Re-Creating Magic: Krazy Kat and The Toy Box

New Photographs

2010-04-01T18:44:16Z

Below we have some fantastic photos from dress rehearsal! Check them out after the jump!

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Thoughts from Rebecca

2010-04-01T18:43:03Z

Over the last few weeks, Rebecca has been responding to questions posted as comments on this blog. Below, I’ve excerpted some of these responses into an entry. Read on!

…There have been many staging’s of Debussy’s Toy Box, some we know more about than others, but it was clear to me early in the process that the lack of documentation would shift this project out of the realm of recreation and towards an original choreography. There were several productions between 1920-1925, (student Pilar Castro-Kiltz is writing her departmental thesis on the history of these productions) but none have substantial choreographic notes, recordings about the creative process, or drawings of any specific steps to gather a sense of style, action, or gesture. It was necessary for me to focus on the inspiration of the materials, the artistic goals, the impulse to create this work, and at the heart of the work was a desire to make a dance for children. From here I imagined creating a play space with the students where they could be transformed and engrossed in a sense of discovery.

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The narrative written by Hellé was not a nuance or fully fleshed out story the way a good play is, with subtext, multiple layers, and driving plot. Before deciding what to do with the narrative itself, I sat down with Simon Morrison and listened to the score over and over. As he described the piece, articulating each of the quotes within the score, I found it had the attention span of a child, extremely focused for short periods of time and able to switch play things quickly. This pastiche, patchwork aspect of the score became a more inspiring starting place for me than the narrative, I wanted to go to the dancers and designers with a question. What would a play space be? Who would be there? What would happen when they were there?

What makes it contemporary? The students themselves. Their bodies move in ways unseen, unknowable in 1920s, from the change in attire, the women’s movement, the evolution of dance performance and training, these students presence infuses the work within the time it lives. I looked to the toys that are common cultural artifacts, and images/ideas/movements that have become part of my students' cultural language. I set the cast into clusters of characters: we have the dolls, the lizards/gorillas, the police, the toys. These separations have basis in the Hellé narrative, but then move to incorporate broader constructs of similar frames. The police draw movement inspiration from sources as varied as Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks, Laurel and Hardy's The Passenger, Charlie Chaplin's Table Ballet, Toy Soldiers, Conductors etc. Because these movement ideas are part of a larger cultural knowledge the work becomes contemporary in its drawing from a pool of influences that span decades. Similar to how Debussy in the score arranges his play things, the quotes from himself and other composers because the content of his play.

The choreography is also greatly influenced by the costume and set design. We agreed early on that we were interested in working with the archetypes of toys, play and wanted to have the ability to allow the toys to be the costumes and vice versa. Drawing inspiration from Oscar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet from 1927, where balls, rings, bells, were used to transform the body, images from children's books both old and contemporary ( from the Helle to Ezra Jack Keat's Snowy Day), and children toys (primary colors of blocks, tubes, rings), Anita designed creations that we could remove and rebuild in multiple ways. Once we had the costume/toy pieces we began the choreographic process again, adjusting, developing changing to take full advantage of our newest possibilities. The set is also greatly influenced by the need to house the orchestra and to create a single vision for an eclectic evening. I will leave the rest to surprise... What is gained is the coming together of Anita, Roberto, the dancers, the orchestra, and creating something new. What is lost? ... hard to know....the past, but with dance it almost always is!

Exclusive Historical Tidbit!

2010-03-28T00:03:44Z

Here is some fabulous material for Krazy Kat, from Michael Tisserand, the authorized biographer of George Herriman, who created the Krazy Kat comic strip. Enjoy!

“SLIP ME A LITTLE INFORMATION ON WHAT YOU WANT ME TO DO OPERA BALLETS AND I ARE TOTAL STRANGERS HELP.”

This was, in part, the text of a November 1920 telegram that cartoonist George Herriman sent to composer John Carpenter, as Carpenter was securing rights to transform Herriman’s masterpiece comic strip “Krazy Kat” into a jazz ballet, which would be staged at The Town Hall in New York City in January, 1922.

]]> Early cartoonists were often a rowdy lot that usually went in for boxing over ballet. But Herriman, who had received a classical education and had even written theater reviews in his early newspaper years, knew more about opera, ballet and other highbrow pursuits than he let on. So it’s no surprise that Carpenter turned to Herriman to collaborate on the production. The program for “Krazy Kat: A Jazz Pantomime” credits Herriman for the scenario, as well as for scenery and costumes.
Herriman and Carpenter had been in contact at least since 1917 , when Herriman sent an original comic drawing as a gift to Carpenter’s daughter, Genevieve. In an undated letter to Genevieve probably sent in the early 1940s, Herriman fondly recalled a musical evening with the Carpenters as they were developing the ballet.

