Imagine Seinfeld

 -- By Tom Phillips 

Can you imagine New Year’s Eve without “Imagine?” Once again this December 31st,  at five minutes to midnight, a hush will fall over Times Square and a solo voice -- this time, indie pop star Chelsea Cutler --- will intone John Lennon’s limpid lyric:  

                    Imagine there’s no Heaven –
                               It's easy if you try.
                             No Hell below us,
                             Above us only sky… 

This dreamy meditation has been the prelude since 2005 to the midnight Ball Drop,  a kind of invocation of Nothing before a big Something hits your eye.  It works. Thousands of young people in the square, and millions more watching on TV or online will sing along with an anthem that negates everything their ancestors lived and died for – religion and country, progress and possessions – and replaces them with, well, nothing.  

And what would that look like?  Well, imagine a show about Nothing...  

Isadora Today: Interview with Lori Belilove

 

The Isadora Duncan Dance Company at Untermyer Gardens, 2022
Carolyn Yamada, Samantha Mercado, Hayley Rose, Diana Uribe, Emily D'Angelo   

--  By Tom Phillips 

Isadora Duncan was and is an outlier -- 100 years ago, a rebel against the academic dance establishment, and now, a pure classicist in a free-wheeling, eclectic dance environment.  Today, no one embodies Isadora’s life and work more than Lori Belilove, director of the Isadora Duncan Dance Company and Foundation.  Working out of a loft-studio in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, she has spent decades as a dancer, teacher, and choreographer, re-inventing Duncan Dance for the 21st Century.  I talked with her over the last year, most recently on the last day of summer, 2022. 

Sisters Under the Skin: "The Great Gatsby" as Jazz and Racial History

 -- By Tom Phillips                        

This is an edited version of my essay published in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Vol 19, 2021, pp. 189-202.

Amid the cacophony of Jay Gatsby’s garden party in chapter three of The Great Gatsby, a bass drum booms and the orchestra conductor announces a request from the host, for “Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World.”  The title is all we learn of the piece.  It disappears, “tossed off” into the evening, a passing joke. However, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s intricately patterned novel, as in jazz, things take on meaning even as they disappear.

Breaking Up America: Liberty and Death

 -- Copyright 2022 by Tom Phillips 

Zaq Landsberg, Reclining Liberty

Give me liberty or give me death! thundered Patrick Henry at the dawn of the American revolution. 

Today, Liberty and Death are partners in a mass murder-suicide pact.  Police with assault weapons blow away mentally ill people with assault weapons, but only after allowing them to slaughter school children, church members, hospital patients and other helpless citizens.     

"Enough!" peeped President Biden, embarrassed into speaking after two weeks of daily massacres.  But the carnage here is dwarfed by the war in Ukraine, the  foreign-policy equivalent of a school shooting.  The Biden administration is pouring 40 Billion dollars worth of deadly American weapons into a fraternal conflict on the other side of the world -- on the pretense of defending democratic ideals we no longer practice at home. 

Maybe we have reached our inflection point at last.  A nation that tolerates child sacrifice to protect its arms industry must perish from the earth -- as must a nation that exports death and ruin and writes off a million civilian casualties as “collateral damage.”  

The USA is a failed state and a danger to humanity.  What is to be done?     

Quiet as it's Kept: White Space at the Whitney

Rebecca Belmore, "ishkode (fire)" 

 -- By Tom Phillips

Two middle-aged white male art critics were coming down in the elevator after previewing the Whitney Museum of American Art's 80th Biennial.  With an air of befuddled irritation, one said to the other, "Quiet as it's Kept?  What does that mean?"  He was referring to the show's cryptic subtitle, which came from African-American co-curator Adrienne Edwards.  His friend had no clue.  

A third, older white male critic was standing nearby, and recalled for them the explanation Ms. Edwards had given in her pre-show remarks.  Her mother and her aunties used to say it all the time, she said--- to preface something widely known to be true, but not discussed in public. 

Something out of Nothing

 --  By Tom Phillips 

Still from For a Dance Never Choreographed, 2021. Photo: Stefano Croci 

For artists and introverts, the Pandemic of 2020-22 was a window of opportunity -- a chance to observe the world in the absence of normal human activity.  During lockdown and quarantine periods, as we walked through deserted streets or sat in empty public spaces, we could suddenly see form without function --- the structure of civilization without its uses.   

Italian artist-choreographer Luca Veggetti found himself stuck in his hometown of Bologna, Italy, when the pandemic struck in 2020.  So he made something out of nothing.  

Veggetti’s film For a Dance Never Choreographed (2021) takes place in an empty plaza designed by Japanese architect Isamu Noguchi, with a text of notes by Martha Graham for a dance she never made.  The movement of the earth around the sun is represented by dark shadows creeping over the plaza, and the only human presence is the sound of voices crying, whispering, gasping and groaning --- expression minus words.  The whole impression is made by taking things away, removing the contents of  civilization and examining its substrate of earth and bricks, light and shade, desire and discontent. 

The 22-minute film is now permanently on view in the digital collection of the Noguchi Museum in New York.  To watch, click here and follow the link to the museum.  

Now--- shhhh. 

-- Copyright 2022 by Tom Phillips