What good excuse for NBC censorship of Olympic opening broadcast in U.S.?

Minneapolis, Minnesota


NBC's delayed broadcast in the United States of Friday's opening ceremonies from the 2012 Olympic Games omitted an elegiac tribute to the victims of a terrorist bombing in London, July 7, 2005, the day after the city was designated the site for the 2012 Games.

Time constraints were not at issue. The network consciously deleted "Abide With Me," featuring a vocalized hymn and interpretive dance, and substituted an inane interview with Michael Phelps, a U.S. swimming athlete.


"Our program is tailored for the U.S. television audience," said NBC Sports spokesman Greg Hughes.


One can only speculate, then, about what aspect(s) of the six minute segment NBC thought viewers would not like or appreciate: 

1. The performance of modern dance that was not part of an insipid, televised contest?

2. A choreographer bearing a name like Akram Khan?

3. A woman of color with blonde hair, Scotland's Emeli Sandé, singing the hymn "Abide With Me"?

4. Memorialized victims numbering only 52 and most, if not all, not being U.S. citizens?

Yet, many observers continue to opine about why record numbers of consumers no longer trust the biases and decision-making of media that insist on telling them what is important, what is news, and what to think.

Duluth, Aurora, Minneapolis

Minneapolis, Minnesota


Drenching sun blessed the city of Duluth, Minnesota, and Lake Superior today. Driving there before dawn this morning, amid frantic radio reports about Aurora, Colorado, and the "Dark Knight," I was reminded of a lesson learned when my niece was killed: When the worst happens and there might be news you never want to hear, you don't have to be in a rush to hear it. It will be bad enough, soon enough. Still, was relieved to learn later today that relatives and friends in the area are OK. 


Returning south to Minneapolis at 3:30 this afternoon, northbound traffic on I-35W was bumper-to-bumper for at least 25 miles, from Forest Lake south to Highway 36 in St. Paul. Oye!


Walking Maggie in Stevens Square neighborhood just now before midnight, an older man approached all of us on the sidewalks with a cell phone photo of a young woman who has been missing since yesterday from the Teen Challenge residence on 18th Street. 


Does the Second Amendment really require that 6,000 rounds of ammo be available on the internet?


Not sure what my point is.

Yo, Mitt! Release your tax returns already

Minneapolis, Minnesota


Mitt, Mitt, Mitt. 


Running for office can be hard. I know – did it once. 


Anyone who believes there is not a free market at work has never thrown his or her hat in the ring to stand for election. Messy and tough as it can be, that's democracy. 


The world is run by those who stand up and show up. Yet, while I believe every citizen should stand and file for some office at least once in a lifetime, no one has to do so.


No one held a gun to the roof of your car and said "Make a run for the White House or the dog gets it!"


People who seek responsibility and accountability in public life don't get to make the rules. Hell, there are no rules. 


I ran only for the Minneapolis city council. There were no requirements or expectations that I publish my tax returns. I would have if necessary. 


You want us to trust you with our lives as our commander in chief, but you won't trust us and follow the time-honored conventions pioneered by your own father. 


Don't release your returns for me. I'm going to vote for the guy your campaign surrogate said needs to 'learn how to be an American.' 


It's time for you to learn how to be that. In this democratic republic, the people get to decide based on the merits of the case. If you want to win, you have to ante up the returns and answer Forbe's 35 Questions Mitt Romney Must Answer About Bain Capital Before The Issue Can Go Away. 


If you don't, that sucking sound you hear isn't from all the jobs you allegedly allowed to be outsourced overseas. It's from your candidacy circling the drain.


John McCain said today that the multiple years of tax returns you released to him in 2008 had no bearing on his selection of Palin as his running mate. In so many words, he said she simply was a better candidate than you, Pawlenty, and all the other possibilities. 


You want to be the better candidate? You want to be the most powerful human on the planet? Start acting like it. Power knows how to be humble and vulnerable. Prove it.


Release your tax returns already.

A journey to a beach with Stan Hill and his chorus of gay men

Minneapolis, Minnesota


"Acts of creation are acts of faith. This is what gives the arts their intrinsic value. Some of us are called to create human life. All of us are called to live life daily."


I penned those words in New Orleans in 2006, at the end of a week-long performing tour of four Southern states by members of the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus. Traveling in a caravan of three chartered buses – from Nashville to Birmingham, to Jackson, to Mobile, and to New Orleans – 130 people experienced "eight days of collective worship, of living life daily."

Dr. Stan Hill • Photo: Paul Nixdorf

Watching Dr. Stan Hill conduct the TCGMC at the Ted Mann Concert Hall in Minneapolis last evening called to mind memories of that week and of other occasions with Hill and members of the Chorus. Rob Hubbard's review for the Pioneer Press this morning is a 'keeper.' 


