Jody Oberfelder, Grace Yi-Li Tong, Paulina Meneses, and Ashley Merker will perform Rube G. — The Consequence of Action at Gibney this month (costumes by Claire Fleury / photo courtesy Jody Oberfelder Projects)
RUBE G. — THE CONSEQUENCE OF ACTION
Gibney Dance Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, White Box Studio C
280 Broadway between Chambers & Reade Sts.
Saturday and Sunday, March 4-5, 11-12, 18-19, $15-$25 jodyoberfelder.com gibneydance.org
New York–based director, dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Jody Oberfelder is the September 2023 entry in the Modern Women: 21st Century Dance Coloring Book calendar. On that page she says, “Standing on my head I see the world upside down. When I’m right side up, I look again with a different perspective.”
The quote is apropos of her latest piece, Rube G. — The Consequence of Action, making its world premiere March 4-19 at Gibney.
“Many of the younger generation know my name in a vague way and connect it with grotesque inventions but don’t believe that I ever existed as a person,” Rube Goldberg once explained. “They think I am a nonperson, just a name that signifies a tangled web of pipes or wires or strings that suggest machinery. My name to them is like a spiral staircase, veal cutlets, barber’s itch — terms that give you an immediate picture of what they mean.”
Reuben L. Goldberg (1883–1970) was an engineer, sculptor, inventor, author, and cartoonist who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for his political cartoon “Peace Today,” a depiction of an American family and their house perched atop a giant atomic bomb that is tilting precariously at the edge of a cliff. But Goldberg is best known for his drawings of crazy contraptions in which a series of odd items must connect in a chain reaction in order to make something happen, like dominoes but with objects and animals.
In Adam Felber’s 2006 novel Schrödinger’s Ball, a character explains, “You know: a lever is pulled, causing a boot to kick a dog, whose bark motivates a hamster to run on a wheel which winds a pulley that raises a gate that releases a bowling ball and so on? Until, at the end, finally, the machine does something incredibly mundane, like making a piece of toast. Yes? Well, as it turns out, that’s the world.”
A fun, immersive, interactive view of the world and our place in it, Rube G. — The Consequence of Action features Grace Yi-Li Tong, Paulina Meneses, and Ashley Merker, joined by Detroit native Oberfelder, weaving in and around an audience of forty people sitting on stools spaced two feet apart, with music by klezmer trumpeter Frank London. There is light touching as the performers ask audience members to give them small pushes, as if we’re all objects in a Rube Goldberg machine, which the Rube Goldberg Institution for Innovation & Creativity says “solves a simple problem in the most ridiculously inefficient way possible.”
In May 2019, London put together “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” at the New York Public Library, in which he selected a wide range of artists to pay tribute to such Jewish cultural figures as Hannah Arendt, Benjamin Cardozo, Morton Feldman, Susan Sontag, and Kurt Weill; Oberfelder was assigned Goldberg. She spent the next four years researching him, leading to the short film Rube G., the performance Rube G at Roulette, and Amphitheater in East River Park.
On a recent Monday afternoon, I was a “test guest” at a rehearsal for the new work, experiencing the piece and then talking about it afterward with Oberfelder, Yi-Li Tong, Meneses, Merker, and fellow test guest EmmaGrace Skove as Oberfelder took notes; she was particularly interested in a comment I made about one section reminding me of a pinball machine. Following the discussion, I spoke with Oberfelder — whose oeuvre also includes Madame Ovary,4Chambers,Throb,The Soldier’s Tale, and The Title Comes Last — about Goldberg, working with new dancers, making connections, and her affinity for site-specific immersive presentations.
Jody Oberfelder watches team rehearse at Open Jar Studios in Midtown (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
twi-ny: In creating this work, did you have a specific fascination with Rube Goldberg himself or the Rube Goldberg machine?
jody oberfelder: I’m thinking of it in a larger context, like how one thing affects another. Frank London actually gave me the assignment in 2019. He had a thing about Jewish thinkers, philosophers, poets, writers. He had like twenty people on a program at the New York Public Library. And he assigned who got what. So I got Rube Goldberg. I knew about Rube Goldberg because when I was working on The Brain Piece, the neuroscientist who was teaching a class in illusion showed us the the Okay Go video [“This Too Shall Pass”], which is quite amazing. I think everybody knows about Rube Goldberg without knowing they know about Rube Goldberg. But now I’ve been researching who he was as a person and how he was of his time. The humor is very much Jewish humor too, like his comic strip “Foolish Questions.” He asks about how things affect each other and that’s a question that’s been in my choreographic toolbox. What interests me is intersections of people and ideas. And my medium is bodies. So this is really nice for me, instead of doing a purely conceptual piece to just work physically with awesome dancers.
twi-ny: You said Frank approached you in 2019, but I would’ve thought that it came out of the pandemic lockdown, when people couldn’t connect. But it was already in process.
j.o.: But that was different; it was more celebratory.
twi-ny: It has the same name, but it’s not the same?
j.o.: That one I called Amphitheater, because I knew I would do Rube G., and then we did the show at Roulette. It totally was about Rube Goldberg.
twi-ny: And you did the film also.
j.o.: The film was a total pandemic film. People said, Look, can’t we wear masks? I’m like, no. Because one day nobody’s going to want to see masks. I look at that film and it was everybody in their little boxes, they would go outside to dance. And I just strung them together with the same words that catalyzed this piece. Like “bounce lever carousel” is one, “slide slice.” So I just came up with the action words from studying Rube Goldberg machines that were posted online, the ones that people work on for a really long time and they jump up and down at the end. In fact, some of the sound score was ripped from YouTube. You can hear the dominoes falling.
twi-ny: So these are new dancers for you?
j.o.: Yes. And that’s what changed the piece.
twi-ny: In what way? Was it an open call?
j.o.: Yes, they’re from the audition that I had. I just thought start fresh, look around, see who’s out there. Ashley is my Gyrotonics teacher; she’s so beautiful when she teaches. I just said, Look, I’m thinking about adding in some new dancers. Do you want to come to the studio? And in a two-hour span of time, I made up a whole bunch of material with her; that was a no-brainer. And then I picked the other two from the audition I had.
twi-ny: Ashley just seems like a natural human connector.
j.o.: She danced with Doug Varone and she still dances with Jacqulyn Buglisi, but I had no idea. You don’t know until you get in the studio how someone will be with you. Each of them has their own quality. They’re not carbon copies of each other. They’re unique dancers. And they just went with the material. I had to stop inventing. Even Frank said, Jody, you’ve got too much material. Just stop inventing.
Grace Yi-Li Tong, Paulina Meneses, and Ashley Merker go horizontal mountain climbing in Rube G. — The Consequence of Action (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
twi-ny: You just want to keep watching them do something.
j.o.: Well, yeah. Now I want to do a pinball machine. I think we’ll have to do something as a transition where someone’s trying to get through and they get bounced back. That’s great.
I don’t like to get an idea from seeing someone in someone else’s piece, because they’ll be different. In fact, I did go see Ashley perform with somebody and I just said, She’ll be different with me.
twi-ny: Since the very beginning of your career, you’ve been into immersive, interactive, site-specific pieces, before it was a thing, a genre. What was the impetus?
j.o.: I’m pretty visual. And I like environments. If I look at the music stands in this room, there’s definite space around each one. [Gets up and walks around room] You get an idea from looking at the place that you’re in. [Returns to seat] The immersive stuff that I’ve been doing the last three years is very much like leading the audience on an experience so that they know what this space is, so that they’re going on a journey.
twi-ny: So that’s how you explore the spaces you’re in? Your mind automatically sees that.
j.o.: I applied for an NEA grant and hopefully we’re going to be partnering with Greenwood Cemetery. That would be the next thing. I came up with a title before, and I have the location. It’s going to be called And then, no.
twi-ny: It’s a great place to see a performance.
j.o.: I’m also doing a piece called Walking to Present, which we’re doing in Munich, right on the site of a Trümmerberg, which is a trauma mountain. It’s at Olympiaberg in Olympic Park. What they did after World War II is they made these huge piles of rubble and just covered it with turf. And then they got the great idea to turn it into a park. And when, when the Olympics came in 1972, they made a beautifully scaled park. And that’s where the performance will take place.
So working on all this primed me to get back to Rube G. in a different way, so that it wouldn’t just be on the stage, there wouldn’t be a separation. It’s an experiment to see if I can be immersive inside, if I can make the room come alive as if it were an installation of people.
twi-ny: Right. As a test guest, that’s exactly what I felt.
j.o.: We’re all in this period where we need to lighten up and not be so hard on ourselves. And we’re in this period where a little goodwill, a little lightheartedness is important. There’s all this heavy stuff we have to think about daily. Walking to Present is a little more deep. But I hope I can find after this piece more lightness, even though the subject matter of walking through history and walking over history is heavy. Cemeteries are heavy, but, on the flip side, you can’t experience heaviness unless you have lightness.
twi-ny: You’re Jewish. Does that have anything to do with your choice of doing it in Munich [where eleven Israeli coaches and athletes were killed in a terrorist attack in the Olympic Village in 1972]?
Jody Oberfelder Projects will become a dancing Rube Goldberg machine in world premiere at Gibney (photo courtesy Jody Oberfelder Projects)
j.o.: Definitely. I’m married to a German guy, so I’ve been going to Germany a lot, and I performed there in 1983, a solo concert in a club, three pieces. And this curator saw me and we’ve been in touch all these years. I was doing my piece Life Traveler with the suitcases, where it’s a one-on-one piece. And she got the gist of that and just said, We’d love you to be part of the [2023 Dance München] festival. So I feel really lucky to have that be in such good company. But Rube G. is its own piece. And it’s not an identity piece. It’s just what it is. It’s not a political statement, but it is kind of, because what would be political about it is what happens when people gather together. Either you resist and you’re destructive or you’re constructive.
twi-ny: Do you see Rube G. as a natural progression of your career or more of an outlier?
j.o.: Oh, well, I see this piece as both. It’s a return to the really athletic physical stuff I did for most of the first twenty years. I mean, I was very athletic. I didn’t dance until I was nineteen and I did gymnastics and water ballet. I was a cheerleader. You couldn’t get me to sit in a chair for over forty minutes.
So it’s a continuation of my exploration of physical possibilities. And it’s fed by the idea that the fourth wall has to come down. It’s just not interesting to me to dance on a stage unless it’s something with bells and whistles, visual opera. I heard a piano concert, Yuja Wang, and that was on a stage and I was riveted, I was part of it. There’s a way to put things on a stage and have the audience be part of it. But I like intimacy.
twi-ny: As an audience member at so many of your shows, I can say that’s one of the draws; you’re not going to just be sitting in the audience as an observer. You’re going to be involved. You might be physically touched, but you’ll certainly be emotionally and psychologically touched.
j.o.: Well, with these pieces that only forty people can attend, it’s hard to make a living. I have to do a benefit and hope people will come to that [on March 19]. Apply for grants . . . but I’m not complaining. I don’t stop working. I feel like dancers and artists, we work so hard, and our brilliance is something the world needs. The climate is making the world smaller. We’re all going to be suffering the same things. I hope I’m putting something really great in the world for people to experience.
Hal Linden and Bernie Kopell star in Two Jews, Talking at Theatre at St. Clement’s (photo by Russ Rowland)
TWO JEWS, TALKING
Theatre at St. Clement’s
423 West Forty-Sixth St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Friday – Sunday through October 23, $88-$127.50 www.twojewstalking.com
There’s something special happening at the Theater at St. Clement’s right now: Television icons Hal Linden and Bernie Kopell are starring in the two-act comedy Two Jews, Talking. For an hour and a half, the ninety-one-year-old Linden, a Tony and three-time Emmy winner best known for playing the titular New York City police captain in Barney Miller, and the eighty-nine-year-old Kopell, who portrayed the evil KAOS agent Siegfried on Get Smart and charming ship’s doctor Adam Bricker on The Love Boat, argue and complain about life, love, and religion.
In the first act, Kopell is Bud and Linden is Lou — a nod to the classic duo Abbott and Costello — two Jews taking a break as the Israelites are making their way through the desert, having escaped from their Egyptian taskmasters. They discuss the Ten Commandments, the rules of kashrut, and the debauched celebration with the Golden Calf.
“What a night that was,” Lou says. “Our cares, like our robes, thrown to the wind. Then Moses comes down from his mountain and ruins everything.” Bud asks, “What did you expect? He was angry. He turns his back for a minute and all hell breaks loose.” Lou responds, “Four hundred years we were slaves — finally we’re free and we can’t throw a party?”
In the second act, Phil (Kopell) and Marty (Linden) are sitting on a park bench, griping about the state of the world and the pitfalls of aging. “In a million years, you’ll never guess where I was this morning,” Marty says. “Probably not,” Phil answers. “Mount Sinai,” Marty tells him. “The hospital?” Phil asks. “No, the place where Moses handed down the Ten Commandments. Of course the hospital,” Marty says. “You don’t look sick,” Phil adds.
The play was written by seventy-seven-year-old Emmy and Peabody winner Ed. Weinberger, who wrote and cocreated such television classics as Taxi and The Cosby Show, and is directed by Obie winner Dan Wackerman (Ten Chimneys,Morning’s at Seven).
Last week I sat down with Linden and Kopell in one of their dressing rooms at the theater — I had brought rugelach, and Linden immediately partook — and we kibbitzed about the play, Judaism, and their long and distinguished careers in show business, including naming their favorites as well as their not-so-favorites. It all began with me fumbling with my iPhone recorder.
twi-ny: Sorry about this; I’ve only had a phone for about a year.
hal linden: So you never had a phone.
Stage manager Catrina Honadle, pointing at Kopell: That’s him too.
twi-ny: Never had a phone. I always carried around dimes, then quarters.
hl: They don’t have pay phones anymore.
twi-ny: There are actually a few left.
hl: Back in the day, we had answering services, and you had to constantly stay in touch with them. They would get angry at you if you didn’t keep calling in. “You didn’t call in; you missed your appointment!”
bernie kopell: Harvey Korman, we’d call him up and ask, “Anything for Harvey Korman today?” “No, sorry.”
twi-ny: Another funny man.
hl: Another funny man.
bk: I spoke at his memorial. A lovely human.
hl: Yeah. I think was there.
bk: Mel [Brooks] was there.
hl: I think I was there. I’m trying to remember where it was.
bk: Carol Burnett was there.
twi-ny: Do you remember any of what you said about him?
bk: He was a dear friend. We would play ferocious ping-pong, drink vodka, and listen to Mel Brooks’s 2000 Year Old Man again and again. And it was always funny.
twi-ny: It’s funny that you bring that up, because I see your show as a kind of Waiting for Godot meets The 2000 Year Old Man.
[Kopell and Linden both laugh.]
twi-ny: I mean, you’ve got the set with the tree, the boots, two guys waiting to go to the holy land. And, for the most part, Bernie is the straight man and Hal is the one who’s kvetching.
hl: Kvetching.
bk: Kvetching.
twi-ny: I saw the show on the first Saturday night preview. So it was very early, but I wanted to see it before speaking with you both.
hl: That was a little touch and go, that one.
twi-ny: You know what, I had a blast. It was a lot of fun. Okay, so we’re Hal from the Bronx, Bernie from Brooklyn, Mark from Brooklyn — Flatbush — and we’re three New York Jews sitting, talking in a church.
hl: I always thought that was a wonderful irony. Two Jews talking in a church.
bk: Another irony just before I left California, I played a Catholic priest on Grey’s Anatomy. The check cleared; it was wonderful.
twi-ny: Bernie, like you, my father graduated from Erasmus Hall also. He went to Brooklyn College.
hl: Do you know how far Brooklyn was from where I grew up?
twi-ny: It was like a different country, wasn’t it?
hl: I was a Brooklyn Dodger fan. In the Bronx.
twi-ny: Oh, wow.
hl: Yes. Only because I hated the Yankees ’cause they won all the time and it was, you know, Brooklyn was Dem Bums. I only saw one game in Ebbets Field in my life. Do you know how far it would be to go? I was a musician as a young boy, actually; my whole social life was I would be playing in the band and trying to pick up some beautiful girl, and she was interested, but she lived in Brooklyn. We called it GU —
hl & bk: Geographically undesirable.
hl: I couldn’t go out to Brooklyn; it would take me another two and a half hours to get home.
twi-ny: Today, I have friends who go to the theater, go out all the time. And they’ve never been to Brooklyn, even from Manhattan, which is kind of absurd.
hl: There are five planets here.
twi-ny: My parents, when they were dating, could walk to Ebbets Field. They’d also go to Coney Island.
bk: Nathan’s hot dogs.
twi-ny: My wife and I ate at Nathan’s last week. We go to Coney Island every year.
hl: The one thing I had to give up was hot dogs — hot dogs, sausage.
twi-ny: But rugelach is still on the menu.
hl: Rugelach — I’m gonna have to check to see if I can have another one.
Hal Linden, Max Gail, and Ron Glass get real on Barney Miller
twi-ny: So I want to thank you guys for keeping me personally entertained over the course of the pandemic. I watched every single episode of Barney Miller. I watched a whole bunch of Love Boats. Then, all of a sudden I’m watching B Positive and there’s Bernie. I’m watching Better Things and there’s Bernie. Popping up all over the place.
bk: I keep saying, If you don’t fuck up too badly, they let you continue.
twi-ny: So you’ve been busy with lots and lots of appearances like that.
bk: Yes, I have. I’m very grateful.
twi-ny: And Hal, I also saw you in Off Broadway, the virtual play that you did. Where you come in at the end.
hl: Yes. I shot that on my terrace in California. You never saw anybody else. We had to really do it on the fly because I was the only one who was not sitting in front of a computer. That was my suggestion because I didn’t have a computer that I could get out on the balcony. So I said, Why don’t I just do it handheld and put the camera down on the chair. So it was kind of weird. It was interesting. I never did see the whole thing.
twi-ny: What kept you entertained over the last two plus years?
hl: Sports. I’m still a Dodger fan.
twi-ny: So you stuck with them when they moved.
hl: Yeah. I am a Dodger fan from when Red Barber did games out of town on ticker tape. That’s how long. I remember sitting around; my father had a Stromberg Carlson radio — it was this high, that big — and sitting around listening to the World Series with Mickey Owen’s passed ball. It was 1941, I think. So I’ve been a Dodger fan since I was a little boy listening on my little radio next to my bed.
twi-ny: And now the Dodgers and the Mets are playing this week at Citi Field.
hl: I know. I’m trying to go to the game tomorrow.
bk: I’m dittoing the Dodgers, because my kid [Adam, named after Kopell’s character on The Love Boat], he just turned twenty, is a great Dodger fan, and he’s a charming kid. The publicity people have kind of adopted him. He goes to games for free. We watch the games sometimes at home and he’s cheering for the Dodgers. He has a picture with Sandy Koufax, he has a picture with Tommy Lasorda, these great, great people.
twi-ny: I come from one of the families where, if I wanted to do something on Yom Kippur, my parents said, Sandy Koufax wouldn’t pitch on Yom Kippur, so you can’t do that.
hl: That’s right.
twi-ny: And in my father’s office at home, there was only one thing on the wall, a picture of the ’55 Dodgers. But a few years after the Dodgers left, he came over to the Mets.
hl: I went to the Mets for a few years, but then when I went back to LA, I went back to the Dodgers.
twi-ny: Bernie, have you worked at all over Zoom over these two years or online in any way?
bk: I wouldn’t know if it was Zoom or what.
twi-ny: So you didn’t have to even rehearse on Zoom, like when you were preparing for this show?
hl: We lived in California. So we got together and worked on it.
bk: We rehearsed at his place, sometimes we rehearsed at my place.
twi-ny: Avoid that whole computer thing.
hl: Yes.
bk: Can I just throw this in?
twi-ny: Yes, of course. This is just three Jews, talking.
bk: I’ve worked with Maurice Schwartz, the great Yiddish tragedian. The chairman of the drama department at NYU, professor Randolph Somerville, said, If you get a chance, work with Maurice Schwartz. So I’m in the Navy, and finally I catch up with Maurice Schwartz at the Ivar Theater in California. And James Drury, who is a co-student of mine, we zoom over to the Ivar Theater and say, Let’s bring up Somerville and he’ll cast us. So we brought up Somerville and he cast us. The problem was, he was at the end of his mental power, tragically. He was so mean to the actors and actresses. And there was an actor by the name of Philip Cary Jones, who was a little cockeyed.
