Derek DelGaudio uses "magic, moments of wonder and mystery" in his hit stage show, “In & Of Itself"; the opera “Anatomy Theater" explores the nature of evil on a visceral level; a new initiative from the Berklee College of Music seeks to resolve compensation issues between musicians, streaming services and record labels.
Derek DelGaudio blurs the line between artist and magician
In Las Vegas, it’s as easy to take in a big magic show as it is to lose big money at the casino.
The most popular acts include Penn & Teller, David Copperfield, and Criss Angel. Magic is even dominating the box office with “Now You See Me 2,” which opened to good box office returns this past weekend.
Now, magic takes center stage at the Geffen Playhouse. Derek DelGaudio’s “In & Of Itself” is dedicated to the most intimate aspects of illusion and sleight of hand.
Like a lot of performers doing so-called "close-up" magic, DelGaudio works in front of only about 100 people, and this intimacy actually makes his illusions more amazing. But “In & Of Itself” is as much a piece of theater as it is a magic show. The director is the filmmaker and muppeteer Frank Oz, best known for his work with Jim Henson. And the show is filled with stories about DelGaudio’s childhood, a legend of a man who cheated death playing Russian Roulette.
The Frame's John Horn spoke to DelGaudio on the Geffen stage about the intimacy of the performance, what he's trying to achieve with "In & Of Itself," and the importance of magic in the art world.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
You start your show not with a magic trick, but with a disclaimer to the audience. Why is that?
I start with a disclaimer that what you about to see and hear — I understand that because of the context of being in a theater and under some lights, I'm a performer, I'm a magician — I realize that you're more inclined to not believe the things that happen in this room, but I implore you to please do because they're true.
Meaning that the audience, when they walk into any theater or a theater where someone is doing illusions, is going to be skeptical of everything they see and hear?
Correct. Instead of having that work against me, I've tried to have that work for me. One of the things that happens in this show is everything starts from a place of truth, and then a sort of an illusion is created around that and the illusion erodes. What you're left is the truth, which is more confounding in a way, because you're left with an enigma that's true as opposed to an illusion that's a lie.
Do you think there are two different ways that people tend to watch somebody like yourself — people who surrender and people who remain skeptical? Is there a blurring between the two — people trying to figure it out as it goes by, and people who give up that process?
Yeah, especially in today's society where information is so accessible and knowing something is a click away. Society tends to be a little more skeptical, a little more intellectual when it comes to a magic show, unless it lands more on the emotional side. I think the people who just want to go and have fun are generally there for an intellectual challenge.
For me, I have no interest in fooling people, but I have an interest in creating a space for their imagination and a space for them to think about new ideas. I try to use magic and moments of wonder and mystery to create that space for people to have an experience, to reflect on something that they didn't know they were going to think about.
I want to talk about the space we're in and how intimate it is. We're sitting in the front row. To the beginning of the stage, it's maybe three-and-a-half feet. The stage itself is maybe 15 feet deep, the house is a little more than a hundred seats. There's a closeness and a proximity from audience to performer that is really tight. I suspect that's important to you, to the show itself, and the way in which audiences see what you're doing and the way you see the audience?
Yeah, it's necessary in terms of the function of the show. They have to be able to see what's happening to experience it, and that creates an intimate environment for everything. The fact that people can see if I'm holding something in my hand — I can just show it to them and they don't need to have the people in the front row vouch for people in the back row. So it's important aesthetically, but it's also important in terms of this show, [which] is very confrontational. Being in the room with a performer who can look you in the eye is a connection that you don't normally get.
You mean there's no place to hide.
There's no place to hide in this room and it's very important, especially with what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to say something and I realize that you're already there to maybe ruin it for yourself in terms of trying to figure it out, or understand it when really that's not what the experience is about.
I need to be able to see the room to know where people's minds are at, because I can tell if their eyes are wandering or if they're getting bored and looking at their feet, or if they're talking to the person next to them about what they think is coming or what just happened. Those are all important things to keep the energy in the room flowing in the right direction.
