Ain Gordon in rehearsal with actress Betsy Aidman.

Could you explain the plot in a little more detail?

Well, I’m not a story-driven guy. I tend to be more interested in characters in a situation and what happens to them rather than a plot unfolding. So, it’s pretty simple. There is a rural, solitary woman alone in her summer kitchen in 1804, baking bread, surrounded pretty much only with the mental remnants of other days, and talking to herself. And it’s about what happens to her, in her head that day. And then a historical re-enactor two centuries later on the same piece of ground, which is now a deficit-ridden historic site, leads the tourist through her ability to re-enact that same day.

How has it developed since the shows that you did at the Vermont Performance Lab and Marlboro College?

At VPL, we only did half of it. That was the very first time working with actors on it. It’s brand new. So we spent five days there, and we did some rudimentary staging and just showed the first half. Then we were at the Baryshnikov Arts Center for another five days, and we pushed through to the end and showed all of it. Then we had a week off, and now we’re here. And we’re going to show all of it again. Each space is one step bigger—at VPL it was in an 1800s meeting house, very small, very intimate, beautiful space. At BAC it was in a larger studio with raked seating. And here it’s in a theater! So we’ve been kind of getting used to leaving behind the intimacy of table work, studio work, theater work etcetera, and building up to being bigger. And here is the first time that we will have basic lighting, and basic use of projections, which we haven’t done at all before.

Right, I read that this is the first time that you were introducing the element of photography to the piece, with photographer/historian Forrest Hozapfel’s projections. Has that influenced the play at all?

We kind of researched together—he lives in Marlboro—and we took walks in the forest together, and looked at cellar holes and that kind of thing. Definitely his thinking and his body of knowledge influenced the writing. And early on, I had his images in mind for what I wanted to see as the set. Here, you’re kind of seeing a sketch of that because we don’t have a giant screen. So this is very much just another stage of showing the piece with some tech.

Can you talk about the local history aspect of the play and how New England ties into it?

With almost all of my work, I’m interested in the idea of marginalized or neglected history as source material for theater. Particularly because in most places, but certainly in America, the writing of mainstream history is kind of a ruthless editing machine, and there’s a lot of stuff that hits the cutting room floor. I’m pretty interested in what hits the floor. And I had been thinking that with this piece, I wanted to reach further back in time to an era that yields even less evidence—sort of the pre-industrial era when things are handmade; things are used until they’re broken and then they’re gone. So there aren’t 80,000 artifacts. And I was interested in looking at a rural landscape, which I had never done, which would be a landscape in which there would be even less manmade evidence manufactured, ever. And the natural distances between manmade outpost and manmade outpost is so huge, that stuff just disappears back into the landscape. So I was interested in that, and then the relationship with VPL started to happen at the same time, and so it just made sense to put it in New England. So we used the Brattleboro-Guilford-Marlboro area as a research launch pad. The play is not situated directly in any place, it sort of uses the ethos of unsettled New England at that time, as opposed to Boston or somewhere like that.

How does the audience or the setting for each performance change your ideas for the play?

Well the good thing about the way this has played out—which I can’t claim credit for—is that three showings in three very different locations for three very different audiences is a great way for me to accrue notes for going to a next draft. With One showing in one place, it’s pretty hard not to just be incredibly reactive. I’m either like “It went well” or “ it didn’t go well”—you either are good or you’re bad. Three showings really gives you a chance to hear it in front of very different communities and get an idea of what to do next. The play doesn’t premiere until the fall of 2013, so I’m going into a whole other rewrite time.

And just in general, what inspires you as a playwright?

As I say, history is certainly my “thing,” but I think that I’m pretty interested in the interstitial, particularly. I’m interested in the moment between the moments that seem to matter, and that evidently matter, and how we can theatricalize insignificance for a new significance. So, the idea of this woman in 1804—she is essentially, by most standards, a woman of no importance, engaged in an action of no consequence, on a day of no significance (laughs). And what does that look like if we actually frame it and pay attention to it?

Performing arts intern Melissa interviews Christine Ohlman before her  rock n’ roll-soul concert on Saturday, April 21, at 8 PM in the Club B-10.

