THE ARTS PAPER – ARTICLES

Steven DiGiovanni:
Making pictures, painting chaos

Hank Hoffman

Steven DiGiovanni. Image courtesy of the artist.

For painter Steven DiGiovanni, big changes in his life — a divorce and a new relationship — triggered big changes in his artistic approach. DiGiovanni established himself over the last two decades with detailed figurative oil paintings that hinted at mysterious narratives of domestic dysfunction. Over the past two years, however, he has shunned oil paints (at least temporarily) in favor of the graphic looseness afforded by painting with acrylics. The shift in medium has been accompanied by a shift in content. Realistic imagery — much of it scavenged from advertising and pop culture, some of it warped through Photoshop — shares canvas space with layers of marks, geometric abstraction, and white space.

DiGiovanni teaches painting at Creative Arts Workshop and Norwalk Community College. His initial interest in art, he tells me in an interview at his Westville studio, came from “picture-making,” specifically teaching himself to draw cars. He gravitated toward the figurative work as a way of conveying “psychological content.”

“What I defined for myself were certain narrative devices that could elicit some notion of psychological depth or mystery,” DiGiovanni says of his oil paintings. “It became almost a kind of ‘psychological formalism.’ What’s more evocative than a realistically painted image of someone floating in the air?”

I note that there appeared a sensibility derived from the conventions of film noir.

“They were like film stills. I was conscious of that,” DiGiovanni replies. His subjects often uncomfortably shared claustrophobic interiors, cramped apartments where alienation, desire, and ennui festered. DiGiovanni employed an ever-shifting repertoire company of model friends, other artists, his fiancée, Chisato Bunin, and himself (always depicting himself in less-than-flattering terms). DiGiovanni says, “Noir settings are mostly indoors. The walls represent limits.”

He adds that many of the paintings backed the protagonists into corners “with less chance of escaping out the sides.” The use of corners also added drama through a “fisheye sense of space.”

While DiGiovanni’s oeuvre is mostly devoid of pastoral landscapes, he has painted a strong series of industrial landscapes. One such work — shown two years ago at the River Street Gallery — is Untitled Industrial (with Golf Course), a tour de force on several levels. Although DiGiovanni doesn’t refer to photographs or real power plants, he renders a convincing depiction of industrial metastasis. The emotional impact of the behemoth network of pipes, towers, tanks, and smokestacks is heightened by DiGiovanni’s keen attention to lighting. The human element is introduced with a fillip of tongue-in-cheek social commentary. While workers in hardhats stand on elevated platforms and take in a raging industrial fire off in the distance, a tiny figure — the owner of the means of production — in the lower right practices his shots on an incongruously situated putting green.

“I discovered ‘analytical Cubism’ through doing industrial landscapes,” DiGiovanni says. “What you have are elongated cylinders, shortened cylinders, lines, conduits, and spheres.”

He’s also intrigued by the “idea of what’s signified in terms of the absolute cold objectivity of things.”

“Going through Elizabeth, New Jersey on I-95 is just magical,” DiGiovanni rhapsodizes. “The forms are so particular yet there’s no aesthetic intent behind them at all. They’re lyrical but it’s obviously not a place you’d ever want your tire to go flat.”

The River Street Gallery show marked the turning point in DiGiovanni’s style. In one portrait of Bunin, Untitled (Sexy Dress), he created a fusion of his narrative and industrial subject matter, overlapping her seated portrait with an industrial landscape. DiGiovanni told me at the time that, “I wanted to play with the quasi-Cubistic deconstruction of her form into industrial forms.”

His idea was to realize an image that would read cohesively at two levels, as an industrial image and as an interior. Fundamentally, the painting depicts Bunin in a short dark dress, sitting at a kitchen table set with a couple of goblets of red wine. But, as if in a CGI-created scene from a Terminator movie, the walls of the apartment kitchen become transparent, revealing an imaginary factory. The floor isn’t linoleum but rather metallic scaffolding. And some of Bunin’s figure is deconstructed as an industrial skeleton. Typical of DiGiovanni’s work, the figure has a believable grace and the industrial forms have a chilly verisimilitude.

Untitled (Sexy Dress) took four months to complete, according to DiGiovanni. But another painting in that show, Festival of Floats (Handa City, Japan), marked a departure of a different sort. Painted with acrylics rather than oil paints, it has a loose, gestural feel. The composition is derived from montage, featuring a deconstructed rendering of an image of a Japanese festival from a tourist guidebook, a more detailed depiction of Bunin on all fours wearing a cat mask, Constructivist diagonals at the top, and a lot of canvas white space.

