the hostlatest Meyer adaptation more

guilt than pleasure

PAGE 3

night collabDinnerstein and Merritt

join musical forcesPAGE 7

learDuke Theater explores

death through modern playPAGE 8

ELIZA BRAY/THE CHRONICLE

FRAMEFRAMEdocumentary film fest

enlivens downtown scene

CENTER

(RE)CORD

RecessRecess volume 14issue 25

april 4, 2013

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SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE

PAGE 2 April 4, 2013recessrecess

[recesseditors]our full frame submissions

Michaela Dwyer....................................................................................................pinaHolly Hilliard..............................................strangling the python: a compsci storyDan Fishman....................................................children dancing how they want toKatie Zaborsky.................................................................life behind the cat cameraTed Phillips..............................................................................................t is for toiletSophia Durand..........................................................................................quaintrelle Emma Loewe...............................................................................................tanz, tanzEliza Bray..............................................................................................dinosaur daze

editor’sNOTE

NASHER MUSEUM OF ART AT DUKE UNIVERSITY

2001 Campus Drive | Durham, NC 27705 | 919-684-5135 | nasher.duke.edu

Wangechi Mutu A Fantastic JourneyOn view March 21-July 21, 2013

Light Sensitive Photographic Works from North Carolina CollectionsOn view through May 12, 2013

ABOVE: Richard Misrach, Submerged Gazebo, Salton Sea, California, 1984 (printed 1997). Chromogenic print, edition 5/10, 30 x 40 inches (76.2 x 101.6 cm). Collection of the Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ackland Fund, 2003.24. © Richard Misrach. Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Marc Selwyn Fine Arts, Los Angeles, CA; and Pace/McGill Gallery, New York, NY.

ABOVE: Wangechi Mutu, The Bride Who Married a Camel’s Head (detail), 2009. Mixed-media collage on Mylar, 42 x 30 inches (106.7 x 76.2 cm). Deutsche Bank Collection, Germany, K20100083. Image courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. © Wangechi Mutu. Photo by Mathias Schormann.

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this weekend!!!

tonight!!!

One of my goals for this year is to consume fewer works of art. If you know how much I love art that probably sounds like a strange and counterpro-

ductive goal. But hear me out.For a long time I had a tendency to want to have read

many of the big names in a discipline before I felt con-fident enough to say anything about it. Freshman year I read five books on evolutionary biology in order to write a six-page philosophy paper. Sophomore year I listened to at least one new album every day because I wanted to feel like I had a hold on music. This summer I tried for months to read a book of poetry every day. I often refused to leave rooms of museums until I’d seen every artwork.

That semi-compulsive fear of not knowing things has served me well for a while. But I’m starting to feel uneasy about it. Part of me wants to work even harder to know everything about poetry or philosophy. I keep thinking about Malcolm Gladwell’s idea that experts need 10,000 hours of practice and how I’m nowhere near that level of commitment for either discipline. I wonder if in the process of dabbling I’ve lost the ca-pacity to become an expert on any one thing. It’s an admittedly depressing line of thinking, and I don’t rec-ommend it.

Recently, however, I’ve tried the opposite approach.

Instead of consuming lots of different albums, I’ve been primarily listening to two albums (Nick Drake’s Pink Moon and Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions). Instead of reading many books of poetry I’ve been reading a few books of poetry multiple times. I’ve gone to the Nasher only to stay half an hour in front of one drawing. It’s been refreshing, and I feel a remedial sense of calm about the whole process of understanding art. I enjoy it more, and I feel less over-whelmed.

I’m starting to come to grips with the idea that being an artist or a thinker or a journalist isn’t about having been properly educated. It’s much more about thinking and feeling deeply about something and creating the means to communicate those thoughts/feelings. Nothing magical is going to happen after having read Ulysses that would make me more able to write a novel. I’d rather engage regularly and repeatedly with the ideas of William Carlos Williams—to have them slowly creep into my daily thoughts—than to have read fifteen other poets that wouldn’t make me feel as deeply.

It seems like an obvious lesson, but for me it wasn’t. I often feel inadequate for not having read texts that are central to the disciplines that I love, for not having read Dante or Yeats or Hegel. I see books on other people’s shelves and make promises to read that I only rarely keep. And I don’t think I’m the only one who feels that

way. But I have to constantly remind myself that not even the experts read everything. My philosophy advisor once told me he knew about an English professor who had never read Hamlet. Though I laughed at the time, I’m sure he or she was still a per-fectly good professor.

