TRIPTYCH (EYES OF ONE ON ANOTHER) HOLLAND FESTIVAL TRIPTYCH (EYES OF ONE ON ANOTHER) Bryce Dessner Kaneza Schaal Korde Arrington Tuttle Roomful of Teeth Asko|Schönberg thanks to production partner patron this performance has been made possible by this performance is part of the HF Young programme YOUNG Y CONTENT Info & context Credits American Wedding Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) About the artists Friends Holland Festival 2019 Join us Colophon INFO CONTEXT date & starting time introduction Tue 18 June 2019, 8.30 pm by Charlotte van Lingen Wed 19 June 2019, 8.30 pm 7.45 pm venue meet the artist Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, Wed 19 June - after the performance Grote Zaal moderator Charlotte van Lingen running time Eyes on Robert 1 hour 10 minutes 18 June – 31 July no interval Melkweg Expo works by: Ari Versluis, Daan Couzijn, Dustin language Thierry, Dylan van Vliet, Ferry van der English Nat, Henri Verhoef, Martijn Mendel and Vytautas Kumza CREDITS music mover Bryce Dessner Martell Ruffin libretto production Korde Arrington Tuttle ArKtype / Thomas O. Kriegsmann text in collaboration with Essex Hemphill & Patti Smith The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation direction associate director Kaneza Schaal Lilleth Glimcher music direction associate music director Brad Wells William Brittelle soloists set, costumes Alicia Hall Moran, Isaiah Robinson Carlos Soto performed by light Roomful of Teeth Yuki Nakase Estelí Gomez Abigail Lennox video Martha Cluver Simon Harding Eliza Bagg Eric Dudley production management Thomas McCargar William Knapp Cameron Beauchamp Thann Scoggin associate lightning design Valentina Migoulia Asko|Schönberg David Kweksilber, clarinet, bass clarinet video engineer Jan Harshagen, French horn Moe Shahrooz Pauline Post, keyboard, piano, harmonium Wiek Hijmans, electric guitar dramaturgy Noè Rodrigo Gisbert, percussion Talvin Wilks, Christopher Myers Joey Marijs, percussion Marijke van Kooten, violin Liesbeth Steffens, viola Sanne van der Horst, cello commisioners An ArKtype Production, Produced in Residency with and Commissioned by University Musical Society, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Co-produced by Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel Music and Artistic Director. TRIPTYCH was co-commissioned by BAM; Luminato Festival, Toronto, Canada; Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, Athens, Greece; Cincinnati Opera, Cincinnati, OH; Cal Performances, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA; Stanford Live, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Adelaide Festival, Australia; John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for performance as part of DirectCurrent 2019; ArtsEmerson: World on Stage, Emerson College, Boston, MA; Texas Performing Arts, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX; Holland Festival, Amsterdam; Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH; the Momentary, Bentonville, AR, Celebrity Series of Boston, MA, and resi- dency development through MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA. world premiere 5 March 2019, Los Angeles (concert version) 15 March 2019, Ann Arbor (theatrical version) websites Robert Mapplethorpe Bryce Dessner Korde Arrington Tuttle Roomful of Teeth ArKtype Asko|Schönberg AMERICAN WEDDING In america, I place my ring on your cock where it belongs. No horsemen bearing terror, no soldiers of doom will swoop in and sweep us apart. They’re too busy looting the land to watch us. They don’t know we need each other critically. They expect us to call in sick, watch television all night, die by our own hands. They don’t know we are becoming powerful. Every time we kiss we confirm the new world coming. What the rose whispers before blooming I vow to you. I give you my heart, a safe house. I give you promises other than milk, honey, liberty. I assume you will always be a free man with a dream. In america, place your ring on my cock where it belongs. Long may we live to free this dream. – Essex Hemphill, 1992 It is the Artist’s desire to permeate existence He does so by the power of his own presence And by will alone he breathes a work into art. As pumping air into a balloon, that when let go, permeates the sky. He sees perfection in a leaf or another man’s psyche. He is a city of veins and lead; building and rebuilding the same chapel, the same marble stairway. As one walks these stairs and looks around one notes a gallery of light wars. That is all. A ship dissolving into an atmosphere, into sea. And when night falls — the light as well. And all disappears into walls. No more luminous than a moon. Composed of love and will alone. And the Artist does indeed love. In love with his own process. It reaffirms his mastery, his mystery. A testament of his own life force and also his gift to humanity. Certain gifts are chosen and arranged in retrospect. The Artist machetes a clearance. Here one can be spared the pain and the