The massive Hauser Wirth & Schimmel gallery is the newest addition to L.A.'s bustling downtown arts district; singer and bass player Esperanza Spalding adds some theatrical touches to her live show; the South by Southwest film festival kicks off today in Austin.
Esperanza Spalding mixes jazz with theater in 'Emily’s D+ Evolution'
In a theater on Long Island, Esperanza Spalding is rehearsing with her band. She’s playing the bass, of course, accompanied by a drummer, guitarist and three backup singers. There’s a tour in the works, and a whole new album to learn how to play live.
“I've always depended on the interplay between the musicians to be the connecting point for the audience,” Spalding explains during a rehearsal break. “So, the overall experience of the sound that we're creating, combined with the dynamic interplay of improvised music, of jazz music — to me that's what they come for.”
Spalding grew up in Portland, Oregon. She took up the violin at age five, later switched to bass, and graduated from the Berklee School of Music at age 20. Berklee then hired her back, making her the youngest instructor on the faculty. Now, at 31, she’s a world-renowned composer, bassist and vocalist, has won several Grammys, performed at the White House, and shared the stage with greats such as Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder. Her next album is another artistic leap: she's turning “Emily’s D+ Evolution” into a theatrical production. That idea came about, she says, because of Emily.
Who is Emily? For Spalding, she's a kind of muse: a "being that asked to come out and play, that's how I feel it. And when I asked her what she wanted to do, she said, 'I want to move, and I want to talk about D+ Evolution.' And I didn't really know what that was, but it seemed like it was important.”
Emily is also Spalding's middle name, and the name she went by as a child. “She sort of represents creative inquisitiveness, and playfulness, and the willingness to try and explore and engage with whoever she encounters," Spalding says. "And that is something I hope we don't think is only for kids.”
Spalding says she envisioned the show as “these little vignettes happening … I was seeing this character, I was seeing the vignettes, I was seeing movement. So, since 2013, I've been looking for the people who could help me bring it there.”
One of the people she turned to is theater director Will Weigler, a long-time family friend whom Spalding met when he directed a show featuring her brother. Now, the two are collaborating for the first time.
“Originally she was asking for my advice,” Weigler recalls. “She'd worked on 'Emily's D+ Evolution,' she'd done the first iteration, and she was trying to find a way to dial it up, to make it much more of a theater production.”
Spalding flew to Weigler’s home in Victoria, B.C. to get his input. She remembers: “We sat down and we talked through all the songs, and I talked about what I wanted them to say, what to me it seemed like this was saying. He told me things that he saw that I hadn't seen. And we ended up basically working out this rough script.”
They started re-ordering the songs on the album to create a narrative arc. “There was a lot of shuffling,” Spalding says. “Once we found the order, it was just singing. It all seemed like it was written that way.”
The next step was to bring their ideas to rehearsal. The musicians and singers were enlisted as actors, and together they all set about to play with and refine the onstage moments that would capture the essence of each song. Finding those human connections, says Spalding, was a process of discovery.
“Equations are being solved by our subconscious creative mind,” she says. “And as we keep working at it, and digging away at that earth, and taking our brushes and trying to figure out how are we gonna get this bone out of the ground — the patterns have been revealing themselves.”
“Emily’s D+ Evolution” isn’t a musical, in the traditional sense, and it’s not exactly a straight concert either. It’s more like an illustrated song cycle. Spalding admits that turning music into theater is a new experience, outside of her comfort zone — even a little scary. But she takes inspiration from the words of one of her heroes, jazz musician Wayne Shorter, who urged her to "have the courage to engage in creative dialogue with the unexpected."
“I hear that phrase all the time, repeating in my head,” Spalding says. “And I think, Wow — that is the challenge! It’s one of the greatest challenges, as we step forward day-by-day, and try to creatively resolve and transform personal struggles — struggles with each other on the planet, sharing the planet's resources, reconciling heinous acts of violence, reconciling heinous acts of greed or expectation … All these attributes of the unexpected can often freeze us into not engaging. And it feels like the power we can draw on is creativity. It is the willingness to explore and to play — and try some new stuff, you know?”
As Emily reminds us, “trying new stuff” is more than child’s play — it’s an essential part of life.
Esperanza Spalding will perform “Emily’s D+ Evolution” on March 15 at The Belasco Theater.
Go inside the arts district's massive new Hauser Wirth & Schimmel gallery
Hauser & Wirth has galleries in Zurich, London, New York and, now, right in the middle of L.A.'s downtown arts district.
The gallery complex — which resembles a small museum — takes up an entire square block, located in a renovated flour mill built at the turn of the 20th Century. In addition to 23,000-square-feet of exhibit space, there’s a bookstore, a massive outdoor courtyard and a restaurant that should open this summer.
Here in Los Angeles, the gallery is actually Hauser Wirth & Schimmel — that would be Paul Schimmel, the well-respected curator who spent more than two decades at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The Frame’s John Horn sat down with Schimmel and asked: why the arts district?
