Category: Culture

The secret to enjoying high-culture arts like operas and the ballet is to know the storyline before watching the performance.

We go to symphonies for the pure enjoyment of watching the conductor and the orchestra paint their tableau of music. There may be a backdrop of information behind the music, or more often than not, there is nothing but the music. But what if intead of just music, there is a storyline? The music by itself is not enough to convey the narrative. This is when the music and the musicians go into the background, and characters emerge to carry the narrative. On one end of this is a musical, with dialog and songs. Moving up the scale is the operetta where almost all of the dialog is rendered in song. At opera scales, the dialog itself becomes more stylized in the form of poetry. Topping out would be a ballet, where there is no dialog, and the narrative is danced as a strict discipline.

Most people start distancing themselves at the opera level, largely because the vocals weren’t quite comprehensible. When it comes to ballets, men flee, and women watch it for the beauty and elegance of the dancers, and not necessarily for the plot.

If you know the storyline to the opera or the ballet, then the audience gets to fill in the context for the artists expression of the story.

Without knowing the storyline, Swan Lake is a nice dance. With the storyline, it is a tale of love, betrayal, and redemption. Not knowing the plot, you lose the motivation for Odette: she is just a dancer moving here and there for no really good reason. Knowing the story of Swan Lake transforms her performance to one of sadness at being cursed to live as a Swan by day, and why even though an evil sorcerer cursed her thus, she still protected the sorcerer from being killed by the Prince because the curse could never be broken if the sorcerer was dead. It requires knowing the story of Swan Lake to understand that Odette and Odile are two very different people, even though in this production, both parts were danced by the same person.

Even without knowing the full backstory to Swan Lake, it was a beautiful perfomance by the dancers. The swans were especially graceful, using their bodies, arms, and legs to mimic the sway of swans.

Part of looking up the backstory of Swan Lake, I also discovered that over the years, there has been several different endings to the ballet, from the romantic to the tragic. The production in Pittsburgh is the version danced by the American Ballet Theater, which has a bittersweet ending in apotheosis after their deaths.

There was a gallery crawl in downtown Pittsburgh Friday night. Basically these art galleries open up and let the gallery crawler wander from one gallery to another in the several block neighborhood. The thing reminded me a bit of First Night in Boston that I attended in the very early nineties.The exhibits ranged from the somewhat slap-dash improvised look to the large and I-don’t-know-what-to-think-of-it Amorphic Robot Works.

My pet peeve on this crawl was the gamut of loud (but not in a good way) bands sprinkled variously along the crawl. Didn’t need them; didn’t like them either.

On the other hand, paintings at Watercolors Gallery followed in the traditional sense of an art gallery, as was the collection of political cartoons by Kirk Anderson, Clay Bennet (Pulitzer Prize Winner), Dennis Draughon, Gary Huck, Mike Konopacki, Andy Singer, Bill Yund and P.S Mueller (of the New Yorker) at Artists Upstairs. That proved to be popular stop, reading the commentary on American political life.

Future Tenant offered an installation piece that abstracts the layout and orientation of downtown Pittsburgh into a large angular sculpture.

Pennsylvania Culinary Institute provided a welcome stop for hot food and drinks.

Favorite stop was the Chatham Baroque in the Prime Stage Theater Space. They were playing music written hundreds of years ago. We heard Spanish dance music written in 1700s. The composer isn’t alive now, and pretty much nobody knows the person who set that music to paper, yet the expression of his creativity lives on centuries later. Of all the arts, music is one where the art is not to be statically appreciated in a passive manner. With paintings, writing, and sculpture we experience it by viewing. With music, musicians are interactively performing it, and in doing so are actively expressing the art of the creator. So, here we are listening to music performed live that was conjured up ages ago in the head of a now long-gone composer. But his music lives on.