THE ARTS PAPER – ARTICLES

Photographer Ken Hanson on top of the world

Hank Hoffman

Ken Hanson.

It was science that first drew Kenneth Hanson to photography. As an English teenager interested in chemistry, “messing around in the darkroom seemed an interesting thing to do.” Biochemistry became his career—he retired from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in 1991—but in the 1970’s, photography became a serious avocation.

This summer, Hanson published his first book of photographs, Himalayan Portfolios: Journeys of the Imagination. Containing more than 100 striking photographs, the book is the result of two decades of labor and a dozen mountaineering trips through storied regions of Pakistan, India, Nepal and Tibet. While the struggle for survival in a harsh environment—whether by local people or mountain climbers—is the subtext of every image in the book, that struggle is framed within vistas of incomparable beauty.

Organized into five regional portfolios, the photos depict the Kashmiri mountains, Tibetan monasteries and villages, expanses of glaciers and the majesty of Everest. An accompanying scholarly essay by Hanson discusses his photographic quest in terms of Tibetan Buddhism, science, politics, the culture of Himalayan mountaineering, and English poetic and artistic traditions (such as the “mountains sublime,” as envisioned by the writers William Wordsworth and Edmund Burke, and the artist J.M.W. Turner).

Landscape photography seeped into Hanson’s blood early. Living in the Lake District in the north of England, the Cumbrian Mountains offered their profile in the distance and the coast was nearby. He was inspired by photographic displays in local camera shops and was particularly struck by dramatic pictures of the Alps on view at the Abraham Brothers shop.

“I soon found out I was not taking pictures of this caliber,” Hanson tells me in an interview at his Orange home. He emigrated to the United States, married, and in 1960, moved to New Haven to take a position as a biochemist at the Experiment Station. (His wife Elizabeth is Professor Emeriti of Political Science at the University of Connecticut and head of the India Studies program.)

Hanson’s interest in photography was revitalized when his children were growing up. He shot snapshots with a 35 millimeter camera on a hiking trip to the Sierra Mountains. In the mid-1970s, he signed up for a weekly course at the Archetype gallery and darkroom facility in New Haven. Hanson jokes that what really prompted him to start taking pictures again was an ad from Gabriel’s Pizza, offering three pizzas for the price of two. “My wife would take the kids for pizza and I would go to the darkroom and everyone was happy,” Hanson says.

But soon after he started shooting, someone told him, ‘If you want to print that sort of picture, you should go to a larger format.’” So in 1975, he decided to purchase a Toyo 4x5 view camera. The larger format was well-suited to his choice of subjects.

The 4-inch by 5-inch negatives captured much more information than a 35 millimeter, offering increased clarity and detail in prints. The plane of focus could stretch from the immediate ground to distant mountains. But shooting was a very deliberate process, necessitating the use of a tripod. Hanson had to drape a dark cloth over himself while using a magnifying loupe to focus through the ground glass back.

“There’s just something about the ritual of setting up the camera and composing on the ground glass screen, this sort of feeling I have that when pictures are taken this way they come out differently,” Hanson explains. “Seeing the scene reversed and upside down [on the ground glass] gives you sort of a second look at the composition.”

Although he had limited time to devote to photography, Hanson began developing his chops on the view camera, shooting in the bogs and woodlands near his Orange home, and the Cape Cod dunes when on vacation. He also returned to the Sierras for a backpacking trip, taking the camera with him.

“It required a great deal of organization to get everything into the backpack. Carrying the tripod and everything required a serious commitment,” Hanson says.

Hanson first visited the Himalayas in 1986, traveling with his wife who had received a Fulbright grant to teach at an Indian university. He took his camera on a three week trek in the Annapurna district. Three years later he returned to the Outer Dolpo, a remote Nepalese region that had only recently opened to foreigners. He journeyed to Dhaulagiri in 1992. To prepare for this trip, Hanson had taken a mountaineering course in Washington state the previous year. “It gave me a certain amount of confidence about camping on snow and ice, that it was something I could do and expect to survive,” Hanson says dryly.

In fact, all of Hanson’s photographs were wrested through physical, as well as technical and aesthetic challenges. There was the danger of pulmonary edema at high elevations. There was the possibility of a catastrophic turn in the weather. On the first trip, they had to cross landslide areas where it would be “fairly easy to slip down.”

