Side Show: Come Look at the Freaks

Introduction

The University of Texas at Dallas Arts and Performance program is unabashedly setting out to widen the establishment's engineering and computer sciences pigeonhole with a faithful reproduction of the acclaimed 1997 Broadway hit Side Show. With an ensemble cast, dancing chorus, and orchestra, the musical spins the tale of two (one?) conjoined twins on their journey from sideshow attractions to national media darlings and their individual (shared?) quests for love and acceptance in depression- era America.

Music

The two and a half our performance displays the wide array of performing arts available to the musical going enthusiast. Newcomers to musical theater will be broken in with a sizable musical repertoire, from the raunchy and soulful The Devil You Know, to playful vaudevillian numbers like We Share Everything and One Plus One Equals Three (which have the peculiar attribute of being show tunes inside show tunes). The prominent lead voices are given ample room to explore the auditorium in solo; Private Confession and You Should be Loved showcase tenors Lakshman Manjunath and Bryan Thompson's range and ability to convey emotion through vocal timbre.

Concurrent with the theme of the story, Side Show's defining characteristic is the duet. Conjoined Siamese twin characters Daisy and Violet (Robin Clayton and Emily McCoy) progress through the story together at the hip and voice, in harmony. The moments in which the two sister's are at impasse or disagreement gives way to heterophonic vocals and gives more depth to the motif of 'unseparated individuality'. The recitative is fluid, and orchestral accompaniment allows both an ambiance during dialogue and punctuation of thematic phrasing.


Performers

From the opening number, the audience is beckoned to Come Look at the Freaks; a menagerie of misfits, oddities, and, well... freaks. The bearded lady, the geek, the snake woman, and the cannibal king, among others, are paraded in front of performers playing an audience. The recurring theme of being an audience looking at another audience watching the actual characters further underscores the separation of the 'freakish' from the 'normal'. The production also featured a small on-stage orchestral accompaniment. Chordophones, membranophones, and aerophones were integrated into the performance only aurally; they were well hidden behind circus sideshow themed props.

Audience

The April 16th performance brought a full crowd to the University Theater. The audience, not surprisingly made up of university students, friends, and family of the performers, remained engaged throughout the performance. The opening number did much to grab attention; the cannibal king rolled his way across the stage and into the audience, beating the ground and even the first row theater seating, snarling in face of amused audience members. The pseudo- simian display was backed by a tribal themed accompaniment by the orchestra, and served to attach the audience to a monstrous character that would later be revealed as all too human. The cannibal king, later redefined as Jake, unrequited lover of lead character Violet, had the audience's full sympathy and vocal reactions when he is refused his offer of love. The character is a role traditionally played by a black performer. It is unclear whether the audience made the observation of Jake's rejection as a racial matter; perhaps it was intended to remain ambiguous. Sideshow performer, or African American in the 1930's; which sort outsider was Jake rejected as?


Time and Space

The Friday evening performance of Side Show drew a large audience despite not being an opening or closing show. For the cast and crew however, the April 16th performance required special attention; it would be video recorded. An interview with performer Eli Aalderink (as the Geek) reflects this sentiment. "I'm glad I actually hit those falsettos!"


Conclusion

The University's production of Side Show stands as both a perfect introduction for many to the American musical and an example of how even a technical school can participate in the long tradition of a music culture.



Works Cited

Side Show. By Bill Russell and Henry Krieger. University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson. Apr. 2010. Performance.

Evans, Kathryn. Program notes. Side Show. 08 Apr 2010. Richardson: UT Dallas University Theater

Aalderink, Eli. Personal interview. 20 Apr. 2010.

Progressive Rock: Rush

Drawing from the abstracts and experimentation of the psychedelic rock found in the late 60's, the early 1970's saw bands beginning to utilize concepts drawn from different art forms, and departing from traditional rock musical structure and presentational format.

This 'Progressive' style, while still generally similar to popular 'Rock' music, is characterized largely by the non- standard arrangements of its presentation. In many cases, 'songs' often stretch for tens of minutes, and may even be broken up into various 'movements', such as in classical composition. While traditional rock is heavily expressive through vocals, Progressive rock can often be instrumental; deeper musical expression is attempted by exploring various different electronic effects, alternating time signatures, and using the idea of presenting a larger theme or concept through the performance.



