Archive for arts issues
Happy Birthday, ShowUp.com
Posted by: | CommentsWhen I first moved to the Valley, almost two decades ago, I kept running into people who didn’t know Phoenix had an opera company, a symphony orchestra, professional theater or a major art museum. I don’t meet such folks anymore, and I suspect ShowUp.Com is a major reason. When it started up five years ago this month, ShowUp.Com was a site to go for info on local arts. Now it’s a place to spend time, swim around, explore what’s going on – and what else is going on. It’s a picture of the Valley arts scene, a scene that’s constantly growing.
Happy birthday, ShowUp.Com. Five years is a good start.
Music has wings…
Posted by: | CommentsRosie’s House student Jamil Muhammad playing Liszt
Venezuela’s El Sistema has swept the musical world. The system of universal music education for underprivileged children has led, over the 34 years since its founding, to the emergence of Venezuelans as major players on the classical music scene. The recent appointment of Sistema graduate Gustavo Dudamel as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic is only its most visible result.
More than that, El Sistema has empowered millions of Venezuelan children to rise above poverty and the hopelessness that poverty generates. Almost 250,000 Venezuelan children are currently enrolled in the El Sistema’s vast network of youth orchestras.
The Valley has a small-scale counterpart to El Sistema called Rosie’s House. The non-profit school has functioned since 1996 as a haven for children who want to learn strings, woodwinds, brass, guitar, piano or voice, but who come from disadvantageous circumstances. Like El Sistema, Rosie’s House provides everything free of charge, including lessons and the use of instruments. Unlike El Sistema, Rosie’s House is not publicly funded and requires individual and corporate giving to keep it going.
The school was started by Rosebell “Rosie” Schurz and her husband, Woody. Growing up in Germany in the devastation of World War II, Rosie found music to be a great consolation, and in 1992 decided to bring that same consolation to the underprivileged children of her adopted home, Phoenix. She and Woody began what was then called “The Christmas House” (named for her favorite holiday) in a small South Phoenix house with a handful of donated music instruments, a few teachers and a couple dozen students. Today, relocated to Central United Methodist Church in central Phoenix, the renamed Rosie’s House provides music education to more than 300 students, ages 5 to 18,
Rosie and Woody are still around, albeit on the sidelines now, cheering everyone on.
“Rosie is a constant source of inspiration,” says Becky Bell, executive and artistic director of Rosie’s House.
“It’s amazing the effort she and Woody put into founding this academy. They are both incredibly dynamic and dedicated.”
Bell sees Rosie’s House and El Sistema as having sprung from the same understanding of music as a spiritual/mental force.
“El Sistema and Rosie’s House were both founded on the principal that music education is an effective method for changing the life of a child,” Bell says.
“I see the transformation each and every day. These students learn music, but beyond that they learn discipline, confidence, teamwork, creative thinking, goal setting and achievement.”
It was qualities like these that caused Abreu to see in music-making a power far beyond music itself and to create El Sistema. Good citizenship, Abreu has said, is the real result of a solid music education.
Rosie’s House can certainly brag of some real success stories. One graduate, Diane Solario, is a senior at Stanford University; another is studying guitar at the San Francisco Conservatory. Flutist Chad Salazar, a current student, was recently featured on the public radio show “From the Top,” and has set a goal of attending the Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia.
On Dec. 17, some of the school’s top students, including Salazar, will perform in concert at Central United Methodist. It should be a chance to hear what talent might have gone undiscovered without Rosie’s House, and to wonder a little as to why, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, Rosie’s House is the only school on the United states to provide completely free music education to the underprivileged.
First, the contract
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Stephen Wade Nebgen
Most people don’t think of law when they think arts and entertainment, but Stephen Wade Nebgen does. Nebgen, a Phoenix attorney, specializes in entertainment law, representing such Valley companies as Phoenix Theatre. He recently answered three questions about his profession and its relevance to the arts.