Hill served as the artistic and spiritual leader of the Southern tour, as he has of the TCGMC for the past 12 years, and as he did for the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus for 11 years prior to that.


Following this weekend's performances in Minneapolis and next month's in Denver, Hill will retire to his native California. This personal ending and new beginning of his journey shares a certain circularity with those of the chorus and community from which he takes his leave.


When the Twin Cities Men's Chorus formed in 1981 (the word "Gay" was added in 1991), I was working as a legal assistant for a Minneapolis law firm, and was the sole closeted gay man operating in a very straight milieu in a very straight civic culture. Many of us, on whom its existence registered at all, viewed the Chorus as a novelty, as one more way for gay men to act flamboyantly flashy and fabulous, including cruising past us in their hired limo as we left the bars on Hennepin Avenue. 


However, as closet doors opened throughout the community, familiarity and friendships formed. One example was the potluck gathering of friends at my West Bank apartment on Christmas Day in 1982, when a Chorus member, the late John Bisciglia, and his partner joined us for great food and provocative conversation.


With plodding and sometimes painful steps, the Chorus worked, wormed, and wove its way into our brains and hearts, getting inside our skins with its songs about our lives as gay men and as general human beings. In part, they did it by showing up and always standing present for our activities and events.


They stood present in Loring Park on a night in 1985 or 1986 for a rally against the violence and muggings that regularly visited gay men in the park in those days. As co-host of Fresh Fruit, the weekly gay radio program on KFAI FM, I recorded them singing their signature anthem "Walk Hand In Hand" that night; it probably was the first time the song was broadcast on the airwaves. 


In 1986, my partner, James Davies, presented a Fresh Fruit feature on the art songs of the composer Ned Rorem, who performed with the Chorus at the (then) Ordway Music Theatre in St. Paul. (Davies joined the TCGMC as a singing member in 2005.)


Fast forward to the spring of 1999 when I was working as executive director of the James Sewell Ballet. The Chorus' artistic director, Craig Carnahan, came by our office at the Minnesota Opera Center to outline a project involving chorus and dance for the following season. Exigencies of our finances and planning structure at the time precluded participation. Four years later, when Stan Hill came by, we were able to sign on for "Metamorphosis," the epic commissioning project that debuted on TCGMC's Ted Mann season in March 2004. 


Almost immediately after saying 'yes' to Hill, however, JSB was invited to present its first week of performances at New York's Joyce Theater in the winter of 2004. Those engagements, plus a  choreographic commission from the Wharton Center at Michigan State University, also in March 2004, meant we would be short of time and money to create a new ballet for our own St. Paul ballet season in April 2004.


Our solution was to invite the TCGMC to perform "Metamorphosis" with us as half of our April program. We were wary if it would work because members of the Chorus would have to commit extra rehearsal time and two weekends of performances as volunteers. In the event, more than 100 men agreed to sing with us. Later that summer, our dancers accompanied the singers to Montreal to present "Metamorphosis" for the quadrennial GALA Choruses Festival. 


In 2006, when partners of Chorus members were invited to join the Southern tour as groupies, it was a no-brainer that I would be a boy on a bus. Similarly, when Hill and the TCGMC premiered "Through a Glass, Darkly" for the GALA Choruses in 2008, I flew with the flock to Miami for a week's worth of music. 


These and shorter trips to Duluth and Bemidji, Minnesota, and Ashland, Wisconsin, have provided an opportunity to view Hill as the consummate showman and heartfelt evangelist that he is. He frequently poses the question "If we don't tell our stories, who will?"


The circular completion of one of my own stories involves the current vice chair of the TCGMC board of directors. A somewhat-younger-than-me Jeffrey Bores is a current partner in the law firm where I worked in 1981, and some of my colleagues from those days now attend Chorus performances and galas. 


As the song goes, "Love is rare, life is strange; Nothing lasts, people change." 


Hill's inspiration and insistence that one particular story be told provides additional proof of that. The story led to one of my half dozen, life-changing experiences. It took place during the Southern tour on Thursday, July 13, 2006, when three buses stopped next to the Gulf of Mexico: 

They formed a tight circle on the white beach sands of Biloxi, Mississippi. In the center stood Richard Long, 61, and words written for the occasion by a black woman in Minneapolis were read. 

They formed-up in two facing columns, two-deep, perpendicular to the Gulf of Mexico shoreline. 

Between the columns, they unrolled a white fabric runner leading to the water. 

As Richard was led through the columns, they joined hands and sang their signature, "Walk hand in hand with me." 

Stepping into the Gulf of Mexico, Richard was surrounded by more than 100 brothers singing, "We shall overcome." 

No dry eyes on Biloxi's waterfront. 

Several of those present were not born in 1965 when Richard was stationed nearby at the Keesler Air Force Base. Black people were not welcome on the Gulf beaches in those days. The power of the federal government, represented by 17,000 soldiers, was no match for the power of attitude in Biloxi, Mississippi. 