You started in the music business young – age 16 if I’m not mistaken – but why did you decide music was the right path for you?

The reason I knew that music was right for me was because it was the most comfortable I had ever felt in my life. Since I was really a small child, I saw other people communicating in that way. So I started to and it wasn’t in my bedroom, not alone, but communicating back and forth with other people. I do consider music to be a very high form of communication, so it was just the place that I always felt the most comfortable, and as I grew up, there became a chance for me to sing with a band, and that’s really how I got into it, as the “chick singer.” As time went on, I began playing guitar and I began writing, and once I began writing there was a lot of empowerment that came with that, and I became a band leader myself. So it was kind of a progression from “chick singer in the band” to the leader of the band, and as B.B King so elegantly put it, I was “paying the cost to be the boss.”

 Did you try other things? Did you go to school?

I was a national merit scholar. I went to Boston University to the school of journalism and I have a degree in journalism. I never used it really until about ten years ago, when I was asked to come onto the staff of the All Music Guide. Also, Boston had this great magazine called the Record Round Up, and I started reviewing for them and then I started writing. Actually it was more like 15 years ago, for the original version of the All Music Guide, which was a big fat print book, not the website like it is now - it was a print, enormous thick book. From then on, I became known as a historian of music and I’ve done a fair amount of writing since then for magazines. That’s how I use my degree, but for years I didn’t use it.

So your nickname, the Beehive Queen… When did it start?

I think when I started teasing my hair. It was probably early 90s. I did it for a photo shoot and I liked it so much and everybody else liked it, and I thought, well maybe I’m on to something. I was really in love with vintage clothes, cocktail dresses, and things like that, so it kind of went along with my style. In later years I dropped so much vintage, like dresses and things, but you know I kept the hair. It’s kind of a lot of vintage but it’s not so retro-retro anymore.

Did someone say, “Well, you’re the Beehive Queen,” or did you kind of make up that nickname yourself?

Ummm… I’m not quite sure. You know a lot of people ask me that. I think someone else suggested that (but I can’t remember who to tell you the truth) and then I liked it so I started using it, and then at some point someone said, “You know if you Google ‘Beehive Queen’ you are by far the number one hit,” and I laughed so much when I heard that, but then I was like, “Okay, well let’s go with it.” It’s kind of cute.

So how did you get started with Saturday Night Live?

Oh, that’s a great story, really a great story. Ummm, G. E. Smith was a friend of mine and we had been in a band together in Connecticut called The Scratch Band, and then the next thing you know, he hooked up with the people on Saturday Night Live as the musical director, and we still stayed in touch. I used to make mix tapes for everyone, and G.E was one of the people that I sent tapes too. Then one day the phone rang and he said, “Hey Chris, its G. E., I have this gig out on Long Island, do you want to do it? It would be two nights,”and I was free so I said yes. So we picked 12 or 14 really pretty obscure songs from those tapes and the next thing I know, he tells me that the gig is with the Saturday Night Live Band, with me as the vocalist! And it’s for the wedding celebration of Lorne Michaels at his estate in the Hamptons. So we did the wedding ([at] which every celebrity in the world at the time was there), and I thought, Well that’s it, that was a great gig, but that’s it.” Well, the next week the show was starting up for the season, and Lorne Michaels kept walking across the studio (which I now know so well) and walked up to the band stage and beckoned G. E. down to the front and said, “Where’s the girl?” And G.E. was like, “What do you mean where’s the girl?”, and Lorne said, “The girl at the wedding,” and G. E. said, “Well she’s not here, it was a one-time thing,” and Lorne goes, “No no, she was great, call her up and tell her to come next week!” So I got on SNL from a wedding gig. So there I am til this day. G.E.’s not there anymore but the band changed very little, and um it’s a wonderful gig, and Lorne has been a prince, you know, forever.

Do you have a favorite moment of being on the show?

