THE ARTS PAPER – ARTICLES

Jazzed about filmmaking
From war veterans to veteran musicians, Rebecca Abbott documents creativity and struggle

Hank Hoffman

Rebecca Abbott. Photo courtesy of the artist.

For Rebecca Abbott, revelation came in the early 1970s with a parade of discordant images and flashes of white, black, and white noise. No, it wasn’t an acid trip. It was her exposure to experimental cinema in her senior year of college. A visual studies major at Dartmouth College concentrating in sculpture and also studying painting and photography, Abbott got the urge to make an animated film of animals moving in time to music. To facilitate her project, she took a course taught by a professor knowledgeable about experimental films. The avant-garde works of filmmakers Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and others were part of the syllabus. Abbott’s concept of film, to that point was, she recalls, “You go to the theater and see a Hollywood film.

“As an art major, it was just ‘oh my gosh!’ It was like being able to make paintings in time that can evolve and you can add sound to them,” says Abbott. “So I fell in love with the medium. Right there in the last semester I decided I wanted to make films.”

Four years in New York City making experimental films followed Abbott’s 1974 graduation. She received her M.F.A. in experimental film from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an M.A. in American studies from Yale University. Abbott, who has taught at Bennington College in Vermont and Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, joined the Quinnipiac University faculty in 1999. Although she teaches a course in using 16mm film, Abbott has worked exclusively with video for her own projects since 1984.

Over the years, her focus has shifted from experimental film to documentaries. Her award-winning and Emmy-nominated documentaries have been shown on public television and screened at national and international film festivals, and have covered such subjects as education, the struggles of veterans coping with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and jazz in New Haven. Abbott was responsible for the video design for 613 Radical Acts of Prayer, the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange performance that was the grand finale of the 2008 International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
Abbott has made one narrative film, Herbert III, an adaptation from Ted Shines’ two-person play that starred Aleta Staton and George Moore. The 2003 short was accepted into more than 15 festivals, including one in England, and won some awards. Since turning 39, Abbott has also carved out a rewarding avocation as a jazz saxophonist and is a longtime member of Jazz Haven, an organization dedicated to boosting the music’s profile in the Elm City.

It took Abbott a while to get started as a documentarian. She says she was shy, “so the idea of putting a camera in somebody’s face and saying ‘tell me your story’” was an initial hurdle. But these days documentary work is where she is most comfortable.

“With narrative, you have control. You can devise anything. If you’re someone like (screenwriter) Charlie Kaufman, (with) the complexity of his stories, he must be good at playing chess,” says Abbott, who feels fictional storytelling is not one of her own strengths.

“But with documentary, you have all of life, all of history, all of time. It becomes a puzzle and a challenge,” she says.

Once she finds her “threads,” the images and story fragments, Abbott feels she can construct a coherent visual narrative much more easily than inventing one out of whole cloth. And she has had compelling material to work with. She began her documentary No Unwounded Soldiers, which deals with the use of drama therapy to help veterans cope with PTSD, in February, 2005. But the genesis of the project came two years earlier.

In early 2003, as the Iraq War approached, Abbott collaborated with Crystal Brian, chair of the Visual and Performing Arts department at Quinnipiac University, and Mary Lou Lauricella, art therapy director at the West Haven Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital, on a production of Bertolt Brecht’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone. Brian wanted the voices of veterans represented in the play. With the assistance of Lauricella, Brian’s drama students interviewed veterans of American wars dating back to World War II. Abbott’s video-production students provided lighting and videotaping. The edited clips were projected on huge scrims like silks on either side of the stage, an extension of the Greek chorus.

“I had never known veterans or had the chance to talk with veterans about war. To hear those stories, it was so moving, so wrenching, so elucidating,” Abbott says, “to get a better understanding of what it’s like to serve in war and then come back to so-called normal life.”

