Benjamin Millepied's new, hip dance company takes to the stage this weekend in newly-hip downtown LA; soul singer Alice Russell tells us how her pre-show rituals have changed now that she’s a new mom; and how the performance troupe "Freestyle Love Supreme" mixes hip hop and improv in a new TV show.
British soul singer Alice Russell is on tour with her baby in tow
U.K.-based singer Alice Russell is known for her commanding and soulful voice. She’s had a successful solo career and collaborated with artists such as Quantic, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim.
This Friday, Russell and her band take the stage at the Skirball Cultural Center as part of the 15th anniversary celebration for her label, Tru Thoughts Records. We caught up with Russell ahead of her show in L.A. to talk about what it’s like being a touring mom.
Interview Highlights
On how her touring life has changed since having a baby:
I've got a little five-and-a-half month old, so this tour is a mini-tour. My little baby's come with me on the tour, can't leave her at home, definitely not. Usually we pretty much do five nights in a row, or six nights, no days off unless we are rehearsing. But the band's hanging out with us here in San Francisco, we've got two days off, and it's like a holiday compared to usual tours. So having babies helps calm everything down, but you still do it. So it's cool.
On how her pre-show ritual has changed since becoming a mother:
The main thing is just getting a little bit of time by myself and just warming up the voice. I just hum up and down a little bit. Basically ... just go up and down the scales. If you're doing it in a cab, people look at you weirdly, but it warms up the little croaky throat. Depending on the show and how you're feeling, I used to have a little shot of vodka, but that's changed cause I'm, you know, making milk at the moment.
On how she keeps her voice elastic during intense touring:
The one thing that's really good for the voice — I remember Chaka Khan saying it when she was at her height of being very naughty on lots of substances — is sleep. It's the most important thing, which is probably the kind of thing you get the least of on tour. So if you can't get sleep, the other good thing to do is to steam. The baby's definitely changed that, because on tour I used to leave the boys and go off and have a little steam sauna, but now I can't really do that, so I'm just using the power of the mind.
On her concerns about becoming a mother and touring at the same time:
I was a little bit hesitant with thinking about how I was going to continue touring when I got pregnant. I was kind of quite defiant in the way that I was definitely going to have to carry on, because it's what I do and it's part of who I am, and you want your children to know that about you. But at the same time, when kids come along, that's your world as well. So you need to do what's best for them. It just means you have to be a little more careful with the travel arrangements — a lot more planning than a normal tour, which is loads of planning anyway. But I only have to be away from her for two hours, max, so I feed her and get her to bed, bath, before the show, then I jump in a cab, warm up, get myself ready, and go on stage. It's been pretty crazy. I'm knackered, but I'm happy.
Benjamin Millepied's LA Dance Project returns to a local stage
Founded in 2012, L.A. Dance Project is a collective that seeks to bring contemporary dance back to the forefront of the Los Angeles arts scene by fostering a community of collaboration between artists in different media.
One if its most renowned founders is Benjamin Millepied, a dancer and choreographer who — among an impressive list of career highlights — was a principal dancer at the New York City Ballet for a decade and also choreographed and starred in Darren Aronofksy's ballet-turned-nightmare movie, "Black Swan."
L.A. Dance Project has rejuvenated the contemporary dance movement in Los Angeles. In anticipation of the troupe's three-night run at the Ace Hotel this weekend, we talked to Vulture.com's Rebecca Milzoff about L.A. Dance Project's history in Los Angeles and the show they'll have in store for the audience at the Ace Hotel Theater.
Interview Highlights:
On the Los Angeles dance world's reaction to the founding of L.A. Dance Project:
Initially there was some surprise at how quickly he was able to establish it. Also, there was a little bit of a knee-jerk reaction of, Oh, this is an L.A. company, but none of the dancers are actually from L.A. But I think that the company has really entrenched itself in the city and very much made itself an L.A. company — especially a downtown L.A. company. With all of the great cultural things that are happening there right now, I think the company has really been at the forefront of that.
On the audience that L.A. Dance Project brings to theaters:
It's certainly a much younger audience than you see at a lot of dance these days, which is encouraging. The company's performances at the Ace in L.A. have been a really vibrant, young audience. But there's some distance from "Black Swan" now, and the company's reputation is more attached to his name as a choreographer and — perhaps more because of the Paris news — his name is in the news.
On the "Paris news," that Benjamin will take over the directorship of the Paris Opera Ballet:
L.A. Dance Project was founded as a collaborative company — Benjamin is actually technically a co-founder — so [he] has never really been at L.A. Dance Project full-time. From conversations I've had with him recently, he plans to still do the group's programming. I think that he sees Paris as just another way of expanding L.A. Dance Project's audience. I actually went to a benefit for L.A. Dance Project in June and there was sort of palpable tension in the air, which Benjamin very quickly dissipated by saying that L.A. Dance Project remains his priority. I have to say that I believe it: I think that he's not just traveling through L.A., but I think that the company really has a deeper connection for him.
