Disney Hall: Artichoke as Architecture

Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall sits downtown as if it was an artichoke dropped between the flat plains of the Los Angeles Music Center and the grand Tetons that make up the California Plaza. Iceberg lettuce, cauliflower, prickly pear – the building hangs onto its square block, a small child with a chip on its shoulder just begging for a fight: “My reflection, made with buffed stainless steel, will dazzle and blind you; my edges, made with a can opener, will give you a good gash, I dare you to call me names!”

Yet it is a chip on a young blokes shoulder, and no matter how lit up the building is – by the heat of the sun or the klieg lights of a film production – Disney Hall remains a minor sibling in the buildings of downtown Los Angeles. Gehry has made a trifle, an attempt at craft art, a building that at times looks like the prows of a dozen ships colliding and at other times like a model airplane peeled from an aluminum beer can. It is a steel pop up book, a quilted teapot cozy made from a teapot.

Given its reception as an important part of the downtown skyline, one would expect the Hall to rise up from Bunker Hill as the Matterhorn rises out of Anaheim, the home of the music hall’s patron. It doesn’t. It sits like a withering vegetable, an aging piece of craft art left out in the sun too long. And seen from the corner of 2nd and Olive, Gehry’s hall seems to ask gamely for the jester who dropped their cap to come back and reclaim it.

Three at UCLA

One of the most beautiful pieces of art I have seen in recent memory, Three, was performed at UCLA’s Royce Hall. That hall is one of the worst performing arts venues in Los Angeles, there are few sight lines of value, and unfortunately from the orchestra rows, the side balconies offer endless distraction when audience members there move about (which they often do because the seats are rarely full, and any seat has a better sight line than the one they are sitting in). Then when light spills off the stage, it spills upstairs so the distractions are lit. Against this backdrop, Batsheva Dance Company, choreographed by Ohad Naharin, demonstrated in simple costumes of different chalk colored hues, against a simple, short wall set upstage, the simple pleasure that composition can bring to any work of art.

In visual arts it is easy to see composition because the art is often still, framed, and shapes can be easily discerned. Although the performing arts are often framed by the edges of a stage or the distance between performer and audience, it is harder to grasp composition: is it where the performers are placed? But then they move, and there is no secure rest from moment to moment, so the composition changes endlessly. Or is the composition simply the patterns movement leave behind, or the short lived shapes performers make, or the space between each other and the surfaces outside of the bodies that move? Then is the composition simply the large parts that make up a bigger piece? In Three, the composition was in all of these dimensions: where people stood was as important as how they moved and how they bent their fingers and when they stopped and where they lifted there costumes to. When music began and ended, how loud it was played, and the period it was from shaped the aural space of the show. The sounds came from Bach and went past the Beach Boys and were designed and edited by Ohad Fishof. The lighting by Avi Yona Bueno (Bambi) was mostly blocks of white that looked worn smooth by time, and some black outs. Rakefet Levy’s two piece costumes were elegant and direct and their chalk colors stood out in the white light like swatches of tempera or gauche against the short grey wall that stood upstage.

Seventeen dancers performed Nahrin’s movement in front of the short wall, and at times they made entrances and exits through it. There were no doors, just darker spaces where they could move off and on the stage, and it was a beautiful surprise the first time it happened, and each successive use never felt misplaced, ill timed, or frivolous. Like this manner of getting off and on the stage, all movement was elegant, whether a bent thumb, a finger noisily plucked from a mouth, a quick or slow movement, a soloist, a duet, a small group, or the whole ensemble. Each action was made (composed) against the action before, the action following, or simultaneous action. The dancers made lines, made spaces, made shapes, showed vocabularies, improvised, spoke, and carried video monitors with equal comfort for seventy minutes that felt like three very fast hours.

Like the brash explosions of shape and color in abstract painting that gives it its masculine bouquet, Naharin’s work also carries with it an oversized sense of maleness: whether by choice or direction, the male dancers show their nipples, the females do not, the women show their pubic area fully, the men tuck their penises behind their legs. These decisions lend Three an air of misogyny that distracts from the ongoing beauty, but it can also be read simply as the pleasure taken by an artist who is willing to let his work go over the edge.

Coppola’s Confection: Marie Antoinette

A small confection makes itself into a rather grey world: Sophia Coppola’s latest movie tends towards the key lime rather than the sublime. Availed of blood and money, Coppola has made a movie that lingers in a formal world, but she is unable to escape a very present world of ideas that linger only as long as they are on the surface. Kirsten Dunst plays the queen like a paper doll: clothes are bent off her and onto her by others, and it is the moments where a nipple peaks from behind a nightgown, that slips down, or gets wet in her bathtub, that comes closest to the candy that Coppola seems to be trying to offer us.

Wandering around the Versaille halls and grounds, finding more to satisfy her physical needs in her surroundings than those offered by her husband, Dunst seems to be playing the daughter of a wealthy Hollywood type who wants a hug and only gets another BMW. Along side Dunst is Jason Schwartzman. Between the two of them they say eight words while eating, and the eight words are delivered deadpan in an attempt to convey the inconvenience of embarassing emotions. Shot straight on, the dining scenes look as if the monarchs and their meals are marionettes, but once Coppola has pulled the strings the first time, their is little else to invent.

Photographically the film is either a mess, or the projection was soft. There was nothing special about the color, the composition, or the editing that could give the film any formal clout: it is a film about confections, but there never is a moment where the confection shocks you with its looks, taste, or composition.

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