extravagance of the entire body and be transported by snaking through a glittering fraction. His gifts, his children, travel beyond the eye and hand that spun them into existence. A lifetime of work letting go of one who has weathered innocence. Pressed laurels upon intelligence All with the generosity of a transforming smile. – Patti Smith, June 1988, from The Perfect Moment TRIPTYCH (EYES OF ONE ON ANOTHER) by Frederike Berntsen The very explicit homo-erotic pictures of Robert Mapplethorpe raised many a scandal in America. Times have changed. Nowadays all variations of pornography are for those interested only a mouse click away. In 2019 the view on homosexuality is completely different. Erwin Olaf, as a producer of homo-erotic photo material a disciple of Mapplethorpe, is a photographer of the Dutch royal family. With Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) Bryce Dessner doesn’t want to fight a battle that has already been won. In the events of those days he sees a possibility to investigate beauty and love, erotism and art, freedom and persecution in a musical way. The perfor- mance, which Dessner creates with, among others, librettist Korde Arrington Tuttle and director Kaneza Schaal, incorporates poems of Patti Smith and Essex Hemphill. Smith met Mapplethorpe in the 1960s in New York, where they lived through an intense and tumultuous relationship. They were muses to each other. Hemphill on the other side was an outspoken critic of Mapplethorpe’s work and emphasized that the photographs of naked, black models (often without faces) objectified black men. The title Triptych refers to three Mapplethorpe portfolios: X (images of gay S&M activity), Y (flower studies) and Z (nude portraits of black men), that are shown. The performance, with Mapplethorpe’s photographs projected hugely, has something mysterious in it, and makes the audience part of a radical, uncom- promising view of humanity, its body, feelings, pain and craving. Composer Bryce Dessner explains: ‘My starting point with Triptych was very much centered in the classical beauty of Mapplethorpe’s work. He was inspired by Italian mannerism and I took a similar approach of adapting some of Monteverdi’s music into the show in a kind of re-imagined twisted setting of a madrigal which we hear throughout the show woven into various movements. Mapplethorpe mixed the sacred and profane in such beautiful ways and the amazing singers of Roomful of Teeth allowed me to use in Triptych many different kinds of vocal techniques and sounds ranging from classical to gospel and folk singing. The instrumentation for the work is quite spare and minimal to leave room for the amazing virtuosity of the singers. I was a teenager in Cincinnati when the Mapplethorpe obscenity trial took place and the police closed the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center and put Dennis Barrie, the director, in jail. These were momentous events for the town and for the country and as a 14 year old I was very sensitive to the issues at work. So my initial interest in the work was very much based on personal experience of the censorship and scandal it provoked. Only later I was able to spend time with the work itself and to fall in love with the incredible beauty of the images. Through working on this project in collaboration with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and archives at the Getty Center I was able to dis- cover so much more of what Robert saw and shot, his work is far more vast than most people know based only on certain famous or controversial images. We do not have a thesis or a didactic message to give to the audience. We are asking questions about the photographs and the audience and the performers on stage. If anything, looking at these images now in 2019 is very different from how we might of seen them in 1978 or 1988 or even 2000. Above all the show inves- tigated how we see one another which gets at the heart of what Robert was working on.’ ABOUT THE ARTISTS Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in his creative efforts, broadened the scope Floral Park, Queens. In 1963, Mapplethorpe of his photographic inquiry, and accepted enrolled at Pratt Institute in nearby increasingly challenging commissions. Brooklyn, where he studied drawing, pain- The Whitney Museum of American Art ting, and sculpture. He also experimented mounted his first major American museum with mixed-media collages, using images retrospective in 1988, one year before his cut from books and magazines. In 1970, death in 1989. His vast, provocative, and he began producing his own photographs powerful body of work has established him to incorporate into the collages. In 1975, as one of the most important artists of the he acquired a Hasselblad camera and twentieth century. Today Mapplethorpe is began photographing his circle of friends represented by galleries in the Americas and acquaintances - artists, musicians, and Europe and his work can be found in celebrities, and the S & M underground.