In No Unwounded Soldiers, Abbott weaves together video from rehearsals and improvisations for a play on PTSD, interviews with veterans, and archival footage. The play was being composed by vets at the West Haven VA, primarily Vietnam War veterans fearful that soldiers in Iraq were increasingly facing a situation analogous to their own. Under the guidance of Lauricella, they work through the anguish of their own experiences as a means of helping returning vets. Through the juxtaposition of the wrenching interviews with the cathartic and creative therapy, Abbott tells a story both of the enduring scars of war and the effort to contain its costs on a new generation. From 120 hours of accumulated material, Abbott edited down the documentary to just under an hour for a recent CPTV broadcast.

“It’s very hard to distance yourself from the emotions you develop with a project like that, to be objective and cut it down,” Abbott says. “For me, it was a question of wanting people to hear these guys and their stories, every word.”

Abbott has worked as a director for CPTV, as an editor on projects, and as a videographer, as with the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange project. She finds virtues and challenges to playing all those roles separately. But she has also found that working as her own “one-man band” has its advantages. In the case of Unsung Heroes, her documentary about jazz in New Haven made in conjunction with Jazz Haven and W. Frank Mitchell, she found that shooting and directing the interviews on her own created a helpful intimacy.

“It became a conversation, just (me) and them,” she says. “They could quickly relax and feel less self-conscious.”

Abbott, who studied classical piano from the age of 5 through high school, tells me she “didn’t understand jazz” until she started to play it. She considers it a “perfect art form,” a “wonderful combination of intellect and emotion.”

When playing and listening to jazz, Abbott says, she imagines it having a visual landscape or architecture. But the notion of rhythm, she adds, is relevant to editing film. In this case, rhythm is visual.

Toward the end of Unsung Heroes, Abbott took the opportunity to merge the concepts of musical and visual rhythm. The percussionist Jesse Hameen II, dressed in African garb, is talking about rhythm, about improvisation, about musicians feeding off each others’ cues.

He likens it to a preacher and a church organist, imitating their cadences and motioning with his hands as though playing a keyboard.

As he reaches his anecdotal climax, Abbott intercuts the interview footage with video of Hameen playing drums in a concert on the New Haven Green. Completing his thought, Hameen claps in 4/4 time, making for a perfect crossfade into video of him drumming the same beat. Abbott says she just thought “wow,” knowing she already had tape of Hameen playing the drums.

“It was this wonderful fortuitous moment when he was telling me that story that I could use to show what rhythm is like,” says Abbott.



Art for one and all

Steven Scarpa

	Alexander Calder's Gallows and Lollipops, part of Yale's public art collection, sits in Beinecke Plaza. Photo by Harold Shapiro.

New Haven is known for many things — an internationally renowned university, world class theatres and galleries, and fine dining. Yet, there is a host of not-so-hidden treasures scattered all over the city for the artistically savvy to enjoy.

Over the past quarter century, New Haven’s Percent for Art in Public Spaces Program has commissioned 31 pieces of art for the city’s municipal buildings and spaces. Only two other cities in the state have similar legislation-dictated programs. These efforts, coupled with Yale University’s impressive roster of public art treasures, make New Haven a veritable open air gallery.

“Aesthetically I think it is very important from a perspective of place-making, defining your space,” said Barbara Lamb, director of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. “I think a lot of cities are known by their public art. New Haven has some fabulous pieces of public art … In terms of our identity, we are very eclectic.”

The concept of public art is not a new one, although the way it manifests itself today is different than in the past. The oldest forms of officially recognized public art are often monuments, statues, and memorials, often in honor of statesmen or war veterans. One need not look farther than the New Haven Green, with its marble fountains and flagpoles, to find examples of that kind of public art.

“When you think of the (Civil War) memorial on the top of East Rock Park, that is a gorgeous piece of public art, but now public art is worked into a lot of different things in the landscape. It can be a fence, it can be a sidewalk, or it can be part of the building itself. I think the whole definition of public art has changed in the past hundred years,” Lamb said.

