With Spoleto wrapped, I’m left with a blur of memories, impressions and observations on the festival. Here are just a few of them.
An audience member filming Harvard Sailing Team’s opening night with her cellphone, distracting the people sitting behind her (including me) as she emailed the hilarious sketches to her friends…
Oversized patrons at the Chapel Theatre, trying to squeeze into the small seats. Some of the grossest guests had to ride side saddle.
Rodney Lee Rogers sitting patiently behind a small curtain for 45 minutes, the audience gathering around him before The Tragedian.
Two old dears I met at the first performance of A Devil Inside who’d been to so many shows that they couldn’t remember what they’d seen the night before, and started arguing about it. The festival had been running for two days.
The miserable actors in This War is Live who were fed up with the show and its technical hiccups… one complained about his simplistic character, while another called the whole experience “torturous.” He should have counted himself fortunate – he wasn’t sitting in the audience…
Sitting next to two of the playwrights of Under the Lights: 10×10 – and trying to make mental review notes without making them feel uncomfortable…
Jay Clifford courageously performing at the American Theatre despite suffering from some debilitating lurgy. After the first night, he conked out in his truck… on the second night, his manager Vance McNabb picked up his bug. They put on a great show, they’re both feeling better now and they’re no longer contagious (I hope).
Watching rehearsals with Chen Shi-Zheng, director of Monkey: Journey to the West… and being invited to look at the aftermath of The Great War after Hotel Modern’s show was over. I witnessed chaos on a model train scale.
One of my favorite elements of the festival, though, was bumping into the various local and national theatre performers, artists and filmmakers who collaborate to help make the festival function. Without their hard work and the overwhelming enthusiasm of the audience, there’d be no festival… thanks to them all.
There’s two more videos from Geoff to come, here’s one of them - some quick clips from the Piccolo closing ceremony on Saturday.
Who hasn’t heard of “The Have Nots!” ??? Its seems they are everywhere…including all over this year’s festival, calling their shows “Piccolo Fringe” and “Piccolo Cheap Laughs”. Last night I got to see the latter in the last running of “Big Dicktionary” (” Stars Bar”; American Theatre) put on by funny men Timmy Finch and John Brennan, who not only hung out greeting every single audience member as they strode past with their tickets and beer in hand, but afterwards offered up an invite to anyone interested in drinking with them (”So…uh…we like to drink…“).
Sitting on a plush over sized blue couch with their comrade, fellow “Have Not”, Andy, and “Have Not in Training”, Meaghan, I realized how much of a family these guys really are. It isn’t all about the laughs. Its about performing, learning from, and supporting the whole troupe.
“Big Dicktionary”, I learned quickly, was entitled as so because the entire show was based on words randomly selected from a (guess?) big dictionary. Ahem, and please note the spelling. I was simply amazed at how two people could keep an audience in an uproar over the words (in order) Physiological Psychology, Quasar, and Emissary.
Favorite quotes:
“I was down at Eric Clapton’s place in Jamaica where its okay to smoke reefer…just as long as it’s not heroine.”
“Here at Outback we offer the ‘Dingo’ (drink)…it’ll kill your baby.”
A theme throughout the entire show was the significant discovery of the irreversible ailment caused by drinking “Dingos”: Thinking Through Your Thighs (which also in turn causes talking through them as well). Don’t ask…I wouldn’t do it justice.
Best parts?
Eight people arriving late, being put on the spot, having imaginary roses strewn at their feet, and watching Timmy and John recount for them the entire show thus far…in fast-forward (it involved several fabulous impressions of the space monkey who’s head exploded and later was transfered through a telescope, “Coco”)
A standing ovation and the “first ever experienced” improv encore for Timmy and John, rightly deserved because I think they possibly played 15 different characters each, interchangeably, and with great gusto.
If you can’t fit in any laughs in the remaining few days of Piccolo, don’t forget that Theatre 99 regularly hosts improv. Check them out at: www.thehavenots.com
Marc Bamuthi Joseph put on an impressive show over two dates at the Emmett Robinson last week. His poetic speech and movement was combined with hip-hop music, conversational “travel diary” monologues, video interviews shot by Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi and a large moving lighting rig choreographed by James Clotfelter.
Yet for a really intense experience, I went to Bamuthi’s two hour workshop at the Avery Research Center, part of a free “Spoleto at the Avery” program” that ran last week.
At the Emmett Robinson Theatre, Bamuthi shared the stage with all those bells and whistles. In the workshop, there were no such distractions. The performer’s work was a lot more powerful in the intimate classroom environment, and he got to show another side to his work – he mentors teen writers through a “Youth Speaks” literary arts organization.
The workshop was part writing class, part dance-off. Bamuthi began with a demonstration of what he does, switching from hip-hop speech to regular talk about his partner’s pregnancy and a planned natural birth. As he spoke he moved, creating visual images with his physical being, his expressions and his breathing.
Last night drummer/performer Tommy Shepherd had his flock squirming in their seats as he roved around the Emmett Robinson auditorium, asking them questions with microphone in hand. he was warming up the audience - or cooling it off - before the his cohort Marc Bamuthi Joseph came on stage.
As far as audience participation went, the audience questions were the farthest Bamuthi’s production of the break/s went. As he danced, conversed and poeticized across the boards, he created an incredible impression of a down-to-earth guy with uncanny abilities in discourse and movement.