"An afternoon on a beach in Biloxi" • July 13, 2006

A reporter-with-camera from the local newspaper was present to record the scene, as were the archival cameras hired by the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus to follow their tour of four Southern states.

Before we left New Orleans a couple days later, Hill observed that all of those who had gathered for the tour would probably never again be present at the same time and place. He expressed his hope that whatever became of us in life we might, on occasion, recall an afternoon on a beach in Biloxi.


So we shall, Stan. That journey and so much more.

The Honeydogs' social conscience echoes at Saint Mark's Cathedral

Minneapolis, Minnesota

The Honeydogs

Adam Levy, the artistic frontman for The Honeydogs, led his six bandmates through 70 minutes of sublime rock music that reverberated off the walls and soaring ceiling of Saint Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Minneapolis, June 10. The 16-year-old ensemble performed a benefit concert for the Wells Foundation.


Music selections, most reflecting a social consciousness, were drawn from older tunes and from the group's recent, 10th studio release, "What Comes After." A particularly moving solo by Levy recounted the activism of his grandmother, Miriam, who assisted communities of immigrants settling in Minneapolis.

Saint Mark's Episcopal Cathedral

The Wells Foundation's own roots hail from an original affiliation with Saint Mark's work with immigrants in the 1880s and from its early 20th century mission/settlement house work with people from backgrounds diverse in religious affiliation and national origin. It makes grants to community programs that address the root causes of homelessness. The cathedral is located at 519 Oak Grove Street, opposite Loring Park.


The Honeydogs will perform next on Friday, June 15, at Tycoons Zenith Alehouse in Duluth, Minnesota. A full schedule of activities is available on its website. 

Gay men's chorus kicks off Plymouth's summer park season

Plymouth, Minnesota

Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus, Hilde Performance Center

The Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus performed an evening of free choral music, June 7, to inaugurate the 2012 season of Entertainment in the Parks at the Hilde Performance Center in Plymouth, Minnesota. A typical summer audience of 150 heard 11 selections drawn from the program for "They Sang To Me,"  TCGMC's upcoming performances at the Ted Mann Concert Hall in Minneapolis, June 22-23.


Dr. Stan Hill, TCGMC's music director since 2000, led 72 men, half of the  total membership, all attired in full tuxes with open collars. The performance represents one of the last for Hill, who will retire at month's end. The chorus has named Ben Riggs, from Denver, Colorado, as Hill's successor.

Audrey Britton, legislative candidate

The Hilde is an open-air facility, 45 feet high, situated in an amphitheater behind the city hall of Plymouth, a community of 70,600 people located 12 miles northwest of Minneapolis. The center's architects, Bentz/Thompson/Rietow, have designed outdoor facilities throughout Minnesota, including Red Wing, Itasca State Park, St. Louis Park, and the Lake Harriet Band Shell in Minneapolis.

July 3, 2012

As they have for the 12 years of Hill's tenure, TCGMC's members concluded their performance by standing hand-in-hand with the audience for their signature song, "Walk Hand In Hand With Me."


The audience at the Hilde Amphitheater included Audrey Britton, a candidate for state representative in Minnesota District 44A, and members of her campaign team. 


As part of Plymouth's summer music series, the Minnesota Orchestra performs annually at the Hilde. Its 2012 appearance is scheduled for Tuesday, July 3. 

May ran out

Minneapolis, Minnesota


Thursday. Lake Calhoun. 64º and mostly sunny. Slightest breeze to ripple water in all directions and keep 16 sailboats circling at lake center. Weed cutter anchored offshore of northwest corner. Water level healthy. West side roses in fierce bloom. Foot/bike traffic light-to-mod for late afternoon. Like our neighbors, all the little kids with no dog see Maggie, want to touch her and take her home. Most of the ducks live on north shore, east of beach and canoe racks.

The 1% will spend $1 billion to finish the wrecking job

Minneapolis, Minnesota


Politico is out with a story today that says GOP super PACs and their fellow travelers plan to spend $1 billion between now and November in order to buy control of the House, the Senate, and the White House. The total includes $300 million by groups related to Karl Rove and nearly $400 million of spending by a network bankrolled directly and indirectly by the Koch brothers.


These forces are not content with the national embarrassment and gridlock occasioned by their thuggish tactics of obfuscation and obstruction in the last three and-a-half years. They are beyond embarrassment, and gridlock has merely served their own special and selfish interests at the expense of the country. 


Their aim is not a balanced democracy that serves our people. They will say that they seek to preserve American values and freedom. In reality, they seek to subvert and destroy. They seek for themselves total and amoral power and control over all checks and balances of the government, the economy, the culture, and religion.