The way most of the city’s newer public art projects have been funded is through the Percent for Art program. By city law, 1 percent of the budget of any city-run construction project must be allocated for the creation and maintenance of a piece of public art connected with the project. A jury is selected from the respective project’s building committee. Working with a pair of professional artists as advisers, the jury selects the location for the piece of art, the kind of work to be displayed, and, finally, the local artist who will complete the piece. Most of the newest works of public art reside in schools, a product of the city’s recent emphasis on new school construction and renovation.

Not only does the art serve as an aesthetic boon, one that gives the city a particular personality and sense of place, it becomes an economic driver, employing artists and beautifying areas that perhaps need the help.

“A lot of the offices of economic development are turning toward the artistic community to enhance the downtown while promoting the artists’ work so they can make a living and not move away. I think the artists themselves are turning towards community collaborative projects because a nonprofit may have some funds, and they can shape a project that’ll enhance a whole society. I think we are in a whole society — it is a very exciting time for public art. Artists are expanding in their vision because they can collaborate with hundreds of people,” said Margaret Bodell, coordinator of the city’s Percent for Art program.

The city’s public art offerings run the visual gamut, from abstract steel shapes to murals depicting important events in the city’s history, and from stoic marble soldiers standing on pedestals to decorative streetscapes.

One example of a highly popular, yet unusual piece of public art stands outside the Morris Cove Firehouse, at 510 Lighthouse Road in New Haven. The cast iron sculpture, titled Hero, is a small yet mighty looking red fire hydrant on wheels, wielding a ladder and hoses, ready to rush toward danger.

“Hero had to be a friendly yet courageous partisan of the community — half mascot, half leader,” wrote artist David Boyajian in his proposal, which was accepted with great relish by the fire department.

With taxpayer dollars involved in the creation of these particular works of art, they often become water-cooler fodder around the city, Lamb said.

“It is important because it can be controversial too — it enlivens a space. How many people hate the piece behind City Hall in Federal Plaza? But I think if it were to go away, many people would miss it,” she said. “I think the whole nature of public art has changed. On the one hand, there has been a backlash from people who prefer to see things that are much more realistic.”

In difficult financial times, one of the first things cut from municipal budgets is arts funding, and New Haven has been no exception.

“I think we have a bit of an identity crisis. I don’t think we’ve invested as much into public art as would truly benefit us … We don’t have a public art plan in the sense of wanting to make sure X number of pieces of public art are built each year. It is something I would like to do and something many cities do, especially larger cities. They have so much bigger budgets,” Lamb said.

New Haven has a unique artistic opportunity, looking ahead to the coming years. With the planned construction of a relocated Gateway Community College on Church Street, for the first time, city and state officials will have the opportunity to make a serious investment in a piece of landmark public art. It is a task not taken lightly.

“It is an opportunity to really make a statement. This is an opportunity for an artist to do a statement piece for the city of New Haven, a piece that people would travel to see,” Lamb said.

It doesn’t necessarily take hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund and create public art. For example, the Arts Council of Greater New Haven has launched Made Space, an ongoing site-specific exhibition of works in storefront windows throughout downtown New Haven.

Still, until the day comes when dollars are not a concern, art will be created in a slightly piecemeal fashion, where building projects spring up and dollars are available to fund them. In early June, the city will dedicate a mural titled READ at the Stetson Library on Dixwell Avenue. The mural is the result of a collaboration between Yale students, library and city officials, local high school students, and community leaders. It is the second creation in a planned series of neighborhood programs geared toward the creation of local public art.

Lamb has a utopian vision for what public art can provide the city of New Haven.

“I would love to put together a plan where we were commissioning artists to do public art once a year, spending a goodly amount of money on public art, up to a half-million dollars a year. I would love to see us do more interesting pieces that we currently don’t have the money for, like something with sound or light projections. I would have projects where we have people from the neighborhoods engaged in making the art. I would like to see more artwork incorporated into private development and into a lot of the things we do, like benches or trash cans, or having artists paint our public works trucks. Art would be everywhere,” Lamb said.

For more information about New Haven’s public art offerings, visit www.cityofnewhaven.com/economicdevelopment/
culturalaffairs.asp. For an overview of public art installations on Yale University’s campus, visit www.yale.edu/publicart.