On the program for the upcoming L.A. shows:
The program in L.A. will be slightly different from New York [last weekend]. There's a new piece by Benjamin that we didn't get to see, set to a Philip Glass score. One of Benjamin's strengths as a choreographer is he's very intelligent about music; he's very adventurous with exploring new music and he's worked with Glass's music before, so that should be interesting. They're going to premiere a piece by Emanuel Gat, who's a contemporary Israeli choreographer. This is a piece called "Morgan's Last Chug" that is, I believe, inspired by some time that Gat spent in L.A. And they'll also be doing [William] Forsythe's "Quintett," which we saw [in New York].
The hip-hop improv show 'Freestyle Love Supreme' takes to TV
"Freestyle Love Supreme" may sound like a strand of medical marijuana, but it’s actually the name of an improv hip-hop show based in New York City. The show, which has toured the country and been performed at venues in the UK as well, advertises itself as "''Whose Line is it Anyway?' meets Wu-Tang Clan" — mashing up the thrill of live improv with the tongue-twisting speed of freestyle rapping. Now it's been adapted into a TV series on Pivot — the cable network from Participant Media.
Given that the show is now on the small screen, we recently spoke with Lin-Manuel Miranda and Tommy Kail, two of the show's co-creators, about the challenges of taking a live act into the studio— and the creative benefits of freestyle rap.
Interview Highlights:
On capturing the energy of a live show and transferring it to television:
Kail:
It was one of the great challenges that we had, and Ryan McFaul, who is one of the other executive producers, worked on the edit with me a lot. We found very quickly that the split-screen helped us a lot, because when you're watching the show live you get to see Lin [watch] Anthony and Utkarsh perform a scene, and his delight is something that informs you, as well as knowing that the suggestion came from the person sitting to your left. You can feel that energy in the room. So there's a lot of simultaneous action, and sometimes there will be three things happening — you'll be watching the scene, you'll have a camera on the audience, and you'll be watching the guys — and we found that that actually created a pretty accurate feeling of capturing that electricity.
Miranda:
Yeah, the net result is longer, uninterrupted takes with split-screen bumping in and out. And so it feels like the electricity when you watch a really good Aaron Sorkin scene, and you know they're not cutting. This is all happening in real time, and we're making it up as we go.
On the creative effects of channeling consciousness into improvised raps:
Miranda:
I write musicals for a living. It took seven years to write my first musical, "In the Heights." We're in year five of working on my next show, "Hamilton," which Tommy's directing. On that project I spent a month crafting sixteen couplets. Whereas, with this, the first draft is what's coming out of your mouth in real time in front of the audience, and I think it's been complementary to every other thing I do in my life. It's allowed us to have amazing gigs, like Tommy and I wrote the closing night raps for Neil Patrick Harris for the Tony Awards two years in a row. That's a skill set that we developed working on "Freestyle Love Supreme."
Kail:
The looseness of the structure of the show is an illusion. Lin and I generally after every show we've done — and we've done hundreds of them — will talk the next morning, see what we can remember, and kind of put the thing back together...As it's happening in real time, you have to be able to distill something to its essence. And that's useful whether you're working on a small play with four people sitting in a room or you're working on a big musical. So that's been really useful. I also find that "Freestyle" represents, in essence, a release of energy and pheromones [laughs] that is so substantial, and you're chasing that, like you feel a little depleted the next day. I don't perform with the group really for the good of the audience [laughs], but when I watch the show...you're participating in a very active way, as is the audience. And I think there's something about trying to capture magic that I think is a larger challenge that we try to do with this television show. But also whenever you're doing anything you realize what you're trying to do in the theater is get a bunch of people to come together and sit in the dark and be taken away somewhere. And that's what "Freestyle" does at its core.
On the methods behind the madness of freestyle rapping on subjects as varied as Maya Angelou to the number of languages spoken in India:
Miranda:
Well, that's the fun of the show — there's no time to lie. The audience throws a suggestion at us, and we take the thing we think we can run with. I'm one of those people who, if I read a book, I read every other book by that author. I was assigned "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" in 9th grade, and then I read Maya Angelou's four subsequent [books], so if someone yells that at me in a freestyle setting, there are certain things I can access because I did that homework when I was 15 years old. The fun is: Can you get it, and can you regurgitate it and say it in a way that makes sense in order, to a beat, in real time? That's the challenge of that particular song — how much can you access from your own brain? So it's not so much that we go out and study the world, it's that we shorten the distance between our brains and our mouths through lots of reps.
Kail:
In essence, what "Freestyle Love Supreme" does is it magical-izes the mundane. It takes the events of the everyday and it heightens them by incorporating music into them instantaneously, by having Shockwave lay a beat and the guys then tell a story over that beat. But it also says, in some way, the things that you have absorbed just by moving through the day are relevant. A lot of times when you have a certain kind of job, you live your life, you leave that at the door, and you go and do your job and go home. This is something that will tap into the subway ride you had on the way to the show, what you ate that morning, what you read when you were 15, and it all is immediately accessed — just because you're in the only place in the world where someone yells, "Maya Angelou!" at you and you have to then rap about it. [laughs]