We knew Spoleto season was upon us last month when people started phoning in Lou Reed sightings a few days ahead of the opening ceremony, and though the former Velvet Underground frontman accompanied wife Laurie Anderson to her official festival house party Wednesday night, he seems generally to have kept a low profile.
But Anderson and Reed had a surprise planned for the audience Thursday night (the second of Anderson’s three Spoleto shows). News of some kind of special guest reached the newsroom at about 3 p.m., and through some mojo I’ll never understand I wound up with a ticket to what appeared to be an otherwise sold-out Anderson performance at Memminger.
The surprise? Near the end of the show, Anderson announced that it was her 61st birthday and called Reed up on stage for a rendition of “The Lost Art of Conversation.” It turns out this isn’t the first time Reed has joined Anderson for a performance of this song from the Homeland cycle, but for what it’s worth, I thought Reed added an electric growl to the piece as it wore on, and for just a moment the five players transformed the relatively minimalistic score into what seemed like a sudden, queasy, blues-rock hallucination, which isn’t exactly an everyday sound when one of your five instruments is an accordion. It surged and faded, but it seemed spontaneous and surprising.
What most would have shocked Spoleto’s first audiences in 1977? That there would be a regional African American country music trio (mostly guitar, banjo and fiddle but also kazoo, snare drum and jug) featured prominently and welcomed warmly during the 2008 festival?
Or that this trio’s first festival performance would occur exactly one night after the first African American managed to clinch the nomination for president of a major political party?
Would the last generation of Charlestonians have raised their collective eyebrows more about a group of black Spoleto performers talking about how their grandparents religiously watched “Hee-Haw” and how they eagerly anticipated their debut at the Grand Old Opry? Or that a black politician with less than four years experience on the national stage defeated a white candidate from the Democratic party’s establishment thanks in part to his overwhelming win in South Carolina?
Maybe the strangest thing is simply this: Sen. Barack Obama most recently appeared in Charleston in January at the College of Charleston’s Cistern, the very same place where the Carolina Chocolate Drops rocked a Spoleto crowd Wednesday night.
One additional coincidence: The temperature was in the 80s both times.
This evening I filed my assigned story on Laurie Anderson, whose musical piece Homeland has its Spoleto USA opening Wednesday night. Not an easy story to write, I told editor Stephanie Harvin, because interviewing an artist like Anderson doesn’t make you want to go write prose — it makes you want to respond to her enigmas with enigmas of your own.
Am I serious or bemused? Or just coy? Well, I’d say, you decide, and then I’d skate away on two blocks of melting ice.
I spent the morning reading about Anderson, watching Anderson’s videos and listening to Anderson’s music, and I have to say I enjoyed “Only an Expert,” a portion of Homeland, more than any of her better-known material from the 1980s. It’s clearly about some big ideas, the kinds of ideas you’d like to talk about if you’re interested in culture and society and politics and art. Very cool, very contemporary stuff.
Only here’s the rub: If you could have that conversation (and when you’re dealing with someone with the celebrity of Anderson, as a practical matter that’s a privilege you must to earn), would it take you any closer to the subject?Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been running caption contests online and in the print edition now since March 2007, but this is our first contest to be Spoleto-themed and cross-posted on two blogs. Vote for your favorite, and read the rest of the entries here.
Sharon makes her debut behind the wheel of the “big rig” Penske rental and nothing can stop her… except that pesky emergency brake. The car seat confusion continues, and then it’s off to a Spoleto show and back to Lance Hall for the Piccolo premiere of K. Brian Neel’s ‘Vaud Rats.’
PREVIOUSLY:
EPISODE 1: PURE cofounders Rodney Lee Rogers and Sharon Graci start their day with their two youngest daughters.
EPISODE 2: Actors and family members pitch in as stage hands to construct PURE’s new theater space.
Since I’ve been telling a video story about the tribulations of the currently nomadic PURE Theatre, it just made sense to me to complete the set by attending the two productions they’re currently presenting at Lance Hall, in the middle of the cemetery at Circular Church. It was The Tragedian at 4 p.m., and Vaud Rats at 7:30…
The crew — including family members drafted for the effort — assembles at Circular Church downtown, and the unloading and construction of the new theater space begins.
No matter what their roles on stage, everyone becomes a laborer when PURE is between productions, from respected actor (and PURE company manager) R.W. Smith to the young cast and crew of “Eurydice,” which staged its final performance the night before.
Rodney Lee Rogers and Sharon Graci juggle the physical labor, the direction of the set-up and the parenting of two young daughters. But the overworked crew’s most daunting task might just be doing math in their heads in front of a rolling camcorder.
Still ahead: Sharon’s first turn behind the wheel of the “big rig” Penske rental truck…
I’ve run a weekly caption contest over at my Fun & Games blog now for more than a year now, and this week’s version (which will appear in Friday’s print edition) is Spoleto-related. Since I blog at both places, I figured I’d cross-post it here to give a slightly different audience a chance to jump in.
The rules are simple: You write as many captions as you wish, you send them to me (conover@postandcourier.com) with the subject line “CAPTION CONTEST.” I publish your entries as comments on the blog, and then pick five finalists at 5 p.m. on Monday. I tally the votes at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, and then write up the winners for next Friday’s Fun & Games section.
I met the founders of PURE Theatre about four years ago through a newspaper assignment and I’ve been an admirer of their work ever since. They’ve got four plays in this year’s Piccolo Festival (Eurydice, Vaud Rats, The Tragedian, and Cloud Tectonics), and that’s a lot for any small company, but there’s one thing that makes that number even more remarkable: PURE Theatre no longer has a theater.
I bumped into Rodney Lee Rogers outside the Gaillard a week ago and asked him how they were handling the logistics of running a homeless theater company with a busy schedule… on top of running an enormous family (Rogers is married to PURE co-founder Sharon Graci, and they have two young children in addition to her three teenagers from a previous marriage). One thing led to another, and on Tuesday I showed up on James Island a little after 8:30 to begin following Rodney and Sharon through their day.
It’s a glimpse of what it means to make demanding professional theater work in a small market, but it’s also a fairly funny glimpse at a talented family that’s adapted to an unusual life on the run.
I’ve run a weekly caption contest over at my Fun & Games blog now for more than a year now, and this week’s version (which will appear in Friday’s print edition) is Spoleto-related. Since I blog at both places, I figured I’d cross-post it here to give a slightly different audience a chance to jump in.
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