To see more images of public art in New Haven click here.



In the Write...
Tools for self-promotion

In September 1855, a curious notice appeared in New York’s newspapers. “An American bard at last,” it proclaimed, adding, “self-reliant, with haughty eyes, assuming to himself all of the attributes of his country, steps Walt Whitman into literature, talking like a man unaware that there was ever hitherto such a production as a book, or such a being as a writer.” Most remarkable about this paean to America’s first great poet was its anonymous author, who was none other than Whitman himself.

A master of self-promotion, Whitman was hardly alone in following the path most writers still follow in making sure that what they write comes to the attention of as many readers as possible. There are all sorts of ways this is accomplished. Traditional methods of publicity — book exhibits, author talks, ads in newspapers and journals, even television commercials — are all still with us. But, like Whitman, good authors understand that promoting one’s work is never done, only that now the toolbox for doing so has more tools in it.

There are Facebook pages, personal blogs, e-mail blast software, and an assortment of other ways for getting the word out. But there is none so useful and sometimes as fun as the author Web site. New Haven authors, no less savvy than their national peers, understand this. What they do with them, however, is where the art really lies.

Author Web sites can perform all sorts of functions. Some are just good advertising, a place to get a quick bio, see testimonials, gather contact information. To find out more about New Haven resident Ira Rosofsky and his recent exposé Nasty, Brutish, and Long: Adventures in Old Age and the World of Eldercare (Penguin 2009), just visit his eponymous www.rosofsky.com.

If you’re interested in reading interviews with an author or printing out an online reader’s guide, then check out Whitneyville resident Debby Applegate’s site www.themostfamousmaninamerica.com, which was built around her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Henry Ward Beecher, The Most Famous Man in America (Doubleday, 2006).

But why stop there? Some take the extra step to supply not only head shots or information about events, but personal shopping carts. Consider the artfully done site of Hamden novelist Chandra Prasad, www.chandraprasad.com. Prasad, author of On Borrowed Wings (Atria, 2007) and a forthcoming fictional biography of Amelia Earhart, offers visitors to her site a chance to visit her online “store” and order her books.

Then there is Westville writer Jake Halpern’s www.jakehalpern.com, which includes not only the author’s writing credits, but also his radio appearances. Halpern has even gone ahead with coauthor Peter Kujawinski to create a Web site devoted exclusively to the world of their recent young adult fantasy novel, Dormia (www.worldofdormia.com). There, readers can listen to Dormian music, meet the characters, check out maps and, if they hit the “hypnogogia” button, see “secret” alternate versions of each Web page with information that “not even the publisher knows.”

The sites that authors assemble, however, do not always just advertise the poems, stories, and books that comprise their trade. Some see their site as an opportunity to explore the writing process itself, which is exactly what a New Haven author whose identity I am sworn to protect has committed to doing. “Working on a Novel” (www.workingonanovel.blogspot.com) is a true author’s blog, being the online diary of the trials and tribulations of one writer engaged in the tedium and exhilaration of trying to make out of a sufficient number of words that thing we know as a “novel” — a story that will hang together over the course of several hundred pages. At this author’s site, visitors will see a record of false starts and episodes of writer’s block, as well as rushes of literary inspiration and adrenaline — all familiar to those of us who have always known how much mightier the pen is than the sword — and how much more difficult it is to wield.

There are, of course, many more sites than these, so if you are aware of additional New Haven-area author sites “In the Write” should know about, drop us a line.

Bennett Lovett-Graff is publisher of the New Haven Review, a literary journal and Web site that hosts parties, sponsors speakers, and supports and celebrates the literary activities of the Elm City. For more information, visit www.newhavenreview.com or contact Bennett Lovett-Graff at publisher@newhavenreview.com.



NHSO to host composers-in-residence

David Brensilver

When we attend orchestra performances, we are introduced to the composers of works we’re about to hear through program notes given to us as we enter the concert hall. From this editorial content we empathize with the tragedy and specter of death that imbued Mahler’s symphonic song-cycle Das Lied von der Erde, we understand the political climate in which Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 was composed, we learn how works by Mussorgsky’s artist friend Viktor Hartmann inspired the composer’s piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition, which Ravel later orchestrated.

