MySpace a place for friends

3/5/2009 National Consumer Protection Week. On March 5, Rouse spoke at a Press Conference for the Department of Consumer Affairs, TheFederal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau during National Consumer Protection Week. City residents have had it with debt collectors. The Department of Consumer Affairs says residents last year filed more complaints against debt collectors than any other type of business. The department says 70 percent more complaints were filed than in 2007 and most concerned debts not owed. This is the first time that gripes against home-improvement contractors did not top the annual list. Rouse was featured in the New York Times, and on New York 1 and Fox News.

10/2009 Center of the Earth Studios. On October 1, Rouse opened his new boutique studio Center of the Earth. Located in Times Square, the studio is equipped for both mixing and mastering. Rouse is currently at work on a new project called Poetry Clocks after recently completing the new radio concert Gravity Radio.

11/7/2008 Thomas Barefoot. In November, Rouse was in San Francisco for the Zellerbach performances of Merce Cunningham's eyeSpace, with iPod shuffle music, International Cloud Atlas, by Mikel Rouse. The highlight of the trip was stopping by Thomas Barefoot's studio to see how he puts together the most amazing monitors around. Rouse had Barefoot's MM27 MicroMain monitors on order for the anticipated opening of his new studio Center of the Earth. Hats off to Thomas for such a well designed product and his hospitality.

7/2008 Go Yankees. The first presentation of Mikel's Trilogy in repertory was a resounding success at the 2008 Luminato Festival. See the Press Page for all the news and reviews. After completion of the Trilogy Mikel took a well deserved rest with spouse Lisa Boudreau (who had just retired after an extraordinary 14 year run with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. They were invited by their good friends Ed and Max Alstrom to hear Ed play the organ at Yankee Stadium. To their surprise, the photo below appeared on the Yankees Jumbotron. Thanks to Max and Ed and the New York Yankees for a spectacular welcome home!

DIANNE BONDAREFF FOR THE TORONTO STAR Composer and director Mikel Rouse, seen here in New York City, builds multimedia works that are called opera but actually defy categorization. (May 9, 2008)

Ushered into multimedia world of a rabblerouser
Mikel Rouse presents extraordinary trilogy for first time in repertory. June 07, 2008
SUSAN WALKER ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER NEW YORK

If the job of an artist is to upset expectations, stimulate the viewers' imaginations, critique the corporatedriven culture and expand the possibilities of any given genre, then Mikel Rouse is at the top of his league.

For the last couple of decades this emphatically multimedia creator has been building works that are called operas but actually defy categorization. His technologically advanced and mind-expanding trilogy - Failing Kansas, Dennis Cleveland and The End of Cinematics - presented by Luminato for the first time in repertory, opens this evening with Dennis Cleveland in the studio of the Toronto Film School.

Picture this: a TV auditorium where cameras are turned on you, the audience, and on a roving talk-show host. Cleveland is not just about the dumbing down done by popular culture, or about the demeaning and falsifying influence of reality TV. It is a talk show, and you are in it, watching yourself live on screens above the stage.

Rouse, fashioning himself along the lines of New Jersey talk show host Richard Bey, is the presenter, surreptitiously casting the audience as a creative collaborator of the piece. A live chorus of performers sing their sad tales, encouraged by Cleveland to "share your memories." Singers stand up in the audience to deliver their laments, the way studio audience members will leap to their feet during a taping.

When the production premiered at The Kitchen in Manhattan in 1996, it was the literal talk of the town and the scarcest ticket Off Broadway. This despite its effect, summed up by a woman Rouse quotes as saying "that was the most entertaining and the most disturbing thing I've ever seen in my life."

"Reviewers described it as a three-ring circus," says the composer/director over a tall coffee and a pastry, sheltered from the rainstorm at his local cafe near the Port Authority. "But it's a very serious piece. The goal is not only to entertain but to (let the audience) actually see the culture they're participating in."

The interactive performance gets its serious intent from "a couple of ideas I nicked from" John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West." One of these notions is distilled in the Cleveland text as "the conformity that passes for individualism."

The basis for all three works is a series of song cycles Rouse composes in a mode that Village Voice music critic/composer Kyle Gann calls his "simulation of normalcy, his suave rock surface, which when you listen to it, is highly structured via unusual rhythmic devices."

Rouse, speaking in a steady, stimulating stream of ideas and experiences, refers to his musical output (running to a discography of 25 titles) as being "very interested in structure, but also very interested in embracing the vernacular."

A native of a small town near St. Louis, Mo. that was lacking in cultural attractions, Rouse enjoyed a classical composer/musician's training at Kansas City Art Institute and the Conservatory of Music at the University of Missouri. Landing in New York City at an artistically fertile moment in 1978, Rouse applied his wide-ranging intellect and imagination to music, dance and theatre projects that juxtapose high art structures and lowdown pop culture content. (A clue to his creative wanderlust: as a teen, he ran away to join a carnival.)