The Canadian band Rush gives example to this 'conceptual' presentation in it's live performance of '2112'. The 'song' is actually a suite in seven parts, describing a dystopian science fiction fantasy reality. The first two parts are performed here, including an instrumental overture.

Listening Guide

0:00 Synthesized effects to convey thematic elements of the concept story.
0:50 Guitars and Drum begin extended musical introduction.
1:35 Beginning of the closest thing you could call a chorus.
3:05 Time signature change and focus shifts to guitar.
3:35 Time signature change and return to 'chorus'
4:25 Cannon blast and first lyric signals the end of the overture and beginning of the next 'movement'.
4:45-End Lyrics begin, sung alongside the theme developed in the Overture, to introduce the antagonists of the story.

The Drumming Folk

The Gullah people of the southern United States present a unique opportunity to analyze the effects of cultural isolation and adaptation. The modern Gullah people are the direct descendants of west african slaves brought specifically to the southern coastal region to grow rice due to their remarkable resistance to tropical disease common in the region. Due to their specialized rice cropping expertise and natural immunities not inherent in white southerners, white plantation owners often left the Gullah slaves to themselves. This had the effect of allowing the oral and musical tradition of native African culture to remain almost unchanged after generations of practice in the the US.



As Gullah drummer David Pleasant explains, Gullah music, like in that of many native African cultures, is rhythm-centric. A strong, often polyrythmic beat, sometimes including background shimmer, draw similarity with the Ewe drummers of west Africa. Here, the drums share a similar communal purpose, yet as further analyzed by Pleasant, they played a direct insurrectionary role in the lives of Gullah slaves. The drum and rythms of the Ewe people are similar in their ability to draw the members of the musical culture together to a single purpose, thus explaining their eventual outlawing by white authority.



The consistency between the Gullah musical culture and cultures in West Africa make it easy to see departures and adapations from the originals, though few they are. The above performance is a gullah 'Ring Shout', a dance strongly tied to christian spirituality. The performers dance to a beat, usually played by two or more membranohpones or idiophones, moving in circular pattern.

Both functional and stylistic roots of these 'ring shouts' are evident in Ewe culture. The Ewe Atsia dance is quite similar, from the circular dancing, to the downward palm movements. In Atsia, the goal is to be possessed by the spirits at the center of the dance; In Gullah ring shout, the spirit is that of the Christian god. The function and form remains very similar, supplanted only is the native African religion.

The Chinese Invasion (by Tunnel, Because it's Underground) Performance Report 1

Introduction
On April 31st, the Chinese underground band AV Okubo played to a barely- there Texan audience at the Denton venue Hailey's. The show was a part of the Chinese Invasion tour that brought the group, among others, on a blitzkrieg tour of the southwestern United States following their unprecedented reception at Austin's acclaimed South by Southwest festival. While marketed in the US as Chinese punk rock, the band does not easily fit into that peg, but may have been cast from the same die somewhere in it's genesis . Post- Punk and experimental are closer to the mark, if still not entirely descriptive of the group, but genre is periphery when concerning these musicians; the American interest lies in the origin, not the classification.


AV Okubo plays an American venue.



Music
AV Okubo opened the night with a set list of high energy, synthesizer- driven Chinese language melodies. The gritty, punk-inspired timbre of frontman Lu Yan will be familiar to American audiences on the Invasion Tour; the coupling with melodic synthesizer harmony may not be. Okubo's stage energy came courtesy of the high tempo drum rhythm played alongside a looped synthesized dance beat, often used as a platform for drummer Hu Juan to depart from. The band made full use of electronic effects, including the old megaphone-in-the-microphone punk standby. Here however, the gimmick is more Tienanmen Square and less Green Day.