The composers whose music makes up what many would consider the standard repertoire — Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Strauss, Tchaikovsky — are all gone. And while many prominent composers of contemporary works are still alive, it’s not often that concertgoers get a chance to talk with them about their music before hearing it.

Augusta Read Thomas, one of two composers who’ll be in residence at the New Haven Symphony Orchestra over the next two seasons, said that speaking to an audience member about a particular piece of her music often predisposes him or her to like it before they’ve heard it performed.

Through Music Alive, a program of Meet the Composer administered with the League of American Orchestras, Thomas and Jin Hi Kim will each spend six weeks a year, over the next two seasons, working with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra and its music director, William Boughton.

Living composers, Boughton said, are the “lifeblood of our art form.” These residencies, he said, are an “extraordinary opportunity for us to embrace the whole organization.”

To him, that means the orchestra’s musicians, administration, Board of Directors, and audience, as well as students in area schools.

Talking about taking advantage of the presence of these composers, Boughton said, “I will try and fit it into absolutely every part of the orchestra’s life.”

That will involve, obviously, the orchestra performing the composers’ works, including those composed for the ensemble during the residency.

It’s a way of bringing new music to the orchestra’s audience and connecting the audience with living composers.

Boughton described Thomas and Kim as being “completely different but complementary.”

Composers are influenced, as are all artists, by their experiences and by the works that preceded theirs.

Kim, who was born in Korea in 1957, has introduced the West to the komungo, a six-string fretted zither-like instrument that dates to the fourth century. It was played by male Confucian scholars during meditations and in court orchestras.

When she was young, Kim was taught European “classical” music, the works of Mozart and Chopin. But as she prepared to go to high school, Kim said the Korean government began to worry about losing its musical traditions, and the timing was right for her to enroll in a newly founded high school that taught traditional music, which she went on to study at Seoul National University before coming to the United States in 1980.

In this country, Kim has studied with such composers as John Adams, Lou Harrison, and Terry Riley. Her main Western inspiration has been John Cage, who she said opened her mind. She’s developed a solo repertoire, and pieces for the komungo — and electric komungo — and various ensembles. Her works have been performed by such notable ensembles as the Kronos Quartet, American Composers Orchestra, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

“I combine my tradition and Western” traditions, Kim said, explaining her music. That is, her mission is to collaborate.

“Music is a wonderful tool to break down all the barriers,” she said.

Thomas, who was born on Long Island in 1964 and grew up in this country studying with such American luminaries as the late Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Jacob Druckman, to name just one, likened connections between composers to “rivers of history.”

“Having living composers around is a good thing,” Thomas said.

Thomas was composer-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1997-2006, and is director of this year’s Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood. Her works have been performed by such celebrated ensembles as the Berlin Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and Philadelphia Orchestra, to name a few.

Part of her mission, Thomas said, is to help young, aspiring composers find their paths. Until last year, she chaired the board of the American Music Center, an organization that champions American music composition.

Thomas said that during her time in New Haven, she plans to work with composers in local high schools through a project called Connecticut Young Composers, which she pitched to Boughton.

“Their age,” Thomas said, “is exactly when I got really serious about this.”

Thomas plans to give lectures at area colleges and prior to concerts. She also wants to start a “commissioning club,” through which a group of people would buy into the creation of a new composition. She said she’ll work with a local youth orchestra on one of her pieces, give presentations to the New Haven Symphony Orchestra’s Board of Directors, and get into the community in other ways.

“This is coming from my heart,” Thomas said.

Part of her enthusiasm has to do with Boughton.

“I really, really like and admire him,” she said. “I feel that he’s really committed to the project.”

back to top

October 08 Articles
November 08 Articles
December 08 Articles
January/February 09 Articles
March 09 Articles
April 09 Articles
May 09 Articles
June 09 Articles

Technical support provided by Odonnell Company.