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October 1999 Brooklyn Academy of Music 1999 Next Wave Festival BAMcinematek Brooklyn Philharmonic 651 ARTS ~' pi I'" T if II' II i fl ,- ,.. til 1 ~ - - . I I I' " . ,I •[, II' , 1 , i 1'1 1/ I I; , ~II m Jennifer Bartleli, House: Large Grid, 1998 BAM Next Wave Festival sponsored by PHILIP MORRIS ~lA6(8Ill COMPA.NIES INC. Brooklyn Academy of Music Bruce C. Ratner Chairman of the Board Karen Brooks Hopkins Joseph V. Melillo President Executive Prod ucer presents Moby Dick Running time: BAM Opera House approximately ninety October 5, 1999, at 7:00 p.m. (Next Wave Festival Gala) minutes. Songs and October 6-9 & 12-16, 1999, at 7:30 p.m. Stories from Moby Dick is performed without an Visual Design, Music, and Lyrics Laurie Anderson intermission. Performers Pip, The Whale, A Reader Laurie Anderson Ahab, Noah, Explorer Tom Nelis The Cook, Second Mate, Running Man Price Waldman Standing Man Anthony Turner Falling Man Miles Green Musicians Violin, keyboards, guitar, talking stick Laurie Anderson Bass, prepared bass, samples Skuli Sverrisson Artistic Collaborators Co-Visual Design Christopher Kondek Co-Set Design James Schuette Lighting Design Michael Chybowski Sound Design Miles Green Costume Design Susan Hilferty Electronics Design Bob Bielecki Video Systems Design Ben Rubin Staging Co-Direction Anne Bogart General Management Julie Crosby Production Management Bohdan Bushell Production Stage Management Lisa Porter Major support for this presentation was provided by The Ford Foundation with additional support from The Dime Savings Bank of New York, FSB. Next Wave Festival Gala is sponsored by Philip Morris Companies Inc. 17 Produced by electronic theater company, Inc. with the generous assistance of Love Stream Productions; agnes b., Paris; and the generous support of Interval Research Corporation. Additional support is provided by a grant from the Bohen Foundation. Co-commissioned and presented by Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Cal Performances, Berkeley, CA; Festival d'Automne aParis / MC 93 Bobigny; Prince Music Theater, Philadelphia, PA; Spoleto Festival USA, SC; UCLA Center for the Performing Arts, CA; University Musical Society, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Production Touring Production Electrician Michael Smallman Staff Front of House Audio Engineer Jody Elff Production Carpenter Paul Strong Visual Systems Operator Daniel Hartnett Lighting Director Eri k Bruce Sound System Engineer Chad Scheer Projectionist Ryan Bronz Assistant Electrician'Octavio Wa rnock-G ra ha m Phantom Band Vocals, keyboards, various instruments, digital processing Laurie Anderson Percussion Joey Baron Accordion Charlie Giordano Bass, sampler Sku Ii Sverrisson Additional pre-recorded tracks co-produced with Greg Cohen and engineered by Dante DeSole. Additional pre-recorded vocals by Tom Nelis and Price Waldman. Visuals Animation and principal photography Ch ristopher Kondek Water photography and additional animation Laurie Anderson Interval Research Talking Stick Development Team Bob Adams, Jesse Dorogusker, Dominic Robson, Geoff Smith Production Staff Dramaturgy Rande Brown Dramaturgy Guy Lesser Assistant Direction Laura Josepher Movement Coaches Maya Saffrin, David Neumann Costume Supervision Linda Ross Assistant Set Design Rachel Hauck Assistant Light Design Ph iii P Wid mer Assistant Light Design Lara Bohon Tour Consultant Linda Greenberg Accountant Robert Bernstein Production Assistant Nancy Magarill European Booking Consultant Philippe Mongay With special thanks to Larry R. Larson, Robin Danar, and Norene Maciwoda. Sound System provided by EAW. electronic theater company, Inc., 530 Canal Street, New York, NY 10013; T: (212) 431-1355; www.laurieanderson.com Press Representation Annie Ohayon Media Relations, 250 West 57th Street, Suite 716, New York, NY 10107 1: (212) 262-4492; F: (212) 262-5306; [email protected] 18 Program Notes on I began to work on this project because a multimedia producer was making Songs and Stories a series for high school kids about books. He was worried that books are from Moby Dick disappearing and he wanted to do something that would get kids interested by Laurie Anderson in reading. So he asked several artists to pick their favorite books and write monologues about why they liked them. I chose Moby Dick. Although pieces of Melville's text have cropped up in some of my songs and films over the years, I hadn't really read the whole book since high school. And I was a bit nervous. I had a vague recollection of being very bored by a lot of the whaling details and technical paraphemalia. I also remember thinking that the captain and his obsession with the whale was a bit over the top, too fantastic, too Shakespearean. Then I read it again. And it was a complete revelation. Encyclopedic in scope, the book moved through ideas about