Pregnant with Art

Since last week, I'd wanted to write a bit on Verdi's recitatives, but I couldn't think of enough to say. I'm working on a fairly difficult Bach recit and aria right now for church, so I was kind of attuned to the recits in Forza. However, performance practice is one of those long-winded topics that requires copious research and long references to obscure articles written in in the 1930s. Believe it or not, it's something hat I find not all that unpleasant; nevertheless, I wrote all the research papers I'm going to write getting my Masters. Plus, I'm not sure I had a solid point to make with it, except that Bach and Handel wrote recits, and Mozart, and Verdi. How they were related was where I began running into problems.

So, here we are in production week already. Everybody's happy-go-lucky mood has turned to dour and dim. Trying to remember new staging, you forget the new dynamics; trying to remember the dynamics, you forget the words; trying to remember the words, you forget to carry your prop on stage; trying to remember to get your prop, you forget your staging. It's a vicious cycle--a vicious cycle that you hope will get better in the two rehearsals we have left. But you're so frustrated by things, you just get "over it," "it" meaning everything that you've been working on for about two-and-a-half months total, not counting the holiday break. You're saying to yourself, "Let's just get this over. Tonight's and tomorrow's rehearsals I can just plow through. Then I'll have a glorious evening off--except for making something for the cast party--and then I can survive Friday night, have a little fun at the party, then enjoy Saturday and plow through the last performance on Sunday to enjoy going to dinner or (dare I say!) going home to bed."

To be honest, I get that way nearly every production. Maybe if I wasn't struggling with some problems with my vocal technique, maybe if I had a body that fell inside the bell-curve of sizes of costumes that Malabar has to offer, maybe if I was a better dancer, maybe if my years of experience with stage makeup meant I was getting better at it, maybe if I paid better attention... It goes on from there. Eventually, I get to the point where I wonder why am I still doing this if it's such a frustrating experience.

I mean, are we making a difference? Are we affecting people's lives with our art? There are people out there in East Tennessee that don't even know that Knoxville has an opera company. Heck! There are downtown Knoxvillians that don't know it! Will John (or Jane) Q. Public, who's still thinking about Tuesday night's "American Idol" and wondering what the praise choruses will be at church on Sunday morning care if "La Vergine's" dynamics are off... or will he even know it. It used to be you could almost bet that, at some point in a person's childhood, they would have had to take piano lessons; used to be at some point a person learned about singing in some choir somewhere; used to be people would listen in every Saturday afternoon for the Met broadcasts.

That's all in the past. Our lovely education system has failed to create an art-wise public. Yes, the three Rs are important, and, yes, it is important that we teach our children well enough to be competitive in the global market and changing technologies. It's also important that we teach them the value of exercise, the tenets of good sportsmanship, and the variety of activities, from football to table tennis, that allow us to burn off stress and have a little fun.

But it's also important to teach the history of art. Why did Van Gogh cut off his ear? What was Mozart dealing with when he wrote his Requiem? Who's Twyla Tharp? Why did Beethoven only write one opera? How did others in the past express themselves? Over all, these questions amount to the question "How can I express myself in a way that is unique and says something about me?" Isn't that art? Shouldn't that be important? Wouldn't it make the world a better place for people to write, draw, dance, or paint their feelings of angst rather than expressing them with a gun?

Wouldn't it be great if, at some point on Friday night or Sunday afternoon, that one person in the audience be inspired with Verdi's story? Or touched by the tragedy of his characters in Forza? "How am I like Alvaro?" "Poor Leonora! I feel for her! I know what it's like to lose a loved one under tragic circumstances." "What a silly vendetta! ... But, you know that big fight I had with my sister last year? We haven't spoken since. I should call her."

So, here we are, back with ill-fitting costumes, a stage setup that wasn't really designed for acoustic music, ten-year-old-makeup, and a shoestring budget that gets thinner by the minute, not to mention whatever "baggage" each of us brings to the theater from our "real" lives. How in the world are we going to reach those people out there in the audience?

Maybe that's the truly greatest art: Creating art when you don't think or feel like you can. Art is not a sure thing. Sometimes something we strive to create just doesn't turn out as well as we'd imagined it. But, then again, is it our job to decide that? Sure, we are educated in all the aspects of what it takes to make "good art," and we certainly wish for something that satisfies our own idea of what "good art" is. But, ultimately, it's not up to us. We'd like that control, but it's the opera-goer that has the final say.

Recently, in remodeling our parents' house, my brother and I had to move our dad's paintings. Dad was a graphic artist by trade, but enjoyed painting watercolors in his spare time. (My brother inherited Dad's ability to draw and, assumedly, paint. Mom's side of the family was the musical one; I got that.) When we started pulling his paintings out of storage, we realized that he had done many paintings that no one else had ever seen before--not even immediate family! All told, there were about 60 paintings, maybe a dozen or so that were new to us. He'd just painted them, taken a look at them, said "Nah, that's not too good." and put them away. And yet they were beautiful! When we donated them to our home church to be auctioned off to raise money for missions programs, people went absolutely nuts! "Oh! Your dad was so talented. I have seen several of his landscapes, but I had no idea he had done seascapes. And this portrait of an old Native American woman is just wonderful." Dad hadn't been satisfied with his output, but the people that mattered, those that saw his art, that consumed it, certainly were.

So bide that jacket that doesn't fit too well, try to keep the dynamics down during the monastery scenes, don't worry too much about how well you can move your feet, and so what if you can't sing that high G absolutely perfectly, you are creating art! And someone out there is listening!