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(04/22/15 1:37pm)
Live music is a strange thing on this campus. One can never be quite certain of what will hit or miss, whether people will show up, stick around or ditch a show for the weekend party rounds. There was an undercurrent of excitement, confidence and yes, palpable irony that surrounded the announcement of the Middlebury College Activity Board (MCAB)’s spring show, featuring none other than the man best known for featuring on other people’s songs, T-Pain.
Cue early high school nostalgia, when Akon was a thing and pool parties were inevitably sound-tracked by “I’m on a Boat,” which, incidentally, T-Pain didn’t perform (much to everyone’s dismay). The quiet, uncharacteristic calm on Friday night seemed to signify that the student body had retreated from public view in order to best prepare themselves for what was to be a weird, sweaty and ultimately impressive turnout in Kenyon Arena the next evening.
With T-Pain, MCAB was successful in achieving exactly what it set out to do: throw a massive party. Close to two thousand tickets were sold, and it was admittedly heartening to see a show that seemed to bring together not only students but also members of the larger community from the University of Vermont, Middlebury and Middlebury High School on such a large scale. The performance itself proved to be a spectacle of pounding bass, loud beats, blinding lights and writhing, jumping masses; maybe that’s what Ultra Music Festival on a hockey rink would look like.
T-Pain was supported on stage by a cast of close to ten musicians and dancers, including a drummer who was absolutely relentless behind the kit, filling every song with tight explosive energy. The accompanying vocalist and MC often appeared to spend more time on the microphone than T-Pain himself, tirelessly playing hype-man to the sea of perspiring people, backing up T-Pain on the higher notes and even singing the larger part of some songs.
This is not to take away from T-Pain’s performance in any way, as there were moments when he owned the crowd with his now characteristic blend of silky auto-tune mastery and flashes of tight verses. Nostalgia flooded through the waves of pink and blue light as he announced to much elation, “We’re gonna go way back. Are you ready?” before launching into fan favourites like “Good Life” and “Bartender.”
Even the most cynical of concertgoers couldn’t help but give in to the smooth bouncing allure of “Buy U a Drank” and “I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper)”; indeed, T-Pain demonstrated his sharp acumen for massaging the guilty pleasure hits we have all loved and grown up on at some point. In many ways, his whole performance seemed perfectly curated for something out of a classic college movie, which maybe explains his current exhaustive run of university shows.
Is this then perhaps T-Pain’s grand return to the music scene after what was a pretty unnoticeable hiatus away? About six months ago, he made an appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert Series, an online platform for independent artists to perform intimate acoustic sets. T-Pain surprised the Internet with some phenomenal vocal flexing, doing soulful slow-jam renditions of his popular tunes, all the while joking with the audience, “I know everybody’s wondering where the auto-tune is gonna come from, it’s totally fine, I got it right here surgically inserted.” On March 27, T-Pain released his first mix tape in over two years, The Iron Way, in which he seems to asks, as one music website puts it, “If everyone else is getting emotional in the club, why not the guy who arguably started the trend over a decade ago?”
Club Midd was definitely alive and well on Saturday night, and proved an intimate, involved audience to an artist that definitely put on a show. Intimate, not so much in the lighter-in-the-air-swaying-side-to-side kind of way as much as in the dancing-drunk-in-the-back-of-an-Atwater-Suite sense. There were definitely moments when the concert felt more like a party playlist DJ set rather than a live musical performance, including one minute cuts and covers of college no-brainers like “Get Low” by Flo Rida and a slightly awkward version of “Royals” by Lorde.
The supporting act, Color Wars, seemed to be a caricature of this college act mentality, hurling an unnecessary amount of over-programmed bass drops and loud synths at the audience. Performing before this group, however, were impressive student openers Ola Fadairo ’15 and Dwayne Scott ’17, who played a powerful set of original solo and collaborative material to a small audience that was growing rapidly as people filed through the doors. Although most of their rhymes were lost to echoes of the huge cavernous space of Kenyon Arena, Scott and Fadairo showed no signs of nerves, feeding off each other extremely well, and continuously pumping up the crowd. Their brightest moments came when they brought on other student performers like urban dance group Evolution and fellow musician and beat-maker Innocent Tswamuno ’15.
While the show was well organized and had an incredible turnout — credit to concerts committee co-chairs Matt Butler ’15, Katherine Kucharczyk ’16 and the MCAB team — the money question inevitably looms large. Was this a show worth the staggering $30,000 plus, when quickly emerging relevant artists like Chance the Rapper cost MCAB only $15,000 last year? Could the money have been put to more efficient use by building a more diversified bill of artists? The answer is complicated, and relates back to the tricky challenge of putting on concerts on this campus that inspire students to come out in support of live music culture. This show achieved that in sheer numbers, and T-Pain’s generous set definitely got the crowd dancing and the shawties snappin’.
(02/25/15 6:54pm)
It’s hard to shake the nagging paradox that seems to be spray-painted all over the upstairs gallery space at the Middlebury College Museum of Art’s Street Art Exhibit. Even if your experience with street art as a form of socio-political discourse is minimal, it is likely you have either heard of or come across the works of artists such as Banksy and Shepherd Faery, now more notorious for their merchandise than for their original urban artistic identities. Faery, who gained much of his fame from his iconic OBEY motif that you now see spattered across hats and t-shirts, held a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 2009. Banksy, perhaps the most popular name in street art today, is an industry on his own. His net worth is in the millions, his prints sell within seconds online and he has even been nominated for an Oscar.
The basic question then begs: can street art ever really be street art if it fails to exist in the street? How can we step inside the often academic, systemic space of a museum and engage with work that is so grounded in its foundation of rebellion against the very same principles? To put art that has gained its popularity from the neighborhoods, walls, streets and masses that define it into a somewhat colorless space is to render it toothless. While Museum of Art Curator Emmie Donadio and Preparator Chris Murray provided a background of the history and techniques of street art in their opening lecture, which certainly prompts further discussion about artistic work not usually acknowledged by the establishment, what I felt was lacking was a discussion on how alienated these works seem in their decontextualized, poster-like display.
Take, for example, “The Conductor,” a collaborative piece by Retna and El Mac, which fuses calligraphy and brushwork with aerosol paint spray to create a dynamic, intricate effect of gradient and contours. The only real problem is that the original work is in fact a 40-foot mural, and not a meager framed print. This is the same difficulty that affects the work of Swoon, an artist who integrates contemporary consciousness with the visceral, physical presence of her pieces, using everything from pavements and fire escapes to rafts made out of New York City’s garbage as her medium. Even the attempt to furnish a rundown-looking wall in the corner of the gallery space with wheatpaste prints, to perhaps engender a sense of what they would really look like if you passed by them in a Brooklyn neighborhood, is an effort to provide context where it is severely lacking. The questions of the modern fetishization of art, commodity culture and gentrification that are so integral to street art culture all remain unanswered and avoided in this exhibition. The Warhol exhibit downstairs now seems to make a lot more sense.
While the reality of the urban sprawl is ultimately inseparable from the work of the art itself, the exhibition does nevertheless provide a platform for this important debate. It also perhaps opens a window into a world of some prominent names in street art for the previously unacquainted – a foothold into the overarching problem.
Judith Supine’s collages, bursting with brilliant fluorescent greens and pinks, are reminiscent of some hazy, seductive, pop-art acid trip; Muto, a stop-motion film of a graffiti project by enigmatic Italian artist Blu, is particularly remarkable in how grossly ambitious, irreverent and wildly fun it is. There is also a playful installation by French photographer JR composed of a series of enlarged black and white portrait pictures featuring Middlebury students that run along the floor and wall.
While it may be difficult to peer through the haze of commodification and the burgeoning celebrity business model that have come to define Banksy and Shepard Faery, their prints are still important for the waves they created, the impact they had on bringing street art to the masses (if it wasn’t already meant for that in the first place) and for the images they depict. Banksy’s “Girl With Balloon” is still inspiring in its simplicity of color and poignant illustration of a young girl watching her heart-shaped balloon slip away from her. Faery’s political posters, including the famous three-toned “Hope” (the face of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign), are still important markers for the histories they were created to depict.
The street art exhibit does diversify the Museum collection, and many of the prints on display have been permanently acquired by the College thanks to the curators’ persistence with navigating the online market platform that most of these artists now work through. However, no matter how technically intriguing the art may be, it is ultimately difficult to reconcile crossing one’s arms to look at work that is native to the street while it is mounted, framed and hung up in a gallery space. Perhaps more visual and cultural information on the original presentation of the art would have been helpful in understanding the context in which it was conceived. It is intriguing to come away wondering whether an attempt to bring in the street at all is not simultaneously one that mutes it completely.
The “Outside In: Art of the Street” exhibition is open until April 19 at the Middlebury College Museum of Art. Entry is free. There is also a film screening of Style Wars, a documentary about the New York graffiti movement of the ‘70s and ‘80s, followed by a Q&A with director Henry Chalfant on March 5 in Dana Auditorium.
(01/21/15 11:14pm)
There are few better or more interesting ways of dealing with Harold Pinter’s work than handing it over to a group of improv comedians. The complexity and confusion of language, the situational farce, the importance of timing and the general feeling of burgeoning absurdity that come inevitably attached to Pinter’s plays could create an exciting space for this weekend’s staging of The Dumb Waiter at the Hepburn Zoo. Three members of the College’s own improv comedy group Middlebrow are taking on an adaptation of one of the more popular early works of the acclaimed British playwright and Nobel Prize winner.