“I tried not to think about,” Hanson says. People would say, ‘It’s just as well to keep moving in this area,’” he says with a chuckle. Heart attacks were also not uncommon. “I’ve seen a number of bodies brought back covered up.”

By 2002, Hanson had made ten trips to the Himalayas. Photographer Charles Fields suggested he make a book. But how would the book be organized, and what additional material would he need? “I couldn’t do the book and leave out Everest.”

Once he had all the pictures, Hanson laid out the photographs to communicate different ideas from one to the next. “If there are dramatic peaks with K2 and clouds sweeping off them, you’re in the Turner/Burke category of danger and emotional challenge. With photographs of long glaciers, it’s emphasizing clearly the emotional duration of the journey,” says Hanson. “If you go to the Everest pictures, obviously the background story is of the people who climbed Everest the first time, showing how difficult it was for those early people to get to this area.”

All the images are in black and white (and are printed in high resolution duotone reproductions). Hanson believes a “sense of awe and overwhelming amazement at the landscape” is conveyed “more effectively with black and white photographs than color.” And, specifically in photographing the Himalayas, there is the problem of “the dominant blue sky that doesn’t match up with anything else.” With black and white, the sky is a rich gray. Hanson can compose his picture to “the precise line of the mountain.”

“When I took the picture of Snow Lake, I kept saying ‘I can’t believe I’m seeing this,’” recalls Hanson. It happened repeatedly. “The sense of awe is very basic to the process. It’s something I want to share with other people.”

City-Wide Open Studios reorganized in bid to broaden audience

Hank Hoffman

	Artist Ken Grimes showcases his work at the 2007 City-Wide Open Studios.

It is back to the future for the start of City-Wide Open Studios’ (CWOS) second decade. The sprawling event, in which the work of New Haven area artists is celebrated in studios and ad hoc galleries, began as a one-weekend, studio-based showcase. But over the years it had grown to encompass three weekends. Artists successively opened their doors at Erector Square in New Haven, then in scattered studios throughout New Haven, West Haven and Hamden. CWOS in recent years has culminated in something of a grand finale, with a large vacant building drafted as an Alternative Space chock full of mini-shows, installations and more.

But this year—the first full year in which planning has been overseen by Executive Director Leslie Shaffer—CWOS is contracting in order to expand. In a bid both to market CWOS to art world professionals and collectors outside the New Haven area, and in response to neighborhood artists who felt they were getting short shrift, CWOS has been reorganized and pared back to one weekend.

This year, Open Studios will take place on October 2–5. There will be no big Alternative Space—instead, the New Haven area has been subdivided into five neighborhood areas (downtown, Westville, Fair Haven, West Haven and Hamden/Newhallville)—and each neighborhood will host an Artists-in-Residence Site (AIRS). Unlike the Alternative Space of years past, the AIR sites are juried. Fifty-six artists have been chosen to show in this year’s AIRS.

In past years, the Main Exhibition in Artspace’s galleries (at the corner of Crown and Orange streets in New Haven) included works by every registered artist or artist group. This year, the show (dubbed CONNcentric) is juried and will feature about 60 artists. Artspace is also publishing a full-color, bound artist directory where each registered artist gets a page with a full-color image and an artist statement. The book will replicate the inclusiveness of previous Main Exhibitions, with the added benefit of being a year-round resource.

Artists who weren’t chosen for an AIRS or for the CONNcentric exhibition were encouraged to find their own space. As of this writing, Artspace Communications Director Jemma Williams says the organization has been placing the so-called “homeless” artists in spaces that have become available in the course of searching out venues for AIRS.

“We’re trying to facilitate as much as we can to artists who need help,” says Williams. “We don’t want anyone to get left behind.”

According to Shaffer and Williams, the changes were the result of an in-depth process of consultation with participating artists from last year. All artists had the opportunity to fill out an online survey that included both multiple choice questions and more open-ended queries. After the surveys were tabulated, Artspace followed up by convening focus groups. Artists were chosen randomly, every tenth name alphabetically.

Williams says there were a few “big common answers:”
• Artists weren’t happy that the audience wasn’t expanding from “just friends of other artists.”
• They wanted to attract a “more professional, or even curatorial audience.”
• “Local studio artists felt they never got the audience the other two weekends got.”

