Guest Blog: What I see with my ears I hear with my eyes.

Long time friend and partner in crime, Aurora*, has provided me with an opinion piece regarding an art gallery we went to this past Friday.

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We spent the evening at Towson University's senior student art exhibition at the Load of Fun gallery in downtown Baltimore.  Like most contemporary art exhibits, the gallery is a playground of speculative reality.  Unlike those Rorschach images where you interpret what you see, these images are what their creator tells you they are, often defying all laws of congruency. Tonight's were definitely exercises in the extemporaneous: welded metal bracelets linked to replicate handcuffs welded to an eyeglass case filled with origami birds made out of pages pulled from a porno mag is wittily dubbed "Sexual Frustration". Photographs of plant life bursting through plots of urban decay is "Wasted Space" - funny, my daughter is curating a gallery showing of similar works in a couple months which go by the theme of "The Third Conflict". Like I said, we must believe the artist's perspective, no matter how quantum the leap from their vision to ours.

Art is language, language similar to the speaking in tongues heard in old revival tents (or some Pentecostal churches). Not unlike Pentecost, each man hears it in his own language, regardless of what is being said. I must say some of what I looked at tonight was babble - things more geared toward the intellect than the heart.

I can't help but compare this language with the older mumblings of Mr. Van Gough or Gogh as you will or if you follow BBC's Dr. Who, Van Goth...(and a postmortem identity crisis ensues),  Like Mozart's four to eight measure classical constructions geared to the primate mind, Van Gough's language is simple and direct.  His vowels are color, his consonants clean dark lines, his elisions clouded skies and starry nights.  He will get in your face and speak of hope past despair with impeccable  diction. No need fear anything being lost in translation. He speaks to the heart, and his words leave you breathless.

I have a hard time reconciling the honesty of image found in photos by Pollock, or paintings by any great master from time immemorial with a gallery of works by students who have been taught to be fundamentally dishonest in the name of creating a commercial product, created without the discipline whose transcendence is the language of true art.

Or maybe this is the frustration of an old lady whose first love was the crayon box.  I did ok, the problem was the music was always voted more impressive than the drawings, which may have led down the inevitable path towards engineering, as it did for so many others on one side of my family.  I remember a high school guidance counselor looking over the results of one of the many tests we were subjected to and muttering something along the lines of "it seems you have an aptitude for engineering.  Too bad you're a girl. Have you considered a vocation with the Dominicans?" and so I turned to a life of crime instead.

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*I have poked and prodded Aurora to start a blog of her own, but she prefers to remain the silent but deadly member of my crime syndicate. Show her some love so that she'll blog for me again. 

Event Review: Journeys - A Cabaret About the Places Life Takes You

Please give a Meep-worthy welcome to Armand O'Bryan, a friend IRL who shares an appreciation with me for nom de plumes. Friday the 8th, we both attended Baltimore Vocal Arts Foundation's latest cabaret. Now, for a word from our guest blogger!

 

Cabarets and dinner theater are not usually the places I expect to find innovative programming, but I was pleasantly surprised by the Baltimore Vocal Arts Foundation July 8th at Germano's Trattoria in Little Italy. 

 

Titled "Journeys - A Cabaret About The Places Life Takes You", this mini-production, lightly staged in the compact confines of Germano's Cabaret room, featured a highly eclectic combination of song literature, thematically tracing aspects of the emotional journey from cradle to grave. At first glance I thought I might find the juxtaposition of art song and Broadway ballad or blues unsettling, but for the most part this was not the case. Some repertoire combinations worked better than others, the most successful being Laura Stuart's rather amazing stylistic metamorphosis as she moved from Massenet's challenging "Je suis encore" from Manon, to a full out Broadway belt rendition of "Here I Am" from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels'".   

 

All the artists exhibited a surprising degree of stylistic versatility, switching easily between classical and contemporary repertoire. Some stand out moments included baritone Michael J. Begley's rendition of "How Many Miles" from Kurt Weil's Lost In The Stars, soprano Adrienne Webster's bluesy, heart wrenching singing of Leslie Adam's "The Heart of A Woman", and Robyn Stevens' transcendent rendition of Rorem's "Ferry Me Across The Water".  While I found the placing of "For Good" at the end of the program a little too blatant an appeal for knee jerk water works, and the encore audience sing-along of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" tacky, I still have to applaud the tender and tasteful interpretation of Schwartz offered by Stuart and Webster, whose performance left me thinking: "how nice to hear this sung by real voices".

 

For a company that's only a year old, BVAF has done an impressive job, establishing presence and high performance quality. I've been lucky enough to attend and work for a number of their shows over the past year, and their latest show, Journey's, is just proof to me that they're going to keep getting better.

 

We Sing, We Dance, We Go Home Happy,

-Maria (and Armand!)