1. How did you get into entertainment law?
“I got into entertainment law as an offshoot of my producing career. I started producing shows in the late 1970’s. In the 1980’s, I worked on Broadway and Off-Broadway. While working on a show, I realized that the entertainment law attorney was making a nice fee and did not have any of liability of producing. I went back to school, received my law degree, and started practicing entertainment law.”
2. Why do artists need entertainment lawyers?
“Just as in any industry, an artist needs an attorney to protect his interests. And an artist needs an entertainment attorney, not just any attorney. Show business is an industry unique to itself. An artist needs an attorney who’s intimately familiar with all aspects of show business. There is no other industry where knowledge of that industry so paramount. I believe I could become familiar with the issues affecting Boeing rather quickly. However, I have been in the entertainment industry for over 30 years and each year there are new nuances on how to construct a deal.”
3. What kinds of contracts and other matters do you handle for Phoenix-area actors, writers, directors, etc.? Can you give examples of recent cases?
“I handle all kinds of matters for clients in Arizona. Two big areas I assist clients with are copyright and trademark, and business formation. I also negotiate and draft, among other things, venue contracts, actor agreements, musician agreements, licensing agreements, recording agreements, and distribution agreements. A current matter I’m handling concerns the negotiation for the rights to develop a movie based upon prominent comic book characters. Also, I am negotiating on behalf of client to gain the rights to a major novel so that it may be developed into a musical.”
Of “truth” and other memories
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Taliesin West
Frank Lloyd Wright has been on my mind lately, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because his presence is always gently felt in the Valley, thanks to the various buildings he designed or influenced, most prominently the Arizona Biltmore and Gammage Auditorium. But mostly I think I think of him because of my lingering fondness for the modern over the postmodern. Only a modernist would say things like “The truth is more important than the facts,” “The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind,” and “An idea is salvation by imagination.” To the postmodernist, there is no “truth,” – just perspective. The postmodern heart is a suspect organ at best, thanks to all those pop culture references, and who can take seriously anyone who’d talk about “salvation” without irony?
Wright designed buildings that said, “This is important,” and we live in a time when “important,” if it means anything, means merely powerful and wealthy. Different times, different sensibilities. But if I ever reach a point when the present presses on me too insistently, I may return to Taliesin West just to be reminded what it must have felt like to be an artist who made his art without the slightest hint of irony, to be someone who suspected that beyond the welter of random facts lay something called “the truth.”
A life for the arts
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Marvin Cohen with his wife, Frances Smith Cohen
The spirit of art is the opposite of the spirit of greed. The artist is inherently a giver – someone who wants to share a vision, an idea, a way of hearing/moving/seeing/being.
But artists are alone and unable to give without the help of those even more selfless: arts patrons and promoters. The Valley lost one of its greatest arts patrons when Marvin S. Cohen died in June, age 77, of Lou Gehrig’s disease. An attorney specializing in eminent domain, aviation law, civil litigation and public-utilities law, he was accomplished enough to have argued and won a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Marvin – he was on a first-name basis with everyone – might have gone still further in law, might have carved out even greater professional glory for himself, but he cared about one other thing so much that he sacrificed inordinate time and energy to it: the arts. Marvin was a co-founder of Arizona Theatre Company in Tucson, and later pushed it to become the two-city operation it is today. Over the years, he served on the board of the Scottsdale Cultural Council, as chairman of the Arizona Commission on the Arts (twice), as president of the Herberger Theater Center and as president of Center Dance Ensemble, the modern dance company in residence at the Herberger. His wife, Frances Smith Cohen, is the company’s founding artistic director.
This week, Center Dance Ensemble gives its first program since Marvin’s death. A certain sadness will likely attach to the event, and yet, Marvin’s presence will be palpable in the joyous art onstage.
“Center Dance Ensemble would never have made it without Marv,” says Frances Smith Cohen.
“The financial help was huge, but more than that, he was a great sounding board. I don’t remember one time where he thought I shouldn’t try something, no matter how weird it sounded to him. He was so proud of what I did.