Performers
The band, a four piece ensemble from Wuhan, takes obvious lessons from the west in terms of composition and dress. All in their early 20's, the musicians seem to be keenly aware of western culture and stage persona. Leather jackets, bleached hair, and low-slung guitars draw from punk sensibilities, and the attitude and delivery of Chinese revolutionary-themed lyrics allows the former to be authentic. Ending the set list on a drawn out, reverb-laden bass note, bass guitarist Zuo Yi threw his instrument violently on the ground, and ran off stage, lighting a cigarette.


Audience
The Wednesday performance kept up only a handful of Denton residents, almost entirely comprised of students from the University of North Texas. Small but spirited, the audience was not afraid to dance to the Chinese band's offerings, and often interacted humorously with the performers. When vocalist/keyboardist Lu Yan prefaced a song with “In old times, Chinese could destroy people with their minds”, the audience answered "Now what do you do?!” to which the leather jacket and chain choker clad bassist Zuo Yi menacingly exclaimed “Now, we destroy everything!”, much to the delight of the similarly charged young crowd.

Time and Space
The performance, which came late in the evening, marked the last Texas stop on the band's Invasion Tour. The unnecessarily ample space of the Hailey's concert floor saw little to no seated attendees; only the most curious and dedicated of the local music going crowd had the makeup to drink and make fist gestures in support of like minded young musicians from half the world away, and they did so on their feet. Most watchers were comfortable being only feet from the stage, not conscious of being small in number and having the option of maintaining a cautious distance. The weekday, late night performance did much to endear the band to the audience, and vice-versa, drawing energy from the close connection between the two peer groups, now not separated by any ocean or authority.

Conclusion
The Chinese Invasion tour is doing much to bridge the divide between youth cultures of the east and west. Chinese bands like AV Okubo are fighting and winning the attention of a generation of young American listeners, not as an empty echo of western punk or counterculture ideas, but as a utilization of these ideas in practice. The themes will find a commonality between the two, and as AV Okubo's performance is evidence to, there will be western ears open to the Chinese bands that find themselves planning similar invasions.



Chinese Invasion Tour. Texas, Denton. 31 Mar. 2010. Performance.

The evolution of Lucia

This woman just brutally murdered her newly wedded husband on their wedding night in a fit of misguided rage. She is Lucia from Lucia di Lammermoor, an 1835 dramatic opera by Gaetano Donizetti.

This alone would normally be enough to captivate my interest long enough to blog about Opera, but then I found this version of the same Lucia aria, by Russian singer Vitas



A masculine soprano, indeed. Minus the blood but added the bling. Yet it ends not here. I then discovered that the alien opera performance from the 1997 sci-fi The Fifth Element draws directly from Lucia.



From early 19th century Italian performances, to the tentacle headed blue alien (non Nav'i) version, the opera remains effective through it's key feature: the voice. Called Bel Canto, meaning literally 'beautiful voice' in Italian, the vocal style found commonly in opera is the focal point of the performance, often driving narrative and putting homophonic instrumentation in a very supporting role.

As you can see, as evidenced by all performances of Lucia throughout the galaxy, the singer's range is used quite extensively. Bel Canto relies on the expert legato (Italian: tied together) of movement throughout the vocal range.

Il Dolce Suono, the title of the above performances, is what is known as an aria. In the operatic style, vocal performances are typified as either recitative (lyrics sung in order to advance the plot, in imitation of speech), or arias. The aria allows a single voice to express in a more structured style than recitation, giving it the ability to convey an important theme or emotion in the opera.

In these arias, the vocal performers may often embellish upon the written score heavily; compare Vita's to the first video, a Natalie Dissay performance. These embellishments, small trills, placed vibratos, timed emphases, allow the aria performance to be the star attraction; a showcase of the Bel Canto abilities of the headlining voice, and the reason the drama is dramatic; the comedy, comedic. It's what makes opera work. Even Bruce Willis was moved.

Avatar

James Cameron's Avatar is the highest grossing movie of all time. It is also the longest movie in existence. Well, the second thing may not be true but it is really long, and in it is about 3 hours of original music by composer James Horner.