Lately I’ve been writing most of my poems about a single drawing by Matisse. Visual art is something I’ve never been all that knowl-

edgeable about, and I never once claim in my poems that I know what Matisse is trying to do. But I’ve been very open to learning from that drawing, maybe most of all because I’m not bogged down by ideas of what I should be learning and should be seeing. Instead I’m learning in order that I can best express what it is that makes me so compelled. I’m figuring out where I stand in relation to the work and what I want to do in re-sponse to it, how my own poetry should change to ac-commodate it.

There are so many things and people I haven’t un-derstood nearly as well as I’ve understood that single Matisse drawing because I haven’t been forced to rec-oncile my stance toward them in my own art. Williams Carlos Williams once advised a poet to “write what’s in front of your nose.” I think what he means is that part of the hardest work of art is not to become the most knowledgeable but to take the material for art that is already with us and communicate it to others. One of the great difficulties and joys of writing poetry is that it requires me to articulate how and why and what I believe about the things and people nearest to me, and frequently that process makes everyday events feel strange and real.

It’s a shift I’ve seen cross over into other facets of my life. While many of my friends are scrambling to see all of the people that have meant something to them before they graduate, I’ve mostly stayed in close contact with a few people. I’ve gone to the same restaurants, and I’ve ordered the same meals. I’m trying to figure out what it is about the people around me that so compels me to be with them, to figure out what I like about the meals I like and the restaurants I like. I’m trying to be less pas-sive about my relationship to the things that I enjoy. And I’m becoming more confident that it’s okay to know only a few things well, that life isn’t necessarily about having seen everything but having known the familiar with for-eign eyes.

—Dan Fishman

April 4, 2013 PAGE 3recessrecess

Sheafer Theater, Bryan Center, West Campus

967-9053 300 E. Main St. Carrboro

Advance sales at CD Alley (Chapel Hill) Charge by phone at 919-967-9053 Or on the web at WWW.ETIX.COM

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Science fiction and (Stephanie Meyer’s favorite) love triangles come together to create a very long two hours with The Host. As human bodies are taken over by alien souls, their eyes turn blue, and the audience’s eyes roll—both back in their heads as they fall asleep and from side to side as the protagonist and uninspired “hot guy number one” make out in the rain for the second time.

As compared with the Twilight franchise, this film isn’t brought down by Kristen Stewart’s attempt at acting or an inexperienced director’s love affair with close-ups; this is just a bad story. Uncannily similar to the already twice-re-made Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Host shows the un-epic battle between the dwindling human resistance and the alien invasion. This foreign species takes over human host bodies, but main-character Melanie (Saiorse Ronan) won’t surrender her body without a fight, and her spirit remains, cohabitating the body with the alien soul.

What this means for the moviegoer is lots of voice-over—snarky teenage girl voice-over that’s not funny and more importantly not necessary. There have been plenty of movies that successfully capture a character with “voices in her head,” but this movie didn’t pull it off. The tension her split personality creates is meant to be the focus, but the interpersonal struggle isn’t compelling or dramatic. To amp up the stakes, there’s the Seeker (Diane Kruger) who’s hunting everyone down, but even this outside threat portrayed by a talented actress can’t save this too-slowly-sinking ship.

I’ve seen all the Twilight movies and I go to every Nich-olas Sparks adaptation. I am not anti-chick-flick, but The Host isn’t even so bad that it’s good. What’s worse is that this isn’t some fundamentally flawed cast and the story’s not missing a crucial plot point. Even as these words make their way onto the page, it just becomes more apparent that there is nothing to say. The movie is just boring. An hour in, I Googled the runtime to see how much more I was in for. The theater was silent all the way through. No laughs. No gasps. Just the sound of a girl talking…to herself.

—Jamie Kessler

the hostDIR. ANDREW NICCOLCHOCKSTONE PICTURES

�����

SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE

by Lucy HicksTHE CHRONICLE

In today’s world many older American music tradi-tions have fallen into the background. Southern blues, once one of the most important music genres in North Carolina, is now only rarely acknowledged as a genre by a younger generation of music listeners. The Music Maker Relief Foundation has been working to bring at-tention back to Southern blues, a genre that has both directly and indirectly inspired many of the styles of music that we hear today, said Tim Duffy, founder and executive director of Music Maker. “Musicians are con-stantly looking toward the South for inspiration,” he added.

