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Celluloid hero
Mikel Rouse finds a poignant spark in the cinematic jump cut at BAM.
By Steve Smith

FREEZE FRAME Live action and film intertwine unpredictably in The End of Cinematics. Photograph: Dan Merlo

The first image that greets the audience in The End of Cinematics, a new multimedia opera by New York composer-performer Mikel Rouse, is a projected warning: cell phones will interfere with the technology used in tonight’s performance. Such admonitions are a necessary part of every live-performance experience nowadays, but Rouse’s caveat carries a special urgency: His new production—the third in an “opera-verité” trilogy that began with 1994’s Failing Kansas and continued with the groundbreaking 1995 smash Dennis Cleveland—relies on technology to an unusual degree.

Speaking from the streets of Manhattan—via cell phone, naturally—Rouse explains the warning that opens his show, which arrives at the BAM Harvey Theater on Wednesday 4. “There’s so much wireless communication going on between the video people, the robotic camera, the in-ear monitor system that the performers use to hear the prerecorded score,” he offers at a caffeinated clip. “Very often you’ll get interference, and it’s usually the result of some electronic device. It’s no different than what they tell you on an airplane—the chances are slim, and certainly in our case they’re not life-threatening; it just means that something might get shut down.”

Rouse’s kinetic, pop-derived music and imaginative stage productions have long been enriched by his innovative use of electronics; The End of Cinematics, a nonnarrative gloss on the commodification of cinema, inspired by writings of Susan Sontag, pushes the envelope further still. “We’ve got a five-camera live shoot that’s integrating prerecorded film shot in Paris with live video,” Rouse says. “The performers are duplicating [characters] in the prerecorded film. There’s a six-panel rear-projection system; the lower panels show a lot of the same scenes that you’ll see in the upper panels, but using CGI, we’ve dropped out the people that were in them, so they can act as set-drops for the performers as they’re photographed live. Then those images are projected on a front scrim, to make this sort of montage.”

Rouse created the ambitious production last year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Key to its gestation was his access to the school’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). “They gave me this fabulous tour of their facility, and turned me on to technology that I had never seen demonstrated,” Rouse says. “One was stereo television, which we could never afford. I didn’t want the entire audience wearing glasses to view this piece, so I came up with this idea of how to ‘fake’ stereo television. Rather than go for the technofest that I could have done by having access to the stuff at the NCSA, it was actually more interesting to me that they inspired something.”

The enormity of the undertaking isn’t lost on the composer. “It’s like the scale of a stupid rock show—minus the stupid,” Rouse says. “When I saw the semi truck that was carrying the show, I thought I’d either arrived or made the biggest mistake of my life.” Even so, audience response assured him that he was on to something new and unexpected. “I wanted to comment on the vapidity of corporate entertainment,” he says. “Inadvertently, I did something completely different, which was to offer an alternative.”

For all its theoretical underpinnings, the sensuous imagery and sleek beats in The End of Cinematics might tempt audiences to simply sit back and soak in it. Not a problem, says Rouse, who refers to the collaborations of John Cage and Merce Cunningham: “What is so brilliant about what they set up is that you’ve got permission to check in and check out.”

Mention of Cunningham is timely—the choreographer’s company will present eyeSpace, a new piece set to Rouse’s International Cloud Atlas, during a Joyce Theater run that opens on October 10. Rouse’s score, provided with the ticket (and one of three new Rouse albums available on iTunes), was created for playback on an iPod in shuffle mode. “Similar to Cinematics, this asks an audience to completely rethink what a theatrical experience is,” Rouse says. “What you have now is a situation where all the audience members have their own secret, their own special version.”

The End of Cinematics opens on Wednesday 4 at BAM.

THEATRE: The End of Cinematics, Royal Court
Nov 17 2006
by Philip Key, Liverpool Daily Post

FORGET the arty title, the fact that it is part of the Liverpool Culture Company series of shows and that it is sold as a multi-media event.

The End of Cinematics is one of those shows that you are unlikely to forget. Directed, produced and written by American composer Mikel Rouse, it leaves the jaw dropping, the eyes widening and the ears filling.

With six background screens, another in front and six on-stage performers, it is a mixture of movie, music and theatre that grabs the attention from the start and never lets you go.

Rouse himself is a major presence, dressed in a trench coat, singing and looking pretty moody for most of the time. He dominates the show.

Around him are others dressed in similar coats and three women in black and white checkered coats. Behind them on screens are Parisian street scenes, other characters and cafe situations.

What is it all about? I have no idea and in the end it does not matter.

What we get are visual ideas (often six different images), music that merges Philip Glass’s minimalist works with The Beatles, on stage singing coupled with semaphore movement and some textual comments on screen.