“We’re trying to broaden it,” says Shaffer, who describes the changes as marking a “physical shift, not a philosophical shift.” Over and over in the consultation process she notes, artists asked, ‘Why don’t you advertise outside New Haven? Why aren’t we on NPR, CBS Morning News, the Today Show? How can we get the audience that’s coming in other cities—collectors, curators?’”

Given the current budget for CWOS—$150,000—and Artspace’s small staff, it is only possible to aggressively market one weekend to New York and Boston audiences. (Shaffer notes that CWOS has built a strong local audience.)

“How do I choose which of those weekends to put all the marketing effort into? And how do I tell this audience [of collectors and curators outside New Haven] if I can only choose one weekend, which weekend is best for them?” Shaffer says. So the choice was made to pare down to one weekend and try to maximize the circulation of visitors.

The goal is to make CWOS a “destination event,” in concert with city and state offices and “community partners” that work year-round to gin up tourism and community and economic development. Organizing the event around neighborhood “clusters”—with the added draw in each locale of the Artist-in-Residence Site—will hopefully attract visitors to the under-attended local artist studios. In conjunction with the community partners, Artspace plans to develop an efficient system for shuttling visitors among locations.

The extensive use of the Artists-in-Residence Sites is new this year. Over the past several years, Artspace has included artists-in-residence by invitation. According to artist Rashmi Talpade, a longtime participant in CWOS, as well as a member of Artspace’s Visual Arts Committee, “One thing that all artists have been fascinated with is the artists-in-residence component that has developed over the last three years.”

“All artists started saying they loved it and wanted to see more of it,” Talpade tells me in a phone interview. “It was like a show within the festival.”

Shaffer and Williams say that the AIRS process is more open than in the past. All artists were invited to submit work to be chosen through juried competition. And all the applicants had images of their work perused by directors from New York galleries, as well as local experts in visual arts.

As to how the jurying process worked, Shaffer says, “I left it up to them. I gave them space, a computer, a partner and a worksheet. I said ‘I’d like you to please find 10-15 artists to put together to make some interesting discussion. It was a challenge for them because it’s an abstract process, and they were given a timeline.”

“The jurors were tasked with trying to identify an interesting thread or theme running through an artist’s work,” Shaffer continues. The siting of different artists might be determined in part by medium. For example, a lack of wall space may make a space more appropriate for sculpture or 3-D work. The jurors were then asked to write 3-4 sentences describing possible themes/threads in their work.

“The artists will be given the space to install, create new work, put up exactly what they put on the Web site or do whatever they like, for the most part,” says Shaffer.

As to the changes in the Main Exhibition with CONNcentric, Williams says that they’re “trying to make the exhibition here more exemplary of what artists are working in and showing. It’s actually limiting to have everyone in a cookie cutter kind of 18” by 18” square.” Artists chosen for CONNcentric may end up showing between 1-3 works, depending on the size of their works. CONNcentric will be up for three months rather than one, giving Artspace the opportunity to do some programming in conjunction with the show. Unlike previous years’ willy-nilly juxtapositions, Shaffer says CONNcentric will be “thematically organized.”

While the initial call for CONNcentric envisioned the acceptance of perhaps 150 artists, the jurors decided to select only about 60. Williams says the jurors “wanted to create a dialogue between the artists chosen and give enough space for each artist to show their work. They were adamant about the [lower] numbers.”

The changes have been accompanied by some criticism. Is City-Wide Open Studios becoming less inclusive, less welcoming to all artists? Would the lack of a large Alternative Space leave some artists on the outside looking in? Is one weekend enough time for visitors to take in such a sprawling event, particularly if they want to spend time talking with individual artists?

Shaffer and Williams are adamant that CWOS is just as open to wide-ranging grassroots participation as in the past. Williams says that despite the necessity for artists to take a more proactive role in securing exhibition space, “they have as much opportunity as they want to put in the effort to get.”

“You have to change over the years. Unless you try, you never know,” says Talpade. As to concerns over having the event take place on one weekend rather than three, she says that many visitors often took part in only one weekend anyway, checking out either Erector Square, the local studios or the Alternative Space. “We figured if we made it a concentrated event for one weekend, visitors focusing on one weekend might spill over into each section.”


Shakespeare Re-imagined

A Midsummer Night's Dream is on stage at the Shubert in October. Photo: Tristam Kenton.

At first glance, it might seem like your ordinary Shakespeare tale. But on October 24–26, Shubert Theater presents a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that promises to defy all expectations.

