gold99 casino login
online slots Review: The Miraculous Simplicity of Patti Smith’s Childhood
“Woolgathering” is a slim collection of prose poems that Patti Smith, the singer-songwriter and punk pioneer, published in 1992. It’s mostly a memoir of childhood — of a poet’s childhood, or of the way that all children have a poet’s imagination. “The mind of a child,” she writes, “is like a kiss on the forehead — open and disinterested.” It is “mystified by the commonplace” and “moves effortlessly into the strangeonline slots,” glimpsing and gleaning, “piecing together a crazy quilt of truths.”
The musician Oliver Tompkins Ray has adapted “Woolgathering” into what he calls a spoken-word opera, which had its premiere at Baryshnikov Arts Center this week. Smith recites selections from the text, accompanied by Ray’s partly live music and choreography by John Heginbotham.
Smith sits on a chair in the middle of the stage, calmly reading from a music stand, backed by a clothesline with one white sheet clamped to it. Two dancers from Dance Heginbotham move around her while Ray, on acoustic guitar and electronics, sits at one side, joined by a violinist and a pedal steel guitarist. There’s also a surprise guest.
Although the production was conceived and directed by Ray, the score is its least attention-attracting feature. Apart from a brief and incongruous bit of drum machine, it’s largely mood-setting background music, heavy on drones and bells over which the violinist, Cornelius Dufallo, sometimes plays sparse lines.
Smith’s childhood memories are rural. When she recalls a barn dance, Ray provides a muted echo of a reel or hoedown, sweetened with Connor Gallaher’s pedal steel. When she speaks of the music of the woolgatherers — spirits she senses in a field — Ray supplies a rather bare field of sound.
There’s much more action in the dance. Mykel Marai Nairne and the veteran dancer Gerald Casel are beautifully delicate and graceful movers, and Heginbotham gives them simple motifs that find their own form while relating subtly to images in Smith’s text. Tender gestures like touching foreheads suggest the “communion of love of innocence” among Smith and her siblings. Casel and Nairne walk toward us, he behind her, peeking out in a pendulum motion.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.online slots