The organization aims to support Southern musicians, not only through finding gigs but also providing transpor-tation, documentation and recording opportunities. Many of the artists supported by this organization are working-class, and few are professional musicians.

“These people are often living off incomes of $5000-$7000 a year and just do not have the means to get their music documented and promoted,” Duffy said. “A lot of these musicians are working-class people that are not even thinking about being [professional] musicians.”

This semester, the Center for Documentary Stud-ies at Duke has partnered with the Music Maker Relief Foundation through a course called Multimedia Docu-mentary. The course allows students with a wide variety of film and documentary skills to create short projects depicting the lives of different musicians involved with the foundation. When the three to five minute videos are complete, Music Maker will utilize these videos on their website to promote the artists’ work to a broader online audience.

“It provides the opportunity for the students to have firsthand fieldwork experience with both the Music Mak-er foundation and particularly its artists,” said Chris Sims, instructor of the course and web content manager for CDS. “Then the videos that will come out of that will not just be a class project but will also live on the Music Maker Relief Foundation blog and have a life of their own.”

The idea for the collaboration also involved Music Mak-er employee Whitney Baker, who interned at CDS last year. She saw potential to connect student filmmakers with the blues artists with whom she works.

“We have a lot of really great artists that are local to the area that have really interesting stories to tell,” she said.

The profiled musicians range from 15-year-old Lakota John Locklear from Pembroke to “Ironing Board” Sam, a

Chapel Hill resident who has been playing music profes-sionally for more than 55 years. Some have lived in North Carolina for all of their lives, whereas others—such as Ben Payton who raised a family in Chicago—have only recently returned to the South.

Before starting on their projects, the groups of stu-dents spent the first five weeks of class studying docu-mentary work and the history of blues. “We spent a lot of time building relationships with our subjects and think-ing about how we are representing these musicians,” said senior Stephani Zakutansky, who is focusing on Ben Pay-ton.

Some students in the class have had more practice mak-ing documentaries than others. Senior Hannah Colton, a double major in Public Policy and Environmental Science and Policy, noted that a large part of the learning process was experiential.

“It makes us a little nervous to go in without having done this type of interview before and maybe not having the camera skills and editing skills. But [the class] is a really good way to [gain] experience,” she said.

Filming these artists at the Music Maker Studio, in their homes and at gigs, the students capture different parts of these musicians’ lives. They see the pre-show rituals, their interactions with audiences and their home lives. About to edit, Zakutansky and Colton are not quite sure about

CDS, Music Maker Relief promote Southern blues

SEE MUSIC MAKER ON PAGE 6

SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE

PAGE 4 April 4, 2013recess

Jessica Yu is a director of documentary film, as well as of narrative film (Ping Pong Playa) and television (Parenthood, Grey’s Anatomy). Her film Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject in 1997. A retrospective of her work and the world premiere of her newest documentary short, The Guide, will be shown at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival Apr. 4 through 7 in downtown Durham.

Recess writer Megan Rise spoke with Yu about her experience with docu-mentary filmmaking and her personal style.

Recess: I’m excited for your work to be shown as the Full Frame Tribute this week. What should the audience expect from your films?

Jessica Yu: I think that what people will notice is that the subject matter and the style of the films being shown ranges a lot. Some-times when you hear about a retrospective of someone’s work, there’s kind of a thematic continuity or stylistic exploration that’s very traceable, and I think in my work, it seems a little more eclectic. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s pretty noticeable.

R: You’ve incorporated animation and puppetry into several of your documentaries, including The Kinda Sutra and The Protagonist. How did your atypical approach affects your films and their recep-tion?

JY: I made Breathing Lessons about Mark O’Brien, who had polio so he was living in severely restricted physical conditions. He was in an iron lung. He had very limited ability to move about the world, so making a film about him was a tremendous challenge. How do you create the sense of the richness of his inner life? I think that was the first lesson in finding ways to, what I call, “order off the menu.” If you have a severe restriction, it’s actually tremendously freeing because there is no set of guidelines for doing what you want to do. For that first film, I thought, “Why do we need to be restricted by the traditional materials of documentary filmmaking?” Especially when you’re telling someone’s biographical story. Unless someone is a media figure or a famous person, a lot of times you don’t have all the pieces that you would like to have, and there has to be some way to bring those pieces to life. I think from that it was a liberating type of lesson.