In this unique version, a cast of 23 actors, dancers, martial arts experts, musicians and street acrobats from across India and Sri Lanka perform one of Shakespeare’s earliest and most beloved comedies in English, Tamil, Malayalam, Sinhalese, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and even a little Sanskrit. The result is a “ravishing,” “enchanting” and “stunningly beautiful” re-interpretation of the play, which casts aside familiar traditions of performing Shakespeare and has thrilled audiences in India and the UK.

This re-imagined production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the culmination of a project that began in 2004, when the British Council in India and Sri Lanka commissioned director Tim Supple to create and direct a theatre production to tour. Below are excerpts of an interview conducted with Supple in India in February of 2007, in which he describes the production and its impact.

How did the show come about? Why were you brought on to do the project?

In the autumn of 2004 I was contacted by the British Council and asked if I wanted to come to India and make a show with Indian actors.

I made my first trip in January 2005, when I visited Jaipaur, Delhi, Kolkatta, Mumbai, Chennai, and Bangalore; that first trip was about simply meeting people, seeing work, getting a feeling for what we might do and how we might do it. At the end of that first trip we decided that we would do A Midsummer Night’s Dream and that we would cast it from India and Sri Lanka and that the production would evolve from a completely Indian team apart from me.

On the second trip, I visited 10 places and set up workshops and group auditions and met hundreds of actors. It was at the end of that trip that I knew the show should be multilingual because I had had such an experience working in the different languages as I had asked people to work in their own languages in the auditions. I short-listed the actors down to about one hundred people and by the end of the trip I wasn’t able to cast because I had seen too many good people. So, we organized a third trip, a re-call of sixty people in Bombay. I choose the twenty two that became the cast.

The auditions for the production have lots of stories. Please tell us about some.

I remember going to Delhi and being taken to a community of about 1000 families in a very poor part of Delhi. I got out of the car on a completely pot-holed street and was welcomed into this incredible performance in a tiny courtyard by guys on stilts and people blowing fire, fantastic drumming, a woman singing, and puppets dancing. It was a seething, totally energized event and I remember feeling such a great, huge sense of theatre at its most raw and urgent—it had to be seen and it had to be done.

It was really quite wonderful to bring people together in audition, I found the mixture electric. But for them as well it was really exceptional to be in the same room together—the English-speaking, highly-educated actors from Mumbai performing with these kids from Delhi, or these boys from Chennai, and highly skilled dancers from Kerala. People who spent years honing a craft that is handed down from generation to generation over 2000 years; actors who come from one of the two major drama schools (there is one in Delhi and one in Kerala) and people talking all these different languages. The interaction between all these people was unforgettable during the audition. It was entirely a natural process, not something that we created. This was about making something happen and it felt very exciting.

Why A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is something that I had wanted to do for many years but had not felt that inspired to do it in another context—partly because it is done so much, and partly because I see the struggles in the play encountered by British companies. I didn’t feel inspired to take on those challenges—I mean, how do you do the fairies? How do we get the really extreme class differences? We have a big class structure in the UK, but actors aren’t that used to defining themselves in such extremes.

I could see how there was a wonderful connection between certain aspects of the play and the traditions of Indian theatre and also Indian society, so the play seemed to match the world I was seeing very beautifully.

How do the seven languages work in the show? How did audiences react?

I wanted the production to arise out of contemporary India, and the more I travelled the more I realized that multilingualism is the only way. The language issue was more a decision of negatives—if I had done it all in English, I would have restricted myself to a very particular group of people who had certain training and acted in a certain way. None of the folk performers act in English, none of the traditional physical performers act in English. And if I had chosen another language alongside English, such as Hindi or Bengali, I would have restricted myself to one region of India. It wasn’t that we thought multilingualism would necessarily be a good thing—it was just a necessity. I was doing the best production I could with the actors I had, and in order to get them to be their strongest selves they had to speak the language they live with and act in.

When we took the production around India we found that it was far from being a problem. It wasn’t only okay—it actually enriched the experience for the audience. The great majority of the audience responded saying it was fantastic for them to hear other languages on stage; that it was a wonderful celebration, that sense of the nation on the stage. But there were also people who didn’t like it—more in India than in the UK. I could sense that that would be the case the more time I spent in India. It was partly snobbishness about Shakespeare, which is greater in India than in the UK; the idea that it must be done in ‘proper’ English, and proper English means old fashioned English. This partly comes from internal politics about language. There is a feeling of superiority in the northern languages and some Hindi and Bangalore speakers feel that their languages are superior to southern languages, Tamil for example.

