Live Arts

By Ilena Peng

This article was first published in The DC Line here.

A new initiative for local artists that has community members pay in advance for nine different original works of art distributed its first round of art to 33 participating patrons last Saturday.

The program was formed by Rhizome DC, a community arts nonprofit in the Takoma neighborhood of DC, and Guilded, a freelance worker cooperative and a chapter of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. Its Community Supported Art initiative draws from the concept of Community Supported Agriculture, where community members pay upfront at the beginning of the season and receive fresh produce throughout the harvest. 

With Rhizome’s collaboration, up to 50 art patrons can choose to pay between $200 and $500 to fund nine local artists. Each patron will subsequently receive nine pieces of art covering a variety of mediums and topics — one from each artist — during three pickup dates between August and November. The next distribution date is Sept. 18, and new patrons who invest before then will receive art from both the August and September pickups.

Driven by their shared experiences working with Community Supported Agriculture, Rhizome DC program director Layne Garrett and Guilded program manager Ajoke Williams joined forces to establish a mechanism to fund the artistic process — not just the sale of the final product — and incorporate social benefits in addition to payment.

“Artists are workers just like employees, and they deserve benefits and security,” Williams said. “I hope this model sheds light on a new framework that shifts the paradigm from just financial contribution to also helping social welfare.”

The partnership between the two organizations provides nine artists with $1,500 stipends, as well as Guilded memberships, which include benefits like health, vision and dental insurance.

The initiative also serves as a different means of fostering interaction between artists and audiences, Williams noted. Prior to the pandemic, she said access to experiencing or creating art was generally tied to a physical location, such as a theater or a community art center like Rhizome DC.

“COVID really highlighted how important it is to have more than just one entryway to art, to have mechanisms that don’t always rely so heavily on the real estate of a particular physical building,” she said.

Garrett said he sees in community-supported art “the same kind of potential” that has been realized for Community Supported Agriculture, which has seen a particular surge in popularity during the pandemic. Paying farmers at the beginning of the season is a “win-win situation,” he said, because it allows them to cover the costs required to start planting, while also reducing the financial risk of having their entire profit be dependent on their crop — and the same could be true for artists. 

“One would hope that society would do a better job of valuing the people who make life worth living — people like farmers and artists,” Garrett said.

While he hopes the community-supported art model will continue to expand, Garrett said he believes even now in its nascent stages it can help artists in the absence of stronger government support for the arts. 

“In the absence of that, something like this can maybe fill the gaps for at least a few people,” he said.

Writer and actor Julia Marks, one of the participating artists, said she previously believed the “starving artist” stereotype — that choosing to be an artist meant that she would have to struggle. But Rhizome’s Community Supported Art initiative and the benefits it offers have led her to realize otherwise.

“Artists deserve to be workers, too,” Marks said. “Just because you’re doing something that you’re passionate about doesn’t mean your life has to be really hard.”

In addition to providing benefits for artists, the model also offers financial stability and artistic flexibility by getting them part of their stipends upfront to cover material costs, rather than waiting to be paid for a finished product. 

Participant Xena Ni, a multimedia artist who also works as a full-time designer, makes this comparison: As a designer, she is paid for the time she puts into her work, not the number of widgets she designed that are ultimately sold. Yet for artists, pay typically comes only from the sale of already created works. In this way, Ni describes a community-supported arts model as artistically “freeing.”

Being “compensated by sales for specific work [is] so much harder to predict, and suddenly you’re incentivized to make work that a particular audience wants versus being compensated for the time you spent making creative stuff,” Ni said.

Performance artist and writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi added that community-supported arts benefit both artists and communities by shifting away from the “wealthy collector model.” Such initiatives expand access to collecting quality art by mitigated the pressure artists feel to find wealthy individuals or institutions to purchase their art, he said.

“This offers a way into an arts ecosystem that feels less complicated, less rooted in sort of these ideas of prestige, of respectability,” Tbakhi explained. “But [it] is instead just really boiling it down to how we can make this sustainable for artists and connect them with community members.” 

By Ilena Peng

This article was first published in The DC Line here.

Thanksgiving isn’t the only sign this week that the Christmas season is upon us, with the curtain rising on two incarnations of The Nutcracker ballet at DC theaters. An evergreen holiday tradition that originated in Russia in 1892, the traditional two-act ballet follows a young girl’s adventures through a fantastical land after her magical toy nutcracker comes to life. 

For those who haven’t seen The Nutcracker, imagine if someone were to cross the story of The Wizard of Oz with Dancing With the Stars. Even those who have never attended a dance performance are probably familiar with the music: Portions of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker suite are seemingly a ubiquitous soundtrack of the holiday season.