From there, like you mentioned, in The Protagonist there’s some animation and there’s some other kinds of fun storytelling pieces. In In the Realms of the Unreal, there’s a lot of animation. What I like is working with other kinds of artists, like animators or puppeteers and puppet creators. It’s kind of like working with a composer where you get real collaborative interaction to figure out how to do what you want to do, but then, it’s always a wonderful surprise when it comes back and it’s even better than you thought it would be. I like that process as well.

R: Your work is extremely diverse, to say the least. How do you decide what you’re going to make a film about?

JY: There’s always a lot of ideas floating around. People will bring things up, or someone will come up and suggest something that

sounds perfectly good, but it’s usually ones where the idea sticks in your mind and your own curiosity starts to take over and you realize you can’t satisfy that curiosity any other way than by making a film. You need that personal curiosity to continue to propel a process which can take a long time. With Realms it was five years, so it’s kind of a necessary component.

R: Is that what happened with The Guide?JY: The interesting thing about The Guide is that I was contacted

about making a film about the Gorongosa Restoration Project. It’s a huge conservation project. They’re trying to revitalize and rebuild a national park in Mozambique, which is larger than Rhode Island. It’s an amazing place, and I think that there was a feeling that a lot of attention goes to the ecosystem and the flora and fauna. There needed to be some emphasis on the human side of the equation be-cause if people aren’t involved and invested and included, then the chances of the long-term success of this project are pretty low.

The difficult thing was actually trying to figure out how you tell that story. We had the freedom to go through the process and see what came up, and Tonga, this young man, was helping us. Then as we got to know him a little better, it was like, I want to know what happens to this kid. I want to know what this experience is like for him, learning about what’s going on with the park and his feeling of what the people of the community experience on a daily basis. Somehow, he represents the hub of what everyone was trying to do because he was really bridging both worlds.

R: Your early films seem to play almost as character studies, but some of your more recent films also address environmental and so-cial issues fairly directly. Is there any reason for this shift?

JY: With Last Call at the Oasis, I was approached about making a film about water. That was an unusual situation for me, but I was very excited about doing that because water is so visual from a filmmak-ing perspective, and that was appealing. Once we started research-ing, there was so much I was being surprised by, and not necessarily in a positive way, so there was a kind of curiosity momentum that started to build. I thought, “How come we don’t talk about these things? How come we don’t know this? How come this isn’t in the national debate?” We kept running into characters who are dealing with these growing crises on the ground. Through these characters, we could see what things we’re all going to be confronting, in one way or another, if we don’t have some plan or awareness. It was very different from the other films I’ve worked on, but again, the per-sonal interest grew very quickly at the beginning.

R: What are you working on next?JY: I’m working on a film right now about population. That’s a

big, big subject, and it’s very story-based. It’s been a really interest-ing project so far, and very surprising. That’s a longer term project. I’ve also been very interested in making a film about Mad magazine, so that’s something that we’re hoping to push forward soon.

Recess Interviews:Jessica Yu, filmmaker

April 4, 2013 PAGE 5recess

Tending flocks has occupied humans for thousands of years. In many parts of the world, it is still a common way to put food on the table. But in more developed parts of the world, pastoral herders are all but phased out. The Last Shep-herd (L’Ultimo Pastore in the original Italian) tells the story of Renato Zuchelli, the last working pastoral shepherd in Milan. With shots of his herds crossing both expansive green pas-tures and urban roadways, filmmaker Marco Bonfanti shows us a troubling separation of nature and society as well as an exploration of the current economic crisis in Europe.

Zuchelli, whose girth shrouds his mobile occupation, promises to be a compelling protagonist. He manages his flock with nothing but dogs and the characteristic shep-herd’s crook, albeit a reduced version of Bo Peep’s, and his affable Italian lilt charms. He comes off as a bit of a crack-pot, but his efforts to bring his flock into the center of Mi-lan should be in parts inspiring, hilarious and beautiful.

—Ted Phillips

Durham’s own Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has grown with ev-ery passing year, inevitably drawing submissions from Duke itself. This year, that includes Erin Espelie, instructor, visiting artist and MFA candidate in the Experimental and Documentary Arts. Full Frame will mark the North American premiere of her documentary, True-Life Adventure.

“I’m trying to subvert your expectations,” said Espelie, who paired foot-age of a stream in the Rocky Mountains with narration from a 1948 Disney nature series, True-Life Adventures, from which she borrowed the title.

