What price, artistry?

An Associated Press article today added further fuel to the flame over the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.

Previous reports reprimanded Chinese government, filmmaker and production director Zhang Yimou, and NBC for adding digital fireworks to the broadcast production. Then came the hubbub over a communist party leader insisting that an attractive nine-year-old girl be broadcast lip syncing the Chinese national anthem while her supposedly uglier comrade actually sang the paean from a secluded room in the bowels of the stadium, safely away from the cameras.

Now additional word comes from various sources about the horrible toll the ceremony and its rehearsals put upon the performers involved in the spectacle. According to the article:

• One performer was paralyzed from taking a 10-foot fall during a rehearsal
• Other performers were injured when they slipped on the glassy surface of the giant LCD scroll that unfurled in the middle of the field
• Some of the 900 performers under the boxes displaying the Chinese ideograms had to wear adult diapers to endure the 6-hour stay under their 40-pound charges
  
• Many suffered heat stroke or other illnesses from the long dress rehearsals, one lasting a mind-numbing 51 hours!with little food and few bathroom breaks.

Apparently Zhang has nothing but contempt for Western performers, saying they needed frequent breaks and could not withstand any criticism. While he never spoke specifically of any of his experiences, one wonders if he was talking about opera performers; he did direct the premier of Tan Dun's The First Emperor at the Met in December 2006. Zhang says:

In one week, we could only work four and a half days, we had to have coffee breaks twice a day, couldn't go into overtime, and just a little discomfort was not allowed because of human rights.

Zhang continued, lambasting divas and performing arts unions:

You could not criticize them either. They all belong to some organizations... they have all kinds of institutions, unions... We can achieve in one week what they can achieve in one month.

There is an interesting dichotomy in these Beijing games. On the one hand, the Chinese have striven--and largely succeeded--in displaying how similar they are to more Westernized countries; on the other, as evidenced by the above examples, they have shown how much they still adhere to 1960s Cold War Communist dogma, where the people sacrifice all for the good of their country and countrymen. For instance, one of the 2,008 martial artists involved in the ceremony, a 17-year-old, said that he had nothing but "pure joy" in his heart the night of the performance.

But is this idea of "sacrifice" truly a Communist tenet? Or is it perhaps related to what we, as artists, face every day: How much do we sacrifice in the name of art?

Take your average opera singer. Most singers have spent years in classroom, practice room, rehearsal hall, and on stage to refine their craft. While many college kids are out partying, having a good time, getting wasted on alcoholic beverages or, perhaps, illicit drugs, and sewing their wild oats, the average voice student is either locked up in a cramped, hot, smelly, practice studio with an out-of-tune piano, struggling with refining his or her technique or trying to learn a new, more difficult aria; or he or she is stranded in the back of some warehouse-cum-rehearsal space down on the, uh... "less fashionable" end of town with several hundred others in equally desperate environmental conditions. Even those singers lucky enough to have avoided such intense operatic education know the discipline and--I tell some of my class voice students--athletic development required to sing properly. "Practice makes perfect," is the watch word for art.

So how much is too much? The throes of agony of a recent KO production have greatly added to the horror tales that choristers, staff, and crew alike tell during the latter hours of an, ahem, well-lubricated cast party. And yet, no production in recent memory elicited more of a reaction from the audience. Some loved it; some hated it; but rarely did they find it boring. As participants, we should feel a great deal of pride at those reactions, even though we put up with the late-night rehearsals, even though we spent countless hours waiting for our call, only to be dismissed, even though we all treaded that thin line between sticking with things and saying, "F**k it!" Would that all of our productions stir up such reactions from our audience!

Another example: I spent four years as an undergraduate in the UT "Pride of the Southland" marching band. Those familiar with college bands know that UT has one of the finest band programs in the country, and the "Pride of the Southland" marching band is a part of that fine tradition--a tradition that insists on hard work and high artistic standards. From the first of August until fall semester began in early September, we practiced almost daily. If we were lucky, we were allowed to rehearse music in the air-conditioned confines of the UT band room; if we weren't--and we often weren't--we had to spend up to 8 hours a day marching on the sweltering, then-artificial turf of Neyland Stadium, the brutal August heat and humidity of East Tennessee battering us at every corner. Things improved only marginally when school started: Marching band was actually a class you would take. "Classroom" (i.e., Neyland or a practice field) hours were from 7:30 to 9:30 am and then again from 1:00 to 3:30 pm Tuesdays and Thursdays, and, generally, 7:30 am to the end of the UT football game on Saturdays. The schedule for participating in road games could be just as difficult--load buses at 6:00 am on a Friday, ride 4 or 5 hours packed in like sardines, dress and give a lunchtime concert for alumni in whatever city we ended up near, back on the bus for another 4 or 5 hours, give another alumni concert in our destination city, then a marching rehearsal for a couple of hours before getting to the hotel. The Saturday road schedule was similar to home games, except you had to lug and load regular luggage in addition to instruments (unfortunately, mine was tuba). We'd either drive back home Saturday night or on Sunday. This went on every week from September to November. During that time, we had to learn up to six separate halftime shows, marching and music, to perfection while keeping our standard pre-game show, learned in those early weeks in the sweltering August heat, in top shape.