UPDATE: Thursday, May 31, 2012: Politico is out with a story this morning that reports some of the GOP's mega-donors are upset that their names have become part of the public dialogue, and that some people have ascribed nefarious motives to their attempts to accomplish the equivalent of anonymous, political hit jobs in the dark of night. Sorry, but bullying of any kind is not an acceptable American value. 

A Minnesota dance family reunion and legacy

Minneapolis, Minnesota


Someday, scholars pursuing graduate degrees at the University of Minnesota will write the definitive histories of Minnesota's and the Twin Cities' performing arts scenes. Significant portions of their research will draw heavily upon records generated over the past 50 years by members of a remarkable family of artists.


Many of the artistic heirs of that family's influence reunited in Minneapolis' Lowry Hill neighborhood, May 5, for an evening of mellow memories and music. Approximately 100 grandparents, parents, and toddlers gathered in the soon-to-be-former family home of the Nancy Hauser Dance Company and School, overlooking the intersection of Franklin and Hennepin avenues from the upper floors at 1940 Hennepin.


For Minnesotans who came of age in the 1960s and 70s, the Hauser company and school occupied one of the central artistic positions in the zeitgeist that produced housing coops, anti-Vietnam war protests, and the worker-owned coop movement. In those days, we knew that ballet was something that came from Communist Russia when Ed Sullivan featured it on his Sunday night variety show on CBS television. What little we knew of modern dance emanated from the doings of Hauser and her colleagues at the Guild of Performing Arts, a music and dance school with a small theater and art gallery centered in the bohemian enclave of Minneapolis' West Bank. The area was known for a time as the Haight-Ashbury of the Midwest.


While Hauser's work flowed from the Mary Wigman and Hanya Holm traditions of modern dance, the remarkable story of her company is that of its service as the crucible from which the elements of contemporary dance in Minnesota exploded and continue to differentiate themselves, 51 years after its founding in 1961.


As fashions and generations changed, it was perhaps inevitable that present-day dance afficionados have little or no knowledge and appreciation of the statewide, domestic, and international touring the company accomplished, nor of the far-reaching contributions made by its students, performers, and choreographers.

A small list of Hauser alums includes the choreographer Ralph Lemon; Lisa Naugle, the chair of dance at the University of California-Irvine; the choreographer and artistic director Gary Lund, whose work has been presented throughout Europe and at New York's Joyce Theater and Dance Theater Workshop; Sara Pearson, a professor at the University of Maryland; Stephen Koester, a professor at the University of Utah; and Nancy Evans Doede, director of the Nancy Evans Dance Theatre in Los Angeles. Artists from the milieu who remain active in the Twin Cities include Gerry Girouard, Derek Phillips, Pam Gleason, Susana di Palma, Laurie Van Wieren, and Jane Peck, among many others.


The artistic talents and interests of the Hauser family exceed the dance pursuits of Nancy and her daughter, Heidi Hauser Jasmin. They include the sculpture and visual art of Alonzo Hauser, who founded the Art Department at Macalester College in 1945, and the classical and flamenco guitar virtuosity of sons Tony and Michael.

My first close crossing of paths with the Hauser company and family occurred in 1986. To help establish a new purpose for itself following the opening of the Ordway Center for Performing Arts in January that year, The O'Shaughnessy, a 1,700 seat auditorium on the campus of St. Catherine University in St. Paul, created the O'Shaughnessy Dance Series, featuring six or eight Twin Cities dance companies during the spring months. I attended rehearsals and performances of those companies, including Hauser, and wrote reviews for my radio program on KFAI. Pam Gleason, who organized last week's reunion, was a performer in my review.

In addition to a bountiful, pot-luck spread of food, a quintet, the Aurora Club Jazz Jam Live, provided music – kicking off with "Days of Wine and Roses" – while those touched forever by Hauser Dance took to the dance floor with each other or themselves to recall where they learned to love dance, some recreating favored roles from days past.

Jasmin announced that, since she stopped teaching last October, she and her husband, Paul Jasmin, have been organizing and archiving the company's 51 years of history, disposing of props and costumes, and preparing to end the 501(c)(3) status at the end of August. The archival documents will be turned over to the Performing Arts Archives at the University of Minnesota.

Updated: 10/19/2012 - 11:30pm CDT

Zenon Dance Company stands tall with brilliant program for its 29th spring season

Minneapolis, Minnesota


A poster hangs in a stairwell of my house for the first performances by the Zenon Dance Company, presented in a studio setting at the Hennepin Center for the Arts, April 6-8, 1983. Preview performances were held a week earlier, March 30-31, at the Edina Community Center. 

Leslie O'Neill & Scott Mettille, rock stars in Zenon's shining galaxy

The occasion represented a leap of faith for the dancers and their artistic director, Linda Andrews, as they assumed the trappings of a professional ensemble, replacing their previous status as advanced students with the pre-professional Rezone [modern] and Just Jazz companies fielded by the Ozone Dance School.