Espelie is particularly interested in how wildlife is presented to younger generations. This interaction is “increasingly mediated by some form of presentation by other people,” whether through narration, music or some other accompaniment, said Espelie.

She noted that the nature presented in her documentary is “not as exotic as the African safari, nor as dynamic as the jungle of South America,” while the modified narrations she sampled could be described as more grandiose.

Her short film, less than five minutes in length, will play between two lon-ger documentaries on Saturday. Honoring her idea that interpretations are increasingly skewed by presentation, Espelie wouldn’t divulge her desired effect for the documentary. “I’ll leave that for you to decide,” she said.

—Jamie Kessler

Most people don’t believe in super powers. But when a man can control up to 20,000 volts of electricity, cook a hot dog with two forks and issue shock therapy through his fingertips, you begin to rethink your stance on the supernatural. Two-time Guinness Book of World Records holder Biba Struja (Electri-cal Biba) was born without sweat glands and short two layers of skin. Once a television celebrity igniting light bulbs with his hands, he now uses his control of electricity to alleviate the mi-graine, sinus and back problems of his clients in Serbia. Now, he hopes to grace the pages of Guinness with a third world record, in which he’ll sustain one million volts of electricity and become a “wireless laser-man.” Directed by Dusan Saponja and Dusan Cavic, Battery Man received the Best Pitch award at both ZagrebDox 2010 and IDFA 2010, and was named Best Serbian Documentary at Beldocs 2012.

—Ashley Alman

Full Frame is the icon of the unexpectedly thriving Dur-ham filmmaking community. One of these renowned lo-cal filmmakers is Duke Arts of the Moving Image professor Josh Gibson. He returns to Full Frame for the fourth time with his black and white journey, Nile Perch.

The film was created during spring break last year, when Gibson went to Uganda for a week-long workshop to teach locals about how to work with film. Nile Perch is a short documentary capturing the process of how Nile perch, an aggressive invasive species, are caught on a fisherman’s line in Lake Victoria and eventually transformed into an export commodity. Through the course of the documentary, Gib-son reveals the sociological and economic impacts of this process on the local people.

However, Nile Perch is also a meditation on the aesthet-ics of 35 mm film—a rare medium that is slowly becoming extinct. Consequently, this will be the only new Full Frame entry that will have to be shown on a film, rather than digi-tal, projector. The unmatched images produced on hand-processed celluloid will engender a world that, at the very least, will provide a unique view into a vanishing art.

—Derek Saffe

FULLFULLFRAMEFRAMEFILMFILMFESTFEST

BATTERY MAN, DIR. DUSAN SAPONJA AND DUSAN CAVIC

NILE PERCH, DIR. JOSH GIBSON

THE LAST SHEPHERD, DIR. MARCO BONFANTI

TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE, DIR. ERIN ESPELIE

PAGE 6 April 4, 2013recess

Duke

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Give them extra f lavor.APRIL ’13:6 SA: HOLY GHOST TENT REVIVAL7 SU: SENSES FAIL w/ Such Gold & more10 WE: THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS w/ Moon Hooch12 FR: MOUNT MORIAH (CD Release) w/ Mac McCaughan, Airstrip13 SA: SON VOLT w/ Colonel Ford14 SU: CHARLES BRADLEY & EXTRAORDINAIRES18 TH: BOB MOULD BAND19 FR: BILLY BRAGG20 SA: MATT COSTA w/ Blank Tapes, Vandaveer26 FR: LILA (CD RELEASE) w/ IWTDI, Unifier**($5/$7)27 SA: MIPSO30 TU: BORIS w/ Young Widows MAY ’13:1 WE: BEATS ANTIQUE w/ Russ Liquid4 SA: YOUTH LAGOON w/ Majical Cloudz6 MO: THE AIRBORNE TOXIC EVENT12 SU: JOSH RITTER w/ Felice Brothers

AT THE CASBAH (Durham):April 19: MILK CARTON KIDS / Aoife O’Donovan

AT FLETCHER THEATRE, RALEIGH:April 10: OVER THE RHINE w/ Ben Sollee**($21/$23) AT RED HAT AMPHITHEATRE (Raleigh):June 7: THE POSTAL SERVICEJune 10: THE NATIONAL w/ Dirty Projectors

SHOWS AT THE HAW RIVER BALLROOM:April 13: FITZ & THE TANTRUMS w/ Hunter HuntedMay 12: Robert Randolph & Family Band

SHOW AT KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE (Cary):June 11: PASSION PIT (tix on sale April 5)

SHOW AT DISCO RODEO:June 4: DROPKICK MURPHYS

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Some shows at Cat’s Cradle

by Jordyn GraceyTHE CHRONICLE

On Tuesday, Apr. 9, the English department and the Blackburn Fund will host a poetry reading by Blackburn Visiting Poet Jay Wright and a play reading the following night. Wright is widely hailed as a prolific American voice and has won numerous awards, including Yale University’s prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry.