Did I hate it? Heck yeah, I did! It was a miserable existence! Being a commuter to UT meant I either had to pack a change of clothes on Tuesdays and Thursdays or go to afternoon classes in sweat-soaked jeans and shirts. It was usually the latter because, as a busy music student and band member, I had no time to walk six blocks back and forth from Neyland Stadium, retrieve or put away my instrument, and make my next class on time... even when it was in the Music Building. (My favorite semester was when I was forced to schedule a required sociology class located on the other side of "The Hill," approximately a mile from the Music Building, right after band. Fortunately, I had a prof that was very understanding.) It was very much like what I would have imagined army life would've been like: You get yelled at all the time, nothing you do is ever good enough, you never have enough time to do the things you need to do, and you were always sweating.

And yet, I loved it! I got great seats to every UT home game and almost every away game. (Today, the band has to sit in the south endzone of Neyland; when I was in school, we were located right down front on the 50-yard line!) I met a lot of great people, some still my friends to this day, learned to act like--and be treated like--an adult with personal responsibilities, traveled to exotic places (e.g., pre-Disney--i.e., ultra-sleazy--Times Square my freshman, and 18th, year), and generally got a whole lot of what I would call "life experiences."

Perhaps the most amazing moment in my life was being on the field for pregame at the 1986 Sugar Bowl in the Super Dome, not being able to hear myself play because of 70,000 screaming No.-8-ranked Vol fans. There were a few No. 2-ranked Miami fans there. Out of self-preservation, they were very quiet, and they left in the third quarter, just after I lost my voice from hollering and when the score was 28-7 Vols; final score was 35-7 Vols and, to this day, you can see both Jimmy Johnson and Vinny Testaverde wince when someone mentions the '86 Sugar Bowl.) Today, every time I hear "The Pride" playing any of over a dozen fight songs (live or recorded), I'm almost reduced to tears with overflowing pride, and every August, when everybody starts talking UT football, I'm as happy as a clam.

Perhaps the greatest mark of high art is that it does illicit strong reactions in people, that it does stir up a range of emotions within them. Although there is not a direct correlation between time spent on a work of art and its acclaim (or outcry), generally, the more and harder an artist toils on a work, the higher the final quality of the product... and, generally, the greater sense of fulfillment the artist has for his or her work. That was certainly true of my experience with the Pride of the Southland... oh yeah, and with the opera company... and with church choirs, and the symphony, and....

So, for the previously mentioned 17-year-old Chinese martial artist, Ren Yang, the long hours, the threat of heat stroke, the danger of injury--or even death (Being an acrophobic, I couldn't help but think what would happen if
gymnast Li Ning had fallen during his "victory lap" around the rafters
of the stadium to light the Olympic torch)--was worth it. For the rest of his life, Ren, and tens of thousands of performers like him, will remember these Beijing games. They won't remember being sick with heat stroke, they won't remember the fact that they could hardly walk with tired, sore muscles, they won't remember the stinging comments of Zhang over the loudspeaker in rehearsal, they won't remember the rainy rehearsals or the long nights at the "Bird's Nest." What they will remember is that they were a part of one of the greatest artistic spectacles to ever be seen on this earth.

So, I ask you, KO chorister, what are you willing to put up with to create incredible art?

Your friendly neighborhood opera company

It seems that many of my entries lately invoke the name of the New York Times. Honestly, I'm not like a regular reader or anything. I'm lucky to make it through a few articles on the online version of the Knoxville News Sentinel and whatever headlines end up on my Yahoo! portal page. Alas! the KNS is hardly the place you would find news of the cutting edge of art except for the occasional informational "five Ws" article (Who-what-when-where-why).

So, in perusing stories on opera and music, invariably I end up with something from the Times. And it was here, in today's issue of the NYT that I found this article on a "shoestring opera company" in the Big Apple performing Monteverdi's "Coronation of Poppea." (BTW, there's an excellent, somewhat frightening, article about the Internet denizens of anarchy, also known as "trolls," in a recent issue. Nothing about art or music, but you know tech is another passion of mine.)

The article piqued my interest: Not just because it is a story about local, unemployed artisans banding together to create an opera performance on a budget that you couldn't buy a good, recent-vintage used car on; not because the company's focus is going to be primarily dedicated to performing Baroque operas with original instruments; but because, as I may have previously mentioned, I was fortunate enough to perform "Poppea" in school and have a special place in my heart for it. Better yet, NYC company, branding itself as "Opera Omnia," is doing "Poppea" in it's audience's vernacular, English. Understandably, if you're only doing a $15k opera production, you'd probably want to maximize your audience, and even in cosmo NY, you'd catch more flies with, uh... English, if you get my drift.