He says he’s a frequent visitor of Planet Hip-Hop. That would explain his otherwordly skills. But he’ll be workshopping with mere mortals today at 5-7 p.m., part of the Avery Center’s free series of classes and panels.
The Avery is a research center for African-American history and culture at 125 Bull Street, downtown Charleston. Tomorrow, the center will host a panel discussion on the Amistad court case. For more information on either of these events, call the Spoleto team on 843.579.3100.
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.
Today, I took inAn Afternoon of Porgy and Bess. The program, which played to a capacity crowd, featured selections from the Heyward/Gershwin opera by soprano D’Jaris Whipper-Lewis and tenor/baritone Richard Blakeney. Robert Rosen provided a excellent overview of the history surrounding the work with his A ShortHistory of George Gershwin in Charleston.
Both Whipper-Lewis and Blakeney, accompanied by Chamber Music Charleston thrilled with their beautiful renditions of Summertime, Oh, I Plenty O’Nuttin, and It Ain’t Necessarily So. I found Whipper-Lewis’s Strawberry Woman especially beautiful.
If you can, do catch this gorgeous program of history and music time next around. It’s a lovely way to spend an hour.
Dan’s post about race and art got me thinking about my own skittishness on the subject of slavery and plantation life. My maternal grandparents were sharecroppers in Marlboro County, SC, and my mother would tell my siblings and me how she picked and chopped cotton for $2.00 a day, how she hated it, and what she did to avoid it.
She also told us about how my grandfather picked 1000 lbs of cotton inone day, and how proud he was of that. I thought about how difficult that must have been and how determined he was to excel at something. For my grandparents, “smart” implied more industriousness than intelligence, and my grandfather was known as especially smart.
As I toured the exhibit which, had art ranging from the pastoral to the provocative, I thought a lot about my mother, grandparents and other sharecroppers and slaves who worked those fields with the hope of a better life.
I thought the exhibit well done and thoughtful. Some of the works, a photo of the charred remains of a lynched man and a photo of a slave woman stripped to the waist were a bit jarring, but it’s all part of a journey that our country is still traveling.
So I hung out for a couple of hours at the Reggae Block Dance on a night that turned surprisingly cool. It was a big crowd and seemed a happy one. Estimates from officials put attendance at about 2700 around 9:30 p.m. I was chatting with the staff of the Office of Cultural Affairs, who all were looking at a long day: From the Children’s Festival that started at 9 a.m. to the dance, which started at 7 p.m. and all the set-up and take-down that goes with it. There’s an awful lot that goes on behind the scenes to put on such massive events. Parks department personnel, according to Floyd “Ray” Swagerty, Jr., production manager of the city’s office of Cultural Affairs, worked almost around the clock to set up the opening ceremonies, Marion Square, the Sunset Serenade at the Custom House and then take most of it back down in two days.
Cultural affairs director Ellen Dressler Moryl stopped by with the latest logistical headache, trying to find a possible replacement for an ailing artist for a Sunday event. Warnell Berry the tenor/baritone slated to sing at Afternoon of Porgy and Bess was under the weather. “We’ll just start with ‘My Man is Gone,’ ” Moryl quipped. I was impressed that she still had a sense of humor. My guess is it’s a required survival skill in her position.
I had a wonderful, serendipitous meeting with members of Henry Turner Jr. and Flavor from Louisiana. The band drove up from Baton Rouge, a mere 17 hours by car. Apparently MapQuest made it look a lot easier than it turned out to be. They arrived about 4 a.m., says singer Nukie Miller. This was her first trip to Charleston, although the band played Piccolo a couple of years ago. The buzz on Miller is that she’s a rising star. 225BatonRouge.com calls her a “local soul tigress.” She’s no diva, though: down-to-earth and oozing soft-spoken charm. It’s a shame she won’t get to see the city, but here’s hoping she gets a chance to come back.
We are waiting on word about the La Cenerentola(pronounced La Chin-uh-ren-tuh-luh with emphasis on the Chin and the Ren, we think) … known to English-speaking audiences as Cinderella … dress rehearsal tentatively scheduled for tonight at Gaillard Auditorium.
Dress rehearsal cannot take place until the opera production’s own tech crew … lighting, staging, sound … give the all-clear. Meanwhile, “Monkey: Journey to the West” rehearses tonight at Sottile Theatre … and we will be there with a video camera.
Watch this space for a peek at “Monkey.”
UPDATE From Janet: Sadly we will not be shooting La Chin. No video allowed. But they are rehearsing. We do have the intrepid Geoff at Monkey, though, so we’ll have that.
On Monday I got a chance to ride with a van full of acrobats and singers from the cast of Monkey: Journey to the West to a great Asian grocery just north of I-526 on Rivers Avenue. This weekly grocery run is part of the Chinese cast’s survival strategy: The players have been on the road off-and-on in support of this production since May 2007, and finding food that tastes like home is a big deal.
It’s a lively, young, likable cast from a production that has all the color and excitement of a beloved Chinese classic, but without the super-serious “cultural treasure” tension that followed Peony Pavilion around the world. Here’s hoping you enjoy the video as much as I enjoyed following them around.
Seeking A Landscape
We are waiting on word about the 
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