The new, professional Zenon was viewed by many as an impertinent upstart, and its debut program offered what most observers at the time, and for some years afterward, considered to be an improbable and unworkable mix of modern and jazz dance choreography. The opening bill featured works by Hannah Kahn, Charlie Vernon, Lewis Whitlock, Linda Shapiro, Wil Swanson, Lynn Simonson, and Anne Gunderson.


The notion that dancers could cross-train to perform many styles of modern dance, as well as jazz dance, was considered to be something of a joke by many local and national gatekeepers who served on the staffs and granting panels of service organizations, foundations, government agencies, and the media. It took many performance seasons and grant-making rounds to convince them to open their minds, trust their eyes, and lend their support.


After 29 years, many of those original pooh-bahs consider Zenon to be Minnesota's artistic leader in dance and a competent competitor as a national innovator. 


After 29 years, the Hennepin Center for the Arts is known as the "education wing" of The Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts, and is connected to the new, 500-seat Goodale Theater, the first venue in Minnesota built specifically to serve the presentation needs of concert dance.


After 29 years, Zenon's program lineup remains an eclectic mix of the modern, the jazz, the cerebral, the entertaining, the dynamic, the bizarre, and the right-on. It is one of three companies (the James Sewell Ballet and Ballet of the Dolls are the others) that can draw an audience of respectable size for two weekends of performances twice a year.


Also after 29 years, Twin Cities dance artists retain a pathological need to label, rate, and categorize each other, their work, and venues. In that, they could save themselves much drama and misspent energy. As observed by the dance writer Lightsey Dharst, many modern dance companies in the Twin Cities "share dancers, and all rely to some extent on those dancers to generate movement, which means that you get to see the same great moves in concert after concert." 


Zenon's commissions of work from a variety of choreographers – many from afar and who are not one of us – mitigate the effects of this dynamic. This is particularly true of the standing tall program presented for the company's 29th spring season that opened May 4 at the Cowles Center, and runs through May 13. The program shines with a brilliance that should not be missed.


The world premiere of "Wine Dark Sea," reflecting on the connection of humans to ocean and choreographed in a modern dance style by Minnesota's Wynn Fricke, featured a symbiotic, original composition and performance by the percussionist Peter O'Gorman. The composer's participation represented one of the first projects underwritten by the Live Music for Dance Minnesota program of the American Composers Forum.


At rise, eight dancers in close proximity faced the audience from upstage center, heads uplifted, elbows crooked above their faces, and legs moving to lateral tendu in costumes crafted by Annie Cady. For an instant, one perceived thrilling aspects of Alvin Ailey's "Revelations," presented in Minneapolis earlier in the week by the Northrop Dance Series.


Two major movements featured two, well-crafted quartets. That for the men, Tristan Koepke, Scott Mettille, Stephen Schroeder, and Gregory Waletski, resembled voguing at times, and that for the women, Mary Ann Bradley, Tamara Ober, Leslie O'Neill, and Laura Selle Virtucio, worked on and into the floor. During the latter, the men crouched across and behind an upstage scrim, unfolding vertically while each struck, in turn, a single toned triangle in sync with O'Gorman's larger theme.


Although an audience member was overheard at intermission to say that most dances, everywhere, could stand to be cut by five minutes, the primal and solid "Wine Dark Sea" ended with an abruptness that called out for one more movement to lend a sense of completeness.


I retain my earlier assessment that "Booba" (Hebrew for "doll") from 2008, represents "an odd set of excerpts" from a full-evening work by Andrea Miller, a graduate of The Juilliard School. Set to music by Balkan Beat Box, the work engages with a series of personality-expressing divertissements, opening with a stage-right-to-left shimmy led by Schroeder, followed by O'Neill, Mettille, Ober, Koepke, and Bradley. Miller's choreography resembles a cross between disco and breaking, and Schroeder and O'Neill shine in a duet that could reflect characters from The Big Bang Theory.


If anything will instill in me an appreciation for postmodern dance that moves beyond grudging, it will be the dances of the choreographer Morgan Thorson, whose work has been recognized and supported by nearly every major funding entity in the field. She accepts, on an elemental level, that dance should include at least a minimal amount of intelligent movement that also does not require an advanced degree to follow and understand. 


In her new, second creation for Zenon, "All Parts ˆAre Welcome," she crafts a mesmerizing world that seeks to "stare down our worst conflicted feelings about life." Thorson immerses herself holistically in the details of her creations, holding credit here for costuming in addition to choreography, and sharing billing for lighting design with Mike Grogan. 


She has described "All Parts ˆAre Welcome" as bringing "everything that makes us human into the choreographic process by way of observation, same sex attraction, flipping, dominance, rejection, a desire for intimacy, lies, compartmentalizing, obedience, manipulation, wanting to be seen, arrogance, love" and more.

