Douglas Dunn & Dancers presents
A Salon Evening Performance
Cyborg on the Zattere
A Poundatorio
by poet Anne Waldman
and musician/composer Steven Taylor
at the Douglas Dunn Studio
541 Broadway (near Spring), New York
April 29 and 30, 2011
Friday and Saturday at 8:00 pm
$15 ($12 Student/Senior)
Tickets online and at the door
To purchase tickets
Call (866) 811-4111 or click here
Doors open at 7:30 pm
"The moon has a swollen cheek . . ."
-- Ezra Pound, Pisan Canto LXXIX
Cyborg on the Zattere is a two-act opera by poet Anne Waldman and musician/composer Steven Taylor. With eight musicians, two dancers, and a score interweaving vocal harmonies of the Italian Renaissance with contemporary music, this work brings the poetry of Ezra Pound and supporting text by Anne Waldman to a luminous, musical focus. Pound is the pivotal figure in this montage-like investigation of his influential and stunning poetry on the one hand, his excesses and hateful politics on the other.
This recital opera is in three scenes: A Casino, Wall Street; Ezra Pound in his cage in Pisa, May 1945; Venice, the Zattere (near where Ezra Pound lived and died). The title locates the aging, silent poet as a kind of cyborg, as he strolls up and down the Zattere, his cape windblown, his face craggy. The work also references the knot of the current economic crisis, with a Goldman Sachs chorus, set in a casino.
Inspired by Pound's extensive knowledge of Medieval and Renaissance music, Taylor's score juxtaposes ancient and contemporary musical compositions. Instruments are guitar, reeds, toy piano, cello, percussion.
The work will be performed on two evenings, April 29 and 30, 2011, as part of the Salon Evening Series at the Douglas Dunn loft. The Salon Series, now in its third year, recreates the tradition of small performances in intimate loft spaces in SoHo. Reviewing a recent performance in the series, Roslyn Sulcas described the evening in the New York Times:
"In the midst of the Banana Republics and Mangos and Sephoras, somewhere between Balthazar and Prada, is Douglas Dunn's studio-loft, where he is currently presenting a 'short salon of dance.' Salon seems like the right word for the evening, which works its casual, from-another-era magic from the moment you enter."
Joining Waldman and Taylor in performance are choreographer Douglas Dunn, cellist Ha-Yang Kim, reed player Marty Ehrlich, vocalist Alaina Ferris, and dancer Grazia Della-Terza.
Anne Waldman and Steven Taylor
Anne Waldman is a poet, performer, professor, editor and cultural activist. She is the author of over forty books of poetry, including Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble (Penguin) the recent book-length hybrid poem Manatee/Humanity (Penguin 2009), and the forthcoming epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press 2011). Her play Red Noir was directed by Judith Malina and produced by the Living Theatre in NYC, running for two and a half months in the winter of 2010. She wrote and performed in Tanks Under Trees, a collaboration with Douglas Dunn, which was performed in Houston and New York City. She has also collaborated on several scripts with filmmaker Ed Bowes, and several CDs, including Eye of The Falcon and Matching Half with Ambrose Bye. She is also the co-editor of numerous anthologies including Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, and Beats at Naropa. She is the co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the renowned Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where she is Chair and Artistic Director of The Summer Writing Program. She has worked with poetry-in-performance much of her career.
Steven Taylor is a composer, musician, poet, professor and ethno-musicologist. PhD, Brown University. He is the author of a musical ethnography, False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground (Wesleyan University Press). He has composed music for theatre, film, radio, drama and installations and has toured and recorded with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Kenward Elmslie, and The Fugs. He is on the faculty of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University.
For more, click the photo:
