential of its beauty.

Exhibiting the works among this subset of Post-Impressionists showcases an important development within a movement that is often difficult to pin down, concentrating the significance of the exhibition as well as the unity of these artists. These works seem in many ways like the sparks that set off the explosion of 20th century art. And yet here they hang, delicate, pensive and ethereal, as if standing on the precipice of an endless free-fall without thinking to look down.

“Snapshots: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard,” is on view at The Phillips Collection through May 6, 2012. For more information visit PhillipsCollection.org

Mary Bird •

No stranger to Washington through his collaboration with The Washington Ballet, Trey McIntyre brought members of his Boise, Idaho-based company to the Katzen Arts Center at American University Jan. 10 to share his creative process. The host committee included Kay Kendall, Eve Lilley and Rhona Wolfe Friedman, who watched enthusiastically as the choreographer and two stellar dancers created on the spot. The artist said of his work, “I seek unconscious narrative.” As one of four American dance companies chosen by the U.S. Department of State and Brooklyn Academy of Music to participate in Dance Motion USA, the troupe will tour to China, South Korean, the Philippines and Vietnam this spring. [gallery ids="100475,116514,116460,116507,116469,116500,116477,116493,116486" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

The first anniversary of the Tunisian Revolution and Arab Spring was celebrated at the Kennedy Center on Jan. 9 with the performance of Hannibal Barca, the symphony composed by former interim Tunisian Minister of Finance Jaloul Ayed. The historic gala evening brought together the new leaders of democratic Tunisia, dignitaries from throughout the Middle East and North Africa, American and multilateral officials, and business and finance leaders for a truly heartwarming event. Ann Stock spoke on behalf of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The former minister equated the courage of the young Hannibal so many centuries ago to that of the young Tunisian vegetable vendor who by his self-immolation lit the spark that started the “Arab awakening.” Twenty-five Tunisian musicians joined members of the Washington orchestra. It was an extremely uplifting ceremony of which Tunisians can be justly proud.

Mary Bird •

Disappointment that mezzo-soprano Susan Graham had a last-minute cancellation of her afternoon Kennedy Center Washington Performing Arts Society concert Feb. 4 was softened when Bonnie McElveen-Hunter informed Daren Thomas, WPAS’s director of leadership and institutional gifts, that the post-performance cocktail reception at her stunning Georgetown residence was “always on.” When Thomas presented her with a bouquet, she quipped, “Am I the entertainer?” As a former ambassador to Finland and chairman of the American Red Cross, she said her humanitarian commitment had led her to realize that “the arts lift us up.” She thanked WPAS president and CEO Neale Perl for his leadership in expressing the “generosity of spirit through music.” He, in turn, said that over his ten years with the WPAS, despite cancellations, “Our track record is very good” and urged everyone to hold onto their tickets because “Susan Graham will be back.” Guests listened raptly to Samantha McElhaney, who sang her signature roles from “Porgy and Bess,” concluding with a cherished spiritual. The hostess invited guests to explore her wonderful home and welcomed Ambassador of Finland Ritva Koukku-Ronde. [gallery ids="100486,117350,117317,117343,117324,117337,117332" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Outside of the mad scene in “Lucia Di Lammermoor” or climbing Mount Everest every year to sing your favorite aria, there are few bigger challenges in opera for a singer than singing and acting Violetta in the last act of Verdi’s “La Traviata”— okay, the whole opera, but definitely the last act.

The noted American coloratura soprano Elizabeth Futral, she of the pitch-black locks and voice rich with rangy emotions does it on a regular basis almost every year, it’s like a yearly to-do list that includes “sing Violetta somewhere in the world.”

If Futral doesn’t own what is a legendary part — Maria Callas was famous for it — lock, stock and legend, she is at least a major, controlling shareholder in the lore and history of the part. She was here at the Washington National Opera four years ago and held her audiences spellbound in the famous last act in which the consumptive consort Violetta sings her way through nearly an hour-long death scene and commands the stage with a powerful voice and a frail but unforgettable beauty and shimmering physicality. It’s like watching a butterfly expiring in a burst of musical longing.

“Obviously, the part doesn’t get old for me,” Futral said during a telephone interview. “I find something new, some additional challenge, a feeling in her as does my voice. And it’s gratifying that people remember it so.”

But now she’s back at the WNO, opening the second half of the season performing as Fiordiligi in director Jonathan Miller’s production of Mozart’s stylish, sophisticated “Cosi Fan Tutte.” Unlike the long-standing relationship with “La Traviata,” this is a first for Futral. “I don’t know, I’ve never quite felt right for the part or I wasn’t ready for it,” she said. “But I think it’s time now. And I love the setting for this, the contemporary outlook. Mozart, to me, his music always looks to the future, it’s so rich with so many layers.”

On the surface, “Cosi” would look to be one of those oh-so-clever and funny opera romcoms, full of game-playing, deception, implausible and romantically dangerous and opportunities for intricate singing and arias. I mean the plot alone is enough to make you dizzy: two soldier buddies, married to two sisters, always a little competitive with each other, get into a discussion about women (the title is a variant on the theme of men’s inability to understand them after they get them). Each feels his own wife is rock-solid faithful and true. So, fools that they are, they make a bet that each can seduce the other’s wife. First one to seduce wins the bet.

“It sounds a little silly and light, and it is very comic on the whole,” Futral said. “But with Mozart, musically, nothing is simple. It’s almost as if some of the arias and the music undermines the plot, it’s layered, beautiful, rich but complicated, sometimes at odds with what’s going on. And the arias are a real challenge to sing because Fiordiligi is a complicated woman. She’s the older sister, and she is formidable.”

You can be pretty sure that the complications of the role will shine through, because Futral, a wonderful singer, is also noted for her acting ability, not always a top priority among divas and stars.

She’s also up to a challenge. She likes contemporary opera and new classical music, and she’s performed in an opera version of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” directed by Andre Previn. “I love new music,” she said. “You have to find a way to live in the present professionally.”

In the opera world, she is something of a rock star, although she hardly behaves like one — no diva doings to report here. She and her husband Steven White, a conductor, live in a secluded house in Roanake, Va., although they don’t spend as much time together as they like.

“Roanake is just far enough away from here that I don’t go home,” she said. “And besides, Steven is conducting for the New York City Opera right now.”

That would be a production of “La Traviata.”

“We have similar careers,” she continued. “We live professionally in the same world. So, that’s rather nice. You don’t have to explain things when you talk about what happened during a performance. Not that we always agree about things. But we’re both successful, both passionate about what we do.”

Traviata. Check. Lucia. Check. Cosi, check.

Mt. Everest.

Nope.

Not yet. [gallery ids="100499,118112" nav="thumbs"]