Some of her parts struck me as weird, but very pleasingly so. From the opening moment when Selle Virtucio burst through the curtains upstage center, we took a journey both light and dark with music created by Chris Schlichting and occasional vocalizations by the dancers. On first viewing, the ending appeared to fritter away weakly in contrast to the intentional composition that preceded it, almost as though Thorson lost her nerve or her interest, and walked away.


In the dance's latter minutes, Thorson has the leggings, the curtains that mask the sidelights and offstage walls, rise into the fly-loft, seemingly because they can. The time-worn gimmick adds nothing here and, frankly, her work has outgrown it.


With no sets or gimmicks, a wearied and troubled world needs the moments of joyful and spectacular uplift delivered by "Pink Martini," the evening's closer.


Since its debut last fall, "Pink Martini," has served a heart-melting grin from beginning to end, and as the capstone work of Zenon's sterling, 2011-12 season. It represents a level of sleek and chic choreographic and performance sophistication that the town needs in its collective dance repertoire. With some smoothing of sound transitions between musical segments, one hopes it might become a signature work for a company that has never known one. 


For audiences present at the work's creation, however, any future cast will be hard-pressed to match the accomplished appeal of the present ensemble of eight, collectively the strongest and best of Zenon's 29 years. The choreographer, Marius Olszewski, created it for them and they own it totally. 


Crafted as a series of ballroom dance vignettes using cha-cha and mambo styles set to music of Rosemary Clooney and Perez Prado and His Orchestra, "Pink Martini" offers the dancers star turns that exude confidence, drip with sex appeal, and glow with glamour. 


The opening solo by Mettille, a recent graduate of the University of Minnesota's Dance Program, set the exciting tone and standard for all that followed. When joined by O'Neill for an ensuing duet, their combined effort was electric. The pairing of these natives of Minnesota (him) and of Wisconsin (her) created a charisma that elevated them to rock stars in the company's shining galaxy.


Additional pairings – of Waletski and Bradley, Selle Virtucio and Schroeder, Ober and Koepke, O'Neill and Schroeder, Mettille and Waletski, and Bradley and the guys, along with quartets for the men and for the women – combined to evoke a huge "Yes!" and ovation from their audience.


Over time, dancers and dance companies, like athletes and sports teams, experience seasons of triumph and loss. For one who discovered the idea of Zenon before its debut performances in 1983, the company has danced through periods difficult to watch. Not so in recent years. The triumph of the present season holds cause for much celebration and higher aspiration for the times to come.


For tickets to Zenon Dance Company at The Cowles Center, call 612.206.3600. 

What a wearied, troubled world needs: Zenon Dance Company in Marius Olszewski's  "Pink Martini"

Gary Peterson served as managing director of Zenon Dance Company from 1986 to 1991. • Photos by Steve Niedorf.

Memo re: Minnesota's 2011-12 legislative session

Minneapolis, Minnesota


We Minnesotans have always been passive aggressive with each other. Beginning with statehood, we had two state constitutions because both parties at the time refused to sign on with each other. No surprise now if it feels like every bill passed by a legislature controlled by one party is vetoed by a governor from the other. My optimist angel says the legislature should carry on until next week's mandated deadline; my pragmatist angel says "shut the session down tomorrow." Present circumstances are better than intra-state civil war with real bullets – but my head screams "make them stop!"

Kurt Zellers, the GOP speaker of the state house, is a particularly interesting study of ineffectiveness. Regardless of his position on any issue, he seems not to understand that when accepting a leadership position, his "positions" are no longer all about him – he needs to anticipate, get out in front, try to work with all constituents; in essence, he needs to lead and take whatever salvos come his way. He had some effect as a low-profile back-bencher but, unfortunately, he is miscast as a legislative leader.

Behind the scenes of the Sewell Ballet's "Opus 131"

Minneapolis, Minnesota


Beethoven completed his Quartet for Strings No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Opus 131, in 1826, the year before his death. That he was deaf when he composed the 40-minute work remains reason for amazement, even – and especially – in the jaded, show-it-to-me culture of our present century.


I recall the first time I heard the work.

"Opus 131" • Cory Goei & Leah Gallas

Following the conclusion of a performing arts conference and showcase in Chicago, I was driving across Wisconsin to Minneapolis on a Sunday afternoon in September 1995 with three members of the James Sewell Ballet. We had stopped earlier at the resort town of Wisconsin Dells, primarily just to say we had done so. 


James Sewell was going to begin choreographing a new ballet set to Opus 131 the next day. None of us had heard the music, so Sewell played it over the van's sound system as we drifted along I-94 toward the Minnesota border and into setting sun. The seven movements, each with a distinct feeling, are played through without pause.


