 Making
Gotham
Michael Gordon and Ridge
Theater, an urban collaboration
By Kathleen
Watt
American
Composers Orchestra launches its Orchestra Underground debut concert
at Zankel Hall February 27 with two world premieres that take advantage
of new hall’s unique facilities. One of two world premieres commissioned
for the event is Gotham, a 35-minute multimedia work that takes
the city of New York as both its subject and its leading lady. Growing
out of the notion of New York-as-hometown, Gotham is a personalized
portrayal of this particular place—its back streets and its minutiae,
its dreams, and its detritus—seeking to reclaim New York for those
who live and work here. In so doing, Gotham becomes a map
of the urban inner landscape for any city-dweller of the 21st century.
“Every
commission comes with a set of parameters that involves compromise.
Never does someone come to a composer and say ‘write anything
you want for any combination of instruments, and tell me exactly what
you would like the concert situation to be like’...,” said
composer Michael Gordon, co-founder of the Bang on a Can organization.
Then American Composers Orchestra did just that. Of his ACO commission,
for which Gordon proposed a collaboration with New York’s Ridge
Theater, he now laughs, “It’s about as close to [perfect]
as you’re ever going to come.”
The Gotham
project reunites Gordon with Ridge Theater filmmaker Bill Morrison,
visual artist Laurie Olinder, and director Bob McGrath. The same team
created Decasia, the spectacularly successful 2001-multimedia
experience now acclaimed from Basel to Edinburgh, to BAM and Sundance.
Gotham is structured along the Decasia model, incorporating
projections, re-edited archival film, multi-tiered sets, and musicians
who sometimes seem actually to inhabit the projected environment. The
prospect that the team may do with the theme of New York City what they
have done in Decasia is exhilarating, and, in some ways, harrowing.
“I
wanted people to feel an aching sense that time was passing and that
it was too beautiful to hold onto,” said filmmaker Bill Morrison.
One critic compares Decasia’s “shimmering dreams
and fantasies” to “Etienne-Jules Marey’s experiments
in chronophotography…radically transformed—their beauty
fully intact—in [the] Surrealist collages Max Ernst [made of them]….
A complex allegory for human experience ensues: knowledge is pursued,
machines achieve manic ascendance, seduction spawns violence, disasters
rain down…life begins anew.”
All the team members agree that Decasia broke new ground for
them. “With Decasia we moved away from being responsible
to anything other than our creative idea,” explained Gordon. “There’s
no pressure for us to deliver anything that anybody in the world can
exploit.” He added, “It’s sort of our fantasy….”
By all
accounts this foursome has discovered a formula for artistic collaboration
that avoids the notorious acrimony of close collaboration, unlocks the
potential of each collaborator, and magnifies it exponentially. Happy
creative marriages throughout history are far outnumbered by cantankerous
partnerships among musicians, architects, librettists, and city planners….
How do the Gotham collaborators account for their success?
Michael
Gordon has lamented that “people think artists pull down their
inspiration from another world, maybe heaven, [which] is pure and uncorrupted…And
this purity somehow is contained by the artist him or herself….”
Still, listening to this team try to distill the essence of their fruitfulness,
one senses a bounty of preternatural gifts—maybe from heaven—and
something like a divine authenticity.
“The
main thing is, we all really like each other,” says Ridge Theater
artistic director Bob McGrath, “and we’re all really good
at what we do. We respect each other. We don’t get in each other’s
way. And if we do disagree, we find a way to work it out.”
In fact,
the artists on the Gotham team admire each other’s work
unequivocally. Asked about the thunderous visual impact of Decasia,
filmmaker Bill Morrison says, “Let’s be clear: it’s
the music that is the driving narrative of these works….Michael
Gordon’s incredible score…holds the emotional dynamics of
the piece.” “We each have different jobs to do,” adds
visual artist Laurie Olinder.
Gordon
adds, “The thing that’s so much fun about working with Bill
and Bob and Laurie is that the [end] result is the greatest thing I’ve
ever seen.” Of American Composers Orchestra, Gordon says, “This
group is incredible…[ACO] was willing to dedicate huge amounts
of time to put this together. It’s almost unimaginable [for a
composer] to have that kind of experience…”
McGrath
reiterates, “I just respect these other three artists so much—it’s
an honor to work with them on each and every project.”
Every marriage
should be so sanguine. But what about the nuts and bolts? There is,
in fact, a procedural scaffolding, on three distinct tiers, and it all
begins with—what else? A meeting.
The difference,
says Morrison, is that “other collaborators have tons of meetings
and nothing gets done. We have very few meetings and a ton gets done.
Our meetings are always very efficient. Especially our creative ones…”
“And
not too many meetings,” echoes Olinder, stressing that “if
you hold onto your ideas too tightly….” She trails off,
confirming with her earnest expression that budding ideas can be ineffably
fragile.
“We
come together on an aesthetic,” says Gordon, a sort of Uberkonzept
that arises out of an initial jam session, and excites each artist individually.
In this
instance, in the afterglow of Decasia’s reception at
festivals around the world, the four found themselves reflecting on
the city, which on September 11, 2001, had itself become symbolic of
that film’s profound meditation on decay, death, and rebirth.
“Decasia seeks to show cycles,” Morrison had written,
“…the birth of a new type of being, separate from the old
one…spiritual rebirth…souls waiting to re-enter new bodies….”
They wonder as a group, and to a man, at the peculiar coincidences between
the work—which both immerses and streams through the artists—and
the condition of the city environment where they were doing the work,
in September 2001. Thus the broad concept of “hometown New York”
emerged, and Gotham was conceived.
So goes
the first meeting, where the broad strokes are laid in. Then the artists
retire to their studios, where the true collaboration begins. Facing
the materials of their respective disciplines, they cast wide and gather
up the bits and pieces of visual montage, found film and sound pastiche.