Being about a skinny blue race of arboreal shamanistic aliens, called Navis, the movie's composer was able to create an entire music culture from scratch. This clip is a medley of the score:



You can easily tell that the music implies certain things about the Navi by using types of existing music and sounds that we have already given 'earthly' correlations to. For example, the use of African tribal-type drumming is prevalent in the Navi portions of the score. Also, the contrast with the music played during the scenes involving the film's villains (a militaristic mining company) gives the impression that the Navi aliens are definitely the good guys. Compare the different types of drum used to divide the two archetypes:



The militaristic, heavy drum pattern and chordophones succeed in sounding as warlike as the film's villains need to be, while the hand clapping, tribal drumming, and vocal chorus (sung in actual Navi) makes the watcher well aware that the alien race is quite spiritual, a bit ethereal, and much more wholesome than the former.

The Goat's Blues


Introduction

Dallas, Texas has long been a hub of Blues music in America. With a pedigree of blues performers spanning the 20th century such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, T-Bone Walker, and the later Stevie Ray Vaughan, Dallasites are among the privileged few to claim the ancestral birthplace of a music culture. The richness of Dallas blues history allows us a good deal of perspective when we attempt to analyze the smaller communities and niches in which Blues music has maintained it's relevancy. The East Dallas dive bar The Goat remains one of these bastions of an often considered bygone musical era, and with that, a unique opportunity to observe the ideas about Blues that have allowed it to maintain it's relevancy and thrive in Dallas.


Methodology

The main body of data collected to create this analysis is fieldwork. Because this music culture is so small and currently active, there is little or no actual data or observation concerning it in terms of description. Many of the ideas presented in this work reflect the direct opinions of the members of The Goat's musical niche, including three interviews with Blues performers involved in the music culture. The events held at the Goat (which may be called events only in the sense that there was a loose scheduling of musical performers) served as the basis for analyzing the actual musical style being performed. For reference regarding many of the influential musicians and places often cited by participants in The Goat's music culture, the website www.Blues.org was helpful.



Aspects of this Music Culture

Ideas
Armed with a at least a modicum of blues history, one could attempt to piece together a history of influences and development of The Goat's Blues style. In reality, it is quite easier. Perry Jones, singer and guitar performer staple at The Goat, says “You want to know something about the Blues around here? Go find out about Tu Tu Jones, then come back here.”

The Goat's brand of blues would and could definitely be linked to the early buddings of Mississippi Delta Blues or Chicago Blues, but that is almost peripheral to accounts of the local top dogs. Names like Freddie King, and T-Bone Walker, Blues musicians who shaped Dallas Blues, are cited almost universally as influences. In this way, it is evident that to understand smaller Blues niches like The Goat, one would glean more insight from searching for more local predecessors rather than pre-eminent Blues musicians that were active outside the Dallas area.


Perry Jones plays one of his influences, Freddie King

Stevie Ray Vaughan is acknowledged as a rightful pillar of local blues legend, but didn't really influence any of The Goat' performers greatly. As Jones explains,“See, he took the twelve bar, and Buddy Guy's guitar style, and Jimi's (Hendrix) electric sounds and did that. But he was coming up at the same times as most of us.” Most of the performers at The Goat are old enough to have been influenced separately from Vaughan. That fact might lead someone to believe that the Goat's performers may be slowing down their involvement in music; in actuality, performers such as Jones have a vitality that seems to be shared in The Goat. Jones admits that he's probably never going to stop playing, and goes on to say that he plays over 280 nights a year, smiling with pride.True to form, The Goat exudes that vitality. Almost every night of the week, the small corner stage will see some sort of performance. As early as 8 AM, regulars can be found happily sitting at the bar, perhaps even waiting for the evening's music to begin.

Activities

The average pedestrian meandering through Dallas bars and hotspots would enter The Goat and immediately be familiar with the scenery. The bar/live music formula is a pervasive one, and possibly for good reason, but what belies cursory glance, however, is the depth of relationship between the on stage performers and the audience. A deeper observation of interaction between the musicians and their audience in between sets immediately informs you of a friendly familiarity, something akin to good friends playing for each other in the comfort of their own home. This initial performer/audience relationship observed was later clarified as something even beyond what was first assumed; while being interviewed, one bar patron, Jim Russell, was called up to the stage to perform Blues guitar. In surprising number, many Goat patrons are in fact musicians that perform in the music culture themselves.

