Merce Cunningham and John Cage's "Ocean," photogrpah by Cameron Wittig

A spotlight on the music, dance theater, and museum and gallery events coming to the Univeristy of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus.

Dance Transitions
As the 2008-09 Northrop Dance Season opens with the final staging of Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s “Ocean,” so will the season usher in the end of an era in Northrop history.

Minnesota native Benjamin Johnson begins his appointment as director of concerts and lectures, a post held by Dale Schatzlein from 1985 to 2006, when he died unexpectedly on a bicycling trip. And when the dance season concludes with the return of the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg in April, Northrop Auditorium will close for three years for renovation.  According to Steven Rosenstone, vice president for scholarly and cultural affairs at the University, the renovation will include improving acoustics, sight lines, and seating to create a “dynamic state-of-the-art cultural and academic center that is central to the life of the campus and that serves the people of Minnesota.”

Johnson takes his post at Northrop after 14 years as director of education and audience development at the University Musical Society at the University of Michigan. He anticipates bringing “an exciting new vision to the Northrop program.” But first, he’s enthusiastic about the season he’s stepping into.

The Northrop Dance Season, Johnson says, “is definitely world class featuring one of the most important arts events in the international arts scene: Merce Cunningham’s ‘Ocean’ at the Rainbow Quarry. Arts aficionados will be flying in from all over the world to see this major event, and it is certainly not to be missed.”

“Ocean” was the culmination of a half-century of collaboration between iconic choreographer Merce Cunningham and his life partner, avant-garde composer John Cage. But Cage never saw the work performed as he originally envisioned it: outdoors and in the round. Cage died in 1992. “Ocean” was performed in 1994 and 1996 but in large indoor spaces. The final performance of the 90-minute, no-intermission “Ocean” will take place—as Cage intended—at the bottom of a

Carmina Burana, photograph by Bruce Monk

quarry, an hour northwest of the Twin Cities in Waite Park, Minnesota, September 11 through 13.

The audience will encircle the 19 dancers on the quarry floor. A 150-piece orchestra (including the St. Cloud Symphony Orchestra) will be positioned around the quarry and perform Andrew Culver’s orchestral score (inspired by Cage’s initial but unfinished composition). Independent, avant-garde filmmaker Charles Atlas will document the event during a five-camera shoot. (The performance is a co-commission of Northrop, Walker Art Center, Benedicta Arts Center at the College of Saint Benedict, and Dance Umbrella.)

The Northrop Dance Season next welcomes newcomer Compañia Flamenco Jose Porcel, a fiery company led by the charismatic, Seville-born Porcel. The October 7 concert will include Porcel’s contemporary interpretations of traditional flamenco dances, including the taranto (a sensual duet) and a rondeña (a light and harmonious women’s section). Live flamenco music spurs on the robust dancing.

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet, last seen at Northrop in 1977, returns November 8 with a youthful cast performing resident choreographer Mauricio Wainrot’s popular “Carmina Burana,” based on German composer Carl Orff’s famous score. Between 1935 and 1936, Orff set to music 24 poems from a medieval manuscript collection that was found in 1803 in the Bavarian monastery of Benediktbeuren. Since then, the score has become part of the repertory of countless ensembles, turned into numerous ballets, used in film scores and video games, and recorded by Goth and metal bands. Wainrot’s eclectic choreography is performed inside an industrial set in which translucent panels are framed by metal piping. A more traditional work, still to be selected, will also be on the program.

The fall portion of the Northrop Dance Season concludes with mixed repertory by the legendary Lar Lubovitch Dance Company December 5. For 40 years, Lubovitch has toured his New York–based modern-dance company around the world to popular and critical acclaim. Says Johnson of the season he inherited: “In many respects, it is my dream program. It is this kind of leading-edge program that will make Northrop and the U of M campus a cultural and intellectual focal point in the years to come.”

For “Ocean” tickets, go to www.walkerart.org or call

Osmo Vänskä, musical director of the Minnesota Orchestra, will conduct the School of Music’s choirs and symphony orchestra in the annual Collage Concert. Photograph by Greg Helgeson

612-375-7600. For other Northrop Dance Season performances, visit www.umn.edu/umato or call 612- 624-2345. 

Don't Stop the Music
In 1940, Disney introduced a multichannel audio system with its animated film Fantasia. Called “surround sound,” the system diffused sound throughout the movie theater, encircling the audience in an aural symphony. On October 18, the University of Minnesota’s School of Music will create a similar effect for audiences with its annual Collage Concert at Ted Mann Concert Hall.

Free and open to the public, the 90-minute, nonstop concert includes upwards of 500 faculty and students in an array of configurations performing a spectrum of musical styles. “For us, surround sound means the music comes to you from all angles throughout the hall—from the stage, the balconies, the aisles, the back of the hall,” explains Jerry Luckhardt, interim director of the School of Music. “There isn’t any applause after each piece,” he continues. “The lights come up somewhere in the hall, a group will play, and as soon as that group is finished their lights go off and the next lights come on and another group begins. The order might go from full symphony orchestra on stage to a solo guitar in the balcony, then shift to a marimba quartet on the floor somewhere to a singer stage right—and it just keeps coming.”