Do you think the idea of a magician as an artist is something that the broader culture doesn't get?
I think there is a fundamental difference between someone who is clearly involved in service entertainment and an artist who is trying to say something and make new things.
Who would you put on that list?
Aside from the obvious, Teller is an artist, Ricky Jay is an artist, René Lavand, who passed away recently, is an artist. David Blaine is absolutely an artist and he's a perfect example of someone who society doesn't really allow to be framed as an artist because he doesn't bother with the rhetoric that goes with most performance art. David Blaine, if he had a curatorial team behind him telling him what to say, would be the greatest performance artist alive.
David does things like standing on a block of ice for three days. Someone like [artist] Chris Burden, that would have been his entire career. [Blaine would] be buried alive, he has people shoot him in the face with real guns. That's performance art, but he doesn't bother with framing it that way because he just does. He doesn't seem to care about being involved in the art world, he just likes doing what he does.
That's what this show is about. The show is about being labeled as a thing and then not being able to be anything other than that thing. The people who I think are incredible are the people who transcend a thing.
If you could be a fly on the wall after the show, and people are talking about their experience, what would be the most gratifying things that you could hear as they leave the theater?
I can't say what would be gratifying for what they would say, but I can say what would be gratifying to not hear. If I heard a room full of people talking about the show and they were not discussing or speculating on how things worked, but what the show meant — that would be gratifying for me. If they were talking about the ideas and what it made them feel and the experience and what this show means, I've done my job.
Where I think I failed is if they leave the show asking the question, How did he do that? Or, I think he did this or that. Then I still have a ways to go.
But you're talking about a divide between cynicism and wonder, about people wanting to be blown away and people wanting to find holes in something. That's the age in which we live. How do you think magic fits into that conversation?
I think it's a time for us to rethink what magic's purpose is in society. Magic's purpose used to be to evoke a sense of what's possible. And the unknown and magicians were so far ahead of technology that they were able to live on their secrets, and [the] technologies they were using against people that they just weren't aware of — advancements in technology and the invention of film. Now, it's impossible for even the heads of technology to keep up with what's new in this world and there's no such thing as secrets, in a sense.
So I think the way that a magician functions and what they think magic is for, they need to rethink it a little bit and it needs to be more metaphoric and more about what magic means about the whole. As opposed to the occult, or the unknown, or the cliché of [making] you think that anything is possible. We now have a better idea of what's possible and what's not possible in this world, and we don't need magicians to show us how far we can reach.
“In & Of Itself” is at the Geffen Playhouse through July 24.
'Anatomy Theater': a new opera that explores the nature of evil
People die in opera all the time. But once they’re dead, they usually stop singing. That’s not the case in “Anatomy Theater,” an opera that takes the inquiry into the nature of evil to a visceral level.
The piece was produced by Beth Morrison Projects for the LA Opera. With a libretto co-written by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang and visual artist Mark Dion, the piece is set in the late 1700s. It centers on a streetwalker who confesses to murder and is hanged for her crimes. She’s then subjected to an even greater indignity, as her internal organs are publicly removed and examined for physical evidence of the evil that drove her to kill.
Lang says the work is based on public dissections that really did take place.
LANG: There would be these Christian lecturers who would go around Northern Europe and they would have these kind of carnivals where criminals would be cut open and their organs would be examined in order to show the bourgeois onlookers that the bodies, the interiors, the organs of the people who were not trying to live happily and peacefully and nobly in society, that their organs were different from the organs of normal, upstanding citizens.
As dark as the piece is, there’s also humor in things like the caretaker of the dissection hall’s pride in his fine new cadaver and the gruesome medical devices of the period. And the vain attempt of the anatomist and his assistant to find evidence of moral corruption in a variety of unblemished internal organs. At one point, the assistant sings, “Sir, I have had a most intimate interrogation of the spleen!”
As unsettling as all this might be for the audience, imagine what it’s like for mezzo-soprano Peabody Southwell.
SOUTHWELL: I am nude and covered in gore and being poked and prodded and pressed by my colleagues.
