Saturday, July 30, 2016

Lists

I love love lists: the authors who have written about whales in Moby Dick's Cetology chapter, the f*cked-up misogynist's library in Darconville's Cat. Joyce is chock full of them, and there is Joan Didion's packing list from the White Album. But for absolute richness of tongue-loving collisional beauty, it's hard to beat those in Kharms. I loved setting them, I love hearing them song or recited, and the phrases connect to so much of my life: the Song of the Sirens, small smooth-haired canines, artworks without theoretical foundations, the lack of persuasiveness of mathematical proofs, a perfect sound.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

UKSUS 2016 announced!

UKSUS

Aug 30
Tue 8pm
   Aug 31
Wed 8pm
Sep 3
 Sat 8pm
Sep 4
 Sun 2pm
Oakland Metro Operahouse, 522 2nd Street, Oakland CA
TICKETS: UKSUS.ORG

Directed by Jim Cave • Conductor Bryan Nies
Design Lynne Rutter

Starring 
Timur Bekbosunov • Laura Bohn • Nikola Printz
Bob Ernst • Roham Sheikhani

accompanied by the orchestra
Beth Custer • Rob Wilkins • Joel Davel • Diana Strong
John Schott • Ela Polak • Lisa Mezzacappa
.

 
A phantasmagoria of delights, the music jazzy, racous, but bitterly sweet,UKSUS is the latest by Erling Wold, composer of Certitude and Joy, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the VeilQueer, and Mordake. 

UKSUS is an autobiography of Daniil Kharms and the OBERIU in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, a narrative told through their stories and brief lives, as the OBERIU - The Association for Real Art - maintained their love of words and nonsensical art to their deaths in Stalin’s Great Purge, Kharms starving to death in a psychiatric hospital in 1942 after his arrest at the hands of the NKVD.

Kharms was known for decades in Russia as a writer of books for children, even though he hated children and imagined their painful deaths, until his adult works, secreted away by a friend, were rediscovered and reclaimed by a new generation of troublemaker artists who have run afoul of the authorities. Pussy Riot claimed the OBERIU poets, saying they "remained artists until the end, inexplicable and incomprehensible, and the librettists, artistic descendents of the group, met working in the Moscow theater of Kirill Ganin, who himself was arrested for artistic hooliganism.

Oakland Metro Operahouse is about a 20 minute walk from the 12th Street BART station, and there's a lovely parking garage just across the street.

Other questions: uksus@erlingwold.org 


       
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