“Jay Wright is a great American poet,” Harold Bloom, liter-ary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale Univer-sity, wrote in an email. “He is difficult and requires erudition and close reading, but he rewards these overwhelmingly.”

Wright has built a career out of illustrating the connection that all people, regardless of heritage, share. His often-alle-gorical depictions of human existence draw upon a massive accumulation of cultural knowledge. Over the years, he has researched the practices, beliefs and mythologies of numerous African tribes. His exploration culminated in the publication of The Double Invention of Komo, a volume of poems that depicts the initiation rights of the Bambara people of west Africa.

“He is a student of world religious cultures, steeped in African-American history and literature, in African lit-erature, mythology, religious thought [as well as] in the Amerindian and South American influences he absorbed growing up in New Mexico,” Joseph Donahue, professor of

Visiting poet Jay Wright to give readings

SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE

the practice of English at Duke, wrote in an email.Donahue, who is organizing the readings, considers Wright

to be an important African-American voice. Wright has been celebrated for his ability to capture the experience of exclu-sion and the process of historicizing human experience.

In his poem, “The Albuquerque Graveyard,” he laments the way that memorializing the dead has become a hierar-chical, political statement, and the tendency to give more significance to some lives than to others. In “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting,” he speaks of the difficulty in aligning a belief in God with a conviction for personal freedom.

“It’s been said that poetry is not made from ideas, but from words,” Donahue said. “Which is not to say that Wright’s poetry is not brimming with ideas, drawn from mathematics, music, mythology and just from living in the world, but it is the music of thought that he offers, the in-terweaving of mind and heart in the measures of poetic speech.”

It is often remarked that Wright is a poet who writes for other poets, one who attracts a reader that is more an artist than a critic. Poetry readings offer a rare opportunity to experi-ence writing from a different receptive position than personal reading does. The listener’s critical gaze is not only affected by the language itself but also by the performative aspect of the

social setting. “Readings can be quietly transforming events… I count

the chance to hear the writers of one’s time [to be] one of the great experiences a college or university can offer,” said Donahue.

Poetry readings are events that the English department is especially dedicated to providing. “This is the second ma-jor reading sponsored by the English department this year, following upon the appearance of Lydia Davis last fall, and it reflects the department’s commitment to writing as a liv-ing, breathing, joking, lamenting, chatting, philosophizing and sometimes singing verbal art form,” Donahue said.

But Wright’s accomplishments are not solely limited to poetry. Before becoming a writer, he played professional baseball for the San Diego Padres, and he is a distinguished playwright and essayist as well. In all of his endeavors, Wright strives to illuminate the tethers that bind people together. Donahue refers to an anecdote that Wright uses to summa-rize his artistic goal: “A young man, hearing me read some of my poems, said that I seemed to be trying to weave to-gether a lot of different things. My answer was that they are already woven, I’m just trying to uncover the weave.”

Jay Wright will read on Tuesday, Apr. 9 at 7 p.m. in McClen-don Commons. The following night, there will be a reading of one of Wright’s plays at 8 p.m. in the East Duke Parlors.

their videos’ primary focus, but they are working to find the best way to spotlight their artists’ strengths. Zakutansky described Payton’s distinct style and stage presence. She said that he often improvises music to accompany poems that inspire him. Colton hopes to highlight areas of “Iron-ing Board” Sam’s life outside of his onstage performances such as his pre-show routine and intriguing items from his house.

Both Colton and Zakutansky noted that beyond sharp-ening their skills in film production the class provided a window into local Southern blues that they would not have otherwise discovered. They both believe that the first weeks of the course helped them tremendously to under-stand blues music and its musicians.

“As with anything, [having more knowledge about a genre] enriches what you get when you listen,” Zakutansky said. “Having a personal connection to a musician of what a lot of [Music Maker artists], or at least Ben Payton, con-sider a dying art form is really special.”