“There were many times, I really wanted to quit. I would get so discouraged. But he was such a great fan–I couldn’t let him down. He never complained about the really late suppers, or the rehearsal times that went into the night. It was, he felt, part of the deal of being married to an artist.”
This week’s program, called “Shakespeare at the Herberger,” will feature The Fateful Loves of Hamlet, choreographed by Fran. It’s the fourth version of her take on Shakespeare’s tragedy, and she feels Marvin would’ve given it a positive nod.
“I looked at the Hamlet ballet Friday and thought, ‘He would have really liked this version four.’ Version three began to explore the women of Hamlet and Marv felt I was really on to something. This version really develops this idea further. I’m pretty sure it would have been a favorite.”
What made Marvin Cohen an effective arts supporter? Shelley Cohn, who succeeded him as director of the Arizona Commission on the Arts, thinks it was his ability to “see both the big picture and the policy implication of decisions we made.”
And then there was his energy:
“I swear the man never slept.”
Cohn is not alone when she says she will “miss Marvin’s wisdom, his zest for knowledge and reading, his passion for the arts and his friendship.”
Many will miss those things. I barely knew Marv Cohen, yet he once gave me a personal tour of his and Fran’s home — which he showed with great relish — and even took the time to inquire after my own artistic goals. He had the kind of life-force energy that makes it hard to believe he’s gone. And as long as Center Dance Ensemble, Arizona Theatre Company and the Herberger exist, he’s not.
Would you please repeat that?
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Travel and Leisure magazine has rated American cities for their theater, and Phoenix/Scottsdale came in 28th out of 30. Only Miami and Honolulu were lower. (We fared just slightly better in the categories of classical music and museums/galleries.)
I can’t fault the magazine’s top ten — New York, Chicago, etc. — though I think Los Angeles (rated only 15th) deserves to be up higher. After that, I really wonder what’s going on with the editors, who seem to be laboring under the assumption there is an inverse relationship between warm weather and culture. Kansas City came in 12th. I lived in K.C. in the late ’80s and unless things have transformed on a massive scale, there is no way I’d trade Phoenix theater for Kansas City’s. Santa Fe pulled 21st place – ahead of San Diego! Santa Fe is an indispensable location for opera and chamber music, but the theater I’ve seen there is spotty in quality and the amount of it quite thin.
Let us know what you think. Click on the title of this entry and it will come up as a separate window, with space below to leave a comment. Feel free to say if you think T&L is dead wrong – or right.
Cutting off art to spite an artist’s morals
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At least one organization has called for the boycott of Roman Polanski’s films to protest the director’s guilt in a decades-old rape case. Polanski, who fled the USA 31 years ago after having been found guilty of having sex with a minor, is awaiting extradition in a Swiss jail.
Calling for justice is one thing, asking to equate someone’s art with his or her moral life is another. That’s a dangerous path to walk. Start out boycotting Chinatown and The Pianist and you just might end up turning your back on many other works of art — that is, if you’re at all consistent. Following the sense of this boycott, here are some local applications:
1) Don’t go to Arizona Opera’s Salome. Its German composer, Richard Strauss, accepted the position of Director of State Music from Joseph Goebbels in 1933. While Strauss never openly embraced Naziism, he was content to live his life and ignore the genocide around him, while allowing the Third Reich to shower him with praise. Not exactly a moral stance.
2) Write to your favorite local choir and request that it never, ever, sing the music of Gesualdo, Prince of Venice. The great Renaissance choral composer murdered his wife and child when he found out the child wasn’t his.
3) Avoid anything choreographed by Jerome Robbins – that includes West Side Story – as Robbins’ testimony before the House Un-American Activities in 1951 resulted in the destruction of many lives tainted by “Communist” sympathies.
Disclaimer for those who don’t catch my drift: Of course I don’t mean any of this literally. Great art and high morals are not necessarily to be found in the same person. That was the point of Amadeus, in which the composer Salieri was appalled by the talent bestowed by God upon toilet-talking Mozart. And while Polanski’s heinous act was far more serious, the point is the same: Don’t mix up ethics with aesthetics, justice with art.
