Tastes of Culture

For many Jews of Ashkenazi descent, the decision to travel to Poland, with its concentration camp sites and museums dedicated to lost Jewish worlds, generally has something to do with the quest to delve further into their heritage. Rosanna Gamson, however, may be the exception to that rule.

“I wasn’t on that kind of search,” says the choreographer of her two trips to Poland that she took after seeing a Polish theater production presented by UCLA Live in 2005. “I went there to find the theater.”

Gamson’s immersion into the world of avant-garde Polish theater and the legacy of director Jerzy Grotowski plays a significant role in the creation of her latest production “Tov,” which will premiere at REDCAT this Thursday.

After taking a workshop in Los Angeles that the Polish theater company Song of the Goat conducted in conjunction with their UCLA Live performance, Gamson traveled to Poland and soon discovered that Song of the Goat and other avant-garde companies owed a great debt to Grotowski. Famous for his primal, ritualistic approach to the theater, Grotowski would subject actors to grueling physical and vocal training methods to create powerful performances.

“What these companies had in common with each other was the quality of their performances, the commitment to their work and their perception of theater as ritual,” says Gamson.

Gamson felt a particular kinship with the members of the Lodz-based CHOREA Theatre Assn., in part because they seemed to share her sense of humor and willingness to collaborate with artists outside their company. CHOREA wound up creating the vocal score for “Tov” and three of its members joined Gamson’s cast.

“I had been trying to get my dancers to sing and they just couldn’t do it,” says Gamson, who brought the CHOREA members to Los Angeles in January. “Once they came, they taught my dancers to sing in a week.”

To read more about Rosanna Gamson and Tov, click here.

-- Susan Josephs

Photo: Marcus Braggs will appear in "Tov." Credit: Steven A. Gunther

After decades of near-neglect and sometimes ridicule, the music of Gustav Mahler caught on in a big way in the 1960s -- and I thank goodness that I was aware enough then to experience it.

Most Mahler nuts, we’re told, find their ways to this composer through one of the less time-demanding symphonies like the First or Fourth -- or maybe the poignant Adagietto movement from the Fifth. My entryway, oddly enough, was through the clangorous finale from the Seventh Symphony on a free Columbia Masterworks LP sampler that my dad brought home in 1966. (I might add that from this one slab of vinyl, I also heard Bruckner, Ives, Nielsen and neoclassical Stravinsky for the first time, igniting lifelong passions for all.) No one ever told me that the Seventh was the tough one that you’re not supposed to get right away. The last minutes sounded like a riotous, even desperate celebration -- maybe the cracking apart of 19th century Romantic traditions, to paraphrase Leonard Bernstein, or something bigger and more current.

That was the start of it, but the year that really pounded Mahler into my consciousness was 1968, in which time seemed to crawl since so many dramatic world-altering events were jammed together one after another. I was 14, all caught up in the political turmoil, and I recall listening to the Sixth and Ninth symphonies on the radio for the first time in the newly issued Bernstein recordings. Imagine hearing the Sixth -- with its sky-high hopes cut down by three hammer blows -- just after the hammer-blow assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Vietnam War still in the news. And then there was the Ninth, whose yearning opening movement seemed like a world-weary goodbye to idealism, and whose urban, angry, agitated Rondo Burleske found its resonance in the cops beating demonstrators in the streets of Chicago.

Eventually, I got to hear the rest of the symphonies and song cycles, accumulated hundreds of Mahler recordings and almost all of the printed scores, and realized that the message and breadth of these amazing works transcended current events. But yes, even to this day, Mahler’s music can still absorb and radiate energy and meaning from the news. It couldn’t be a coincidence that two of the most powerful Mahler performances of recent years -- Michael Tilson Thomas’s Sixth and Rudolf Barshai’s remarkably convincing reconstruction of the Tenth -- were both recorded on Sept. 12, 2001.

For my article on how appreciation of the composer has grown over the years, click here.

-- Richard S. Ginell