It is all quite eye-boggling and with the music, totally captivating. You may not agree that live on stage action, numerous back projections and live video of actors is where we are going. But you will agree that it is all fascinating.

Seeing characters both on stage, on film and duplicated is like nothing else you have seen before.

The six performers, Cynthia Enfield, Matthew Gondolfo, Christina Pawl, Robert Rivera, and Penelope Thomas together with Rouse himself, keep the action moving, much helped by Rouse’s vibrant score.

Some critics have complained about New York being involved in Liverpool’s Capital of Culture. For this show, they can only sit back and admire.

MUSIC REVIEW | 'THE END OF CINEMATICS'

Corporate Entertainment, Criticized With a Rock Beat

By ALLAN KOZINN

Published: October 6, 2006

Mikel Rouse's music is rooted in the sounds and textures of rock, but he seems to prefer the grander forms and structures of classical music. His big works of the last decade have been multimedia theatrical productions that he calls opera vérité. The latest, “The End of Cinematics,” opened at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday.

Richard Termine for The New York Times
“The End of Cinematics,” written and directed by Mikel Rouse, being performed at the Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Mr. Rouse describes “The End of Cinematics” as the conclusion of a trilogy about American culture. It follows “Failing Kansas,” which revisited the murder described in Truman Capote's “In Cold Blood,” and “Dennis Cleveland,” which took the form of a television talk show. Its subject is film, and it is meant to be a lament on the death of the art-house movie theater and a critical look at the domination of the big screen by entertainment blockbusters and escapist fantasy.

Or at least that's what Mr. Rouse says about the work in interviews. There is little in the piece itself to make that case.

Its backbone is a film Mr. Rouse made in Paris. Fragmentary and nonlinear, it is shown on monitors at the back of the stage, and occasionally projected onto a scrim at the front. Between the monitors and the scrim, Mr. Rouse and his ensemble sing to a recorded track and act short scenes that are also magnified on the scrim, creating an appealing three-dimensional stage picture that juxtaposes reality and projection and continually morphs. A philosophical overlay is hardly necessary, except as an excuse to call the work what it isn't — an opera — instead of what it is: an extended rock work with a sophisticated stage show.

To put it differently, it seems less about film — artistic or otherwise — than about long-form pop video, and it frequently calls to mind quirky productions like the Talking Heads' “Storytelling Giant.” And though Mr. Rouse's music and staging are rich in original touches, his debts are clear as well, among them the jittery puppetlike movement that was long a David Byrne trademark, and the cryptic, ritualized hand gestures of Robert Wilson and Meredith Monk. Even the use of scrims and projections to create a changing three-dimensional space has a predecessor in Philip Glass's “1,000 Airplanes on the Roof.”

Maybe proposing a grand concept for a nonlinear work is, by definition, asking for an argument. But the argument shouldn't obscure this work's strength, which is Mr. Rouse's music. Sometimes built on heavy, repetitive beats, and sometimes couched in Beatle-esque psychedelia, the songs are vivid, pleasingly visceral and often engagingly harmonized, with amusingly off-kilter lyrics. That should be a sufficient draw, bigger themes notwithstanding.

“The End of Cinematics” will be performed tonight and tomorrow night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene; (718) 636-4100 or bam.org.

DANCE REVIEW | 'MERCE CUNNINGHAM'
You'll Take the Dance You're Given, but You Can Call the Tune

From left, Cédric Andrieux, Jonah Bokaer and Brandon Collwes of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing in a new work, “eyeSpace,” at the Joyce Theater.

By JOHN ROCKWELL
Published: October 12, 2006

The Joyce Theater is a good place to see the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. These days the company usually plays in larger public spaces. At the Joyce, which seats fewer than 500, the dancers and the dance are relatively intimate.

Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
Audience members donned headphones for iPods before the show.

Mr. Cunningham's is an intimate art, despite all the dazzle of the décor he gets from mostly famous artists. The dancers hop and bend and extend and sometimes interact, and it can all look pretty much the same if you aren't playing close attention. Intimacy encourages close attention.

The program for this week's run, seen at the opening on Tuesday night, offers a new, a newish and an old piece. The new one, “eyeSpace,” accompanied by a Mikel Rouse score set to shuffle mode on individual iPods, was the novelty, and an appealing one.

But the opening “Scenario Minievent” had its charms, and the middle piece, “Crises,” from 1960, offered a piquant indication of the evolution of Mr. Cunningham's style.

“Scenario” dates from 1997 and was turned into one of Mr. Cunningham's excerpted (and presumably shuffled) “events” this year. What is most striking about it are Rei Kawakubo's bizarre costumes with their Surrerealist lumps and distortions (humps, big rear ends and the like). They are in mostly vertical blue stripes on white or in a sickly pale green-and-white checked pattern. For most of the 30 minutes five or six dancers twist and pose, each in his or her own space, although there is an amusing rush of additional dancers toward the end. David Behrman and Takehisa Kosugi provided the bumptious and consoling live electronic music.