Locally, the Washington Ballet — which premiered its current version, with an American history twist, in 2004 — opened Nutcracker season with performances last weekend at Ward 8’s Town Hall Education Arts Recreation Campus (THEARC) in preparation for a monthlong run that starts Saturday at the Warner Theatre. For those looking for something less familiar, the Atlanta Ballet brings its new production of The Nutcracker to the Kennedy Center on Wednesday for a five-day visit.

The Washington Ballet at the Warner Theatre: Nov. 30 to Dec. 29

Now in its 16th year of performance, Septime Webre’s The Nutcracker takes place during an 1882 Christmas Eve celebration at a Georgetown mansion. George Washington is the Nutcracker here, and when he battles “the Rat King,” it’s King George III. Other historical figures including Harriet Tubman, Benjamin Franklin and Betsy Ross also appear, as does iconic DC scenery — the famous “Waltz of the Flowers,” for example, is renamed here the “Waltz of the Cherry Blossoms.”

“It’s become a family favorite, certainly a holiday tradition,” said Barbara Berti, public relations manager for the ballet company. “People come with their grandchildren and their parents, and it’s still very appealing to all ages. Everybody loves it.”

DC Theatre Scene wrote in 2017 that Webre’s DC-inspired Nutcracker is “like no other, but familiar enough not to be too jarring to traditionalists.” In a 2015 review, The Washington Post’s Sarah L. Kaufman noted that the production “at times feels too hectic for [the company’s members] to shine.” Instead, it rests upon “the cleverness and adorability of its least-experienced and littlest dancers.” 

Once again this year, the performance schedule began with several shows at THEARC, where the Washington School of Ballet opened its Southeast DC campus in 2005 — complete with a 400-seat theater that’s large enough to accommodate the annual Nutcracker performances.

The schedule at the Warner Theatre, 513 13th St. NW, continues almost through New Year’s Day, and that’s intentional. Berti said the post-Christmas shows allow family members visiting from out of town to see the production after the Christmas festivities are over. 

“Our version is just so beloved and enjoyed by so many — and it does kind of take up the whole month of December,” Berti said.

As for the November dates, the company added six extra performances last year — an effort to boost revenue in light of a $3 million debt, The Washington Post reported. The timing continues this year, although Berti declined to comment on revenue projections or needs.

Three performances will be accompanied by special events: Family Day (Dec. 1), Military Appreciation Night (Dec. 4) and the Nutcracker Tea Party (Dec. 8). 

Family Day features pre-performance activities for children, like coloring and ornament making, as well as opportunities to watch a rehearsal and take photos with dancers. On Military Appreciation Night, cast members and military dignitaries greet audience members prior to a rehearsal of The Nutcracker’s “Soldiers Marching” dance.

The Nutcracker Tea Party, which audiences can attend at the Willard InterContinental Hotel either before or after the day’s 1 p.m. performance, treats guests to refreshments like tea sandwiches and scones (plus mimosas for adults). Party guests can also take photos with the Sugar Plum Fairy and other dancers.

The Atlanta Ballet at The Kennedy Center: Nov. 27 to Dec. 1

The Atlanta Ballet’s first appearance in recent memory at the Kennedy Center features the company’s new production of The Nutcracker, which premiered last year. The production closely follows the traditional storyline from E.T.A. Hoffman’s 1816 tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King — the predecessor to the 1892 ballet — but adds a modern spin with video projection technology.

The production’s choreographer is Yuri Possokhov, who after 12 years dancing with the San Francisco Ballet is now that company’s choreographer-in-residence. Possokhov first delved into integrating video projection and ballet when he choreographed Swimmerfor the Bay Area company in 2015. 

Possokhov’s works have been performed at companies nationwide such as Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, as well as internationally at Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet and the Georgia State Ballet.

The production’s video projections are designed by Finn Ross, who won a Tony Award for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and the rest of the team is no less stellar — dance-world luminaries Tom Pye, Sandra Woodall and David Finn designed the production’s sets, costumes and lighting, respectively.

This Nutcracker is the Atlanta Ballet’s first major commissioned production by Gennadi Nedvigin, who became artistic director in 2016. Like choreographer Possokhov, Nedvigin is also a former San Francisco Ballet principal dancer. 

In an interview with The DC Line, Nedvigin said the holiday production simultaneously appeals to older generations with its traditional storyline and the younger “video gamer” generation with its digital projections.The latter, he said, “kind of serve as a glue between the real world and imaginary world, and it really fits this story perfectly.”

Possokhov’s Nutcracker’spremiere last year brought more ticket sales than any of the Atlanta Ballet’s prior productions of the holiday classic, and this Kennedy Center run marks the company’s first performances outside of Atlanta in some time. 