"Poppea" is a good opera to do, too, if you like a healthy dose of sex with your opera. The show deals with a young, ambitious courtesan (some say), named Poppea and her sexual domination (not black leather and whips-type, mind you) over the most powerful man in the known world at that time, the Roman Emperor, Nero--yes, that Nero. There are a lot of scenes with just Poppea and Nero, in his or her bed chambers making pillow talk. I suppose you could play those scenes in a Victorian manner, but, hey! This is the bright lights, big city, New York. Everyone either has a porno shop around the corner from them or they had one nearby when they were growing up. As a visitor to Times Square in the early 1980s, I counted more porno shops and peep shows in that area than you might find "Lion King" ads today. As an entertainment, you have to compete with the likes of "Oh, Calcutta," too, not to mention thousands of other, seedier, way off Broadway shows or artsy events that would definitely get someone locked up here in the Bible belt. UT's "Poppea" in the early '90s wasn't exactly prudish. Though Carroll Freeman had not yet come on the scene, we had an equally sex-obsessed Michael Erhmann as opera director back then.

And Baroque operas are good for small companies to do. Most of them have just a few characters and, in most cases, there's not a chorus per se. The later Baroque composers like Handel and Purcell were to change that, though. Despite the deus ex machina craze in the theaters of that time, many Baroque operas are relatively simple, stagewise. They were meant to be much more portable: the King's ballroom one night and a local theater the next. There certainly wasn't the explicit attention to detail that, say, Verdi or Puccini put in their descriptions of scenery.

I applaud Opera Omnia for their endeavor. I'm sure this is more of a labor of love thing than a "we're going to be rich" thing. The ensemble encompasses various young singers in their 20s and 30s and several prominent musicians in the New York area, a retired church music director. The article mentions the recent blossoming of various small ensembles that perform in unusual venues--bars and such. It even lists other opera companies in the city: Dicapo Opera Theater, Gotham Chamber Opera ("where opera gets intimate," according to their website), Opera Company of Brooklyn, Amato Opera of New York City, and Opera on Tap, which apparently seeks to turn opera performances into something similar to a rock or jazz musician's "gig." Of interest to local opera lovers: Opera on Tap has, uh... opened a branch office in New Orleans, sponsored by New Orleans Opera, where Robert Lyall, former KO director/conductor, abides as the General and Artistic Director.

I've often wondered whether something like what all these small companies are doing might be possible here in Knoxvegas. The theater companies around town seem to be able to do it. You've got the Black Box Theater, Shakespeare on the Square during the summer, as well as numerous other "shoestring" troupes. When I was singing with the Knoxville Early Music Project (KEMP) we did several quasi-staged productions. One was based on the life of the Elizabethan poet, Philip Sydney using his poems, his songs, letters, songs relevant to his time, etc. KEMP's perennial venue was the Laurel Theater, a small church which has been converted into a performance venue. The building lends itself to more intimate music such as that of the Renaissance and Baroque that we performed, and it might make a perfect space to mount a small opera production. Though the stage is tiny, there is lots of open floor space and you could do some marvelous "breaking the fourth wall" productions in it. There is even a balcony that might be suitable for an appropriately sized Baroque orchestra.

The problem for a micro-opera (I claim coining the phrase!) group in K-town? The usual suspects: Money, time, money, participation, money, and motivation. Knoxville can barely support a traditional opera company and its university feeder program. How can it support any other organization with "opera" in its title? Such a group would be on its own, probably. The KO needs to pay its own way and can nary afford to pay another group's way. Also debatable is how the KO might take the formation of another opera company in town. Would it support such an effort or see it as a threat? There would probably be some overlap between the two groups. Not a whole lot of opera singers to go 'round in this part of the country... at least ones that would be interested in performing pro bono for x number of years while the company got on its feet. Then there is the bane of so many now-defunct performing arts organizations here in town: Good management and administration. Many local musically inclined individuals have little experience with management, fund raising, hiring talent, etc. (e.g., myself). Those that do, do that kind of thing for a living, and would rather have fun singing than to sit at a desk and hound the two Jim's (Haslam and Clayton) for money. That is a hardly glamorous job, much less one that someone might be interested in getting paid McDonald's/Wendy's wages to do.

Still, the idea has intrigued me since a friend suggested it out of the blue a few years ago. She seemed to think that that might be something I could do. Personally, I don't see how a guy who can barely keep his own personal checks from bouncing every month to be put in charge of other people's money. But I could be coaxed into taking some other role, like artistic direction or just plain ol' singer.

I invite comment on the subject of a small opera ensemble in Knoxville. Let me know your thoughts.