The holy grail in the world of both galleries and not-for-profits is to find a location where people have both a destination and an opportunity to engage with and live with art. And the very difference that is here than even just a few blocks away on Bunker Hill [where MOCA and the Broad Museum are located], is that this is a living community ... I love looking around, you can see the first-time visitors. There’s a little shock-and-awe. And museums can be intimidating. Galleries can [also] be very intimidating because people think, Oh, I can only go in there if I’m going to buy something. So, opening this space up from 2nd to 3rd [street] — creating an open courtyard, a destination with a book shop and a restaurant and a public garden where people can sit at a table and have their own lunch and Wi-Fi — the separation between how they live and how they experience art becomes in some ways much more organic and much more the way artists see the world.
The combination of a non-collecting art museum, a commercial gallery and an educational and arts foundation enterprise — those three things don’t naturally always go together. But is it your feeling that the combination is what will make this space successful?
I’ve had the great experience of having been a curator in contemporary arts museums since the mid-’70s. It was in a time when there were only a handful of public institutions that felt comfortable inviting artists directly in. In fact, even the most significant institutions devoted to the art of our time until just recently — meaning over the last 15 or 20 years — have engaged artists in that very direct and creative way. So, in that respect, galleries have had an enormous impact on the museum landscape.
Vice-versa, there is a long history of galleries doing museum-quality exhibitions. Whether it was [Paul] Durand-Ruel in the 19th Century doing the most important exhibitions of Monet, Renoir, Manet, or [Daniel-Henry] Kahnweiler with Cubism, or Sidney Janis with [Piet] Mondrian, or more recently Pace with its exhibitions. So, the space that this enterprise has is one that has in some ways already been defined in the programs of different Kunsthalles and non-collecting institutions, museums and their introduction of artists — living artists — into the space. And, with galleries, I think what’s maybe truly unique is that both in the choice of the space and the creating of a destination is unique in the gallery world. And it is somewhat unprecedented that this should happen in Los Angeles.
How will you measure the success of what you’re starting here?
In the same way I think I’ve always measured success, whether I was doing exhibitions at the Orange County Museum of Art or at MOCA. Our first client, our first interest, is the artists themselves. And how we judge our success is by the interest and willingness and commitment that artists to make great things that happen here. And they make great things when you raise the whole platform up, you put them with great works of art and a program that respects their vision, their integrity, and gives them a sense of their own place, their own history.
Paul Schimmel is co-curator of the gallery’s inaugural show: “Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016.” The other curator is art historian Jenni Sorkin. She gave The Frame a tour through the expansive space and explained why the gallery is opening with a show of female artists.
I think that starting with a sculpture show is a way of announcing and taking up space. And I think, in particular, the idea of women taking up space — or what I like to think of as territorializing space, colonizing space — [is about] making their presence known in an art form that has been traditionally very exclusionary to women.
You said in previous interviews that sculpture is one of the last bastions for the exclusion of women. Who was doing the exclusion and did it become a self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of women not being able to enter?
I think it was actually men who were doing the exclusion, and I think it was not actually by choice. I think that it has to do with our socialization in the world. For instance, if you think about the way in which kids are trained or not trained to use tools, this was very gendered in schools ... certainly throughout the 20th century. For instance, shop class was male students, home economics was assigned to women. And that has a massive impact in terms of who gets to use tools, who’s comfortable using a hammer, who learns to use a lathe, who learns to weld. And those are massive kinds of exclusions. Because when you have a skill set in terms of building, it takes a long time [to] build on that.
On Lee Bontecou, one of the artists with featured works in the exhibition.
These are largely early ‘60s pieces, so 1961 to about 1966. And part of the androgyny of her name, Lee, was a way of disguising her gender ... Because mid-century, she probably would not have gotten a show as a woman doing this kind of work. And because people often thought she was going to be a man, it was a name that disguised her in a way.
SxSW 2016: What to expect at this year's film portion of the festival
The massive entertainment festival known as South By Southwest takes place from March 11-20 in Austin, Texas, and everyone from J.J. Abrams to Iggy Pop to even President Barack Obama will be there.
The festival runs for 10 days, and is separated into three categories: interactive, which focuses on the tech industry; film; and music. The film portion of the fest kicks off on March 11 and The Frame's John Horn spoke with Marjorie Baumgarten, a film critic at the Austin Chronicle, about the festival's history and program.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
The Austin Film Society is important to the city's attention and love of cinema. Can you talk about the society and why it's important to the festival itself.
The film society is essential to the film culture in Austin. It was founded by Richard Linklater and several of his friends who helped made "Slacker" and movies like that. They were watching movies on their own — 60mm films that they'd rent — and they started opening it up to the public and it grew into this enormous thing.
(Linklater's new film, "Everybody Wants Some," will have its world premiere at this year's SxSW.)
There are so many choices of what to do at the festival. What is your advice for what people should be paying attention to, or how to enjoy this year's SxSW?
My advice is always, Go with the flow. I mean, if the line looks too long, just go to something that you haven't heard of. All of these films have been curated and pre-selected and you really can't go wrong. Just take a chance on something you know absolutely nothing about, and you may come out happily surprised.