Nedvigin said he hopes the performance will spark audience members’ interest in the Atlanta Ballet’s work. He added that he is “super thrilled” to be in DC, having previously danced at the Kennedy Center on several occasions.

“Every time I’m coming back, it’s almost like I’m coming back home,” he said. “It brings a lot of memories from my performing days, and to be able to bring my own company to the same stage is meaning … a lot to me, and I just want to share it with everyone.”

by Hannah Berk

This article was first published by DC Theatre Scene and can be read on their website here.

Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (trans. George Tabori) presents us with a familiar story: a churlish Chicago mobster slashes and wheedles his way to the top. This time, it’s the top of the city’s cauliflower game. In case that doesn’t ring a bell, Scena Theatre’s production offers up Brecht’s suggested projections, orienting us within the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany.

Each scene and its players has a direct parallel to historical events and people, and the play has an anti-fascist message to hammer home. The show is high-energy, builds a cinematic gangster world, and has moments of resonance, even if the parable lacks a nuanced consideration of fascism’s horrors.

Brecht wrote this play in 1941 after going into exile from Germany upon Hitler’s rise to power. He envisioned it for an American audience, but its first staging would actually be a posthumous one in 1958 Berlin.

It opens with a vaudevillian summary in which the ensemble lays out the plot, its major players, and establishes the play’s breakneck dialogic speed. We then meet Ui, Brecht’s Hitler analog, played by Robert Sheire as equal parts glory-hungry and insecure. He whines about his reputation, sports an ill-fitting get-up, and needs his henchmen to explain how corruption works, and yet he shrewdly pinpoints his opponents’ weaknesses and evinces a ruthless pragmatism: “When guns are silent,” he proclaims, “so’s the press!”

Ui and his gang wrest control of the Cauliflower Trust from Dogsborough (Joe Palka), a well-respected local politician tied up in some embezzlement schemes. Palka gives a mournful, conflicted performance of a man whose ethics never quite win out over self-interest. Looking out the window of his country house, he muses, “The lake looks just like silver before it’s been beaten into a dollar piece.” Dogsborough is just the first in a long line of people and institutions Ui bulldozes through on his way to power, including the justice system, despite the protests of an astounded defense attorney (Caroline Johnson).

No one seems especially drawn to Ui, other than his loyal friend Roma (Lee Ordeman); his rise is best explained by a critical mass of people choosing the path of least resistance.

This is in part a satire, and the show mostly strikes a good balance between its dark subject matter and sardonic tone. It plays up the absurdity of Ui’s insistence that grocers are in great danger (a danger he has independently and intentionally generated), and the dissonance between his self-righteous grandeur and his apparent petulance is a frequent punchline. A highlight of the show is the scene in which Ui solicits elocution coaching from a classical Shakespearian actor (director Robert McNamara). He learns to strut, gesture, and orate with excess pomp. Sheire exaggerates the awkwardness to comedic effect as his Ui gains confidence.

This moment is punctuated by an intermission and an overall tonal shift in a darker direction; sound designer Denise Rose fills the pause with an eerie mix of “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” In the second act, Ui edges closer to a Richard III archetype; he is decreasingly funny, more paranoid, and quicker to kill. A sort of emotional climax to the play is his decision to have Roma executed on wrongful suspicion of disloyalty. In one of the most effective scenes, his ghost visits Ui’s dreams. Lighting designer Johnathan Alexander bathes the stage in hellish red as Ordeman tumbles, contorts, and torments the sleeping dictator.

The play is sometimes a little heavy-handed in its moralism (see the projection over a courtroom scene that reads, “Mockery of Justice”), and sometimes not hard-hitting enough. Since Brecht was writing about the ascent of Hitler more than his rule, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is absent the extremities of fascist violence. Ui’s avarice is dark, but doesn’t plumb the hatred that allows a genocide to take place, and there is no treatment of either complicity or resistance beyond a blanket assumption of human cowardice.

At a time when we are arguing over what to term the concentration camps popping up along the southern U.S. border and the real-life parallels to historical atrocities proliferate, it can feel counter-productive to toy with fatalism.

The few who make an effort to stand up to Ui are minor characters and almost immediately bend or are dispensed with. The apathetic grocers, stand-ins for the working people writ large, see through him but don’t think about organizing against him beyond throwing up their hands (literally) and imagining themselves defenseless in the face of his gang’s guns. The final tableau, Ui with one arm raised in a heil, surrounded by tentative grocers imitating the motion, strikes a chilling note. Breaking from the group, Sheire delivers Brecht’s famous concluding warning about the fascist regimes brewing as we speak. What are we going to do about it? If Ui’s rise is indeed “resistible,” it’s up to the audience to figure out how that might be.