MUSIC MAKER from page 3

April 4, 2013 PAGE 7recess

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by Marie-Claire “MC” BousquetteTHE CHRONICLE

Night, the collaboration between singer-songwriter Tift Merritt and classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein, is an un-usual convergence of classical, Americana and folk. It’s also a unique translation of live performance into record, a direction that is typically reversed in the creative process. Tonight, at both 7 and 9:30 p.m., Merritt and Dinnerstein return through Duke Performances to perform the record live at First Presbyterian Church in downtown Durham.

The project itself began as a live performance two years ago. Said Dinnerstein, “the album really comes from our con-certs— we almost think of the album as a song cycle.” Their collaboration evolved as Merritt and Dinnerstein learned each other’s musical tastes, methods and performance styles before Night was recorded and then released this year on Sony Masterworks, the classical branch of the label.

The album is a combination of classical pieces, contem-porary covers and a handful of original songs. Merritt de-scribed the choice to use only a few original pieces as stem-ming from her belief in “experienc[ing] music outside of your own story,” a way “to get out of yourself.”

“You tend to treat music or a song the way you would treat a painting or a book,” she said. “When it isn’t your own, you come to it with a great deal of admiration. If it’s your own, you know the blood, sweat, tears, shame. So it was great for me to experience music beyond my own pen.”

Three songs were commissioned specifically for the Night project. One piece was written by jazz pianist Brad Mehldau, another by folk singer-songwriter Patty Griffin and a third by classical composer Philip Lasser. The Mehl-dau and Lasser pieces were set to existing poems, whereas the Griffin composition is entirely original. Duke Per-formances helped the artists select these composers and funded the compositions. Musician and producer Jenny Scheinman was brought on board to arrange some of the other tracks that Merritt and Dinnerstein selected for the album.

For myriad reasons, from stylistic to personality dif-ferences, it is not always easy for artists of such different genres to collaborate. Merritt described how she and Din-

nerstein navigated these challenges while recording Night: “I’m very sensitive to who I play music with. It’s a very spe-cific kind of intimacy, and collaborating has been such a joy with Simone because she sings all the way through and gives all of herself. She is willing to be so open and feel so deeply; she’s an ideal person to collaborate with.”

The title Night itself holds significant meaning for the duo. “We were thinking about night in various ways—searching through the dark, trying new things, [all the while] protected by the dark to be more experimental,” Dinnerstein said. “Night is a theme that runs throughout the entire album.” The pair ran with this vision, stepping out of their individual musical styles and backgrounds. Dinnerstein traditionally learns music from reading a score and remaining true to each and every note on a page. Conversely, Merritt learned how to sing and play guitar by ear, and prefers to learn music this way. Each of the artists expressed that the experience of learning music outside of their comfort zone has changed their subsequent solo work.

Night has Duke roots, as Director of Duke Performanc-es Aaron Greenwald conceptualized the collaboration in 2011. “It just seemed like something that Duke Perfor-mances ought to help develop,” said Greenwald. “We have a tradition of presenting classical music, and we are very mindful of the community we live in. Having an artist from here with a national reputation seemed rewarding.” Din-nerstein had, at the beginning of the collaboration two years ago, performed through Duke Performances five times, and Merritt is a nationally renowned North Carolina artist.

With Greenwald’s push as impetus, Duke invited Mer-ritt and Dinnerstein to Durham for about a week. The art-ists worked in Reynolds Theater, and each offered a master class—Merritt in songwriting, and Dinnerstein in piano. Additionally, the artists hosted a listening session at The Pinhook. There, Dinnerstein and Merritt played music that they found inspiring while talking about how they ne-gotiated their performance.

Tom Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies, is a fan and friend of Merritt, and described the

broader implications for Duke’s backing of Night. “It sug-gests something about the arts working at somewhere like Duke—that we can have these collaborations across styles, [and] we can come up with new relationships, forms and new great art.”

“Collaboration is challenging,” said Greenwald. “Col-laboration across genres is even more challenging. It often does not work. [Night] is a testament to the integrity, curi-osity and artistic chops of Simone and Tift, that they were able to not only pull this off when we presented it a few years ago but also to convince one of the leading classical labels in the world to release it as a record. And it’s a really great record.”

Merritt and Dinnerstein will present Night tonight at 7 and 9:30 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Durham. Tickets are $10 for students.