When we came to the UK I think there were other factors at work—people really enjoyed the unusual quality of sounds on stage. We are much more used to foreign-language Shakespeare in the UK—a lot of theatregoers would have experienced some kind of foreign-language production. But I also hope that we reach lots of people who haven’t. I don’t see this show as a foreign-language Shakespeare, just that half of the production is not in English.

You spoke about how the play was received differently in the UK to India, but what were the differences?

The profound difference was that there is much less theatre of this kind in India than in Britain. There is much more grass roots work in India, rather than theatre that sets itself up as a show. So in India we played to the rarefied elite theatre-going audiences. They looked on it with an extremely self-critical gaze, which I don’t think is a very productive streak in Indian life. As an audience they weren’t easily capable of letting go and just enjoying the show. There were people in the Indian audiences who would have been snobby about the cast because they know that the cast didn’t represent the grand men and women of Indian theatre. I think there was an initial thought by some of the audience that this was supposed to be an ‘A-team’ from Indian theatre—which it wasn’t and it isn’t.

In Britain it was just a show. In Stratford in 2006 we were just an Indian company; people weren’t interested in ‘are they the best,’ ‘are they the stars’—there is an incredible obsession with fame in India and it’s different to the idea of fame in Britain. They did celebrate it in India, but it had to win them over.

How did the audiences react to the show at The Complete Works Festival at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford upon Avon? Did the success surprise you?

It was overwhelming. Despite the way I have just painted it, the reaction was overwhelming in India, standing ovations every night, people very moved. After India I told the cast not to expect standing ovations at Stratford, as I had never seen one for a Shakespeare production. Musicals get standing ovations and often in the dance world, but it’s just not done for Shakespeare. My gut feeling was that people would like it but we didn’t expect it. When we arrived in Stratford the cast were on great form and I remember thinking at the dress rehearsals that it was really good—and this is not something you always know. But this still doesn’t mean that other people are going to think its going to be good! Then, the first preview. A very traditional Stratford audience filed in and it was a really, really moving occasion for us and the audience too when at the end they just stood and roared. These people who see Shakespeare all the time! The cast were in tears and it was a really big event for all of us. I wasn’t just surprised, I was overwhelmed. That happened at every one of the 12 performances. Maybe the challenge for us is to not expect it, as we got it 12 times in a row in Stratford!

This show is totally different to how a production in India would happen. Do you think the production has changed the cast in any way?

I think that is has and is doing so still. There is a great variety of experiences in this company; some people have done a hell of a lot of theatre, some have done very little, some have done very professional theatre (in Indian terms) and some people haven’t. But I don’t think any have been involved in a production with anything like this degree of funding or structure of organisation. They are all multi-taskers. They act, produce, write. They are very rooted and I don’t think they will have problems continuing working in the conditions they were in, but I think they will all hang onto this experience because of the level of pay, care, and the level of theatres they will be playing in—they don’t have theatres like that in India.

The show has been so successful in India and the UK, how does it feel now that the production will be seen on a world wide stage?

It’s just as exciting as it was. I am not so stupid that I don’t know there is a challenge to that—you need to live up to expectations. Of course it’s exciting to have created a piece of work that so many people want to see. The great joy of the production is that it was done without compromise. Of course I want to make theatre that people want to see, but my yearning is not to do a musical so that millions will see it. The yearning for me is to do something that becomes my whole life, because the process of choosing the play, auditioning the actors, rehearsing the play, putting it on the stage—those things have to be deeply satisfying and that matters to me before the success. Then, when you get all that right, you hit the jackpot and feel double blessed—that’s how I feel about this production, double blessed.

Why should people come to see the show?

People should come and see this show because it will show them something they haven’t seen before. It will give them an experience they won’t have had before. It will give them a hugely pleasurable encounter with performers that come from somewhere so different and do something so wonderful on stage that it will give you everything you want from the theatre: an extremely good time, a rich and moving experience. It’s exciting—it’s a blooming good story and it’s Shakespeare who we know we love, but it’s just revealed in a way that people won’t have experienced before—and the production has such great heart and great skill that I have not seen one audience as a whole who have not been completely won over by this rich, warm, group of performers.

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Technical support provided by Odonnell Company.