So he was supposed to say, [in a Yiddish accent] “As a fleeing Jew, the sun is down, the ship, I suppose, will also go down.” It was called A Lonely Ship. So Schwartz didn’t like his reading, says, “Do it this way: The sun is down, the ship, I suppose, will also go down.” He tried it the same way: “The sun is down, the ship, I suppose, will also go down.” Schwartz said, “Mr. Philip Cary Jones, you may have worked with Katharine Cornell, but I’ll tell you the truth. You’re setting the theater back a thousand years.” Oh, this is how he was, at that time in his life.
twi-ny: Well, you know, Yiddish theater is making a comeback over the last ten years or so. There’s the New Yiddish Rep and the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene.
twi-ny: They do it in Yiddish with Russian and English surtitles.
hl: I’m on the album. They made an album of that [Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish: 2018 Cast Recording], but they added songs cut from the original. Sheldon Harnick did one. I did one [“Get Thee Out,” with Richard Kind, Tam Mutu, Shaina Taub, and Matthew Sklar].
twi-ny: Well, you know, you need to see it because in Yiddish, “If I Were a Rich Man,” do you know what it translates as?
hl: “If I Were a Rothschild.”
twi-ny: And there’s the Tony that you won, for The Rothschilds.
bk: I saw the film recently and I thought it was brilliant.
twi-ny: And there’s a new documentary about Norman Jewison and the making of the movie [Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen]. He tells the story where he admits to the studio, You know, you’re hiring a goy.
bk: They assumed that Jewison is Jewish.
hl: I was not a fan of Topol.
twi-ny: As an actor or as a person?
hl: No, I didn’t like his interpretation after I saw Zero do it.
twi-ny: My parents saw Herschel Bernardi.
hl: I saw Herschel Bernardi.
bk: Norman Jewison directed the first film I ever did, which Carl Reiner wrote, The Thrill of It All.
twi-ny: Well, this is a good time to turn our attention back to Two Jews, Talking. When you guys began working together, did you automatically know who was gonna play which role or did you work that out over time?
hl: It was interesting. I was on it before Bernie and there was a question because it was originally written with Ed Asner in mind.
twi-ny: And Jamie Farr.
hl: That was the original. And when I read it for the first time, it was with Jamie; Ed had died. Ed had been immobile, so he played the two parts where you don’t move. So Ed played Bernie’s part in the second act but my part in the first act. But once I read it, I said, If we’re gonna make a play out of it, you gotta have some continuity, some relationship so that we can enunciate the themes, that I’m the one who’s cynical and skeptical. And the other part is the believer. That was right off the bat. I switched to that part, but then again, I became semi-immobile [laughs] because I just had a hip operation.
bk: Let me throw this in about Ed Asner. One of the sweetest human beings. I guested one time on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He comes over and says, “Bern, come with me.” He leads me into the prop room and he says, “Whenever you get hungry, we got nuts here, we got cookies. You’ll have a little bite.” I said, “That is so sweet.” But that’s how he was.
twi-ny: He was a mensch.
bk: A mensch.
hl: A mensch, I agree. Yeah. Ed was a poker player. We had a regular poker game.
twi-ny: Can I ask who else was at the game?
bk: Jason Alexander . . . It was a showbiz game, which was about 30% poker and about 70% bullshit. It was just wonderful. Unfortunately, I don’t know if it’s ever gonna be again.
twi-ny: Did you have a usual, big winner?
hl: No, there’s no big winners; you bet for a dollar or two, you couldn’t be a big winner, you couldn’t be a big loser.
bk: I don’t play cards. My father convinced me that as a Jew, I’m the only Jew who can’t count.
twi-ny: Bernie, when I saw the show on that first Saturday night, you said a word that immediately made my heart soar. And then when I read the new script, it’s out.
bk: What did I say?
twi-ny: You said the word “chaos.” It was in the original script, and I remember you saying it.
bk: It reminded me of my organization [KAOS, in Get Smart].
Bernie Kopell starred as devious KAOS agent Siegfried in Get Smart
twi-ny: Right. But I’d never heard you say it without Siegfried’s accent before.
hl: I didn’t even notice it was in or out.
bk: “Without structure there would be anarchy and chaos.”
twi-ny: That’s the line! My heart actually did a flip.
hl: [laughs]
twi-ny: As Hal noted before, Bernie, your characters are the ones that are more faithful — you have faith in Moses, you have faith in God — but Hal, your characters are —
hl: Skeptical. I won’t say cynical. I’ll say skeptical.
twi-ny: Do your personal relationships with Judaism relate at all to your characters’ relationships?
bk: Okay. I have to be truthful here. My father was very rough. He didn’t know that I had dyslexia. So in synagogue, I wasn’t keeping up fast enough in the cheder. He dug his nails into my forearm, just like that motherfucking Danny Kaye did. Danny Kaye was awful. I made a horrible mistake on The Danny Kaye Show: I got a laugh. He was way too rough. And he ended badly. There was some possibility that he might have done his Italian Giovanni character on Love Boat. So all the Love Boat people are at the Beverly Wilshire. And I see Danny there. And by this time he had done [the 1970 Broadway musical] Two by Two, which did not go well.
hl: No, it did not go well.
bk: And he’s having a big argument with our producer. So I go across the room to see my pal Pat Harrington, and as I’m coming back, Kaye is out of control, screaming at our producer, “You’re full of shit!” Not too great.
hl: In answer to your question, I’m a secular Jew. I do not attend synagogue. I am a tribal Jew. I’m the celebrity spokesman for the Jewish National Fund. I’ve been there for twenty-some-odd years, doing appearances for them and things like that. But that’s on the tribal level.
Phil (Bernie Kopell) and Marty (Hal Linden) discuss life and death in Two Jews, Talking (photo by Russ Rowland)
twi-ny: So Bernie, you and your characters are not the same.
bk: No. Vastly different.
hl: I have a lot of skepticism.
twi-ny: It’s hard not to these days, right?
hl: Yeah.
twi-ny: When you deliver certain jokes in the play, can you tell if it’s a more Jewish audience?
hl: We did this as a reading in North Carolina. In Mark Meadows’s district. I mean, western North Carolina.
twi-ny: That’s gotta be a tough audience.
hl: There wasn’t a Jew in miles, and they got a lot of the jokes. A few of the jokes they didn’t understand.
bk: I think part of it was they’re happy to see us, who’d been on television.
hl: But there was way more response than I expected.
bk: Me too.
twi-ny: Well, I know Bill Maher, who was raised Roman Catholic but whose mother was Jewish, talks about taking his political comedy nationwide, and he goes to red states and they laugh sometimes harder than the blue states.
bk: Bill Maher is a genius in my humble opinion. He’s brilliant.
twi-ny: So Hal, you said that you came into the project first. Have you been friends a long time?
hl: We were not that close. We’ve appeared in celebrity events together and things like that. We never worked together.
twi-ny: The only time I could find you guys on a stage at the same time was a 1980 ABC promo where you both danced in white tuxedos, with other stars from the upcoming season.
hl: I don’t remember doing that.
bk: I don’t either. But then again, at our age, what do we remember?
hl: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen things, particularly now with YouTube.
twi-ny: Well, that’s where you’ll find this, on YouTube.
twi-ny: Another interesting thing that I discovered was that Hal was on the first Love Boat pilot episode, which Bernie was not in. Dick Van Patten played the ship’s doctor.
bk: Dick was under contract to ABC. So when Eight Is Enough came about, they pulled him out, opening it up for other people. So I tested with a number of other guys.
twi-ny: You know who else was on that pilot episode?
hl: Harvey Korman.
twi-ny: Yes! And Don Adams.
hl: I only interacted with Karen Valentine. Maybe a couple of the regulars, I don’t recall.
bk: Well, let me throw this in. In the first pilot, the captain was an amazingly handsome Australian [Ted Hamilton]. He was gorgeous. But ABC said, No, he’s gorgeous, but he doesn’t have the authority. He doesn’t have the humor. He doesn’t have the kindness. So now we go to the second guy, the second guy worked on soaps. He wrote soaps. He acted in soaps. Quinn Redeker, I think his name was. And they said no. So now ABC is really getting pissed off because it’s so much money they’re putting into it and it’s not happening. So Gavin MacLeod had just come off of McHale’s Navy. And I had met him on McHale’s Navy. He was depressed because he’d done Operation Petticoat with Cary Grant, and he’d done The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
twi-ny: He was in the fabulous Kelly’s Heroes.
bk: Yes. So it opened it up for Gavin, and they were very happy. He had all the qualities they wanted and he became a great friend. A great friend. This was Gavin: There was some kind of a fakakta tradition in film and television that the director will perceive who is the weakest one in the cast.
hl: That’s the story of every play.
bk: And pick on them so that they can assert their authority.
hl: Jerry Robbins was notorious. He would always pick on the weakest link and destroy him.
