Deborah Slater Dance Theater piece 'Private Life' premieres at ODC Theater, December 11-14, 2014

My words, not music, are providing the text for the bulk of Deborah Slater Dance Theater piece 'Private Life' which premieres at ODC Theater,  December 11-14, 2014.
'Private Life' explores the unique bonds, loyalties and rifts born of the contradictions of the military experience set on a human scale. Private life — military and civilian — implies an intimacy based on the sharing of exclusive knowledge, experience and shared codes of conduct.  How do our private beliefs about morality, honor, etc. lead us to conduct ourselves, and how does this conduct steer us toward or away from one another?
DSDT's 'Private Life' at ODC Theater, 3153 17th Street SF CA 94110
December 11-14, 2014
8 pm shows Thursday - Saturday, 2 pm show on Sunday

Always...Patsy Cline in Alameda

Belton & Etzel

Pre-show entertainment

The acclaimed musical Always...Patsy Cline show is now playing at Altarena Playhouse here in Alameda.  We saw Always last Friday night after perforing a short pre-show set at the theater and can say it's wow. Margaret Belton completely owns the starring role of Patsy, and her co-star Julia Etzel will make you laugh and cry in the role of Patsy's friend Louise. Plus there's a bang-up house band that backs Margaret/Patsy on more than 25 classic country songs a la I Fall to Pieces, You're Cheating Heart, and Crazy. The subplot is how well these songs hold up. A great song really is timeless.
 Grab a ticket if you can.   http://www.altarena.org/

Off-the-Grid Entertainment: Alejandro Escovedo's SF house concert and All Terrain Theater's Women in Solodarity showcase

It wasn't that big of a surprise to see last week's East Bay Express feature a story about  'Living Room Stages' on its front page. The rise in private, alternative performance spaces is a phenomena we're well acquainted with and greatly applaud, both as performers and audience members. Some of my favorite shows this year have been at non-traditional spaces (Treebones, Self & Soul Center, The Monkey House) and two of the three performances I saw this past weekend were in alternative spaces. Friday night was all about an Alejandro Escovedo (!)  house concert in SF, while Sunday afternoon was occupied with All Terrain Theater's annual showcase 'Women in Solodarity,' likewise in a private Berkeley space.
The audio experience in each was pristine and the audience well-mannered and intimate — folks mingled pre-show and during intermission and listened attentively during the show. In other words, the experience was completely about connecting to the artist and the work and the community.
I felt extremely privileged to get to see and hear Escovedo with about 75 other avid listeners at the KC Turner presented show. KC is a tireless house-concert producer (and music presenter in general) and the Escovedo show was a real coup. In a revelatory hour-and-a-half of music, Escovedo sang a selection of his songs representing the breadth of his career, from 5 Hearts Breaking to Chelsea Hotel to San Antonio Rain to Sabor a Mi.  In between, he discussed the genesis for each song as well as his early days in punk rock, his family's move from Texas to California, his evolution as songwriter, and touring, going on the road "with $50, a roasted chicken and a bag of weed." The audience, needless to say, hung on every word.
Escovedo himself is new to the small, solo house show experience but said he enjoyed the relative ease (no band and extensive gear to worry about) and planned on doing more.  Lucky us!

While I've seen plenty of musical house concerts, I'd yet to see a professional play in a private residence until Sunday. A friend, playwright Elizabeth Flanigan, had a short in this year's All Terrain Theater's showcase, the theme of which was "Digital Love."  All Terrain "specializes in presenting theater in non-traditional spaces, including a baby store, residences, laundromats, a record store, and traditional theaters" and Sunday's juxtaposition of venue setting and theater subject was noteworthy in itself. The show's venue was a converted downstairs in a private Central Berkeley home, while the showcase's theme called for seven different solo shorts depicting scenes about our often conflicted relationship with technology and the Internet. The playwrights covered a lot of online terrain: a woman addicted to her iPhone, another mulling the knowledge of Google, troubling aspects of surveillance, the damage done by drones and the convenience and pitfalls of online dating. Well-written and well-acted, I left both wanting to unplug that much more often and go to more theater.