It was a conscious decision, DiGiovanni says, to make a break from the painstaking approach he had taken with oil paints.

“A lot of it had to do with the life change I went through with Chisato and my divorce. The change in my art occurred a couple of years after. It was a result of asking myself why I keep leaving myself in this box,” says DiGiovanni.

“Wouldn’t it be exciting to put my facility at some risk or try utilizing some other intellectual and creative resources?”

The shift from oils to acrylics was a technical liberation that facilitated a content liberation. DiGiovanni attributes this to acrylics’ quick drying time.

“It’s a graphic medium. You can pour it, stencil it, stain it. Pour a cup of paint over the canvas and it’s dry in 15 minutes and ready to put something on top of it,” DiGiovanni explains.

He is layering images, using shapes to break up the continuity of an image, leaving exposed white space. The white space, he says, “is very appealing to me because it reminds me of the ‘objectness’ of it. The raw canvas emphatically reminds you that you have paint on canvas, a field that is acted upon as much as a support for an image.”

He is also using tape “constantly.”

“It makes the edge so mechanical, so sharp,” DiGiovanni says. “There is something really visceral about peeling the tape off. It’s like picking scabs.”

The use of acrylics has affected his working process.

“The speed involved and the vocabulary I’ve associated with it has made my own judgment of the quality of what I’m doing much more tenuous,” he says, “so much so that I just radically rework something.

“I’m learning to live with the ‘I wish I didn’t do thats’ of my paintings. There are points in half my paintings, it seems, where I’m like Berserker,” DiGiovanni says, gesturing the throwing of paint. He is interested, he says, “in that play between looseness, chaos, precision, and order.”

DiGiovanni still sees his paintings as having narrative corollaries, although these days they may be more akin to William S. Burroughs’ cut-ups than the taut fictions of Raymond Carver.

“I don’t want these to be any less narrative” than were his oil paintings, he says. “The narrative here reads more in terms of layering.”

He makes an anaolgy to the Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali.

“Buñuel is making very specific decisions,” DiGiovanni says. “He’s spending time with his camera looking at very detailed elements and the performers are performing with all their heart. But there’s no decipherable content. There are themes but the themes almost happen because you can’t avoid having themes.

“I like the idea of an illusionistic image thrown into the mix with a line or spatter,” DiGiovanni says. “The truth is, I can’t totally abandon ‘picture-making.’ There’s always some manifestation of it. I could never be a pure formalist.”



The spread of creativity

David A. Brensilver

	Artspace is flooded with people during the Main Exhibition in 2007. Image courtesy of Hank Hoffman.

For more than a decade, City-Wide Open Studios has been a destination. This year, while Artspace serves as the physical headquarters for CWOS, and the site of the juried exhibition Dispersion, the heart of the event exists as much in cyberspace, thanks to a significantly upgraded online Artist Directory, one that CWOS coordinator Rashmi Talpade said is “much, much more expanded and user-friendly” than anything that existed previously.

“It’s giving a lot more flexibility to the artists,” Artspace Executive Director Leslie Shaffer said.

Each registered CWOS artist has a dedicated web page he or she can update over the course of the year. Each artist’s page can hold up to 20 images and may include his or her bio, contact information, resume, and a link to an external site. For obvious reasons, the enhanced online Artist Directory is a boon for the public, and for curators and collectors, as well. As of mid-August, more than 100 unique visitors were visiting the online Artist Directory on a weekly basis.

Talpade, Shaffer, and Artspace Programs Director Laura Marsh have utilized the upgraded website to help organize this year’s CWOS. Artists, when registering online (which required a $50 fee), indicated whether they wanted to show their work in one of two unjuried shows at Artspace, have their work considered for inclusion in the juried show Dispersion, participate in Open Studios Festival Weekend, and/or simply have access, for a year, to the Artist Directory. Organizers expect that nearly 300 artists will register and participate in this, the 12th annual City-Wide Open Studios.

The online Artist Directory connected artists hoping to see their work included in Dispersion with the exhibition’s curator, Dina Deitsch, a New Haven native and assistant curator of contemporary art at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park outside Boston. Each artist was able to earmark five of the 20 images he or she uploaded for Deitsch’s consideration. Obviously, if Deitsch liked an artist’s work, she was a click away from more.