bk: So Gavin says, Bern, let’s have a little chat with [director] Jack Arnold. Jack, come on over here. And we say in harmony, Jack, you may not behave that way on our set. Is that clear? Okay. Hey. All right. Fine. No problem. So he was a pussycat the rest of the way.
twi-ny: Getting back to Barney Miller, one of the things I noticed was how many of the regular cast members and guest stars I’ve seen recently onstage — Barbara Barrie, Linda Lavin, Kenneth Tigar, James Cromwell, Bob Dishy, Christopher Lloyd, David Paymer.
hl: The thing about Barney Miller, if you watched every episode, I’m sure you noticed this: Danny didn’t give a shit about repeaters.
twi-ny: What struck me is all these repeat actors, it gave it a theatrical feel, and it felt like the way the episodes were shot was very theatrical.
hl:Barney started out like a traditional sitcom. Three days of rehearsal, one day of blocking. And you do two shows on Friday night. Danny Arnold was a perfectionist. He was the head producer, the creator. The scripts were coming out later and later and later and later.
twi-ny: Five minutes before showtime, here you go, new pages.
hl: Yeah. Finally at about, I don’t know, I think it was about the fifth week or so, he didn’t have the last scene and we had to cancel the audience because we didn’t have a full script to do. What are you gonna do? He was still working on it. That’s a sin. People would come from all over the world to see the show — give them an ending. So the question was, Are you gonna have an audience next week? You gotta tell us now. And he wasn’t sure, so we never had an audience again.
twi-ny: Did you miss not having an audience?
hl: Believe it or not, when I was offered Barney Miller, I was offered three pilots. There were two hour shows and Barney Miller, which was a sitcom. I thought since I had spent so much time on Broadway, working to an audience would be easier for me. So that’s why I chose Barney out of the three — good choice, because the other two died. Anyway, the point is I quickly learned that the audiences are really a distraction, that you must close them off and work to the camera. If I’m talking to you, the camera’s over there; onstage, I would talk to you like this because the audience is out here. You know what I mean? The cameraman finally said to me, Hey, over here, because I kept crossing the line, working to the audience. So I quickly was dissuaded from that.
My point is that from then on, it was done actually like a movie. We’d start in the beginning, stage the first scene, work on it, shoot it; we’d only have two days of rehearsal, because that’s all the script we had. And on the third day we’d start shooting the show scene by scene, and because it was an independent production, we’d just do it until we figured it was right. The only people on the set were from the network to make sure we didn’t say anything wrong.
twi-ny: I also noticed how many of the episodes dealt with important issues. I hadn’t remembered it being so political.
hl: I was not a part of the writing of it, but a lot of it, the writers all came in and read the morning newspaper and found things. The atomic bomb, marital rape, racism, police violence. Danny Arnold was the genius behind it. Let me tell you a story. One of the episodes, do you remember the episode where Wojo falls for a hooker? [“Wojo’s Girl”] He keeps arresting everybody in the house to stop her from plying her trade. He finally goes and asks her for a date and she says, Sure, like everybody else, fifty bucks. At the end of the show, we have this kind of father-son-related talk as we’re about to go home. And just as he goes out the door, he turns back to me and says, Uh, Barney, can you lend me fifty bucks to payday?
The network says, You can’t say that. Danny says, Why not? They say, That means he’s going with the girl. Danny says, Very astute, you figured that out. So we’re shooting the show on the soundstage. He’s up in the office arguing with standards and practices. It’s the last line of the show, basically. We shot everything up to there. This was only about the third year; we weren’t a hit. We were still on the borderline. Eventually the director [Noam Pitlick] calls up and says, Okay, we’re about to shoot the last scene. What do we do? And Danny says, Shoot it the way it’s written, and hangs up. He says to the network, I’m shooting the show the way it’s written. If you don’t put it on the air, I’m not gonna make anymore. The network put it on the air: X-rated. Did you ever hear of an X-rated sitcom? It made the show. The ratings went way up and from there on in, they didn’t even come to the set.
bk: Can I do a Danny mishegas?
twi-ny: Absolutely.
bk: Before Barney, he worked with us on The Marlo Thomas Show. And he got very frustrated with lunch. For one hour, everybody zoomed out and they went to some restaurant and it was a big waste of time. He says, No, we’re not gonna do that anymore. So one day he ordered sandwiches and coffee and tea for everybody. But everybody zoomed out because he didn’t tell anybody that he had done this. So all this food is sitting here and Danny ate about half of it himself.
The crew of The Love Boat eavesdrop on the latest superstar guest
twi-ny: So Hal is working with a lot of theater actors while on The Love Boat, Bernie is working with —
bk: Academy Award winners.
twi-ny: Superstars from around the world.
bk: Some were lovely. One in particular was a gigantic pain in the ass.
twi-ny: And you’re gonna tell us.
bk: Yes. No, not mentioning any names. Shelley Winters.
hl: Oh, well, Shelley was a pain in the ass everywhere.
bk: But Ernie Borgnine, he worked with her on The Poseidon Adventure. So he knew her mishegas very intimately. So she’s on the show, and you know, it was so difficult to be on the ship — you gotta get on a little boat, bring all the equipment and all the people to Capri, for example, and then get on a truck. Everybody goes to location. Well, she didn’t like her hair, and she says, These lines are terrible. They don’t really suit me. She was just awful. Awful. Ernie Borgnine ripped into her with every Italian curse. And I think she was looking forward to that. She finally behaved.
twi-ny: New superstars every week.
bk: Eva Marie Saint, this is her personality. Shelley Winters, dreadful human being, couldn’t help it. So I’m outside in the parking lot. Eva Marie Saint comes by. Bernie, what are you doing? Oh, I’m studying. Would you like me to cue you? I said, I couldn’t possibly, you know, you being who you are. She said, I do it for all my friends. She said, Please, I’d love to do it. And she did it. What a mensch.
twi-ny: So there are some sweethearts in the business.
hl: We have two old actors who have worked with —
bk: Everybody.
hl: Everybody. I could tell you, some were magnificent. Judy Holliday was the most generous actress to work with. And some were . . . Ethel Merman. Ugh.
bk: I still have an earache from working with Ethel Merman.
Bernie Kopell and Hal Linden have been in show business a combined 127 years (photo by Russ Rowland)
twi-ny: And now, for the first time, you’re working with each other. What’s that been like?
hl: I put up with it.
bk: [laughs]
twi-ny: You sound like an old married couple.
bk: I’m so great.
hl: Yeah. You should be great.
bk: I am.
twi-ny: It does look like you’re having fun doing it.
bk: It’s fun.
hl: You know, this is not Arthur Miller. This is just two Jews talking and the more laughs, the better. And that’s the way we approached it.
bk: We haven’t said one word yet about our director.
twi-ny: I am a fan of Dan Wackerman’s. I like his shows a lot.
hl: You know, as I said, we did the show only once in North Carolina, that was a reading. And there was only Ed. Weinberger; there’s no staging. So it was hardly directed. We were kind of on our own . . .
bk: Sitting in chairs.
hl: And Dan took it and tried to break it down and put it back together, you know, with some sense of where we’re going. He really turned it from just a conversation into a sketch. Let’s put it that way.
bk: Our director just keeps at us until we continue to improve, to get it right.
hl: It’s been two old guys who get to try again —
twi-ny: And succeed. Standing ovations, right? Selling out?
hl: Ovations aside, our critics are ourselves. “We did it.” “We didn’t do it.” “We gotta work on this.” And the more you do that, the longer you hang around.
twi-ny: Well, thank you for hanging around with me here. I hope the show runs as long as you want it to.
hl: It’s a limited run. He’s already got the next gig.
bk: And so do you.
hl: And I got the next gig.
twi-ny: Can you talk about it yet?
hl: In Kansas City, I’m going to do Come Blow Your Horn, the Lou Jacobi part [Mr. Baker].
bk: We have a cruise honoring Gavin MacLeod, who passed away a few months ago, on the Princess ship, going down to Mexico. That’s where we started: Mexico, Mexico, Mexico. Somebody whispered in Aaron Spelling’s ear, Schmuck, we’re a hit, we can go other places. So we went to the Caribbean, we went to the Mediterranean, we went everywhere in the world.
hl: And I got stuck on one set.
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[For a behind-the-scenes look at the interview, go here.]
Barbara Pollack first visited China in 2004 (photo courtesy Barbara Pollack)
MIRROR IMAGE: A TRANSFORMATION OF CHINESE IDENTITY
Asia Society Museum
725 Park Ave. at 70th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through December 31, $7-$12 Artist Talk July 21, free, 7:00 Brooklyn Rail talk Tuesday, August 9, free, 1:00 asiasociety.org
In a 2010 twi-ny talk, Barbara Pollack noted, discussing her book The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic’s Adventures in China, “Until the late 1990s, the art world was extremely narrow-minded and unwilling to think that a major talent could come from somewhere other than Europe or North America. That has changed forever, good riddance.”
Pollack spent the following decade meeting with, writing about, and researching these major talents, in China and other countries, leading to her next book, 2018’s Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise.
Right before Covid-19 forced the lockdown of restaurants, theaters, museums, and other businesses in March 2020, Pollack’s “Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity” had been scheduled to open at Asia Society but had to be put on hold. Pollack, a writer, teacher, curator, and visual artist with a law degree, pivoted immediately and formed, with Anne Verhallen, Art at a Time Like This, a nonprofit that presents sociopolitical art, both on- and offline. Finally, after a more than two-year delay, “Mirror Image,” curated by Pollack with guest curatorial assistant Hongzheng Han, opened at the Park Ave. institution in June and has just been extended through the end of the year.