Image upon image, color and light, natural element upon fabricated form,
tone upon sound, design upon discovery, time upon space—a colloquy
is engaged. Over a decade of working together, they have developed a
fluency that ensures transparent communication, and the trust so critical
to any collaboration, freeing each to work independently, within a governing
aesthetic.
On their
second collaborative tier, the team will convene to share the seeds
of each other’s creative process. Each artist gingerly bares a
fledgling design. These meetings are both tender and bracing, characterized
by much kindness, deference, and mutual awe.
Morrison
explains, “[Bob] will say, ‘How could you make a film that
somehow relates to this?’ Or, ‘Remember that idea you were
talking about, the evolution film? Don’t you think that would
work here?’”
"I
spit out my two cents’ worth,” answers McGrath. “If
it’s helpful, good, and if it’s not, ignore me! There may
be tiny bits of friction,” he grants, “but we just work
it out. It all kind of just flows, like a river to the ocean….it
just kind of goes….”
In the
Ridge Theater OBIE-award winning production of Jennie Richee,
for example, Olinder’s view of the lead character as a “violently
disturbed man,” seems at odds with playwright Mac Wellman’s
view of the “profound moralist.” Asked about this potentially
incendiary disparity, Olinder answers, “The subject of [Jennie
Richee] is so vast…In our little microcosm, my opinion and
Mac’s do not cancel each other out. I don’t disagree with
Mac, [and Mac] can’t say that [the subject] isn’t violent.”
To this
Morrison exclaims, “It’s the inherent contradiction that’s
so compelling.”
Olinder
and Morrison erupt in a riff about scrims and scrims within scrims.
They all mention magic. “We love that magical quality,”
says McGrath, “of making the audience feel that they have x-ray
eyes, that they can see through the image into the orchestra or the
performer...” And they talk easily about spirituality, which threads
like a theme through the titles in their collective resume. “There’s
been a type of spirituality [in] the ones we choose, the ones that choose
us,” reflects Morrison, “spirituality at all costs, defying
logic….”
Certainly
this team defies a logical expectation of clashing egos. How then have
they escaped the logistical disasters that run so many collaborations
aground?
“We’ve
made disaster the theme of our projects,” laughs Morrison.
So continues
the collaboration. In infrequent meetings the artists come together
to keep their course true, with long rich periods of creative gestation
and hard work in between. The team eschews the suggestion either that
A.) it imposes design upon nature, or that B.) design happens by accident
in their process. Instead they imply an artist’s intuition about
beauty—it’s there all the time. You know it when you see
it. You see it when your internal instrument is in tune, and tuned in.
So in separate studios the artists tune in, and the work grows in all
its inevitable dimensions toward the day it will be assembled.
"Working
with Bob and Laurie is like walking on air. We never know if it’s
going to come together until tech week. And then miraculously it does,
and sometimes in the most uncanny way,” muses Morrison. “You
know, John Lennon said when he was a Beatle he felt like he was part
of a single mind….”
McGrath
adds, “It is a pure thing. It feels very natural, very organic
when we work.”
When the
group brings their new work for orchestra and projections to Zankel
Hall they will be embracing a new collaborator—the venue itself—more
intimately than ever before. Olinder’s visuals and Morrison’s
film will be projected not onto the multiple scrims that they typically
favor, but onto the walls of the hall. Offered a choice of two possible
projection surfaces—both of them rectangular—Olinder and
Morrison started looking for ways to turn a limitation to their advantage.
Olinder brightens as she explains the capacity of digital technology
to custom fit her images to projection surfaces, rendering them perceptually
one.
“I
start to see [limitations] as the Form,” says Morrison, and all
together they hail the “good fortune” of Zankel’s
beautiful blonde walls, as though the walls themselves had been designed
for Gotham.
There will
be other new elements in Gotham. Gordon’s orchestration calls
for amplified instruments. How well Zankel will accommodate amplification
remains to be heard, writes music critic Terry Teachout. “Amplification
is an art, not a science,” to be arrived at over time, and not
by technology alone.
Then there’s
the matter of Manhattan’s subway trains. Just nine feet of bedrock
stand between their seismic roar and Zankel’s underground audience.
Gordon
crows, “No one’s gonna hear the subway!” True to the
hard rock heritage of its generation, the group bursts into a paean
to volume. “I’m into visceral music! I like to feel it!
It’s gotta be loud!”
The third
and arguably most crucial stage of the collaboration is the presentation
of the work to the audience—which, for this team, means an invitation
to the audience to become the final collaborator.
McGrath puts it this way: “We really gravitate toward things that
are kind of open-ended in nature—either images or ideas or sound—so
that interpretations by the audience can be grafted on. So a lot of
the conception of the piece goes on within the mind and psyche of each
individual that watches it.”
“I
love talking to the audience after a performance,” Olinder interjects.
“I find out so many things I hadn’t known about the piece!”
“Audience
members say, ‘That was the most amazing thing…what was it
about?’” confesses Gordon. “But there’s room
for that. The more tangible the thing you’re involved in, the
less room there is for you to use your own imagination…”
McGrath
reflects. “The answer to why it works is kind of a mystery. The
times have kind of demanded this. We try to make art that we would like
to see, [and] we are of an age where we wanted to put visuals on music.
It’s just a natural progression of things in the culture, and
we’re just responding to it. We’re leading it, and we’re
responding to it.”
One thing
seems clear. Gotham will not be fully accomplished until we’ve
heard it, seen it—and brought our experience to it, and made our
collaborative contribution. They’re serious about this—pure
and inspired—“maybe from heaven.”
Kathleen
Watt writes frequently on the performing arts. Visit KEWatt.com.
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