Deitsch’s involvement in this year’s CWOS was somewhat serendipitous. Deitsch visited Artspace last winter, Shaffer said, looking for artists whose work might be suitable for the 2010 DeCordova Biennial.

“This just happened to be a perfect fit,” Shaffer said.

Deitsch, in an e-mail, said, “One of my goals for the (Biennial), which opens this January, was to work with exhibition spaces from major art centers throughout New England that are essential to and help create the local art scene. Artspace has always produced wonderful and adventurous programming and embodies the richness and excitement of much of the art scene in the New Haven area. It was a natural place to start looking for artists. Liza (Statton, Artspace curator and gallery director) has been an amazing help in directing me to artists in the area and, in fact, we’ve planned an overlapping show of the work of (New Haven artist) Phil Lique for this winter/spring as a means of extending the Biennial into Connecticut. Phil will be featured in the Biennial and have a solo show at Artspace in the same season.”

Talking about the curatorial process Deitsch said, “There’s a certain degree of gut instinct in reviewing submissions, but I’m also always looking out for work that reads on more than one level at once — work that makes me look twice or prompts a pause. Also, in a jurying opportunity like this, I try to choose a range of types of artwork as a way to showcase a breadth of styles and media and to avoid a singular, dominant form of art making. This type of show, it seems, works best when diversity and range are emphasized rather than uniformity. It’s a way to showcase the vibrancy of New Haven’s art community.”

Asked to describe Dispersion, a collection of works by 27 artists, Deitsch said, “I would say diversity is the common thread but also a certain mixture of conceptual rigor and formal skill. I was very impressed by the amount of work that showed such an intelligent combination of the two.”

Talpade said Deitsch’s approach to curating Dispersion “was very thoughtful,” and that the body of work she chose gels together very well.

“There is a lot of diversity in the work she selected,” Talpade said, “but there is not discord.”

Over the course of three-plus months, more than 200 artists had work exhibited in a pair of CWOS unjuried shows: Index I, which was on display from June 25 through July 25, and Index II, which was on display from July 30 through August 29. Last year, CWOS included no unjuried component. Before that, works included in unjuried CWOS shows at Artspace were limited in size to 18 by 18 inches.

This year’s unjuried shows featured works as large as 30 by 40 inches, a “fairly generous size limit,” Talpade said.

And while Index I and Index II were unjuried, they were curated. Marsh said a concerted effort was made to present works in appropriate groupings, whether they represented abstract, figurative, or ephemeral art.

For the Open Studios component to this year’s program, scores of registered CWOS artists are expected to open their studio doors to the public (some individuals and groups will have found temporary spaces). Clusters of studios will be open in downtown New Haven, in Erector Square, and in the Fair Haven and Westville neighborhoods. For members of the public, collectors, and curators, the online Artist Directory offers a number of search criteria for finding artists and previewing their work.

Talpade, who’s been involved with CWOS since its inception as an artist, as a volunteer, and, for the past four years, as the coordinator of the event, said Open Studios Festival Weekend has always been “very much a part of the community and the artistic lifestyle of New Haven,” a “unifying event” that a huge number of artists regards as an annual opportunity to interact with the public.



Allure of the past
Q&A with music director Mark Bailey

David A. Brensilver

Mark Bailey. Photo by Paige Baker.

Mark Bailey is the music director of two local choral ensembles: the New Haven Oratorio Choir and Orchestra and the Yale Russian Chorus. He also directs the Westchester Concert Singers, a group based in Pleasantville, New York. Bailey has degrees from the Eastman School of Music (BM, 1984) and the Yale School of Music-Yale Institute for Sacred Music (MM, 1989). The following interview was inspired by a conversation that took place in August.

Q: You’re a scholar in the area of Slavic sacred music, particularly music from the Russian baroque period. How did you arrive at that area of focus?

A: This merges the two areas of music that I’m most passionate about: Slavic sacred music, and all music of the 17th and 18th centuries. My involvement in Slavic music stems from childhood, influenced especially by my mother and grandparents, who emigrated from Ukraine after World War II. I was raised under many Ukrainian cultural and religious influences. My grandmother, who had a wonderful voice and sang in our local Ukrainian Orthodox Church choir, would teach and sing to me numerous hymns, carols, and folk songs, starting when I was little. When I began my undergraduate work in voice, piano, and orchestral conducting at the Eastman School of Music, I also became choir director at an Orthodox Church in Rochester, New York, and simultaneously developed my knowledge and abilities in that area.