Rain & Magik

It was the Bicentennial year, 1976, and the driest California year of the century was wrapped up in red, white and blue. All year, it seemed, we were celebrating the nation's birthday by stitching up Betsy Ross era bonnets, drawing flags on whatever surface we could find and studying up on our founding fathers. I remember collecting the special Bicentennial quarters featuring the colonial drummer and how our school teacher solemnly detailed the importance of the Declaration of Independence. By the day of the big celebration, the 4th of July, though, summer was as marked by the drought as it was patriotism.  As a kid, the drought was a curiosity as much for the concern expressed by adults as it was by the strangeness of not being able to get relief from the heat by running through sprinklers. We easily fished trout out of puddles that once qualified as the local creek, we let the lawn go,  had less fruit on our trees and reduced the fireworks celebration to some sparklers. But while it had lasting repercussions, that dry spell was only  a year. Time went speeding ahead, the rainclouds returned, and soon we were back to contending with flood years (1982). Living with extremes was growing up in California.
Like everything, extremes are relative, and as familiar as it is, in many ways, our current drought is dissimilar to that of the 1970s. The California Weather Blog has a comprehensive comparison of what's going on now vs. then.
So how welcome it was to wake up to the sound of rain on Sunday. How magical it seemed again for clouds to form and drop water, rinsing the air, rinsing the streets, cleaning off the car we haven't washed to add to our 20% reduction of water use. Most of all, it just felt good. I threw on a rain jacket ran/walked to my favorite cafe, not caring I was getting wet for the sheer joy of needed water received.
Speaking of magic, we went to the Magik*Magik Orchestra 5-year Anniversary Concert at The Fox in Oakland on Friday. A celebration of the amazing work of orchestra founder and director Minna Choi, who continues to innovate and expand the sonic landscape with her "made-to-order orchestra for artists and creatives."  
The concert featured a whose-who of Bay Area and beyond indie music acts (ala John Vanderslice, Rogue Wave, The Dodos) who've employed the orchestra for their recordings (Magik*Magik is the house orchestra for Vanderslice's Tiny Telephone studio) or otherwise performed with the orchestra, as well as the also stupendously-amazing Pacific Boys Choir. Highlights of a night of sonic excellence were performances by The Lonely Trees' John Van Deusan (below)and Diana Gameros. But really, the night belonged to Minna and her already-incredible body of work.  Wowza.

Google, The Creative Class & Keeping It Real

I just finished reading "What Would Google Do" by Jeff Jarvis and as I said in a previous post, I think it maybe a must-read of our times. Outlining how Google has not only changed but created many of the rules of current media, information, and business, a given of the brave new world it portrays is how much content is replicable, remixable and readily available. The fact that media no longer belongs to 'the creative class' alone is noteworthy. While this trend is healthy (I do believe expression should be free and generally makes for happier people to boot) it can be a bit sobering for those painters, musician's, writers and other fine artists whose lifeblood is tactile, audible and live, both in the creative and performative act.
Jarvis's book wasn't about the 'creative class,' and he only mentions it in passing; however, his reference reminded me how some of the basics of the value of art & art-making may get lost as we spend more and more time online. While much of his book is devoted to how social media enables once isolated communities to find one another (provided they've got online access and the ability to get some content online), and then organize, it leaves out how much organization precedes content creation, and what that process requires. You can capture and document a moment but you can't replicate one, and creation is a series of irreplicable moments.

In my experience, much of the challenge in creating something of value is keeping the faith through the amount of time it takes to hone a craft, which is rarely an immediate process. The payoff, the gold so to speak, of that demanding process, is the real-live transactional relationship. I'm not talking so much about money (though equally necessary to survival) rather than the transcendent moment creation sparks, whether that's a meeting of minds or uplift of spirit. That is, while I'm a fan of YouTube, I've yet to get shivers up my spine or have my soul touched by watching a video, like I have had at a live performance, in a studio or at a museum. The visceral experience of sound vibration or light-bulb comprehension of compositional technique that comes with viewing the individual brushstrokes of a painting have no equal. YouTube is educational & definitely valuable, but a living song, actual painting, or simply pen put to paper is relational, and I'd say necessary to health.

So, life in the Mission District is getting me back to several grassroots community centers that are working from the ground up and keeping its creative pulse beating. Volunteering at Pirate Cat Cafe & Radio, a community & volunteer run radio station and espresso bar a few blocks from home, turned me on to several events & performances. Within the space of a couple of hours, I got a preview of a show by songwriter Holcombe Waller that is running at Dance Mission Theater, chatted with author John Law (& co-founder of Burning Man) who has a new book of short stories out, and heard how RonKat Spearman defines funk (beer & cereal figure into this as much as groove). I'd already planned to attend the Goddess of Harmony show at the Great American Music Hall, featuring Valerie Orth (with whom I'm sharing several shows in Austin during SXSW) tonight. Amid all this, last week, I ran into someone on the bus, musician Mark Growden, who was one of the first artists I met upon my return to the Bay Area more than a decade ago, and one made to see live. On Wednesday, he played at Climate Theater, yet another small, community supported venue devoted to excellence in theater and music. Sitting in the intimate theater—where he held an audience rapt while singing his faith & desire drenched lyrics and alternately played accordion and baritone sax — it was clear Growden would not likely have been able to polish his mix of soul, blues, folk and cabaret to such a burnished sheen anywhere else but on the stage. Genius takes time, and don't get me wrong, Google understands and certainly has plenty of genius, but we'd be poorer people without the many necessary on-the-ground creative processes—be they face-to-face conversations, jams, performances— that keep us human. The very acts that lead to the desire to share the experience — in person OR online. Perhaps after reading this, you'll Google 'live local music' in your town or city?