Yeah, my favorite moment to this day is the first time we had Paul McCartney on. He had never been on the show and everyone was really excited about having him there and he played a little set at his sound check, he played extra songs, and the late Chris Farley and I were standing there watching him and he started to play Hey Jude, and Chris Farley grabbed me and we waltzed all around the studio and it was just a wonderful moment. We were dancing, everybody was there,it was great. You know it’s very like a family there, so I’m just really grateful to be a part of that family for so many years.

Do you have a favorite artist that you’ve ever worked with?

Honestly I’ve worked with so many. I was lucky enough to sing with Al Green, which was a thrill, and the Bob Dylan thing at Madison Square Garden, because it was the first of its kind ever, where multiple, multiple, multiple artists were gathering to pay tribute to one artist. Also I must say, I am so saddened about this news about Levon Helm. Levon Helm appears On The Deep End with me, and I had not realized his cancer had come back. I’m very, very sorry to hear… One of the great voices of American popular music across the board and one of the deepest. Also an amazing, amazing drummer. I can testify, having been in the studio with him. He recovered and he was singing, and that voice just cannot be denied. I think the blessing in this whole thing was that he was able to sing again.

So your band is called Christine Ohlman and Rebel Montez; how did you come up with the Rebel Montez part of it?

We were just trying to think of a name that maybe I could use as sort of a nom de plume or whatever, and first we had Cortez from Cortez the Killer, the Neil Young song, and then it kind of morphed into Montez. We were looking for another word… Maybe I was reading it and I was like, “Oh, how about Rebel?” Anybody who has ever thought of a band name can tell you there’s almost nothing harder to do than think of a band name, it’s ridiculously It was probably a serendipity kind of thing, the day when we put those two words togeher.

I just have one last question for you. You’re playing here Saturday. What should people expect when seeing you live?

One of the things that has always been said about our shows is that we rock really hard but there’s also a sense of continuity to it and a sense of history. I’m a pretty good storyteller, so I’ll tell some stories in-between the songs. The music will rule the day, you know, but we really include a few surprises. The cover tunes that we do are pretty well chosen, and they’re historic, all of them. People have always said that it’s very soulful. [The audience] should expect to see a very deep performance. I’m out there to connect on a deep and visual level.  I’m really excited to meet all of you, and to meet some new friends from the area, and to see some old friends from the area, ’cause we definitely have some. It’s a great area for music, and  have nothing but respect for MASS MoCA and everything that you guys do up there. I’m really honored.

Watch Christine perform on SNL.

Interview by Melissa Page

How has it been working at MASS MoCA?

So far so good! I like it a lot actually. When I came to North Adams for the first time, I was really impressed by the museum. I really liked it and I thought “wow,” because I like these old abandoned infrastructures and old factories, and I think this museum works perfectly. I said to myself, “Oh I would really love to work in such a museum” but I thought “I’m so far from that, I’ll never come here.” And then just one year later, I got an email from Susan [curator at MASS MoCA] asking if I would want to do a project and I said, “of course!” You never know. I’ll just keep saying that to myself from now on.

And you got your start in painting and drawing, is that right?

Yeah, I’m actually primarily a painter. I finished my studies specializing in painting. In Slovenia, our academy has more traditional training, so the drawing is very much part of it. After school, when I was very much into painting after the academy, drawing became more and more an important part of my painting. For example I did a painting in a few layers, and the first part of the process was just a grid on the canvas and the outline of the image—pretty much the same process as it is in the site-specific works with the wall drawings. I use the grid as a base and then the outline of the image for basically every work.

How has your style evolved and how did you become interested in urban planning and architecture?

Immediately when I finished academy I started working with self-portraits, and they were made from CT scans. So I took the CT scans and used them as a reference for paintings, and I titled them as self-portraits. And then when I was more involved in this high-tech digital imaging, I combined images from computer games simulating wars, and actual photographs of smart bombs bombarding places like Iraq or Belgrade. But the reason I’m saying this is because it’s always about this grid system, and the outline of the image—it’s always the same process. And then I came to cityscapes, so I was using my own photographs I had taken in different cities, and I would discard the colors and put them in low resolution, and then make a simple black and white print, draw a grid on it, and use them as references for paintings. So this is how I came to the cityscapes. These first steps of paintings became more and more structured—much more information, much more detail. When I was drawing the first layer, when I finished it I always thought “this looks nice,” and I would leave it in its first stage.  That’s how I came to drawing, and then did drawing separately from painting. So it started with pencil and paper, then the next stage was drawing on tracing paper—several layers to get this illusion of perspective and 3-D space, and then in the last stage I came to wall drawings. I was a bit fed up with just installing paintings on the wall, I thought, “I have to do something with the space as well,” and this was one option. So I usually do exhibitions with everything together, because there’s so much connected—paintings, drawings and wall drawings; it works as a whole, as one complete work.