As the murderous Sarah Osborne, Southwell spends much of the production naked and deceased. She says it’s hard enough playing dead — but being dissected is even worse.
SOUTHWELL: I hear the slosh of blood and a sponge and I feel the cold wetness of the instruments on me and it is absolutely grotesque and terrifying.
Lang says what he finds most terrifying about the piece isn’t the blood and gore, but the idea that people can be made to fear individuals or groups they don’t know, who they nonetheless believe harbor evil deep inside them.
LANG: That’s really what this piece is about. People thinking that evil is something that is not a choice that people make, but it is a truth that only needs to be uncovered, and then it needs to be exterminated. And I think personally that’s a very scary sounding thought.
Directed by Bob McGrath, the macabre and darkly funny new work from L.A. Opera has its world premiere at REDCAT at Walt Disney Concert Hall from June 16-20.
Note that this production comes with a parental advisory: This production features nudity, violence, mature themes and adult language. Not recommend for children.
Streaming royalties could improve with new music industry initative
Compensation issues between musicians, music streaming services and record labels are extremely difficult to resolve. However, there may be a solution.
The Berklee College of Music’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship is creating what it calls the Open Music Initiative. Most of the major music streaming services and several large record labels have signed on to participate. The goal is to clarify who the rightful owners of songs are, and to give them — and the people who distribute their music — access to data that will tell them where, and how much, their music is being played and shared.
Panos Panay is the founding managing director of Berklee’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship. He spoke with The Frame's John Horn about how this new shared protocol will help databases within the music industry talk to one another.
Interview Highlights:
How complicated and obscure is the present system for identifying and compensating the rights owners for digital music?
It's a system that has never really been designed to accommodate the way that music is created and consumed today. This is really no particular entity's fault. You're ultimately talking about an industry that is over a hundred years old and that has gone through multiple transformations and multiple changes. I think this is one of the strengths of the industry, but when it comes to the ways that music rights owners and creators are being identified and compensated, that complexity is not really working in favor of the creator or in favor of the overall industry and its ability to grow.
Musicians complain that for all of the growth in music streaming — YouTube has one billion streaming users, and more than a third of all U.S. music revenue now comes from streaming — they are making less money than ever. Could the initiative rectify this so that the creators of the music are actually getting fairly compensated?
Yes. The objective of the initiative is to fundamentally make it such and create the conditions for creator compensation, irrespective of the medium where the music is ultimately being consumed. Think of all the music that is being shared right now across social networks and all the user-generated content that exists. So the hope behind this effort is ultimately to make identification and the distribution of money a lot more efficient for the people that are making this industry run, and that's the creators and the rights holders.
Is the idea that, if the initiative is successful, an artist or a record label will have a place that they can look and figure out who has bought what and how much they are owed?
Well, right now, a global hit could have [many] ways of deriving revenue. Then, to multiply the complexity, a modern song often has multiple creators, there's multiple owners associated with that composition. So the complexity is on both sides. There's been a multiplication of different ways that music is being consumed, but on the other hand, correspondingly, there is a lot more people that are involved in ownership with that particular asset. So even the distribution of money has become a lot more complicated. Again, our initiative is about creating a shared framework so that organizations, companies and entrepreneurs can build applications, systems, products and services on top of this shared protocol.
How do you think it will benefit artists? Will they be able to understand better how and when they're getting money?
Without a doubt. If you talk to any artist right now, there's tremendous complexity in them understanding where their money is coming from. There is an enormous lag time between, let say, the time that your song is played on the radio or in a bar somewhere, and the time that you get paid — if you ever manage to get paid. If your song is getting played in a totally different country, or if your song is being shared on social media or somebody creates a mashup of your song, there's all kinds of ways right now that music is being consumed. We believe that a world where not only are you able to accurately track where your music is being consumed, but also one where that money reaches the creator a lot faster. That's ultimately what we're striving for because by doing that, everybody benefits. If the creator benefits, then certainly at the end of the day, we will be looking at a far more rich and far more robust music industry that is able to drive value to the people that are creating the music, and an industry that is able to grow and thrive on innovation.