“Crises,” staged by Carolyn Brown and Carol Teitelbaum this year, uses a sequence of Conlon Nancarrow's “Studies for Player Piano,” which sound like fractured ragtime. Here there are actual musical sequences, and the five dancers worked away, sometimes touching and lifting one another, more deliberately than in much of Mr. Cunningham's more recent choreography, and always demonstrating exquisite bodily control.

Mr. Cunningham, now 87, has long been fascinated with technological innovations, and there can be a whiff of gimmickry in his use of them. The new “eyeSpace” worked well, with one reservation. Mr. Rouse's score blends rock and folk-rockish vocals with electronic instrumentals and an urban soundscape. The handsome blue costumes and backdrop — blue against an intensely saturated red — are by Henry Samelson. The 12 dancers twisted and gyrated, mostly in subgroups of diminishing size, though one's attention was sometimes distracted by the novelty of Mr. Rouse's presentation of his music and by the audience fumbling with the iPods, most of which were on loan from the lobby.

What was thrilling about hearing the music this way was how personal it was. We were all cocooned in our own worlds, hearing something different, just for us. “All the audience members have their own secret, their own special version,” Mr. Rouse was quoted as saying in Time Out New York. It was the purest realization of Mr. Cunningham's chance aesthetic, the ultimate in intimacy.

But my reservation is this: Mr. Rouse and Stephan Moore, seated at keyboards by the stage, chose to add a general sonic racket through loudspeakers (city noises, subway announcements) that was audible through the earphones. Maybe for some this further juxtaposition of public and private was interesting. I found it distracting. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company continues through Sunday at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 242-0800 or joyce.org.

Mikel Rouse: Narrative Biography

For the last fifteen years, composer and performer Mikel Rouse has been developing a technically and thematically adventurous trilogy of multimedia operas that have played in theatres and festivals around the world. He's putting the finishing touches on the final installment of this series, The End Of Cinematics, in anticipation of its September 17th premiere at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Rouse's musical and theatrical repertoire has its roots in the high art-meets-popular culture, mix-and-match aesthetic of the early 80s downtown Manhattan music and art scene from which Rouse emerged. In Dennis Cleveland, his most celebrated work (and the second part of his trilogy), he transformed the landscape of trash-talk TV into opera. Rouse himself played the rabble-rousing host, a character who, it turns out, is not so much holding a volatile show together as falling apart in front of the cameras. This provocative piece of environmental theatre, in which cast members were planted amongst the audience and the audience itself was featured on video monitors, blurred the lines between performance and reality in the same way the "Jenny Jones"/"Jerry Springer" type talk fests confused personal confession with popular entertainment. Dennis Cleveland began its life with a sold-out run at tiny New York City avant-garde venue the Kitchen, where theatre-goers had to turn to scalpers to nab hard-to-come-by tickets, and returned to Manhattan years later in more full-blown form, for a critically acclaimed engagement at Lincoln Center. Village Voice critic Kyle Gann called it "the most exciting and innovative opera since Einstein on the Beach."

Rouse was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, “Michael” became “Mikel” at an early age, when Rouse decided to spell his name the way it sounded – and realized it looked considerably cooler in print like that. He attended both the Kansas City Art Institute and the Conservatory of Music at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, simultaneously fueling his interests in the visual and the musical. He may have acquired some of his theatrical smarts even before then when, as a teenager, he briefly ran away to join a carnival. Relocating to New York City in 1979, Rouse explored African and other World Music and began studying the math-based Joseph Schillinger Method of Composition. Through Carla Bley’s New Music Distribution Music Service, which at the time was the avant-garde music community’s most effective conduit to forward-thinking consumers, he released albums with his contemporary chamber ensemble, Mikel Rouse Broken Consort. He recorded more overtly rock-oriented material with another combo, Tirez Tirez, through a deal with new wave indie label, IRS.

Rouse started working in 1989 on the first piece in his operatic trilogy, Failing Kansas, inspired by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. This piece was performed solo by Rouse and employed multiple, unpitched, prerecorded voices in counterpoint to each other and to Rouse's own vocals, a technique he dubbed counterpoetry that would become central to his work. Failing Kansas, which premiered at the Kitchen in 1994 and continues to be mounted internationally, examined the perception-altering and manipulative power of media as well as Americans' approach to religion and spirituality, themes that re-emerge in both Dennis Cleveland and the forthcoming The End Of Cinematics.