“In your Chicago home one evening your Father was going over this music - on the piano,” he wrote (with his typically idiosyncratic use of capitalization and punctuation). “- and his sound effects of the winds - all vocal, was amazing - The way he Bassooned - pump-horned, & saxophoned would have made the Mills Brothers all go out and get whooping cough - and that’s what a really fine man of music - gets when he attempts to raise a strip cartoonist to his level - I do hope your amiable father has lived it down -- and will you please tell him that I still cherish the honor that he did me -----”
Carpenter also cherished the collaboration and maintained a lifelong friendship with the cartoonist. In 1944, Carpenter learned that a production of Krazy Kat was being staged in California -- on ice. He wrote Adolph Bolm, who staged the Town Hall production and danced the role of Krazy Kat, suggesting he look up Herriman and attend the performance. Then Carpenter shortly sent a second letter to Bolm.

“Just before receiving your letter I had the sad news of the death of our beloved friend George Herriman,” Carpenter wrote. “He was such a lovely little man and certainly one of the most interesting creative artists that this country has managed to produce.”

AUTHOR BIO New Orleans writer Michael Tisserand is currently completing a biography of George Herriman for HarperCollins.

Helle Exhibit at Cotsen Children's Library

2010-03-24T20:55:19Z

Here's a link to the poster for the Helle exhibit at the Cotsen Children's Library at Firestone! You should stop by!

Toy Theater-poster(rev3).pdf

First Rehearsal on Stage!

2010-03-19T16:35:37Z

Hanging out at the Berlind Theater and Rebecca has her cast all onstage! It's so exciting to see it all really starting to come together!

The Creative Process: Some Personal Reflections

2010-02-26T22:31:41Z

Watching "Toy Box" begin to come together has been an absolutely fascinating experience. In a rehearsal room, I'm used to being the dancer or the choreographer, the creator or the created-upon. These days, I'm more observer. That's not to say, of course, that I don't ever participate, I do, but it's more tangentially than usual--I'll spot a lift, suggest a solution, annotate a score. I'm not an active participant in the same way that I am when I'm choreographing or dancing.

But this kind of distance has really allowed me to see this project from many angles--perhaps more so than I could have as either dancer or choreographer. Because Rebecca has assigned each of the students to create some of the choreographic material and vocabulary, the rehearsal room is always bustling with creative energy and insight that I get to watch happen. I'm beginning to see how the lizard dance will morph into the ballerina dance into the policeman dance.

]]> I've also had the pleasure of playing with the score. My copy is marked up with numbers and writing: Pilar's annotations about past productions, notes on Prof. Morrison's lectures about the musical games in the score, my notes about how the page numbers correspond to seconds on a CD, Rebecca's notes about what phrase will fit in where and how her narrative arc relates to the music. It's become a sort of archive of all the different influences and ideas that are coalescing into this new creative work.

A 25 minute improvisation on Wednesday provided the impetus for a lot of new material today and I'm so excited to see what the dancers and Rebecca will do with it all. This project is definitely beginning to come together and I'll keep all of you out there posted on its progress!

On the Music (and Musical Borrowings) of The Toy Box

2010-02-23T20:37:46Z

Besides an homage to childhood, Debussy’s The Toy Box also seems to be a tribute to the works, and composers, that inspired him. The score is, in short, a collection of his favorite musical toys.

Most of the scholarship on the ballet concerns its presumed – and I use that word deliberately – fidelity to Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Robert Orledge suggests numerous references to Stravinsky’s score, the most significant, in his view, being a passage near the start of the score. A chain of chromatic thirds in Debussy’s prelude seemingly recalls the entrance of the ballerina in scene 2 of Stravinsky’s ballet. Moreover, in The Toy Box Punchinello is represented by a theme comprising alternating seconds; a comparison can perhaps be made to the alternating seconds representing the ghost of Petrushka, except that Debussy sticks to major seconds, while Stravinsky alternates major and minor. The two scores share the octatonic scale, although Stravinsky relies on it more heavily than Debussy, and there are some common instrumental choices (for example, snare drum rolls mark the transition between scenes). Yet the references to Petrushka, such as they are, mingle with echoes of other Stravinsky works, notably The Firebird and The Rite of Spring. Ultimately, Debussy proves too subtle a composer for musicological games of gotcha: he resists directly quoting Stravinsky’s melodies and harmonies. Instead he alludes to much more elusive things: the texture (thickness or thinness) of Stravinsky’s scoring in certain passages; the instrumental combinations he prefers; the registers within which real and invented snatches of folksong fall.

]]> Debussy was a French Symbolist composer seeking to recreate a child’s sense of enchantment; remember that he conceived The Toy Box for his tragically short-lived daughter Emma (affectionately nicknamed ChouChou). He does not parody Stravinsky. Indeed within the ballet, parodies are frowned upon. In scene 4, the marionette children’s performance of the polka displeases their marionette parents for the simple reason that it is comical, an impish satire of a proper polka. Scene 1 finds an English wooden soldier in blackface performing a cakewalk. The music is foursquare and feeble, completely unidiomatic. The character tries to mock an African-American dance, but mocks himself instead.