It wasn’t until my time at Yale in graduate school and just after that when I was drawn to 17th and 18th century music performed in a historically informed manner, using instruments and the stylistic practices of the period. That interest was inspired when I met the great baroque violinist Jaap Schröder many years ago, a renowned musician who remains a friend and great source of inspiration. Music of this period really took hold of me. The process of discovering and rediscovering the vast array of great musical works from these centuries, and researching the treatises and other historical sources that reveal so much insight beneath the surface, became my musical preoccupation.

Some years later, it seemed liked the obvious and natural choice for me to merge these two fields of interest and activity, especially since so little is known or understood about how Russia and Ukraine embraced and cultivated music, sacred and secular, influenced by Western Europe during the baroque era. And I absolutely love the results.

Q: The Russian baroque period continued beyond the period we identify as the European baroque period. Would you talk about what was going on musically in Europe and Russia, respectively, between the mid-18th and early-19th centuries?

A: Since the Russian Court, first in Moscow and then in St. Petersburg, sought to model many of its musical practices after Western Europe, it took a while to infuse baroque styles into Slavic culture. Also, the Slavs tend to use the word “baroque” as compared to medieval Slavic chant, which was largely monophonic. In other words, “baroque” refers to music composed using Western-style harmony and counterpoint, which was largely unknown to the Slavs until after 1600, and not exclusively to describe music that, to most, would sound like Vivaldi, Purcell, or Handel.

In Western Europe after 1750 we see the development of the classical period through great composers such as C.P.E. Bach and onward to Mozart, Haydn, et al. A select group of especially talented Russian composers, such as Dmitri Bortnianksy, was sent by Russian Empress Katherine the Great to study music in Italy, before being summoned back to serve the Russian Court around 1800. While their compositions resemble classical music in terms of sound, they relied more heavily on baroque musical structures from slightly earlier periods, especially baroque dance forms, and the concerto grosso, which Bortniansky especially perfected into the sacred choral concerto. Therefore, three elements make for a unique period in Russia: classical sounds, baroque structures, and new forms — combining both — such as the unaccompanied Slavic choral concerto. This is what I consider equivalent to the Western European high baroque period of Bach and Handel about thirty to fifty years earlier.

Q: In April 2010 you’ll conduct the New Haven Oratorio Choir and Orchestra in an all-choral program of Russian baroque music. The sacred music of the time was not written for instruments other than the voice. Would you talk about this particular difference between what was going on musically in Russia and what was happening at the same time in Europe?

A: With so much Western musical and cultural influence being brought into Ukraine and Russia — and with the introduction and frequent performance of opera, symphonic music, and the great choral works of Bach, Handel, Haydn, and even Beethoven — it’s interesting that the Slavic Orthodox Church never yielded to adding instruments to the musical component of liturgy. Sacred music remained purely vocal and therefore primarily textual.

Bortniansky, who eventually was appointed censor of all Russian sacred music, was a fine instrumentalist and wrote terrific chamber works and operas. At the very least he could have sneaked a continuo organ into church. Instead, he brought an instrumental presence into the singing, without having to use actual instruments. As mentioned, he perfected the choral concerto form, which, in various movements or sections, mimics the baroque concerto grosso for orchestra. Instead of solo instruments paired in various configurations so that they may have a musical dialogue with the rest of the orchestra, this is how the voices interact over sacred text. We don’t really see the same dynamics of exchange as extensively in the choral works of Bach and Handel, for instance, where select movements are either dedicated to the choir or to the soloists. But certainly this is a primary feature of baroque instrumental works.

Another unique feature is that the Slavic choral concerto shifts effects or mood in baroque manner. In medieval Slavic chant, the verse or hymn basically maintains a single ethos to convey a snapshot image of the entire sung text. In the Slavic choral concerto, however, the text is broken down into phrases or sometimes even single words, and a mood or effect is created to paint a more specific or even physical image of the textual snippet being sung. Just as baroque instrumentalists need to determine and convey the effect of any section within a concerto grosso, so must the singers perform accordingly in sacred choral concertos.