Created for six dancers at its 1995 premiere at The O'Shaughnessy in St. Paul, "Opus 131" featured three partnered pairings by Anna Laghezza and Sewell, Sally Rousse and Christian Burns, and Penelope Freeh and Joel Klausler.


When reprised during the 2002-03 season, Sewell expanded the work to four pairings: Freeh and Matthew Keefe, Rousse and Sewell, Peggy Seipp and Benjamin Johnson, and Julia Welsh and Justin Leaf. JSB's touring schedule was extensive that year, and "Opus 131" saw action on stages throughout the country. 


One of those stages, a college in New England, would be followed by a Sunday matinee at Brooklyn College in New York City. It would be the company's first gig in the city since performing at Hunter College in Manhattan in March 2001.


In Minneapolis on Friday, April 11, 2003, it occurred to me that it would be fun to make the scene in Brooklyn, and I told my administrative colleagues that I would go if fares were under $200. Through the wonders of online booking, I found a round-trip to LaGuardia for $184, and arrived at the hotel in Brooklyn 30 minutes before the company drove in the next afternoon.

The Parker Quartet

Sunday, April 13, was Palm Sunday, and the staff at Brooklyn College had no expectations of filling even half of the 2,500 seats in Whitman Hall. I arrived at the theater in the morning with Kevin Jones, the production manager, and Matthew Keefe, who served the dual role of dancer and wardrobe master. My job was to not interfere, pace, and hold court in the lobby when the audience arrived.


For a while, it seemed as though there would be no audience. In addition to being Palm Sunday, it was one of those bright and romantically languid Sundays that only New York City can muster, and the streets of Brooklyn were bereft of movement. Finally, as though a faucet was turned on, people arrived from nowhere to take their seats. 


The performance began, and I watched from the back of the theater where I could pace with my usual thoughts, hoping that the performance went well, that the audience had an engaging time, and that terrorists or some other mayhem did not disrupt the scene. 


My blood pressure shot up as a series of episodic camera flashes appeared from the audience, not far from the stage. Cameras are never allowed in live performances out of consideration for other audience members and to protect performer safety and intellectual property interests. The nature and length of the music and dance, however, meant that trying to confiscate a camera would be more disruptive than the flashes, and I seethed in silence.


At intermission, while stationed near the lobby exits looking for a wayward camera, a college press officer walked up and asked if I was with JSB and could I identify photos of the dancers for Anna Kisselgoff, the senior dance writer for the New York Times. In our brief, pleasant exchange of business, she noted – a bit archly, I thought – that our public relations game had left something to be desired for this performance.


Neither we nor the college had thought of trying to schedule a photo call for the press given that we had a single performance, and I was thunderstruck by the thought that Kisselgoff had brought a photographer "all the way to Brooklyn" on Palm Sunday. I also was glad that we had taken pains to make our program notes look as respectable as possible. 


Back in Minneapolis, two mornings later, I received an early call from the mother of a JSB dancer who told me I would never believe that day's New York Times. She was right.


Across the top, front page of the arts section, and under the headline "Balletic Sonnets, Surprises Included," was a full-color photo of the JSB dancers taking a curtain call in Brooklyn for "Opus 131."


In her review, Kisselgoff wrote,

Someone needs to give the James Sewell Ballet from Minneapolis and Mr. Sewell's always imaginative, often exquisite ballets a full season in New York. In the meantime, thanks go to the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts for presenting Mr. Sewell's chamber troupe with three New York premieres at Brooklyn College's Whitman Hall on Sunday afternoon.

Mr. Sewell is one of American ballet's best choreographers, albeit one who composes sonnets rather than epics. This lack of pretension can make his work look deceptively gentle, but it is not modest. Grounded in a neoclassical style that is exploited in different ways, his choreography brims with surprises in movement invention.

This rich texture was obvious on Sunday in ''Opus 131,'' a fanciful, plotless ballet set to Beethoven.

Quite simply, reviews do not get much better than that. Most artists, let alone dancers, will never get their names and photos splashed across a page of the New York Times.


It is no longer my job to pace at the back of theaters during JSB performances. Instead, I sit calmly and expectantly in the audience, as I did last Friday at The Cowles Center for the latest iteration of "Opus 131," this time for seven dancers: Nicky Coelho, Leah Gallas, Cory Goei, Chris Hannon, Nic Lincoln, Sally Rousse, and Eve Schulte.


This go-round has its own special excitement. For the first time, the dancers are performing to live music, provided by The Parker Quartet, an exquisite ensemble of passionate talent whose members include Daniel Chong, violin, Karen Kim, violin, Jessica Bodner, viola, and Kee-Hyun Kim, cello. 

 
You can catch them at 8pm, April 20-21, and 2pm, April 22. Call 612.206.3600 for ticketing.


Gary Peterson served as executive director of James Sewell Ballet from 1995 to 2008.