LISA-MARIE MAZZUCCO/THE CHRONICLE

dP hosts Merritt, Dinnerstein in collaboration

PAGE 8 April 4, 2013recess

by Kathy ZhouTHE CHRONICLE

A checkered floor with raised steps to an ornate throne, two curious mush-room poofs, a toy castle made of building blocks, an enormous gold-framed mirror and a chandelier—the Bryan Center’s Sheafer Lab Theater has become a surre-al, Cocteau-inspired, pseudo-Renaissance wonderland. Throw in exceptional light and sound work, resplendent costumes designed from scratch and the ghost of Shakespeare, and you’ve got the backdrop to the upcoming production by Duke The-ater Studies.

The first thing to know about Lear by emerging Brooklyn-based playwright Young Jean Lee is that the play is but an echo of Shakespeare’s King Lear. The only necessary prior knowledge is that the two sons of the Earl of Gloucester and the three daughters of King Lear are coping with their fathers’ deaths. “It takes char-acters from Shakespeare’s King Lear but sets them in a contemporary theatrical world,” explains Jody McAuliffe, direc-tor of Lear and Chair of Theater Stud-ies. “It combines elements of absurdist theater and also of popular culture. Lee mixes the classical and renaissance with the contemporary to bring us closer to how Shakespeare is a way to understand her own life and the world in which she lives.”

Though the piece runs parallel to King Lear, it is not an adaptation. Rather it ex-ists on a separate register to serve a spe-cific purpose. A contemporary absurdist, Lee drives her characters through exis-tential crises fueled largely by the inter-personal, executed in a way that can be

disorienting or bewildering. Through its modern—and often shocking—language, the play provides a relatable reflection on the deaths of Gloucester and Lear with a new perspective: the various and unex-pected methods of coping with a parent’s death.

“King Lear is known historically as one of the grandest attempts to explain death,” says stage manager and sophomore Mike Myers. “There’s a juxtaposition between what Shakespeare’s given us and how Young Jean Lee has adapted that so we can visit other explanations.”

In a way, Lear is a very personally driven work. Lee had done extensive research on Shakespeare and King Lear during her Ph.D. studies, yielding subtle details and connections between the two plays. More exceptionally, Lee wrote Lear in the midst of her own father’s bat-tle with cancer. Lee furthers her explo-ration of coping with death by weaving through a blaring and frantic dialogue that is furrowed down into a singular cri-sis: what do you do when your father is dying?

“This is a group of children,” says Jules Odendahl-James, resident drama-turg and visiting lecturer in Theater Studies, and the production dramaturg for Lear. “It gets down to the purity and essence of self, going from a highly styl-ized borrowing of Shakespeare, inter-spersed with contemporary references, to the moment when these children are about to lose their father. It’s a discon-certing type of doubleness…we’re always meant to see the fissure between those two worlds.” The duality recurs stylisti-cally and thematically: the complex and

the simple; the parent-and-child rela-tionship; narcissism and selflessness; fe-alty and disloyalty; childhood and adult-hood.

The play resonates powerfully, traversing time frames in a short space. It engages but also differentiates from the world Shake-speare has crafted. Rather than focusing on the play’s relationship to King Lear, the audience is instead drawn into the distinc-tive foundation for Lear. The characters’ developing struggles, and their confronta-tion with the moment of mortality, haunt the space.

“Lear is exaggerated and bizarre, but it’s so accurate to life,” says freshman Faye Goodwin, who will play Cordelia, one of Lear’s daughters. She explains that she learned more about her own relation-ship to her parents—that the process of Lear is not only about art or acting, but about things that can be especially relat-able to Duke students. “You want a reso-

Duke theater performs absurdist Lear

lution. Each character presents their own methods—shutting things out, falling apart, stepping into their father’s place, making a mockery of it all—and it can destroy them if they don’t find a way to acceptance.”

Lear evokes a funnel, stripping away the madness and fear that surrounds death. In-terspersed with compelling twists and pop culture references, the play throws the au-dience into a whirlwind of confrontation, struggle and deliberation. As these sons and daughters become no more than chil-dren losing a loved one, so is death chis-eled down into its barest and perhaps tru-est understanding.

Lear opens Thursday, Apr. 8, at 8 p.m. in Sheafer Lab Theater and will run until Sunday, Apr.14. Tickets are available online or at the box office. More information can be found at http://theaterstudies.duke.edu

JISOO YOON/THE CHRONICLE