The exhibition, which Pollack sees as a kind of follow-up to Asia Society’s seminal 1998 show “Inside Out: New Chinese Art,” features multimedia works that explore the idea of “Chinese-ness” by seven artists who were born on mainland China in the 1980s, six of whom are still primarily based there. In her curatorial statement, Pollack explains, “These artists continue to push forward. We no longer view them as ambassadors from an exotic land but as representatives of a world we share.”
Pixy Liao, who lives and works in Brooklyn and was born in Shanghai in 1979, contributes intimate digital chromogenic still-lifes of parts of her and her partner’s bodies. Cui Jie creates futuristic cityscapes with hints of the past in large acrylic paintings. Tianzhuo Chen invites viewers into one of his ecstatic theatrical performances in the five-minute two-channel video Trance. Liu Shiyuan, who divides her time between Beijing and Copenhagen, combines found images with original footage in dizzying prints. Miao Ying, who lives and works in Shanghai and New York City, incorporates online gaming into her computer-animated film Surplus Intelligence, while Pilgrimage into Walden XII is a live simulation that learns over time. Tao Hui’s Similar Disguise Stills is accompanied by QR codes that take visitors into digital TikTok soap operas with nonbinary characters. And Nabuqi’s How to Be “Good Life” is a living room installation, influenced by Martin Heidegger and Richard Hamilton, that questions how popular culture invades personal spaces.
Tao Hui, Similar Disguise Stills, archival pigment prints mounted on aluminum panels, 2021 (photo courtesy of the artist, Kiang Malingue, Esther Schipper, and Macalline Art Center, Beijing)
On July 21, Pollack will moderate a conversation with Pixy and Miao at Asia Society and Nabuqi and Tao participating remotely; the talk can be viewed in person as well as online here.
Pollack is an old friend; her second book was represented by Stonesong, my wife’s literary agency. Pollack recently discussed the impact of the internet on Chinese art, putting together an exhibition during a pandemic, the Chinese art market, Chinese identity, and more in her latest twi-ny talk.
twi-ny: The exhibition includes a timeline that goes back to President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 and Mao’s death in 1976. I know this could take a book – and you’ve written several on the subject – but, in a nutshell if possible, what have been some of the biggest changes in Chinese art and the perception of Chinese artists since then?
barbara pollack: I begin the timeline with Nixon’s visit and Mao’s death, basically the end of the Cultural Revolution, the most repressive period in modern Chinese history. The artists in this show were mostly born five to ten years later and had no experience with that kind of scary attitude toward intellectuals and creatives. In fact, they grew up in a world where there was an art infrastructure including auction houses, galleries, and, finally, new contemporary art museums. This all happened really quickly.
In the 1990s, art was still kind of underground, but by 2000, China hosted a major biennial, several official auction houses, and a few galleries. By the time these artists were exhibiting, China had an art market that rivaled that in the U.S. Most people here don’t realize that Shanghai now has a dozen contemporary art museums and there are several hundred galleries between Shanghai and Beijing and other cities. That creates an incredibly rich environment for artists to exhibit their works, despite censorship and other drawbacks.
twi-ny: The internet came to China in 1994, and much of the art in the show incorporates elements of AI, high-tech social media, and online gaming. How did the internet impact the work Chinese artists were creating?
bp: In 1994, China was still a pretty isolated, agrarian society. The internet changed everything for everyone, but mostly the generation born in the 1980s, as are the artists in this show. Suddenly you no longer had to smuggle in catalogues or merely read about shows of contemporary art elsewhere in the world. It took a while for the internet to improve, but soon you could get information directly. Artists in China learned rapidly how to have their own websites and how to email international curators. I know this firsthand by those who contacted me early on. But more importantly, before the establishment of the Great Firewall — China’s surveillance of all internet activity — people in China could learn about Chinese history not included in domestic textbooks. It was an eye-opening period and one of the reasons that this younger generation is so enthralled with the liberation that came from this technology.
twi-ny: In our 2010 twi-ny talk, you pointed out that Chinese artists were able to produce without the interference of the Ministry of Culture and that restrictions rarely impeded their output. Is that still true? That was two years before Xi Jinping took over as general secretary.
bp: I have no idea what has happened in the last two years, but it should be noted that in 2014, Xi Jinping gave a speech exhorting media, television, films, and art producers to “serve the people” and uphold Chinese culture. That’s a return to Mao’s rhetoric during the Cultural Revolution. As a result, there has been a rise in self-censorship for sure. I need to return to China to see how this has had an impact on cultural institutions and art making.
Miao Ying, Surplus Intelligence, single-channel film with sound, 2021-22 (courtesy of the artist)
twi-ny: Speaking of going to China, what was it like putting “Mirror Image” together during the pandemic? You’re used to traveling there often, but I imagine that because of Covid, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and other political situations, that is not possible.
bp: “Mirror Image” was supposed to open in the spring of 2020, just as Covid took over New York City and museums and galleries were closed. I was devastated that the show was canceled at that point. In fall 2021, Asia Society came to me and revived the show. By then, I knew we could not ship works from China — not because of Covid but because of shipping tariffs imposed by Donald Trump. So we used “virtual shipping,” with artists sending photo works and videos digitally.
Even Nabuqi’s great installation — originally created in Beijing with elements bought at the local IKEA — was completely assembled in NYC. The artist sent us a “shopping list.” We ordered from IKEA here and then she directed the installation via Zoom with a translator in the museum. I think that’s a perfect example of how globalization can impact — even facilitate — art making in the twenty-first century. Also, several galleries — Kiang Malingue in Hong Kong, Tanya Bonakdar in Chelsea, Pilar Corrias in London, and Chambers Fine Art downtown — were incredibly helpful in sourcing works in the U.S. I really have to thank the team at Asia Society for an extraordinary effort to pull this together.
twi-ny: The exhibition includes a wild video installation by Tianzhuo Chen; a few years back, you attended one of his performances here in the city. What was it like to experience it in person?
bp: Tianzhuo’s work is the most visceral experience I have ever had in an art institution. It’s like watching wild animals refusing to get back in their cages. The tension between the space and the performers is absolutely riveting.
Pixy Liao, Play Station, digital chromogenic print, 2013 (courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art)
twi-ny: Another highlight of the show are ten digital chromogenic prints by Pixy Liao. How did you get introduced to her work?
bp: I met Pixy early in her career, around 2010, when she came to New York. She and her partner, Moro, have their own quirky band and I saw them perform at Printed Matter. I may have known her even before that. I love working with Pixy because she has no ego and comes off like a cutie pie but is actually quite brilliant and powerful. That’s the tension that comes through in the photographs. Her images really speak to people about the state of relationships in today’s gender-fluid world, not just in China or Chinese communities.
twi-ny: For people who might not know that much about contemporary Chinese art, what do you think will most surprise them about this show?
bp: Everything! Many Americans have such a limited view of China that they don’t even believe that creativity is possible in such a repressive society. It is repressive, but that is the framework that Chinese artists push against and test the limits of. Almost all of the work in the show has been shown in China without problems. Many of these artists have major markets with a new generation of young Chinese collectors, and internationally. But this may change. I’m worried about the future. Very worried.
twi-ny: On July 21, you will be moderating a conversation with four of the artists. What are some of the main topics you will be discussing?
bp: We will start with a discussion of how being born in China has influenced their choices as artists and whether that still guides their work. Then I will allow the artists to guide the discussion more or less. But this issue of identity will obviously recur throughout the evening. Most of the artists have told me they are citizens of the internet, not China. We’ll see where that leads us.
[You can watch a recording of the panel discussion here. Pollack will also be participating in a free Brooklyn RailNew Social Environment discussion on Zoom on August 9 at 1:00 with artists Liu Shiyuan and Miao Ying, moderated by Lilly Wei and featuring a poetry reading by Abby Romine.]
Visual artist Russell Maltz monitors the load out for installation on Jay St. in DUMBO (photo by Matthew Deleget)
RUSSELL MALTZ: PAINTED / STACKED / SITE
Minus Space
16 Main St., Suite A, Brooklyn
Saturdays through July 30, free, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm www.minusspace.com www.russellmaltz.com
When I first arrived at Minus Space in DUMBO to see “Russell Maltz: Painted / Stacked / Site,” I thought that the final phase of the Brooklyn-born visual artist’s multipart four-month retrospective had spilled out of the gallery and into the street. Since the mid-1970s, Maltz has been creating works using a wide range of materials, from concrete cinder blocks, glass, and pegboards to found wood panels, PVC pipes, paper, and a swimming pool; he has collaborated with construction companies, and he enjoys photographing artlike industrial detritus. There’s a lot of construction going on outside the gallery, some of which evoked Maltz’s use of color and materials.
Minus Space first showed his “POOL” project beginning in April, followed by “Stacks,” and now concludes with “Needles,” consisting of long, narrow vertical works of acrylic and polyurethane on glass plate and wood, suspended from a galvanized nail, each at a different height on the wall, forming three-dimensional palimpsests. Depending on where the viewer stands, they’ll experience varying depth of space in the works, including reflections of what is happening on Main St. — in this case, bringing the outside construction inside. In the main gallery each piece is a shade of blue, creating unique shadows on the walls. (There are additional works in other colors in the office.)
In conjunction with the exhibit, Maltz put up a temporary installation in a storefront at 28 Jay St., and his Scatter sculpture is part of a group show in Hillman Garden at 100 Broome St. in Luther Gulick Park this summer.