Sharing space with 70 gay men in Bemidji, Minnesota

Minneapolis, Minnesota

 

While most Minnesotans at least know of one person who is gay or lesbian, most people have never been present in the same room with 70 gay men. The opportunity for that to happen made for interesting and merry mingling between members of the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus and their sold-out audience in Bemidji, Minnesota, March 19, 2011.

Walker, Minnesota, Muskie capital of the nation

For the Chorus, the encounter began with a four hour drive that started earlier that Saturday with a 12:15pm departure by bus from the parking lot of the Ridgedale Shopping Center in Minnetonka, a western suburb of Minneapolis. 

After advancing north through Monticello, Big Lake, Little Falls, Pine River, Backus, and other hamlets, the bus stopped at 3:50pm for lunch in Walker, on the shore of a bay belonging to Leech Lake. The lake, Minnesota’s third largest, is huge, while the town of Walker is a bit less so.

Thirty miles further on from Walker is Bemidji, home of Bemidji State University, 229 miles north and west of Minneapolis. The city boasts 13,541 residents. The campus serves 5,300 students. 

BSU, 5,300 students & 89 acres on the shores of Lake Bemidji

I accompanied the Chorus as one of 15 staff, groupies, and miscellaneous hangers-on. It was my first visit to the city and campus since October 1970, when I was doing advance work there and in Bagley and Park Rapids for Hubert Humphrey’s campaign for the U.S. senate. 

Bemidji State University is situated on 89 acres (with a 240 acre private forest) on the shores of Lake Bemidji (6,400 acres). "Bemidji" is an Ojibwe word for "lake with cross waters." The Mississippi River crosses Lake Bemidji, 30 miles from its headwaters at Lake Itasca.

70 gay men & audience in Beaux Arts Ballroom, Bemidji

A demographically diverse, sold-out audience of 270 rocked the Thompson Recital Hall in a 90-minute program sung without intermission. Many of them came for good music, well performed – it did not matter who was singing it. Music is music, after all, and state budget cuts had recently caused the university to send packing two of its six professors of music.

Afterward, audience members, singers, and sponsors from the Phoenix Gay-Straight Student Organization and Servant Hearts, an organization for marginalized and at-risk youth and adults, visited in the lobby and at the Beaux Arts Ballroom of the student union. 

Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus, March 19, 2011, Lakeland Public Television, Bemidji, Minnesota

Real Minnesotans voting "no": Pastor Erik Strand

Minneapolis, Minnesota


Pastor Erik Strand, Edina Community Lutheran Church, has been a Lutheran pastor for 33 years, and has been married for 37 years. He is voting "no" on the anti-marriage amendment to Minnesota's constitution this November.

"As a Christian, I am a pastor who advocates that we include and welcome couples who are GLBT couples who want to make promises to each other....

"To me, there is more intrusion of the state by restricting marriage in this amendment than there is protection for religious communities."

Faith Forward will document "the moral right of the religious left" in Minnesota's debate about marriage

Minneapolis, Minnesota


One must take a long view when foraging through the underbrush of societal views that treat gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people as second-class and unequal citizens in the eyes of the community and of the law.

When I spoke as an openly gay man at discussion forums in Lutheran churches in the early 1980s, some of the conversations were distinctly more civil than others. While it seemed possible then that passing an amendment to Minnesota's human rights act that banned discrimination could be within reach (we passed it in 1993), it required far-fetched thinking to believe that any Lutheran church body would ever ordain openly gay people (the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America said yes to that in 2009), or speak kindly of supporting their marriages (many do so in 2012). 


The tides of history favor full equality in the fullness of time. Navigating those tides, however, is neither a free ride nor a passive journey. 


A year ago, the Republican members of Minnesota's Senate and House of Representatives voted to place an amendment on the statewide ballot in November 2012. The amendment would ban same gender marriage. Some of the legislators voted based on honest conviction while others voted based on cynical political calculation. In the overall scheme of things, their various reasons really don't matter.


This is the year that we tell them "No, we are not going to do that." 


The Roman Catholic bishops of our state and their tax-free dollars are leading the charge in favor of the amendment, while the ranks of their parishioners are far from unanimous about it. A diversity of views also manifests among those of other faith traditions. Much of our discourse and the electoral outcome will turn on people's faith-driven beliefs and understandings.


Some of the discussion will be up close and personal. I met recently with a high school classmate who is now a Catholic priest and supports the amendment. Another classmate, who wears the cloth of the Methodist clergy, opposes the amendment.


A longtime Twin Cities journalist, Matt Peiken, has answered his call to inaugurate Faith Forward, a video project documenting the faith-based fight against the marriage amendment. He will not be highlighting the proponents as they have more than enough control over the levers of power and the media.  Rather, his focus will be on "the moral right of the religious left."


Peiken's efforts are a welcome addition to the campaign for equality and justice in Minnesota.