history, philosophy, science, religion, and the natural world towards Melville's complex and dark conclusions about the meaning of life, fear, and obsession. Being a somewhat dark person myself, I fell in love with the idea that the mysterious thing you look for your whole life will eventually eat you alive. The project for high school kids never materialized, but I read Moby Dick five more times in a row. I began to hear it as music. The rambling, rolling sen tences, the lapses into iambic pentameter, the lyrical poems all mixed with the thees and thous of another time. And the stories? On one level, Moby Dick is a magnificent collection of essays and short stories about the night sky, the behavior of polar bears, theories about the origin of the universe, all entwined with countless bits of information about rope and weather and oars and the many objects of a lost nineteenth-century world. Call Me Whatever Moby Dick is also a tour de force in narrative style. With most books, it takes a few chapters to identify the author's voice. For me, the first three words ("Call me Ishmael") are among the strangest in the book. As the book unfolds, it becomes virtually impossible to find the author. He's hundreds of people: accountant, botanist, lawyer, philosopher, dreamer, preacher, historian. These narrative styles and forms of address morph rapidly. And it's this daring approach to narrative voices that I've found most exciting and original about the book. Imagistic, concise, and associative, Melville built his world and inhabited it with a cast of the living and the dead. Spinoza, Noah, Job, and Jonah sailed on the doomed Pequod just as much as Ahab, Ishmael, Pip, Queequeg, and the crazy cook. Is Moby Dick a Of course-from page one we know the ship will go down. Everything relent Tragedy? lessly moves to that vanishing point. But for me the Pequod is more like the Mayflower than the Titanic. When the Titanic sinks it's spectacular; it sinks expensive technology, money, power, and savoir faire. It's a perversely satisfying experience, like blowing up the White House in Independence Day. But when the Pequod sinks, it takes a whole universe down with it while somehow building a new one. So what does Melville have to say to late-twentieth-century Americans? Obsessive, technological, voluble, and in search of the transcendent, we're a lot like our nineteenth-century forbears. Melville's search for meaning is 19 alternately frustrating and illuminating, multilayered and elusive, like the great white whale he searches for. For me, a key question is asked, almost as an afterthought, at the end of Father Mapple's famous sermon, "So what is a man if he outlives the lifetime of his God?" Yes, really. What do you do when you no longer believe in the things that have driven you? How do you go on? Translation and Translating a complex and classic literary text into a multimedia procuction is Invention a completely new kind of project for me. I've attended enough meetings of the Melville Society and read enough issues of the newsletter over the years to know that whatever I did with the book would inevitably have many gaps. Eventually, I decided not to try to represent the characters but to try to catch the spirit of the book and some of Melville's ideas that I find the most challenging. Visually, I've tried to create several levels for the action by making a set where characters can emerge and then be reabsorbed into a more abstract place, a device I've used in pieces like The Nerve Bible. The images themselves words, water, paper, flowing textures, gritty machines, fire, and constellations are meant not so much to conjure a place as to create a parallel dream world as well as to provide visual counterpoint to the sound. As for characters, the performers in Songs and Stories ... shift through many roles and voices; sometimes they're readers, sometimes sailors, sometimes commentators or critics. Of course there is no way to tell the whole story in an evening. My goal is to translate some of my favorite parts of the book into music and images that suggest the flavor and strangeness and beauty of Melville's world. And finally to make a world of my own where ideas and obsessions take a new sensual form. So how much of this According to my very fast computer, approximately ten percent: Sometimes show is actually I picked my favorite passages and left them alone ("Seat thyself sultanically Melville's text? among the moons of Saturn..."). Other times I used only an idea or phrase to build a song ("Because in all men there reside certain properties, occult and wondrous and hidden."). Other times, in the spirit of Melville's digressions, I just invented things and added whatever I felt like adding. In writing lyrics and words that would be singable and sayable, I've used several methocs to shorten the words and make them resonate when spoken aloud.