I noticed you included the physical cables from the room in this drawing, and I was wondering, has the architecture of the museum or the room changed your initial ideas for the piece?

It did to some extent, for sure. When Susan showed me this space for the firs time, I immediately noticed the ceiling structure and thought this would be great to work with. I use a lot of masking tape in the wall drawing, and the wooden structures usually work very well with the masking tape and kind of continues into the ceiling. And I was pretty sure I would use string, and attach some strings to the ceiling structure. But I didn’t know that I would actually try to simulate cables coming out from the wall and attach them to the ceiling structure as I did here. This came about during the process, with kind of me improvising. And I really like it, because I think that this structure is even more involved in the artwork. And the shadows [from the cables], they also came into the actual work afterwards—they’re so much present and luckily they work so well. So for now, everything is kind of in the right place.

What new ideas or projects are you excited about going forward?

Well, I always get new ideas with each site-specific work. There’s not another upcoming project as big as this one for now, but I’m sure it will come. I’m a city person; I’m interested in this human position within the cities, within the architecture, which is always there even though it’s changing.  The people are constantly moving; moving in and out.

Kind of like a museum.

Exactly.  This is also why on the wall drawing, it’s strictly architectural and there are some empty areas within it, which are written as dislocated humans. So the idea is to create some possible spaces where humans could be, where they could actually exist—or where they actually were in the original photograph. I didn’t include them so I just leave the empty spaces. And I usually put the humans on some smaller objects and put them outside the wall drawing.

Did you base this cityscape on any particular city, or is it largely from your imagination?

The final cityscape is imaginary, but it’s imaginary because it’s from different cities and different locations throughout the world. So I kind of created my own cityscape. And it varies from New York, to my hometown in Slovenia, to Dublin and Vienna and Manama in Bahrain. But when putting the photographs together on the computer, sometimes it works so well you couldn’t believe it. It’s a lot of fun.

By Cora Sugarman

We are really delighted to be able to highlight the work of area students with an annual art show. Its coming up next weekend — on view during regular gallery hours on Saturday and Sunday April 14 and 15.  Hope you can stop by and see the amazing art our local students are making.  Here’s our press release on the show.

(North Adams, MA) For the second year in a row, MASS MoCA is collaborating with high school art teachers and artists in the  northern Berkshires to invite local students to submit artwork for a temporary exhibition at MASS MoCA. Cash prizes will be awarded to the best works submitted. MASS MoCA Director Joseph Thompson said: “This event was a highlight of our spring last year, and we are delighted to be able to present this exhibition again. It is an honor for us to be a part of this celebration of the talents of the young people in our community. Athletic and academic achievements are frequently celebrated; this is a great opportunity to shine a bright light on the work of kids who excel in a completely different field.”

While many of the students participating in this high school invitational art exhibition have also taken formal art classes in school, the invitation is extended broadly: the goal is to reach all students who are engaged by art and who have made excellent work, inside or outside the normal curriculum.  The work will be judged by a panel of MASS MoCA staff, area artists and teachers. In addition to cash prizes, a special tuition credit is also offered as the grand prize by North Adams’ Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA).

Participating schools include Drury High School in North Adams; Berkshire Arts and Technology Charter School (BART) and Hoosac Valley High School, in Adams; Buxton School and Pine Cobble School, in Williamstown; and Mt. Greylock Regional High School in Williamstown, which includes students from Williamstown, Hancock, and Lanesborough.