While it is surprising that a distinction between audience and performer is not entirely clear, it also underlines a salient point about what it means to look like a blues performer. Russell, who sat slumped at the bar wearing plain slacks, loafers, and sporting glasses, had this to say after he departed the stage subsequent to delivering his performance, “No, it doesn't matter what you look like.....you know...It matters what's in here (he taps his chest), could be anybody”. For anyone expecting to see the flamboyant style of Stevie Ray Vaughan, or the patented cool of John Lee Hooker being replicated at The Goat, disappointment would be certain. Simply put, visual persona has little to do with the culture.

Many of the patrons and performers look just as unassuming as Russell (with perhaps the exception of the long haired, John Lennon-esque, round-spectacled Perry Jones); they are also almost entirely white. Race, it seems, does have it's definitions in Dallas Blues communities. Without prompt, performer Perry Jones exclaims, “If you wanna see what the black people are doing, go head down to R.L.'s (referring to prominent area black musician R.L. Griffin's live music venue)”. Not only Jones, but many other patrons of the Goat, and especially performers, eagerly direct you to predominantly black establishments or musicians. With a small grin, Jim Russell recounts one of his favorite accomplishments; playing well enough at R.L.'s that blacks danced to his performance. “Whew..thank you for that....”, Russell laughs. The noticeable divide between the two races is easy to mistake as perhaps a prejudice, but in reality, for the predominantly white patronage of The Goat, there is a reverence for black Blues. Russell goes on, “This is their music, you know...... they take it seriously. You better know what you're doing.”


Repertoires

Most Goat musicians would accept the title 'electric blues', or 'blues rock' in a general sense. The 12 Bar chord progression remains prominent throughout performances and performers, as with many other Blues cultures. Standard Blues lyrical themes of misery and problematic love also remain unchanged. An example from performer Homer Henderson's Monday 8thperformance of Dynamite Nitro:

My love is like dynamite
Don't you mess with my fuse
My love's like Napalm
Better handle me with care


Homer Henderson plays Dynamite Nitro

Lyrics will also often change to reflect the steady stream of new performers taking the stage. During a performance by Tony DeCiccio, the names of the new performers on stage were improved into the song as a sort of running introduction. During the same night, one of the performers, Jim Dugger, a jazz-fusion drummer, experienced his first time playing at The Goat. He had never before played with any of his fellow performers. He was able to use his knowledge of jazz drumming and music theory to improvise without any rehearsal. He explains; “Well, you know it is going to be shuffled, and in swing time, so you can almost fake it. That was 100% improvised”, he says, packing away his drum sticks. To this point, rehearsal does not play a significant part of the music culture at all. When asked what band was playing, one patron explained that it was no particular band – only particular musicians who happened to be playing together that night. Perry Jones gives this perspective, “I don't want to be in any band. That means two things – that I have to have a job, and that I have to go to rehearsals. And I ain't doing any of that.”


Material Culture

While the music coming out of The Goat has little to do with anything material at all, there is something to be said about it's near round-the-clock serving of alcohol. It's consumption is near universal, not even the performers refrain. One performer, an electric bass player named Russ, rationalized that at some point, some money has to be made.

Conclusion

With such royal parentage and legacy to pass on, Dallas Blues culture depends on venues like The Goat. The very nature of the bar allows a very flexible cache of talent to express Blues music without many of the common constraints of musical performance. At the Goat, Blues musicians are able to perform almost nightly, without a formal band, and sometimes even without any ties at all to the music culture. These musicians are not only the current keepers of Dallas blues culture, but the influence for the next generation in turn.










Works Cited

Tony DeCiccio/ Perry Jones Jam. Texas, Dallas. 08 Mar. 2010. Performance.
Jones, Perry. Personal interview. 8 Mar. 2010.
Russell, Jim. Personal interview. 08 Mar. 2010.
Dugger, Jim. Personal interview. 08 Mar. 2010.