Maltz is a relaxed, easygoing guy who loves discussing art; below he talks about color, material, Brooklyn, and working during the pandemic.
twi-ny: You’re a Brooklyn boy, like me.
russell maltz: Yes, I am.
twi-ny: What do you think about how Brooklyn has changed over the years? I can’t imagine a place like Minus Space existing when I was a kid.
rm: I was born in Brownsville. My family moved to Canarsie when I was two or three years old. We lived in the Bay View Housing Project down by the Belt Parkway alongside Jamaica Bay.
twi-ny: I was born in Flatbush.
rm: Many different types of people lived [in Canarsie], mostly working class and from many ethnic and religious backgrounds. I’ve always regarded Brooklyn as a place where there is an ever-changing community of people. I think that the essence of any community and its value is all about the neighborhood. It seems that what is changing and what is inevitable is that in many places the need for development and the changes to a neighborhood that the development brings has priced out many of its current and historic residents from living in that particular neighborhood — the folks who made it what it is. Development should enrich a neighborhood and should be community-based so that the people who live there can continue to contribute to its identity and culture.
twi-ny: I couldn’t agree more. Since April, Minus Space has been showing a retrospective of your career in different phases, going back five decades. What has it been like putting together each individual section? Were you flooded with memories?
rm: Always — although, there was a prequel to the Minus Space exhibition in 2017 at the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken in Saarbrücken, Germany, that was accompanied by a monograph that covered work from 1976 through 2017. The work shown in Saarbrücken was mostly done in Europe during these years. The Minus Space show gave me the opportunity to build from the Saarbrücken show in that [Minus Space owner] Matthew Deleget and I decided to make this show in three phases. Each phase would represent a different period of my work and identify the common threads within the work that continue to identify the work to present.
The “POOL” project (1976–79) explored the origins of my ideas and philosophies, the “Stacked” works (1983–2022) explored works made as sites and examined how color transforms material, and the third phase, “Needles” (2018–22), explores my concerns with painting on glass. Combined with other simultaneous activities, such as at 28 Jay St., the installation of construction materials in a vacant storefront, and the “Yardbirds” installation at the Hillman Houses on the Lower East Side, painted wooden elements used by gardeners in their everyday gardening activities. All of these venues gave me a chance to exhibit the many forms that my work can take and elevate the question of what a painting can be.
twi-ny: How did Scatter come about?
rm: The Hillman Garden came about as an invitation from a good friend, the artist David Goodman. David along with sculptor Bruce Ostler invited several artists to install their work in the garden. A garden to me exudes the energy of change: changing seasons, changing growth, and changing habit. I decided to do a work that comprised numerous wooden stakes used by the gardeners (mostly people who live at the Hillman Houses) to stabilize the trees. I painted the stakes Day-Glo yellow. It started in early April as a pile of painted material leaning against the garden shed and was transformed, evolving into a work that was scattered and used by the gardeners for its original purpose. The yellow color enhanced the daffodils, complemented the daylilies, and spread a smattering of color throughout the garden in a natural and random way, creating yet another way to see a painting.
“Russell Maltz: Painted / Stacked / Site” continues Saturdays through July 30 at Minus Space in DUMBO (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
twi-ny: This month at Minus Space you’re showing your more recent fragile “Needles.” What were some of the main considerations when hanging the show?
rm: The “Needle” works began in 2013. I had been developing a series of works using glass because of my ongoing explorations with transparency. For this phase of the exhibition I wanted to install the most recent pieces on glass and give the work the space to breathe to establish a presence in the site and give the viewer time to experience each work as a unique one.
twi-ny: How do you decide what materials to work with?
rm: The “Needles” are a result of a serendipitous event that occurred while working in my studio. I was cutting long lengths of plywood for another piece I was working on. When the cutting was complete and as I was doing my cleanup, I saw a bunch of sawn-off strips lying in a pile on the floor; the results of one action can be the beginnings of another action — and — Aha! Well, the rest and what was to follow came quickly in that these long narrow strips evolved into the exploration of color, form, and presence with various materials in yet another way to make a painting.
twi-ny: Your use of color is striking, particularly bright yellow and green and bold red. In a recent Minus Space talk, you said that “color is the glue that holds it all together.” What comes first — material or color, and how do they come together for you?
rm: Most, if not all of my inspirations and ideas about what I make, come from everyday life, both locally and when I travel. This is a great question because the answer is not always identifiable for me, in that the order of a thing that is inspirational or evokes me into the process of making has a sequence. However, if there is one thing that might be identifiable, it would most likely be light. It is the light that is the identifier to action, and the color that is the glue that transforms and holds the work in place.
twi-ny: The show also features two red stacks (ACCU-FLO Bundled #1 & #2) in the side window that are visible to passersby. There’s a lot of construction going on in the street, so it makes for a fascinating juxtaposition. You were a carpenter and a house painter, but I can imagine your having been a construction engineer in a previous life. Do construction sites really get your juices flowing?
rm: Yes. Not so much in that the sites are there but in the sheer energy of focus, coordination, and human power and coordination that it takes to engage in the process of making.
twi-ny: How did the pandemic lockdown affect your work? Were you able to spend productive time at your Crosby St. studio, or was creating difficult?
rm: I was in New York City for the entire run of the pandemic. It was for me one of the most productive times I can remember. It gave me the time I needed to do what I want and love most to do . . . the work.
“I wanted New Yorkers to come and watch their home come back to life, to reengage with their friends and family they hadn’t seen for a long time and create ritual and ceremony around human connection, which is actually the antithesis of New York, which is a highly transactional city where people are just trying to survive,” Kenzo Digital said on a private walkthrough of his multipart permanent installation, Air, near the top of the SUMMIT One Vanderbilt skyscraper. “So I want to have a place where people can forget about that aspect of their survival identity in New York and connect through a primal curiosity on a basic, authentic level.”
Kenzo, a graffiti artist, DJ, and film and video director who has worked with Kanye West and Beyoncé, had lofty goals when designing Air; he didn’t want the project to just be an Instagram-friendly tourist attraction but to generate other, more meaningful conversations, especially among New Yorkers.
“In a nutshell, what I wanted to do was essentially create an experience of physical space that was capable of having a deep emotional and psychological relationship with a human being over the course of their entire life. The idea is you walk into this space and it will feel different every time,” he explained. “I wanted to create something that specifically challenges and defies language, both the written word and the image. It’s impossible to describe what this is, even though you can break it down by its components and you’d be correct, but it’s impossible to describe the effect of the experience and the emotional impact. Everyone is wrong and right in different ways, and it will be a different wrong and right every time you come.”
Air consists of several floors of fantastical views of New York City and dramatic reflections, reaching high into the sky and way down below, of the humans occupying the space on the ninety-first floor and above. “We built the entire thing during the pandemic. It was like making art in a science fiction film. It was . . . fucking crazy,” Kenzo notes. Glass windows and mirrors are arranged in geometric patterns that result in awe-inspiring repeated imagery that forces visitors to try to find their body in the space as well as their position in the city and the world. Kenzo, whose previous installations include Social Galaxy, which featured chambers where visitors were barraged by their social media history, and the immersive haunted house Nocturnal Awakening, considers the work to be “the story of your relationship to time, your relationship to New York City, your relationship to weather, and also your relationship to yourself.
“It’s about the relationship between the natural world and the physical world,” he points out. “If there is an approaching storm from New Jersey, you will see the city as an organism react to that storm — cars, traffic, people move differently, with rain on the street, fewer people, umbrellas pop up. You can see the city as an expression of nature. People always talk about the life force of New York; Air is an organ within that life force, the heart of it that contains its spirit. This is expressing the infinite power of chaos that is the collision of uncontrollable variables: nature, time, the world, your emotions, your place in all of this.”
Visitors first take an elevator that recalls one of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity rooms, with lights flashing on and off and mirrors that reflect the passengers into an endless oblivion. You get out at “Transcendence,” a large rectangular space with tall windows that offer stunning views of the city on three sides and glass floors that reflect the inside and the outside. It will take you a while to orient yourself, especially as you look down at what appear to be multiple levels of people either upright or upside down as buildings, blue sky, and clouds merge with the interior space.
“There are so many avenues, it almost looks like they’re delivering you to the front doorstep of One Vanderbilt,” says Kenzo, who speaks quickly and excitedly, like a child with a new toy. “And because it’s positioned so symmetrically, you can almost see the city like an organized system of neighborhoods; you understand it spatially, you understand the grid, and that grid is magnified and deconstructed within the grid of reflection that exists in here.” The gridlike structure recalls the multimedia installations of the father of digital art, Nam June Paik, who arranged television sets into wholly new, living environments; Kenzo is the late Nam June’s great-nephew and the creative director of his great-uncle’s estate.
Much of the eye contact in Air is made via the reflections, so you can connect with individuals who are not in your immediate physical space, if you can find them. It’s a far cry from being on the subway, for example, where many straphangers go out of their way to avoid eye contact with anyone.
When I mention to Kenzo that it’s hard to tell who is actually on the mezzanine and what are reflections, he replies slyly, “They are asking themselves the same question about you.”
In the mezzanine, you can look down and see how the next batch of people initially react to the area. Kenzo explains, “The idea behind Transcendence II is this concept of folding time in the sense of that when you’re up here, you’re essentially watching people exposed to the concept for the first time, and so the idea of connective language through primal curiosity is in effect because you see people, just where you were a few minutes ago, processing the information at a base level for the first time. So as we were just down there, observing that there’s a physical mezzanine up here and making eye contact, everyone up here has already established equilibrium and has the foundation of knowledge and information, and everyone down there is still figuring out what’s going on.” Kenzo envisions Air as encompassing human development: “crawl, walk, run, fly.”
Kenzo Digital stands next to the Empire State Building in his permanent installation at Summit One (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The idea for Air emerged from Kenzo’s subconscious.
“This is all based on a recurring dream I’ve had for twenty-five years; it’s a strangely, deeply personal thing,” Kenzo reveals. “In the dreams there’s a fictitious skyscraper, residential; so I’ve had these dreams that took place in the top two floors, the penthouse of the skyscraper, which is circular in shape, which is why I have the two circles on the east and west side as a nod to that dream. So it’s the ability to project my dream and then put it inside of other people’s mind and then for that to be a shared dream. And oftentimes I find people dream about it after the experience.”
