Music: Mavis 80, Mavis Staples’ 80th birthday celebration taped at the Ace Theater in LA and rebroadcast as a benefit for the Newport Folk Festival Foundation.
It’s hopelessly reductive to say any single voice is America but sometimes the temptation is irresistible. Since the 1960s, Mavis Staples has earned that voice if anyone has. Bringing gospel music into the contemporary world, enlivening rock and soul, and still making outstanding record after outstanding record, still hungry for the best new songs and the best players, she’s an inspiration on every level.
I got a lot of joy this weekend out of tuning into the Newport Folk Revival weekend streamed through WFUV (also giving me pandemic life with Binky Griptite’s Saturday slot), a perfect reminder of how great this institution has been for so many years and argument to archive everything.
I heard so much great stuff but the crown jewel was this rebroadcast of the third of Staples’ 80th birthday concerts, with a cross-section of great American voices approaching one of the finest canons in 20th century music with exactly the right amount of intensity, reverence, and play, and, course, even in such a stellar lineup – highlights for me included War and Treaty and Deva Mahal and Son Little – Mavis Staples wiped them all out of our minds within three notes.
Theater: We Need Your Listening by Velani Dibba, Ilana Khanin, Elizagrace Madrone, Stephen Charles Smith, presented by New Ohio Theatre as part of the Ice Factory Festival.
Despite the sudden proliferation of Zoom readings and similar real-time grappling with the question of how to make theater in our new time of plague and worry, this tribute to human connection and study in “radical listening” came the closest to delivering on the age-gifted new double meaning of Aretha’s late-period classic “Who’s Zoomin’ Who.”
They ushered each viewer from the digital waiting room that irritates most of us into breakout sessions – after time scanning the slightly shabby West Village space where the New Ohio recently moved (that made me extremely nostalgic). Unseen hands led us through a solo journey (represented in space by a tablet or computer) from one other computer to the next, featuring a member of the ensemble: Hilary Asare, Alex Bartner, ChiWen Chang, Sam Gonzalez, Alice Gorelick, Julia Greer, Nile Assata Harris, Annie Hoeg, Sam Im, Bri Woods.
That fantastic ensemble, for a couple minutes, interacted with me, the viewer, to a greater or lesser degree (most impressively, one woman played an abbreviated “20 Questions” with me) while muted. There are layers of discomfort in not being able to say your piece and a heavy re-figuring toward listening, absorbing what the person is staying that was difficult to adjust to (even for those of us who have exercises and think we’re better at it, this puts the lie to that – addressed to my fellow men, mostly, probably).
These snippets of conversations – some responding to the same prompt: were two different people meant to talk about the three memories they’d take to a desert island or did someone get confused on the order – are provoking in themselves, for me the character who had a family friend say, “The least we can do is show up.” at her father’s funeral, a delectation-soliloquy about favorite sounds, and a fantasia about “Doing a knife dance to Nina Simone’s ‘Take Care of Business For Me’” all hit me hard.
But these vignettes accumulate weight, like a combine, from the objects in immediate proximity. And that underlined how we all accumulate meaning and resonance from one another. The hum of other conversations that periodically came through the edges made me so lonely for other humanity I almost cried.
There’s also an interesting, rough-hewn visual poetry in the movement. The not-perfect rise and walk when we’re picked up. The blur of lights and shaky faces, the theatre lit only by that blue light that will wreck all of our sleep.
I’ve had some wonderful one-person experiences – most prominently I remember a COIL Festival show called Hotel Goethe – and I’ve seen some brilliant theater since the lockdown. But this was the closest thing I’ve seen to feeling like I’m at the theater. And I can’t thank the company enough for it.
Theater: Beginning Days of True Jubilation by Mona Mansour, directed by Scott Illingworth and conceived with SOCIETY, presented by New Ohio Theatre as part of the Ice Factory Festival.
Mona Mansour further cements her status as one of our most exciting playwrights, engaging with these confusing, melting-ice-floe times, with an expansive look at start-up culture Beginning Days of True Jubilation.
With a huge cast and sharp satire, I couldn’t help but picture what this would have looked like on a stage – and I hope that chance comes sooner than later – but Mansour’s voice and the brilliant players leaned into the format of Zoom (also tied in with the tech company they give us a cross-section of) and found diamonds throughout.
Monsour and the company conjure the implacable but easy-to-forget truth that a company is made up of people, and she carves the start-up here with sympathy for the burst of creativity at the heart of this cannonball and the people who end up as its cannon-fodder.
Screen of Distance 