The high school invitational exhibit will open at MASS MoCA on Friday, April 13, at 6 PM, with free admission. Awards will take place at 6:45 PM, with a reception to follow at 7:15 PM. The artworks will remain on view at MASS MoCA from 11 AM to 5 PM on Saturday, April 14, and Sunday, April 15 (gallery admission required).  After the run at MASS MoCA the exhibition will move to the gallery at the Eclipse Mill on Route 2, in North Adams, thanks to the support and courtesy of the mill residents, many of whom are professional local artists, where it will be on view from noon to 5 PM on the weekends of April 21-22, April 28-29, and May 5-6. A reception at the Eclipse Mill Gallery will take place on Friday, April 27, from 6 PM to 9 PM.

 

A mastodon. Baseball player. Cowboy. Ninja.  Monster. Fire-eater. Tattooed grandma….Curious?

You know I must be talking about another wacky exhibition organized by Kidspace. Curiosity, to open on June 23, will fire up the curious nature of young people. Art materials range from LEGOS to fiberglass, prints to paintings. Ten internationally recognized artists will be featured in this action-packed installation, which will also include an “art cabaret,” where children can place an order for art materials to work with at café-style seating.

Colin Boyd’s work above… that is one big mastodon!

Nathan Sawaya’s piece, ”Han Solo in Carbonite.”

Relating to the curiosity theme will be our new Summer Teachers’ Institute, organized in collaboration with our partners The Clark and the Williams College Museum of Art. To be held on July 30 – August 3, the institute will explore different approaches to encouraging creativity and curiosity in the classroom. I am so excited to have as our keynote Jessica Hoffmann Davis, a renowned scholar in the field of art education who will make clear that the arts are essential to the well being of children, and foster healthy schools and communities. We are still accepting applications for the institute; for more details, follow this link.

Isobel Varley holds the Guinness World Record for “World’s Most Tattooed Senior Woman” with 76% of her body covered in ink!

Another exciting event to be held this summer is the opening of our Bus Stand Project by Victoria Palermo:

You might recall Vicky’s work in Kidspace’s Nature Park exhibition of 2003: think grass chairs and rubber trees! While not made out of natural materials, the steel and colorful glass bus stand will be a permanent fixture on Main Street in North Adams, replacing the old stand outside of Radio Shack. A ribbon cutting ceremony will be held on the opening night of DownStreet Art on June 28, 2012.

chunk·y [chuhng-kee]

adjective (chunk·i·er, chunk·i·est): ample, bodied, compact, fleshy, irregular, loaded, muscular, rotund, solid, stocky…

 How would you define it?

Artistic Director of Chunky Move (Australia’s powerhouse modern dance company), Gideon Obarzanek, has spent a lot of time thinking about this question. He says: “My movement, my choreography, hasn’t really been about the beauty of the human condition or the ennoblement of the body, which a lot of dance performance is like. The word ‘chunky’ came up because of the type of rough movement that we’re known for, particularly when we began. And it was a big move for us to start a company, so ‘Chunky Move,’ that’s what we came up with and it stuck.”

Artistic Director Gideon Obarzanek.

Founded by Obarzanek in 1995, Chunky Move has earned an enviable reputation for producing an innovative and unpredictable brand of genre-defying dance. The company has created work that is for the stage, site specific, media-driven, and installation-based. Known for pieces that immerse dancers in an illusory world of motion tracking and projection technology (such as GLOW), Chunky Move takes a bold leap with their newest work Connected, side-stepping the use of the digital technology in favor of pure mechanics.

Sculpture artist Reuben Margolin.

Reuben Margolin, a sculpture artist, met Obarzanek in 2009 while they were presenting our work at Poptech. Says Margolin: “He was talking about dance. I was talking about waves. We both talked about movement. I immediately loved his work and felt that he was reaching deep into a realm of meaning to create his dance pieces. And I was simply struck by how dynamic and expressive the human figure can be. We struck up a conversation about how to do a collaboration combining kinetic sculpture and dancers. Rather than simply having the sculpture overhead and the dancers below, we both wanted to do something more challenging, and to somehow have the sculpture reflect the movement of the dancers.”

Margolin and Obarzanek in collaboration.