The maxim, even today, is for instrumentalists to model themselves after singers. But in the Slavic sacred concerto, the reverse is true as well. The voices, while conveying text, articulate in an especially instrumental manner, where it’s not hard to imagine oboes, trumpets, and strings playing alongside them. There’s just nothing like it.

Q: In November you’ll lead the New Haven Oratorio Choir and Orchestra in a program called “Mendelssohn’s Muse,” celebrating, as much of the world is, the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth. This concert will call on your annotation and indexing of Mendelssohn’s letters. What struck you in going through those letters? And how will you use Mendelssohn’s influences in programming the November concert?

A: Clearly Mendelssohn wasn’t as concerned with what would come after him as with what came before. He had an insatiable interest in older musical works and the geniuses behind them, even when he was fairly young. It’s hard for us to imagine that, in Mendelssohn’s time, composers such as Mozart and Haydn — even Beethoven — let alone Bach and Handel, were already being forgotten and dismissed as outmoded. Mendelssohn was their champion, constantly programming as a conductor, performing as a pianist, and arguing as an apologist, for the works of the baroque and classical eras. In 1831 he also wrote of Bach’s influence on his own compositions, which can be heard especially in works such as his Jesu meine Freude, the featured piece on our November concert. As in Bach’s famous motet by the same name, Mendelssohn also features the same melody or cantus firmus that Bach used.

Mendelssohn’s famous revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is just one example of the many things he did to keep older music alive. In 1840 he organized a performance of Bach’s triple keyboard concerto featuring himself, Franz Liszt, and Ferdinand Hiller. And by then he was already criticizing how musicians overly romanticized 18th century music.

NHOCO’s November concert will lead up to Mendelssohn’s Jesu meine Freude through several works and composers he highlights in his letters. We’ll begin with choral works from the Renaissance period, as he discussed hearing them sung — especially works by Palestrina and Allegri — in the Sistine Chapel. We’ll also include Bach’s great cantata Christ lag in Todesbanden (BWV 4) and Mozart’s famous Eine kleine Nachtmusik, performed in period style, among other works. I anticipate the audience will recognize in Mendelssohn, as we end with his Jesu meine Freude, the centuries of great music that he found so inspirational and crucial to his musical development.

Q: The New Haven Oratorio Choir and Orchestra is a period-instrument ensemble. Would you talk about authenticity in the context of musical performance, be it the use of period instruments and/or languages?

A: I’m absolutely convinced that the music should shape the performer more than the performer shapes the music. Various aspects of post-romantic musical practices are influenced by profoundly difference conditions than what gave birth to music of earlier times. When we perform music on modern instruments, with modern tunings and temperaments, according to modern articulations, we lose far too much of the inherit spirit, nuance, and meaning of the works written before 1850 or even 1900. As they say, we would never think to update or modernize great paintings such as the Mona Lisa, and therefore I think music suffers when needlessly modernized to meet conditions it was never designed to serve.

Music before post-romanticism, especially of the baroque period, is comparatively more intimate and interactive (and to my ears even more exciting). Therefore, as with other period ensembles, we seek as much as we can to connect directly to our audiences, as if they too were sitting in the orchestra or standing in the chorus having a musical conversation with us. That’s why so much research goes into our concerts. Singing Latin according to the pronunciation standards of the nation of origin is one example (rather than defaulting to Italianate Latin on all sacred works). For instance, I’m fortunate to have a copy of the first recording of the Fauré Requiem from the early 1930s in France. The singers on the recording clearly use French Latin, which has a profound impact on the shape, color, articulation, and effect of the sung musical line. We followed that practice in our performance of the work a few years back as well, as we also use Germanic Latin for Mozart, Haydn, and other German composers.

I don’t want to deprive the audience or the ensemble members, singers and instrumentalists alike, of any inherent musical element that would prevent them from becoming immersed in the genius and power of great music. Therefore we endeavor to approach each piece on its own terms and let it tell us, through various resources and modes of inspiration, how it may be performed. And suddenly all sorts of inner colors and deeper levels of meaning become apparent. This is why, for instance, we use purer forms of tuning, to create warmer sonorities that were crucial to these works. Or why we minimize vibrato so that it may color rather than obscure the beauty of the melodies and harmonies. Put another way, we don’t need to try to improve on greatness; we just need to keep greatness alive. Using period performance practice to the extent possible helps us to do that.