While New York City may have been his artistic incubator, it was on the campus of the University of Illinois that Rouse has fully able to put his remarkable imagination to work. As Rouse explains, Krannert director Mike Ross has been fostering the sort of interdisciplinary dialogue that would not have been out of place in Manhattan back in the day, trying to get artists, teachers, scientists, philosophers to intermingle and realize that their goals are not dissimilar. Which meant that Rouse wound up in, of all places, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where he was introduced to new technology, hybrid technology, CGI stuff they're doing with computers, motion sensing, stereo television. Collaborating with NCSA scientists, Rouse dreamed up a high-tech framework for The End Of Cinematics that turns Hollywood-style special effects inside out. Rather than placing actors in computer-generated landscapes, he has removed the images of actors from a film he shot on the real streets of Paris, so that live performers can take their place on stage and, in a sense, on film. Via panels, scrims and real-time video projections, The End Of Cinematics will become a "hyper-real" live-action 3-D movie.

The End of Cinematics was inspired by a pair of essays on movies written by the late Susan Sontag and is intended as a commentary on the vacuity of corporate entertainment. The score has a pronounced Beatles-esque feel at times (think trippy, Revolver-era Fab Four) and a definite, electronic-edged, hip-hop influence at others. The music from the piece, which will travel to the Mondavi Center at the University of California, Davis after its Krannert debut, is collected on The End Of Cinematics, available via iTunes.

But Rouse doesn't only think big: he's also been able to operate on a more intimate scale as a solo recording artist and live performer, traversing the United States like a 21st Century Mark Twain with a surreally beautiful song-and-video storytelling piece called Music For Minorities. He's now made the soundtrack to this suitcase tour, as he calls it, available via iTunes and CD, along with its audio prequel, Test Tones. This isn't just another easily downloadable collection of material, however, but a fourth wall-shattering theatrical experience all its own. His elegantly arranged, subtly spiritual songs constitute a portable performance for audiences on the go, guaranteed to transform even the most ordinary of daily journeys.

This material, while as theoretically complex and technologically sophisticated as his operatic work, is easily accessible, emotionally compelling and utterly personal stereo-worthy. He dedicates Test Tones to Brian Wilson and Steve Reich, which may seem like an odd pair to name-check together, but says a lot about the nature of Rouse's music and the breadth of his influences. Layers of gorgeous harmonies, multi-tracked by Rouse in an affecting, Harry Nilsson-like voice, float above rigorously structured, hypnotically repetitive tracks. Lyrics are terse, epigrammatic, sung over and over like mantras, as fragmented -- and riveting -- as the content of dreams. The arrangements on Test Tones feel more experimental, angular, urban; Rouse employs instrumental versions of these tracks to underscore the video portions of his Music For Minorities live production. The actual songs he performs in the piece, accompanying himself on guitar and harmonica, are collected on the Music For Minorities disc. They have a gentler, almost-folk-ish quality; the arrangements, on the surface at least, seem more traditional, and there's just a hint of the blues.

Music For Minorities, commissioned by UCLA Live, was shaped, sonically and conceptually, by the time Rouse spent in rural Northern Louisiana at a college artist-in-residence program arranged by Meet The Composer, Inc. along with the North Central Louisiana Arts Council, Louisiana Tech University and Lincoln Parish School Board. As Rouse explains, "I got to know some of these really old delta blues guys. I kind of got back into playing guitar more and hanging out with them, just playing music. I think you can see the progression from Test Tones to Minorities. You can still hear the sort of metric combinations I like to use, but the flavor starts to change. There's a progression with those two records as I got further and further into the delta and further back into playing guitar."

On the visual side, too, Music For Minorities mixes talking heads from rural Louisiana, some sporting accents so thick they need subtitles, with snippets of Manhattanites enlisted from Rouse's own circle of friends and colleagues (including choreographer Merce Cunningham). No one from either locale quite gets to finish a story, but their dialogue is edited into a kind of music, their images into visual poetry.

"I shot the film over two and a half years, doing interviews with people I knew in the Delta during my residency and in New York," he explains, "I wanted to come up with a different way of working with film and live performance. I started to focus on how people actually consume media nowadays. Channel surfing to me, that's how people live with television. Part of it is because television is so bad, part of it is because it's a new vocabulary. You can go around 500 channels in 20 minutes. The whole non-narrative thing is really natural to me. I like to think of Music For Minorities as romantic channel surfing. Some stories almost resolve, but it's like when you're watching movies around the TV dial. You might find one whole movie, but usually it's just twenty minutes here, twenty minutes there, it doesn't matter. You still realize whether the guy gets the girl or when something else happens. You see some infomercials, you see some news, you see a number of things. I'm taking that exact same experience and presenting it from a different perspective."

Test Tones and Music For Minorities (along with the new releases International Cloud Atlas, House Of Fans and Love At Twenty) are available via iTunes. Music For Minorities is packaged as a CD/DVD two-disc set, containing both the music and video imagery from the live piece.

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