In addition, this year’s concert will include the Minnesota Orchestra’s musical director, Osmo Vänskä, conducting the school’s choirs and symphony orchestra in Finnish composer Johan Julius Christian “Jean” Silbeilus’s “Finlandia.” Explains Luckhardt, “We have collaborations with the Minnesota Orchestra on an ongoing basis, and Vänskä really enjoys working with our students. So we thought this is an opportunity for him to conduct a performance with the house absolutely packed full of people.”

The School of Music initiated the annual concerts to “demonstrate the complexities and the total music offerings in the School of Music in one 90-minute program,” Luckhardt says. “Audience members can attend one concert and receive “a collage-like overview of the School of Music. All of the pieces are rather short and exemplify what that medium is about. The offering might range from a gamelan ensemble to a vocal soloist to a symphony orchestra

Osmo Vänskä, musical director of the Minnesota Orchestra, will conduct the School of Music’s choirs and symphony orchestra in the annual Collage Concert. Photograph by Greg Helgeson

to wind bands to guitar quartets. It’s everything we do in the School of Music, in snapshot.”

This year’s concert is also Luckhardt’s last as interim director. In September, David Myers, formerly a professor in the School of Music at Georgia State University, becomes the 11th director of the School of Music at the University of Minnesota.

Luckhardt admits, good-naturedly, that assembling the concert is an organizational nightmare. “Backstage is a real circus. But the concert’s also rather magical in that way,” he adds. “It’s a real team effort on the part of the faculty, staff, and students.” A School of Music staff person, with help from graduate students, produces the event.

While this year’s Collage Concert has a “headliner,” the mega-performance remains a School of Music event. Says Luckhardt: “The main bill is our students.”
The Collage Concert takes place October 18 at 7:30 p.m. at Ted Mann Concert Hall, 2128 Fourth St. S., on the West Bank of the Minneapolis campus. Visit www.music.umn.edu. —Camille LeFevre

Inside a Character's Head
Georg Büchner’s unfinished stage play Woyzeck has tantalized the imaginations of many artists who took it upon themselves to “finish” it. Werner Herzog made a film of the play. Robert Wilson and Tom Waits crafted it into a musical.
Written beginning in 1836, the play is based on the life of Johann Christian Woyzeck, a Leipzig wigmaker and soldier who, while in a jealous rage, murdered his lover and was subsequently beheaded. In Büchner’s telling, Woyzeck is the father of an illegitimate child by his lover and subjects himself to degrading tasks and medical experiments to earn money. Woyzeck’s poverty and exploitation at the hands of the upper class foment his visions, insanity, and murderous impulses. When Büchner died in 1837, the tragedy was mere fragments. But Büchner is credited with creating the first working-class main character in German literature.

In part because of its fractured structure, investigation of madness, and social-justice themes, Woyzeck also appealed to three innovative performance faculty in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Theatre Arts & Dance: Michael Sommers, Luverne Seifert, and Carl Flink. After a six-week workshop with U students last spring, the trio decided to add The Woyzeck Project to the department’s performance docket this fall—but with a twist.

The students’ experimental staging of the play will take place inside Norris Hall gymnasium, where both the women’s athletics program and the dance program originated. The gym was converted to carpeted office cubicles years ago and is now slated for demolition.

The directors called on students from architecture, visual arts, dance, and theater to collaborate on creating “dioramas, peep shows, and tableaux vivants [posed and costumed actors], almost like State Fair booths,” in and around the gym’s cubicles that reflect aspects of the play, explains Sommers, assistant professor in the Department of Theatre Arts & Dance and the Interdisciplinary Program in Collaborative Arts. The students have only cardboard, lumber, and other low-cost materials with which to construct their booths. “The gym is really a studio or laboratory for them to work in,” Sommers says.

The performance won’t have a narrative. Instead, audience members will arrive and then be free to wander in the cavernous, cacophonous space and try to figure out what to do and where to go next. “As they move from booth to booth, see visions, and hear odd sounds, they might find themselves in a disorienting state similar to Woyzeck’s,” Sommers says.

The performance will also include the character of Büchner as a docent-guide of sorts, a choreographed work by Flink, and a circuslike sideshow in the green space outside Norris Hall. “It’ll be a raw, visceral world—quite a contrast to the other U productions with their big sets, heightened design, gorgeous costumes, and regional-theater approach,” Sommers says.

Sommers hopes that “each audience member will piece together the play in their own way and have a singular experience. Our Woyzeck is one of those productions that could fail, but in a really beautiful way. We’re trying to have this be a learning experience for the students that goes beyond just ‘doing a show.’ ”
The Woyzeck Project plays October 10 through 18 at Norris Hall on the East Bank of the Minneapolis campus. Call 612-624-2345 for tickets or visit www.theater.umn.edu.