Still Life with Commentator is the product of a three-way collaboration between pianist/composer Vijay Iyer, poet/librettist Mike Ladd, and director Ibrahim Quraishi. It's a multimedia theatre piece about cable news, blogs, technology, voyeurism, and war. As a certifiable news junkie and resident of a two-blog household, I was really anticipating this work -- it seemed almost tailor-made for me, bringing many of my musical and non-musical obsessions together under one roof.
Still Life is billed as an oratorio, but don't expect any kind of narrative structure -- Quaraishi, in response to a post-show question from an audience member, proudly proclaimed his hostility to "the psychosis of the narrative," and said he was instead trying to create "spaces of synergy." (Yeah, I don't have any idea what that's supposed to mean either.)
In practice, the show consists of a series of poems with music, some of which veer closer to what you'd call "songs" than others. They are all loosely connected by the thread of media criticism -- there's a trio of "Commentator Landscapes," in which Aaron Brown, Shepard Smith, and Dan Rather are rendered as bodies of water or (in Rather's case), New Hampshire's Old Man of the Mountain, in flowery language evocative of 19th century pastoral poetry. There's an ironic ode to cable TV bumpers ("Barn storming graphics/Final Cut barrel rolls"). One of the strongest bits, "Blog Mom," deftly and subtly evokes real-life warzone bloggers like Riverbend and Mazen Kerjab. And the rapid-fire cut-up patter of "Fox 'n' Friends" perfectly captured the "what rabbit hole have I fallen down this time?" sensation sane people have when tuning into Fox News:
Well drain my bib Jenny,
If that's not my boy the prez
then this ain't coke in my coffee.
Louise to jesus at at a reach-around picnic!
Did you say monkey?
But the obvious crowd favorite was (appropriately enough), "Jon Stewart on Crossfire," with the soulfully intoned chorus "Please stop, you're hurting America." This was the most concrete and specific song, with glimpses of Jon flitting by on the video screen above. As much as I love the moment Ladd is referencing here, I thought his celebration of it was a bit too... well... over-earnest, let's say. It didn't quite seem to fit with rest of the libretto.
Vijay's music for Still Life -- excerpts of which you can hear here -- is steeped not just in his expansive modern jazz palette, but in hiphop and electronica, dense with layered, programmed beats and soundscapes. Vijay himself was center-stage the whole time, playing piano and synth, triggering laptop events, and (when needed) conducting the ensemble -- Liberty Ellman (guitar) and Okkyung Lee (cello). Cast members Guillermo Brown, Pamela Z, and Mike Ladd all contributed live electronics as well, when they weren't needed elsewhere on stage. It was almost uncanny how well Vijay's score complimented Ladd's poetry, from the synth bass heartbeat that opens the piece to the faux-rhapsodic David Bowie/Brian Eno-like finale, "The Last Atrocity."
Vijay described his role as one of "creating environments," or "spaces in which to take action." The other performers, including the singers, mostly created and/or improvised their own parts. While I understand the impetus behind giving that kind of freedom (and responsibility) to the other artists involved, there were a few spots where I wished Vijay had taken a firmer hand -- not everyone is as gifted a melodist as Pamela Z. That said, the open-ended, collaborative approach hit more than it missed -- Okkyung Lee's haunting solo at the end of "Blog Mom" was especially gripping.
[Unfortunately, the live mix at BAM Harvey still needs work -- many times, the electronic elements swamped the insufficiently amplified acoustic instruments.]
The video design, by Prashant Bhargava, Sebastien Derenoncourt and Aron Deyo, had just the right blend of concrete imagery and abstraction, with enough activity to create a feeling of information overload without actually overloading the stage action. But I was a little underwhelmed by Quraishi's direction -- for a piece about media consumption, I didn't think the live visuals were particularly striking or memorable, and when they did make an impact it was usually through brute force (e.g. blinding us with ultra-bright fluorescent tubes). Also -- and this will seem nitpicky but I have to say it -- the projected titles were a real distraction. All of the singers were amplified and sang clearly. I'm seriously the worst person in the world at deciphering lyrics, and even I didn't need the titles. And nobody needs them for spoken text. But when they're up there, they're hard to ignore. Especially when they go out of sync, as they often did.
These caveats aside, Still Life with Commentator is a provocative and powerful work, an abstract riff on the current media landscape and the way it mediates our uneasy relationship to life during wartime. These are the issues we all grapple with every time we tune into the news or check our RSS feeds.
UPDATE: Tyler Ho Bynum has his own review up, including thoughts on how Still Life compares to the previous Iyer/Ladd collaboration, In What Language.
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Still Life with Commentator runs through December 10 at BAM Harvey Theater. Tickets to this event were provided by BAM.
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