First staged in 1960, The Dumb Waiter is a one-act two-man play that follows two hitmen, Ben and Gus, as they wait — like most popular absurdist characters tend to do — in a sparse windowless basement for their next assignment. In a room filled with empty space, vague objects and a mysterious, lurking dumbwaiter (a small elevator used for transporting food and dishes between levels of a building), the action or lack thereof unfolds through Pinter’s masterful breakdown of language and logic. The longer the hitmen await their instructions, the more they tend to dwell on the seemingly mundane, discussing newspaper articles, complaining about dysfunctional flush tanks and arguing over the semantics of the correct verb form of “putting on the kettle.”
Pinter creates a wormhole in which reason and linear narrative are meshed into a shapeless form, punctuated with repetitive symbols like the constant movement of the dumbwaiter, seemingly unable to communicate with Ben and Gus as much as they are unable to communicate with each other. Despite its complexities, The Dumb Waiter is not short of any of twists, turns and entertainment; it comes with an air of lingering suspense, uncontrollably hilarious moments and a shocking revelation at the end.
Director Melissa MacDonald ’15 says she chose the play last summer, specifically for its strange sense of humour and structural idiosyncrasies.
“I really enjoy working within the format and structure of the comedy in this play. Obviously we do a lot of comedy work in Middlebrow, but it’s often two to three minute sketches where we create our own rhythms and patterns,” she said.
“I wanted to direct a play like The Dumb Waiter that is contingent on its own specific patterns because it’s something that I’ve never really done before.”
Actor Luke Smith-Stevens ’14.5 noted the importance of avoiding the over-intellectualization of such a studied play.
“Our process has been about the balance between close reading, keeping it natural and continuing to play with the text,” he said.
MacDonald did a lot of background work to help contextualize and understand Pinter’s unique writing style against works like Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett.
“The role of silence for me is a definitive aspect of this play” she said. “We actually spent one rehearsal in complete silence for over thirty-five minutes in preparation.”
It’s no surprise then that both Smith-Stevens and Alexander Khan ’17, playing Ben and Gus respectively, are able to rehearse and react at a level of total ease with each other. Their work with Middlebrow strongly influenced their creative process for this production.
“We are very comfortable with each other because we know our individual comedic styles and how we play off each other, so we can morph to new choices on the spot,” Khan said. “Our experience working together gives us the freedom to make big — and subtle — choices.”
Even in an accelerated rehearsal schedule like this, we’re constantly trying new things knowing that the other will throw the ball back to you,” Smith-Stevens added.
Although they have been conceptualizing the play since the fall, the actual rehearsal process began only at the start of J-term, and the cast, while well aware of the challenges of such a time frame, is excited to finally open this weekend.
“The biggest challenge besides time has been navigating Pinter’s physical cues and construction of space,” MacDonald said. “He’ll often write in stage directions in some places and then nothing for the rest of the play; the stage and design elements have also been difficult to set up in such a short amount of time.”
“Just the basic fact that this is a two man show has been pretty challenging,” Smith-Stevens added. “It’s not like other plays where you can work different scenes and come back to problematic ones late. This one is all about pushing through and understanding the stitches and seams as much as the fabric of the play itself.”
The glittering sense of excitement amongst the company is palpable, and everyone is eager to put up a show of this nature as part of the independent theatre scene on campus, which Smith-Stevens — graduating at the end of the month — has seen grow in both scale and quality in his time at the College.
“The most memorable experiences I’ve had in theatre have been in student productions; I think it speaks to the willingness to take advantage of the resources here and the eagerness to work hard on putting up small projects and hopefully feel how rewarding the experience is,” he said.
Over the last few years, the Zoo has been a bastion for hosting diverse, independent student run productions, and The Dumb Waiter most definitely has the potential to be an entertaining and evocative highlight. It promises to be a show packed with questions both surreal and utterly human, and with humour that is explosively funny as well as tragic.
If not for any cultural inclination, go watch the show to hear Smith-Stevens and Khan tackle British accents, which they joke somewhat reassuringly, is in keeping with the absurdity of the play.
The Dumb Waiter runs this weekend at the Hepburn Zoo on Jan. 23 and 24, with shows at 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. on Friday and at 8 p.m. on Saturday. The show stars Smith-Stevens and Khan, and is directed by MacDonald, stage managed by Ella Rohm-Ensing ’18 and designed by Tosca Giustini ’15.5, Kate Eiseman ’15, Bjorn Peterson ’15.5, and Ben Rose ’17.5.