In the course of a prolific career, he has invented forms such as "counterpoetry," the basis of the first opera Failing Kansas, which premiered at The Kitchen in 1995. Inspired by materials relating to Truman Capote's writing of In Cold Blood, Rouse began work in 1989 on a one-man show. Live vocals respond to prerecorded, multi-tracked voices, including his own. "It feels like you're inside the heads of the characters, but you don't always know which ones."

Failing Kansas is remounted Friday at Factory Theatre.

Rouse's third work of "opera verite," The End of Cinematics, opening Thursday, was sparked by reading two Susan Sontag essays on the death of formal cinema with the onset of a fragmentary, constantly bombarding form of moving image exemplified in TV commercials, music video, YouTube. With Cinematics, which premiered in 2005, the artist lodged himself in the labs at the National Supercomputing Center where he was given "a toybox" of tools to work with.

The resulting show creates an environment to lull the audience into a state akin to watching a conventional movie, but then the fun begins. The End of Cinematics is a live 3D phantasmagoria of sound, images and live action that lifts the movie-watching experience to a level beyond IMAX. Using a film he made of him and his wife, Canadian dancer Lisa Boudreau, walking in Paris, Rouse digitally removed the people in the celluloid story and posed real actors in front of them, thereby merging live and film.

"It is playing with time in the way film can do but in a much more surreal musical and numerical way," says Rouse. He hopes Cinematics will provoke a watcher to question the global stranglehold that Hollywood has on cultural production.

"I provided one solution. Not the solution," he says of his powerful critique/composition aimed at returning the means of artistic production into the hands of the individual. "New concepts happen."

Expect to see Ralston Saul and Adrienne Clarkson, whom he counts as good friends, in an audience eager for immersion in Rouse's surreal world.


LUMINATO: FESTIVAL OF ARTS + CREATIVITY 2008: OPERA

Dennis Cleveland has left the building
Mikel Rouse's acclaimed opera left him in five-figure debt. A decade later, it'll have a final hurrah in Toronto. Simon Houpt reports SIMON HOUPT JUNE 7, 2008

NEW YORK -- Mikel Rouse didn't single-handedly cause the collapse of the subprime credit market in the U.S. economy, but he did his part. This is how it happened: In the late summer of 1996, Rouse was getting his dystopic pop opera Dennis Cleveland on its feet at the downtown performance space The Kitchen when he was informed that some promised funding had fallen through. He'd already spent $20,000 (U.S.) of his own money developing the show, and if he didn't find more cash, it would never get onstage. He figured: in for a penny, in for a pound. And back then, credit-card offers were arriving in the mail multiple times a week.

"First of all, they should never have given a credit card to someone like me," he said with a wry chuckle the other day, sitting in the back room of a Hell's Kitchen bakery near his Manhattan apartment. "That's my excuse. They were giving them out like it was candy."

Rouse, a wiry Missouri-born transplant who is 51 but looks a decade younger, possesses the fervour of an evangelical preacher and the restless mind of a polymath. "I was really nervous, but I thought: I can probably do this. I believe in the work, I think it'll be okay," he explained.

Though Dennis Cleveland earned a few strong reviews and great word of mouth among the downtown crowd - it is said to be the only show in The Kitchen's three decades ever to attract scalpers - administrative issues prevented an extension past its scheduled five-night run. For years, Rouse (whose first name is pronounced Michael) struggled under mounting debt to breathe new life into the piece, a multimedia critique of the trash television genre (Geraldo, Maury, The Jerry Springer Show) then littering the afternoon landscape.

Three years later, just as his Dennis Cleveland-related debts were hitting about $70,000 and he was defaulting regularly on the interest payments, a sophomore five-night staging in Los Angeles brought him another raft of strong reviews - The Los Angeles Times said the work pointed the way toward a bright future for American opera - and the attention of an agent. By 2004, he had finally paid back the principal of his debt (even if most of the interest had to be forgiven).

By most accounts, Dennis Cleveland is a bracing experience: As the eponymous TV host and ringleader (played by Rouse) prods four dysfunctional couples to spill their secrets, actors planted in the audience jump up and over-share as well; their images, captured by a pair of TV cameras, are projected on large video screens. Two other people hold up cue cards urging the "studio audience" to applaud, just as in a real TV taping.

"It is absolutely all-encompassing - music, sound, video, and environment - which is why the pieces were called operas. It wasn't to be pretentious, that was the term that made sense, in terms of using all the forces that are available right now in this time period," Rouse said. "If there's a piece made by somebody my age that is as innovative as Dennis Cleveland that doesn't deserve to be called opera, then I welcome somebody to tell me what it should be called - because, let me tell you something, I'd do a lot better in ticket sales if they weren't called operas."