Rephrasing the point, we might say that the correspondences between Petrushka and The Toy Box are atmospheric, ephemeral. Perhaps Debussy wanted to show that French puppets are different from Russian puppets – kinder, gentler. (To wit, one surviving photograph of The Toy Box finds Punchinello choosing wine over vodka.) Perhaps Debussy wanted his references to be themselves like toys: What, he might have wondered, would be a cardboard cutout of a folksong? How would it sound? How to miniaturize a leitmotif? Debussy’s task, in essence, was to distance his borrowings, to preserve their faint outlines rather than their actual contents. Here we have the musical equivalent of Didier Maleuvre’s fabulous definition of a toy as “an object from the hic et nunc [here and now] of empirical experience – an object removed into the distance of its own image.” This is exactly the nature of Debussy’s references to Stravinsky: they are distant sonic images.

The Toy Box offers small-scale reproductions of passages from Petrushka, like the delicate furniture in a dollhouse rightly sized for a young girl’s hands. At the same time, however, it greatly expands Stravinsky’s soundscape, effectively universalizing it. Children, after all, have more vivid imaginations than adults. Debussy’s network of allusions proves richer than his rival’s; the eminent French composer displays all of his creative devices, pulls out every toy in his musical chest. Stravinsky’s bricolage of folksong borrowings becomes, in Debussy’s hands, a cluster of gentle-spirited references to French, German, and Russian masterpieces. When the soldier declares himself to the doll, he quotes the reunion music from scene 3 of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe; they kiss to tolling bells that echo Felix Mendelssohn’s famous Wedding March. The battle scene evokes Gounod’s Faust, and the episode of the soldier’s wounding refers to the opening of act 3 of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.

As Jose Martin’s first noted in a 1985 article, there are also a plethora of allusions to Musorgsky’s Pictures of an Exhibition. This makes perfect sense. If each scene in The Toy Box pops up like a page in storybook, what better to quote than a composition that tours a portrait gallery? Debussy cites several passages from Musorgsky’s score, although he pointedly avoids invoking the music of the promenade, perhaps to avoid the banal.

My sense is that Debussy would have frowned upon any attempt to identify his quotations (my own included) or catalogue the goods in this boutique-like score. Such mundane exercises, he might have protested, drain the magic from the music. And so here we might recall the French Symbolist writer Charles Baudelaire’s essay “A Philosophy of Toys.” Baudelaire argues that toys are children’s first exposure to art, to the powers of enchantment. Disenchantment, or melancholia, descends when the child, succumbing to morbid curiosity, tears the toy apart seeking to perceive its soul, only to confront an absence.

Official Poster for Table's Clear, Krazy Kat, the Toy Box

2010-02-10T00:26:48Z

tbkctc_posterfinal[1].pdf

Creative Ideas from Krazy Kat

2010-02-10T00:22:04Z

Tracy, the director of Krazy Kat, sent along some of the ideas that she has expressed to her class. Take a look after the jump!

]]> In Tracy's own words:

what i am about to describe is merely the conceptual framing device; i am not including the thematic and narrative threads nor the answer to the big question: why is the exploration of these characters important today? these are all the things we will be working on together in class. but here are a few little clues that may help guide your imagination until we meet in the spring.

essentially, i am creating a kind of window into a world where regular people, often strangers, are some how stuck together. For example, a doctor's waiting room, in a long line for something important, on a subway (this is my favorite). so the window we are looking into is this kind of contemporary, temporary purgatory, and inside this we get to know a few very interesting people, with all their quirks and quibbles. however, this is not where the magnifying glass stops; through the convention of either falling asleep or very active daydreaming, we then look through the window of the mind of one in particular--most likely the person that becomes krazy kat. this character reveals (her) rich and perhaps absurd inner life as her imagination manipulates the people around (her) to become the characters in krazy kat. its like when your dreams alter your life's events and people into something fictional, unrecognizable and yet when you wake up, you know there is facsimile to something in your waking life. so we are alternating interchangeably between "real life waiting room" and the strange arizona-esque moon landscape of the the cartoon. (in the future we may just call that the dream-scape).

there are 5 specific characters listed in the ballet: krazy kat, ignatz mouse, offisa pup, bill poster, & joe stark. the first 3 will certainly be used, the other 2 are dependent on story and there are many more fascinating characters in herriman's comic from which we can pull. so we are certainly not limited; some of you may play multiple "fantasy" characters, depending on what our story evolves into. the fun will be in creating a real character that when distorted becomes the herriman character.