Q: You serve as artistic director of the Yale Russian Chorus. What sort of opportunities does that ensemble provide you in terms of programming, arranging, and composing? And what do you have planned for the Yale Russian Chorus this year?

A: I recently told the group, after one of our many successful performance tours, that no matter what lies ahead in life, nothing will supersede the kind of musical experience I have as its artistic director.

Because many people are unfamiliar with Slavic choral music, we tend to perform repertoire from a variety of periods and styles, ranging from ancient chant to 20th century multi-voiced choral works, including sacred music, operatic choruses, patriotic ballads, and folk songs. Each season we develop a list of around thirty pieces that we perform regionally and on tour. Some of the repertoire includes my own arrangements, and periodically my own compositions, especially since we sing in the male choir/tenor-bass range.

In addition to concerts at Yale and in the area, we will be touring to the Pacific Northwest and probably up to Vancouver in March 2010. We’ll begin the tour as guests of the Cappella Romana, the premier professional chamber choir based in Portland that I’ve had the pleasure of guest conducting twice; we will perform in Portland and Seattle to start things off. I must admit that my love for the Pacific Northwest makes this upcoming tour particularly exciting. We toured the area about four years ago and had a terrific time. We’re hoping also, as part of our bi-annual Slavic Choral Festival in the Spring of 2010, to do a special performance of music from the All-Night Vigil service, so as to give the audience a taste of the music from that unique liturgical experience.



In the write …
How to read a short story

So how do you read a short story?

If you are girding yourself for battle by arming yourself with some high-falutin’ literary theory or an author bio lifted from Wikipedia, then stop right there. Let me rephrase: So how do you read a short story … out loud?

This is a different question, and it’s one I’ve been asking myself lately as New Haven Review, along with the Arts Council of Greater New Haven and the New Haven Theater Company, gets ready to launch Listen Here!, a weekly Thursday night reading series of short stories at coffee houses throughout New Haven (specifically Blue State Coffee, Koffee on Audubon, Lulu: A European Coffeehouse, and Manjares Fine Pastries).

Reading aloud with adult audiences in mind is a unique experience, one that raises questions about the readers’ capabilities, audiences’ likely reception, and the internal voice — or rather voices — that suffuse all great short stories. Like most parents, most of my experience reading aloud stems from feeble attempts at sonority from trying to send children to lullaby land. Not infrequently, it was I who led the way, with my son eventually pushing me out of bed claiming that not only was I nodding off in the middle of the story but I was also babbling. For my son and daughter, I commonly assumed dramatic airs when I read, taking heartfelt stabs (pun intended) at doing voices. Harry Potter was inevitably read with an upper-crust British tinge; Tom Bombadil, in The Lord of the Rings, spoke with an Irish lilt; Aslan from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe declaimed in a stentorian bass while Edmund griped through a nasal whine that grew less nasal as he matured. But my audience then was not especially demanding, which lowered the bar considerably.

The pile of short stories that I’ve been plowing through for Listen Here!, however, will not lend itself to such easy sliding. Instead the stories raise some rather pesky issues of tone and timing, accent and accuracy. In essence, I have begun to ask questions that, I suspect, actors and directors consider when a story goes from that semi-silent space in our skull through the vocal cords in our neck into the sound-resonating air we breathe.

Normally I read in silence — as do we all. But for Listen Here!, there was no way around testing stories aloud, which meant doing my best trying to capture the internal voice of the tale. For James Joyce’s “Araby,” a plaintive tale of boyhood love and gallantry gone awry, should the reader assume a middle-class Irish brogue to recreate the post-pubescent protagonist’s first-person narration? Or would a plain-Jane Americanized reading do just as well? I’ll admit that when I read it aloud, I went all in for the brogue, despite my lousy Irish.

Or consider an even more complicated example, John Updike’s “A&P,” one of my favorite stories of gender and class at odds. At first reading my tone was the flat American accent (despite the bit of Brooklyn that sometimes peeks through) I nominally adopt as a starting point for any story I read. But by the third page my mistake had become all too obvious: “It’s not as if we’re on the Cape: we’re north of Boston and there’s people in this town haven’t seen the ocean for the twenty years.” So, we are talking about a Boston accent. Moreover, the narrator is a local handling the cash register, in contrast to the high-class, bathing-suited Queenie, who strolls into the local A&P to pick up herring snacks. So not only Boston, but Boston working class, too.