In developing the show, Rouse attended a number of real talk shows. "I wanted to get the feel of what it felt like to be in it. I didn't want to make an artsy-fartsy piece. If I had a string quartet in it, it wouldn't work," he said. "There were shows on at that time like The Richard Bey Show out of New Jersey - strange shows. This guy did something called the 'Wheel of Torture.' If you were cheating on your lover, you were put on the Wheel of Torture and she got to spin it and throw food on you. And I thought, the only difference between this and [the chocolate-smearing performance artist] Karen Finley is that she plays for 200 people a night at The Kitchen and this is going on TV. For better or for worse."

Today, Rouse begins what might be Dennis Cleveland's triumphal last stand when the show unfurls at the Toronto Film School as part of Luminato; more than 15 years after hatching the idea, Rouse is ready to bid it adieu. He will perform it a total of three times in Toronto, along with the other two pieces in a loosely connected trilogy of operas that take a cold look at the state of American culture: Failing Kansas (1995) a solo work based on the 1959 Clutter family murders at the centre of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood; and The End of Cinematics, a film-based multimedia piece inspired by Susan Sontag and Jean-Luc Godard, originally staged in 2005. (One of Luminato's busiest figures, Rouse will also participate in a panel discussion ..ring the boundaries between disciplines - he is, after all, a composer, filmmaker, actor, singer, musician and director - and perform two numbers at the Canadian Songbook celebration at Massey Hall.)

Though Rouse has never played Toronto before, his visit to Luminato will in some ways represent a coming home. His wife, Lisa Boudreau, was born in North Bay, Ont., and trained with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet before moving to New York and landing a spot with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, where she danced for 14 years. (She just left the troupe.) And Rouse was greatly influenced in the creation of Dennis Cleveland by John Ralston Saul's dissection of Western civilization's dependence on reason, Voltaire's Bastards; he has become good friends with Saul and his wife, former governorgeneral Adrienne Clarkson.

Listening to the music for any of the three pieces - it can be sampled at his website MikelRouse.com - brings comparisons to Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich and occasionally Talking Heads, though Rouse's love of complex rhythmic patterns far exceeds them all. But music is just a part of what he does: His pieces also build a hypnotic effect through their non-narrative approach and the use of surreal film images. If Rouse hasn't achieved the success of those other artists, he suggests the fault may lie in part on critics' inability to grasp - or even describe - his work.

Furthermore, he argues, in their totality his pieces are unlike anything else out there. "I always think about people like Merce Cunningham and John Cage: You're not gonna make a school after me. It's not like, oh, that's a great idea, let's go and do a slight variation on that. But at the same time, my biggest influences when I was in school were Jasper Johns, Bob Rauschenberg, Cage and Cunningham," he says. "Bob Rauschenberg, rest his soul, once said, 'No one else wanted to do what we were doing, so there was no competition.' It's a pretty interesting way to think about the world."

Rouse's pieces certainly unsettle audiences' preconceptions. During Dennis Cleveland, the house lights are never lowered, reinforcing the lack of separation between ticket holders and cast members. Though The End of Cinematics is playing at the St. Lawrence Centre's Bluma Appel Theatre, popcorn and other movie-house snacks will be sold. And Cinematics begins with more than 10 minutes of trailers for current Hollywood movies. "It's all about corporate entertainment, and God bless the corporations," Rouse says with a laugh. "They've never let me down: Every time, from the very beginning, there was a new Batman that went along with it. So of course now we have a new Batman trailer, we have the new Hulk trailer."

Cinematics is perhaps the most perceptually unsettling piece: It deploys six rear-projection screens displaying a non-linear series of prerecorded scenes, a scrim four metres in front of that and live actors placed in between, whose live images are projected on the front scrim. The actors mimic, in costume and action, much of the filmed scenes projected on the back screen. The result is vertiginous.

"Remember the story about the [first] people to see a film and a train was coming at them and they ran out of the theatre?" Rouse asks. "I know it's hard to believe, but there are people who come to this show, I'll see them afterwards, and they'll say, 'You're telling me there were live performers onstage?'

"One of my favourite comments ever was, 'It's like a moving Rauschenberg.' And I thought, that's it! I don't care whether it's an opera or not. Whatever it is, it's an art piece, and I'm happy with it."

Rouse at the fest
If there is an It Boy of this year's Luminato festival, surely it is Mikel Rouse.

THE CANADIAN SONGBOOK



Mikel Rouse, the New Yorker whose trilogy of chamber operas is running in rep all through Luminato, provided one of the high points with an unforgettably wonderful performance of Neil Young's "Harvest Moon."

-June 11, 2008 MARTIN KNELMAN, The STAR

Alex Cuba, Mikel Rouse, Nikki Yanofsky, Karen David and Ron Sexsmith were all particularly strong.

-JAMES BRADSHAW JUNE 11, 2008, The Globe and Mail

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.