Three Minutes

2010-02-10T00:19:44Z

The work started for real last week in Rebecca’s DAN 409 class. As of this Monday, we have a whole three minutes of the piece put together and lots more on the way! Students have each been given assignments to begin generating material while Rebecca works on the overall structure. The assignments have been based on different types of toys in a toy box: dolls, soldiers, stuffed animals, bouncy balls, and all other sorts of things that inspire children’s imaginations. We’ve also been looking at lots of youtube clips for inspiration! Hopefully we’ll get an update soon from Krazy Kat and the musicians!

"An Evening of Enchantment": The Beginning

2010-02-04T00:15:25Z

And so we’ve begun! Monday, February 1, 2010 marked the first day of rehearsals for the project(s) that will ultimately result in “An Evening of Enchantment” at the Berlind Theater in April. All the collaborators are excited and ready to go and I’m excited to get this blog off the ground and start documenting the process.

Given that you’ve made it over to our site, you may know what this project is all about but in case you don’t, here’s a little background:

“An Evening of Enchantment” will showcase three dance/theater premieres, “Table’s Clear,” “Krazy Kat,” and “The Toy Box.” Each focuses on themes of childhood and enchantment, but “Krazy Kat” and “The Toy Box” are also directly influenced by the jazz age and culture.

“Table’s Clear,” a musical work by Professor Paul Lansky, will be choreographed by Princeton dance faculty member Tina Fehlandt, a former dancer with the Mark Morris Dance Group, on three Princeton alumni, Julie Rubinger ’09, Jennie Scholick ’09 (me!), and Elizabeth Schwall ’09. This work will open the evening of performances.

“Krazy Kat” will be created by Tracy Bersley as a part of THR 311: Creating Character and Text. The music will be played live by the students of MUS 320: Jazz Performance Practice in Historical and Cultural Context, taught by Simon Morrison and Anthony Branker. “Krazy Kat” by John Carpenter was the first example of jazz music being treated as high art—a topic that I hope Professor Morrison will later discuss in this blog. We also hope in later weeks to have Prof. Bersley, her students, and the students of MUS 320 write for this blog to share their personal artistic and creative reflections and processes.

]]> The students in MUS 320 will also be playing for “The Toy Box” as created by dance faculty member Rebecca Lazier in DAN 409. “The Toy Box” was one of Debussy’s last works, composed in 1913 for his daughter Chou-Chou based on a script by André Helle. It was thought that it was incomplete when Debussy died and was later orchestrated by a student but recently Prof. Morrison found a previously unknown version of the score in a Russian archive. This version had been orchestrated by Debussy and included a jazz overture. This composition has never been heard and will be performed for the first time in the Berlind on April 8. Prof. Morrison can better explain the intricate and clever workings of the score than I, and I’m sure he will do so soon. What I can say, however, is that Rebecca’s interpretation will be quite different from any earlier production. She’s starting with a new story, a new movement style, and, essentially, new music, so we’re all excited to see what happens!

It would probably also be good to name some of the key players in this whole process:

Simon Morrison is a Professor in the Department of Music and the Project Coordinator for both “Krazy Kat” and “The Toy Box.” For more info on other projects he’s spearheaded, check out his Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Morrison

Tracy Bersley is the Director of “Krazy Kat” and a lecturer in the Program in Theater. Her bio can be found here: http://www.princeton.edu/arts/arts_at_princeton/theater/professor_bios/bersley/

Rebecca Lazier is the Director/Choreographer of “The Toy Box,” a Senior Lecturer in the Program in Dance, and the Artistic Director of Terrain. Her bio can be found here: http://www.princeton.edu/arts/arts_at_princeton/dance/professor_bios/lazier/index.xml

Anthony Branker is the Conductor for “Krazy Kat” and “The Toy Box,” a Senior Lecturer in Music, and Conductor of University Jazz Ensembles at Princeton University. His bio can be found here: http://www.princeton.edu/~puje/conductor.htm

Pilar Castro Kiltz is a Music concentrator with certificates in Theater and Dance who is writing her thesis on “The Toy Box.” She’s acting as the Dramaturge on the project and giving us lots of insight into past productions of the work.

And I’m Jennie Scholick, a 2009 graduate of Princeton University, and the “Assistant” on the Toy Box project. I got involved thanks to Prof. Morrison and Rebecca who were two of my mentors and thesis advisors while I was a student at Princeton. Although I now work at the McCarter Theatre (in fact, my office is directly below the stage on which these pieces will be performed), I’ve been lucky enough to have been asked to stay involved in this “on campus” project. I’ll be maintaining this blog and updating from the “Toy Box” side of things.

We’re looking forward to you joining us on this journey and hope that this blog will allow our audience a little insight into the creative process. Up next, the first rehearsals!

We Start Creating on Monday!

2010-01-29T22:48:05Z