Affinity is a room of silver balls, reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s helium Silver Clouds, that visitors can run through, kicking the balls in the air and against mirrors and windows, each ball reflecting themselves, those around them, the view, and other balls as dozens of orbs seem to multiply into thousands in a fun deluge. “It’s constantly engaging with the city; it’s always an inside-outside experience,” Kenzo says. In another room, the inside-outside connection involves a projection of sky and clouds on the wall and the floor as scanned images of your face are added to a large screen.
Levitation puts you in a space where you are seemingly floating above the skyline, standing on a transparent floor facing a window so clear that it makes you feel like it’s not there, that you are on a ledge, midtown Manhattan right below you. Cameras are set up to take a picture and/or video of you in the space that you can pick up at the exit. As wondrous as it is to look at, it also makes you feel the interdependence between nature, technology, and humanity as well as the impermanence of life. “It’s the story of your relationship to time, your relationship to New York City, your relationship to weather, and also your relationship to yourself,” Kenzo explains. You can further those relationships by taking the outside glass elevator, Ascent.
Levitation offers a chance to seemingly float above New York City (photo courtesy Summit One)
Kenzo honors Japanese artist Kusama with her 2019 work Clouds, a collection of amorphous stainless-steel and wax floor sculptures that also reflect visitors and the sky; it is the first of a rotating series of exhibitions Kenzo will curate by other artists in the space.
Kenzo sees Air as an ever-changing, always-evolving experience that changes from day to day, hour to hour, depending on the crowd and the weather, and he wants it to be more than just a photo opportunity that’s over when you leave.
“There’s a part of you that stays in here,” he says thoughtfully.
PTDC artistic director Michael Novak is deep in thought during rehearsal for Joyce season (photo by Whitney Browne)
PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY
Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
June 14-19, $71-$91 (Curtain Chat follows June 15 show)
212-645-2904 www.joyce.org paultaylordance.org
Growing up in a Chicago suburb, Michael Novak initially tried his hand at sports, but when that didn’t go very well he soon found his muse in musical theater and dance, as both a performer and a disciplined student. Dance became a form of expression that helped him through a severe speech impediment when he was twelve.
He was an artistic associate at the Columbia Ballet Collaborative at Columbia University, where he performed Paul Taylor’s solo from Aureole and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 2008. He made his debut with Paul Taylor Dance Company in 2010-11 — Taylor created thirteen roles on him — and, on July 1, 2018, was named the artistic director designate.
At the time, Taylor announced, “I know that Michael is the right person to lead my company in the future. I look forward to working with him to continue my vision.” However, Taylor died that August at the age of eighty-eight, leaving Novak to take on his mentor’s legacy.
Having guided PTDC through a two-year pandemic lockdown, Novak is now ready to present three special programs at the Joyce, running June 14-19, offering something different from the company’s usual seasons at City Center. The schedule consists of Taylor’s Events II (1957), Images and Reflections (excerpt; 1958), Fibers (1960), Aureole (1962), Tracer (1962), and Profiles (1979), along with a pair of PTDC commissions: the world premiere of Michelle Manzanales’s Hope Is the Thing with Feathers and the New York premiere of Peter Chu’s A Call for Softer Landings.
On the eve of opening night, Novak, who is married to award-winning Broadway choreographer Josh Prince, shared his thoughts on transitioning from dancer to artistic director, navigating through the coronavirus crisis, and planning the future of a beloved, legendary troupe.
twi-ny: You performed with Paul Taylor Dance Company for nine years and were named artistic director designate only a few months before Mr. Taylor’s passing. What were the initial challenges of maintaining his legacy, especially with him no longer there?
michael novak: One of my goals as artistic director is to both preserve Mr. Taylor’s art, legacy, and values while also innovating to push the art form forward driven by my own beliefs and vision. Initially, many of the challenges were centered on how to hold space for the death of a founder and simultaneously move forward, bringing tens upon tens of thousands of people along with us.
But we did it, launching the Celebration Tour in 2019 — a multiyear international retrospective of the most celebrated and captivating dances by Paul Taylor — and creating PTDF Digital, a platform that created a host of unique digital engagements during the pandemic.
twi-ny: How was your transition from dancer to artistic director?
mn: The transition from dancer to artistic director was, overall, smooth. I have always had a passion for arts administration, dance history, and graphic design, so those passions have served me well, as has my education from the Columbia University School of General Studies.
twi-ny: Just as you’re establishing yourself as artistic director, the pandemic hits. What was lockdown like for you, both personally and professionally?
mn: The initial phase of lockdown was extraordinarily unsettling because I was very concerned about our dancers’ safety and company’s sustainability. Simply, we worked nonstop . . . on revamping our educational platforms, rethinking social media strategy, building new ways to engage with patrons and audiences, and, most importantly, getting our dancers back in the studio as soon as possible. We knew that if we wanted to thrive in such a volatile environment, adaptability and sustained momentum were essential.
Michael Novak performs in Paul Taylor’s Concertiana (photo by Paul B. Goode)
twi-ny: In some ways, dance thrived during the coronavirus crisis, unlike other art forms, leading to innovation in online productions. PTDF Digital included the 2021 gala benefit “Modern Is Now: Illumination.” Can you describe that title and what it has been like creating digital works?
mn: I believe modern is a movement, not just a moment. So, “Modern Is Now” is another way of creating an awareness of our present moment to create and experience something new. Being modern has been the foundation of our past and it is what propels us into the future. It has been a very thrilling opportunity to step into the digital world and reach audiences in new ways. At the same time, it has made me realize the poignancy and preciousness of live performances where audiences and artists are in the same space experiencing art together.
twi-ny: In March, PTDC returned to the stage and live audiences at the City Center Dance Festival. What was that experience like?
mn: It was wonderful to be back on the New York stage for our audiences, and at City Center, where so much of our history was made. It was emotional on both sides of the curtain.
twi-ny: The City Center shows saw Michael Apuzzo’s final bow as a dancer, and Jessica Ferretti and Austin Kelly have joined the troupe. What does it take to be a Paul Taylor dancer?
mn: Taylor dancers are known for their athleticism, power, transcendence, and, most importantly, their individuality. They are also known for their emotional range — from the comedic to the horrific, and everything in between.
twi-ny: In preparing for the Joyce season, what Covid-19 protocols were in place, and how did that impact rehearsals?
mn: Covid protocols have changed constantly over the past two years. Our board of directors has been relentless in supporting the company at every stage of this recovery, from daily testing, mask wearing, building upgrades, rehearsal schedule adjustments, etc.
twi-ny: The Joyce season includes the sixtieth anniversary of Aureole, which was a major turning point in Taylor’s career as he reexamined dance as an art form. How do you approach such a piece in 2022? You yourself danced the solo when you were studying at Columbia.
mn: This lyrical, joyful work was a controversial departure from the norm of modern dance in 1962, and it catapulted the then-thirty-two-year-old choreographer to the forefront of the dance world — a position he never relinquished. This is a seminal work that is as impactful now as it was on its premiere. We work diligently with alumni to ensure that its poignancy remains steadfast while also encouraging each artist to find their own voice within the work. It’s balancing both preservation and interpretation.
twi-ny: The three Joyce programs include major works from more than fifty years ago, a New York premiere by Peter Chu, and a world premiere by Michelle Manzanales. What was the impetus behind these specific selections, and how do they differ from the company’s usual Lincoln Center shows?
mn: As artistic director my goal is to curate theatrical experiences that celebrate both our ever-expanding dance repertory and the unique venues we perform in. I have been interested in presenting a series of performances that link early, foundational works from the Taylor canon with new works for a very long time. I am thrilled to present premieres by two of today’s most captivating choreographers, Peter Chu and Michelle Manzanales, at the Joyce.
My vision is to juxtapose the past and future of our company in one of the most intimate dance theaters in our city so audiences will understand — more than ever — how our company sits at a fascinating intersection of radicalism and beauty. These early dances by Paul Taylor were made on small ensembles, and audiences will benefit greatly from their proximity to the stage. It will be up close, visceral, and vibrant.
twi-ny: Four years after taking over as artistic director, what do you see as the next chapters for the company?
mn: The Paul Taylor Dance Company is one of the most innovative, athletic, and expressive dance companies in the world. Our next chapter takes us into celebrating seventy years of bringing the best of modern dance to the broadest possible audience.
We will continue to bring Paul Taylor’s great dances to stages around the world; curate great modern dance from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; invest heavily in the creation of new work by our resident choreographer, Lauren Lovette, and other compelling choreographers and designers; and expand our educational programming and outreach initiatives.
Modern dance is born out of a desire to innovate, rebel against convention, liberate the human body, and to express the freedom of the emotions of the soul. The need for this never subsides, and our company will never stop innovating and responding to our experiences in the world.
On Site Opera returns to site-specific productions with Gianni Schicchi at the Prince George Ballroom (photo courtesy On Site Opera)
GIANNI SCHICCHI
The Prince George Ballroom
15 East Twenty-Seventh St. between Fifth & Madison Aves.
April 7-10, $50 osopera.org
Since 2012, On Site Opera has been presenting immersive works in unique locations around New York City, including Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw at Wave Hill, Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, Gregg Kallor’s Sketches from “Frankenstein” in the Green-Wood Cemetery catacombs, and Michi Wiancko and Deborah Brevoort’s Marasaki’s Moon at the Astor Chinese Garden Court at the Met.
But when the coronavirus crisis led to a pandemic lockdown and people quarantining at home, barely venturing outside (or leaving the city entirely), the NYC-based company had to reevaluate its immediate future. Cofounding artistic director Eric Einhorn decided to continue making opera, but instead of fans coming to them, OSO would deliver the works straight to the audience, wherever they were sheltering in place.