Karen Hildebrand: The Newness of "The Old In-and-Out"

I first met poet, journalist and editor Karen Hildebrand 10 years ago at a writing workshop high in the Colorado Rockies. A few months later, I re-met her in San Francisco and have been keeping up with her work ever since. Now boasting credits in Fourteen Hills, Southern Humanities Review & Slipstream (among many other publications), her two-woman show "The Old In and Out" premieres at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York (where she now lives & works as VP of editorial for a publisher of dance magazines) on January 11, 2009.

DC You've a new performance piece. Can you talk about how your poetry evolved into a stage production?

KH It helps to be friends with theater people. "The Old In-and-Out" was my friend Kat Georges' idea. She published my poetry chapbook, One Foot Out the Door, and knows my body of work. Then she heard Madeline read her poetry. Kat called me up and said there's a poet whose work is amazingly compatible with yours. Would you be interested in doing a two-woman show? Of course, I thought she meant some kind of joint reading.

DC What has been challenging? What has kept you going?

KH The easy part was meeting Madeline and falling in love with her work. Kat suggested that each of us show up with narrative poems—maybe some that involve a man—and we'd see what happened. We ended up with some 20 poems that formed a narrative arc. Kat put them into an order and Madeline and I each wrote a couple of new things to fill in gaps.

It wasn't until maybe the third rehearsal that it dawned on me that this wouldn't be a poetry reading where I could hide behind my reading glasses and a piece of paper. I would have to act.

I was intensely uncomfortable with that. What Kat wanted me to do felt like miming my lines. I thought it trivialized the work. So she lied to me. She said we had to start by exaggerating and later the pantomime would drop out. Well. Not only did the mime not drop out, but the gestures and movements got larger and now I'm doing characters in different voices.

I'm still intensely self-conscious, but we're way past the point of no return. I have to forget myself and do my best for the good of the work and my partners. I can't let my partners down.

DC How does your work change (or not) knowing you'll be performing it?

KH When I'm selecting work to read in public, I go for what's easy to hear--language people can get on first reading. Colorful imagery, story telling. Some humor. And then there's always the poem you remove from the stack when you see your boss is in the audience.

But for "The Old In-and-Out" I was simply thinking about what poems would be a good match for Madeline's in subject or tone. Kat suggested changing a word here and there or adding a line for better rhythm. We decided early on to remove the titles because it interrupted the flow.


I think that none of us realized the full dramatic potential of the work. Maybe Kat did--she's a gifted theater director. She saw parallels and possibilities in our work we didn't know existed.

DC: Can you tell what the dramatic impact of the piece is for the audience? Is this piece hopeful or?

KH There's definitely a dramatic arc--not as pronounced as a more traditional play, or a movie where every emotion is manipulated by music or visually. The play is about the search for love on one's own terms. What these two particular women seem to find is loss and disappointment. They do find resolution. Is it hopeful? I hope that's what comes through. I hope our audience feels the impact, but it's subtle--this is poetry, after all, and not slam poetry that gets a crowd all worked up. But we haven't yet performed the entire piece for an audience, so I really don't know.

DC Is your poetry writing process or approach changing as you work on this theater piece?

KH I still face writing in the same way--trying to describe an image or an experience in an evocative way. It's all about getting words onto the page and how they look on the page. What's changed is that I'm a better reader. I'm more comfortable in front of a room and I'm able to modulate my voice better.

DC Who or what/where do you look to/go to for inspiration?

KH For me the act of writing poetry is where it's at. Time disappears and I make amazing discoveries. Performing--even if it's only a reading behind a podium--requires something completely different.

The actor Anthony Zerbe once staged a poetry reading at Theater Artaud in San Francisco. I was completely taken with the dramatic possibilities. He gave a workshop the next day--ever since, I've wanted to be a better interpreter of my own work. But for me the performing is all in service to the words.


For "The Old In-and-Out," I think of Meryl Streep. I heard her read poetry once and it came to life--the way her eyes sparkled and her face glowed. Wouldn't it be great if like Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues, -- by the way got its start at Cornelia Street on the very stage where we performed "The Old In-and-Out" in December-- Meryl Streep were to eventually take over my part?