But then I noticed something else. My mistake was entirely reasonable. After all, Updike’s narrator may be uncouth enough to give us the ungrammatical “there’s people in this town,” but he doesn’t deliver any sort of Huckleberry Finn-like “… we’re nahth of Bahston” in the actual writing. For that, the reader will have to deliver all of the local color that orthography has politely refused. So my tone changed: now I was a Bahston cashier, leering at these smaht-looking girls. That was, until I ran into the story’s spoil-sport store manager, Lengel, who notices the underdressed girls sauntering up to our narrator’s cash register to pay for those herring snacks. “Girls, this isn’t the beach,” he says — according to our narrator, of course — to which Queenie replies: “My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks.”

Problem alert! Queenie’s dialog is relayed by our narrator, so what is a publicly performing reader to do? Does the narrator (and thus reader) imitate the authoritative baritone — or should it be a high-pitched nag — of his boss? Does Queenie’s round contralto — or should we make that a surprised soprano — shed the narrator’s Bahston-y flavoring? All good questions as I stumbled around and settled on gently raising my timbre for the supermarket lovely while turning “jar” into “jah” to keep the narrator’s voice in the forefront, so my audience does not forget that it’s still his imitation of her.

Sound complicated? It is, and don’t even get me started on translations or mind-bending humor pieces, like Woody Allen’s “The Kugelmass Episode,” in which a City College professor with lotsa New Yawk in his attitude (but not in his orthography) is magically transported into Flaubert’s Madame Bovary so he can start an affair with the beautiful protagonist.

Emma turned in surprise. “Goodness, you startled me,” she said. “Who are you?” She spoke in the same fine English translation as the paperback. It’s simply devastating, he thought.

Devastating, indeed, to which I say, God bless the actors, one and all, who can make heads or tails of these challenges — which if you’d like to witness firsthand, then join us for Listen Here!



Thoughts and remembrances of Zannette Lewis

Bitsie Clark

On September 25, 2009, Zannette Lewis passed away and the Arts Council lost a former staff member and a very good friend. Between 1998 and 2001, Zannette worked at the Arts Council under the auspices of the Regional Cultural Plan. She was employed to be a major change agent for the arts community. Zannette’s charge was to assure full participation by all parts of the community in the cultural life of the region and provide opportunities for sharing artistic and cultural resources between city neighborhoods and the larger community.

Working with neighborhoods in the Empowerment Zones and with the Arts Council’s Inner City Cultural Development program, Zannette recruited and worked closely with Cultural Development Officers from each neighborhood, trained and nurtured emerging artists and held speak-outs that brought together the leadership of such organizations as the Yale museums and the Shubert with neighborhood management teams, grassroots political leaders and emerging artists to dialog and learn from one another. She listened, taught, encouraged, empowered and expanded everyone’s thinking and experience. She opened up the community on so many levels and helped us all to appreciate one another across barriers of race, ethnicity, social class and spirituality.

Betty Monz, director of the Regional Cultural Plan and executive director of the Arts Council from 2002 to 2006, expressed very well the importance of Zannette’s work.

“Zanette was an agent for change in a challenging environment,” Monz said. “She gave a collective voice to a powerful community of neighborhood artists and persevered with a steady pace filled with baby steps, giant steps and a few stumbles along the way. Her work in the community paved the way for the vibrant, culturally diverse and thriving arts community that New Haven is known for today.”

In addition to her profound effect on the community, Zannette never ceased to surprise and delight her colleagues on the Arts Council staff with her unusual and exotic knowledge. One of our staff meetings was devoted to the extraordinary horoscope that Zannette cast for the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. By learning the exact date and time of the Council’s founding in 1964, Zannette told us useful and thought-provoking facts about our past, present and future.

All of us on the staff and board of the Arts Council will never forget the contribution Zannette made to one of the organization’s most successful fundraising events, the “Little Court of Horrors.” This was a Halloween Costume Ball held on the first floor of the Superior Court building at Elm and Church streets in 2000. Zannette sent this already lavish entertainment over the top by her recruitment of a phalanx of professional psychics, astrologers, and palm and tarot card readers who provided private consultations free of charge in a large room just off the dance floor. It was the hit of the evening.

Zannette was a stimulating, exciting and fascinating person to know. We mourn her passing. Quoting Shakespeare, “We shall never look upon her like again.”

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