The result was a series of innovative productions conveyed live over the phone for one person at a time (To My Distant Love); a mailed diary box featuring music by Dominick Argento, Juliana Hall, and Leoš Janáček and text by Anne Frank, Osef Kalda, and Virginia Woolf (The Beauty That Still Remains); and a live Zoom opera based on Georg Philipp Telemann’s Der Schulmeister (Lesson Plan).
Then, just as the troupe was preparing for its first site-specific indoor work in more than two years, Giacomo Puccini’s 1917–18 Gianni Schicchi at the Prince George Ballroom, Einhorn contracted Covid, forcing him to direct rehearsals over Zoom. The first of Puccini’s Il trittico (“The Triptych”), the fifty-minute comic opera tells the story of a family fighting over a will; the original was set in 1299 Florence, but Einhorn has reimagined it for the Roaring Twenties. OSO plans on staging the next two works, Il tabarro and Suor Angelica, in the coming years.
As opening night approached — Gianni Schicchi runs April 7-10 — Einhorn discussed the past, present, and future of OSO in this new age.
twi-ny: Okay, let’s start with the pandemic. What are the immediate thoughts of the head of a site-specific opera company when a health crisis suddenly shuts down indoor and outdoor venues everywhere and people lock themselves inside?
eric einhorn: I had two immediate thoughts when the pandemic hit: First, what does it now mean to be a company built on the idea of gathering in a specific space? And second, how can we as a company serve our community in these troubling times? The first question led us down a road of fascinating exploration about what constituted a site. The safest choice seemed to be to create projects that allowed each audience member’s own location to serve as the “performance site.” So many arts companies were defaulting to digital media as a way to maintain production, which made a lot of sense for most proscenium-based companies, but it did not for us. Looking at audience sites that did not involve patrons sitting on their computers (a must-have thanks to pretty immediate Zoom and YouTube fatigue) led us to create projects over the phone, through the mail, and via mobile app.
The second question of serving our community was answered through the fantastic collaborative efforts of our staff, board, advisory councils, and past artists. We offered free live watch parties of some previous productions, hosted industry panels, and offered free virtual performance coaching. All of this was rolled out in an effort to help our community remain together and offer experiences that could allow us all to focus on the things that brought us joy in the midst of the terrifying first months of the pandemic.
Eric Einhhorn directs via Zoom for latest OSO site-specific production (photo courtesy On Site Opera)
twi-ny: The phone project was To My Distant Love, a Beethoven song cycle performed for one listener at a time over the phone. How did that come about?
ee: Early in the pandemic, I was sitting in my home office going through my score collection, hoping to find some thread of inspiration in these newly troubling times. I pulled out my copy of Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, which I had once performed when I was pursuing my vocal performance degree many years ago. I had always loved the song cycle for its compact pathos. Rereading the text in 2020, though, resonated in a totally new way. The poetry was about two lovers at a forced distance and the burning desire to be together again. If I didn’t know it was nineteenth-century poetry, I easily could have thought it was brand new and of the moment. Around the same time, I had been made aware of theater companies that created interactive telephone plays for an audience of one. After experiencing one for myself, I became convinced that opera (or a song cycle) could be delivered the same way. We commissioned playwright Monet Hurst-Mendoza to create an interactive script around the song cycle to allow performer and audience member to connect even more, as well as preshow love letters that elicited some fantastic, in-character replies from audiences.
twi-ny: You continued this idea of delivering the company to the audience instead of the audience coming to OSO with the diary box The Beauty That Still Remains, which was mailed out. How did people respond?
ee: After our “low tech” success with the Beethoven phone project, we continued to explore the various ways that we could connect with audiences that were not truly computer-based. Inspiration for The Beauty That Still Remains came from the phenomenon of subscription boxes that now permeate every market and taste. We didn’t know how audiences would respond to a project that was mailed in installments and featured both a tactile element (the box contents) and a digital one (the prerecorded musical performances). It turns out audiences loved it! As with all of our productions, every experiential element was tied into the story, which made it all that much more immersive. Patrons from all over the world engaged with this project, and it gave us yet another opportunity to explore the boundaries of site-specific performance during a time when gathering at a site was not possible.
twi-ny: Last summer you were finally able to gather at a site with The Perfect Pig and Tapestry of New York, at the Glade at Little Island. What did you think about the performance space and Little Island itself?
ee: Performing on Little Island as part of the NYC FREE festival was an incredibly special opportunity. Little Island is such a special place, and the Glade is a magical corner of the park that is perfect for performing. While we were in rehearsals for a full, outdoor production at the same time, the performances on Little Island were actually our first in-person performances since the pandemic began. It was really quite emotional to bring this particular repertoire to Little Island for our first in-person performances in two years. The Perfect Pig is a lovely short opera for families about the self-acceptance, and Tapestry of New York was a concert of selections highlighting many of the incredible communities that make up our city. Seeing audience members of all ages gather again and to be able to perform opera for them was truly a gift. For as much as audiences needed live music again, performers and creators needed to produce again.
twi-ny: If I’m not mistaken, your first Zoom show was Lesson Plan this past January. Had you previously been using Zoom for rehearsals or other reasons?
ee:Lesson Plan was, indeed, our first Zoom-based production. We had been using Zoom since the start of the pandemic for meetings and some select rehearsals but never for a full production. When most opera companies went fully digital in 2020, we did a significant amount of self-reflection to consider what it meant to be site-specific in these times of forced distance. In exploring the idea of the audience’s own location as the “site,” as you mentioned, we created productions for the phone and through the mail. We also created a self-guided walking tour program [The Road We Came] that explored Black music history in New York City through a mobile app with prerecorded performances. When planning our 2022 season, specifically the January slot, I took the general consensus of the scientific community to heart when they said that there could very well be another Covid surge during the winter of 2021. It seemed prudent to plan another remote project rather than face the possibility of having to cancel an in-person production.
For a while, I had wanted to create something around Telemann’s cantata Der Schulmeister — a charming comedy about a curmudgeonly music teacher attempting to teach children to sing. There were some jokes in the piece with the kids singing out of sync with the music teacher that immediately made me think of Zoom delays. This seemed like the perfect project for Zoom to become the site. We wanted to expand the piece a bit and create an English translation. For that, we commissioned Rachel J. Peters, who created something incredibly special with Lesson Plan. Our cast and team of engineering wizards brought it to life in such an amazing way — and it was fully remote and live over Zoom. This production choice proved prescient, as Omicron was in full force during the production period.
twi-ny: OSO is getting down to the site-specific business again with Gianni Schicchi at the Prince George Ballroom. Why that opera in that space?
ee: The Prince George Ballroom has been on my list of potential production venues for several years, but we couldn’t quite decide on the perfect piece to perform there. In planning the 2022 season, some of our programming goals were to keep our repertoire on the shorter side and skew towards comedy. We wanted to allow our audiences to ease back into the experience of being back “on site” and, given what the last two years have been like, we wanted to make sure laughter played a significant role in that. [OSO music director] Geoff McDonald and I arrived at Gianni Schicchi for several reasons: It’s funny, under an hour, and filled with some of the best music in opera. In matching the piece to a space, the Prince George Ballroom immediately came to mind as an opulent room perfect to serve as the home of Buoso Donati, the wealthy patriarch of the opera. The large ballroom also accommodates the audience, orchestra, and performers with plenty of room to spare, making sure that no one feels cramped — another important consideration given Covid.
twi-ny: What were the rehearsals like?
ee: Rehearsals were fantastic! To be in a rehearsal studio with so many wonderful artists working on such a masterpiece was really a joy that almost made one forget about the pandemic. That said, we adhered to strict health and safety protocols that included multiple tests every week for everyone involved in the production and fully masked rehearsals — all under the supervision of a Covid compliance manager hired specifically for the production.
twi-ny: The company is currently celebrating its tenth anniversary. What were your expectations when the company started in 2012? What are your plans for the next ten years?
ee: Back in 2012, On Site Opera was a side project for me. It was an experiment in producing and directing in the crazy format of site-specific production. I never could have imagined it would turn into my full-time job, nor be able to grow to support a staff and as many productions as we now do. There are still moments when I have to pinch myself. The next few years will bring several new commissions, the completion of the Puccini Trittico cycle, and further exploration of the most exciting sites in NYC and beyond. One of the great aspects of the company is its nimbleness. This allows us to remain incredibly flexible in our programming and create productions and initiatives that can serve our community most immediately. In our second decade we will remain committed to our values of equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility as well as rich collaborations with our community of patrons, volunteers, artists, and audiences.
twi-ny: You’ve been a leader in the digital opera movement, incorporating apps, Google Glass, and other cutting-edge technology. How is this impacting your audiences?
ee: Adoption of our various technological initiatives has been quite high across all demographics. I think that it is, in part, due to the way our tech is always integrated into our productions. Whenever we decide to include new technology, we evaluate how the tech will interact with the show, what the adoption process might be, and if it could potentially be distracting. We also are mindful that it does not create a barrier for entry for any audience members. By approaching technology from this people-first angle, our initiatives have been quite successful.
Google Glass was an incredibly exciting experiment that brought together the tech and opera communities. I was disappointed when Google changed Glass’s focus to enterprise versus retail, as it essentially closed the door to further operatic applications. Our mobile app, though, and specifically the supertitle translation module, has had an extremely positive impact on our audiences. Before the app, many of our productions did not feature projected English translations (an industry staple these days) due to our immersive seating arrangements or simply a lack of surfaces onto which we could project in our various venues. The app now allows us to always offer English translations for patrons, as well as other languages — we are now consistently offering Spanish translations and have offered Japanese on a previous show. Plans are in the works for multiple language offerings for all of our productions. Since the app is very intuitive and smartphone-based, most audiences find the use of it in performances quite easy and fun.
twi-ny: When you have time to go out, are you seeing opera, or do you have other guilty pleasures?
ee: The pandemic has made me even more of homebody than I was before. However, when I do go out, it is typically to go on some crazy adventure with my kids or see a musical with my partner.
