Mighty Movie Podcast: Robert Persons on General Orders No. 9

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Friday, 24 June 2011 21:06

Written by Daniel Persons

I tend to lose patience with people who go the "words cannot describe..." route when they're talking about something. There are always words, if you know how to use them. I gotta admit, though, General Orders No. 9, the enigmatic debut work of filmmaker Robert Persons (no relation), is something of a challenge. A meditation on small-town South -- Georgia in specific -- its connection to the natural world and its death at the hands of growing populations and commercial interests, the film is quiet, beautiful, and strangely moving. It's also the kind of thing you have to sit down and experience for yourself, ideally when (like a certain film journalist who has maybe overindulged on CG-gorged, three-explosions-per-minute summer fare) you're ready for something that repays your rapt attention with still, thoughtful grace.

Click on the player to hear my interview with Robert Persons.

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Music Interview: Soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Tuesday, 21 June 2011 10:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Isabel Bayrakdarian Is The Cunning Little Vixen
An opera by Leos Janacek
Directed by Doug Fitch
Performed by the New York Philharmonic
Conducted by Alan Gilbert

The New York Philharmonic finished its first season under music director Alan Gilbert last June with Doug Fitch’s stunning, multi-media staging of Gyorgy Ligeti’s fantastical modern opera, Le Grand Macabre, in its New York premiere.

In what may become an annual closing event, the Philharmonic has brought back Finch to stage Leos Janacek’s gorgeous opera about the cycles of life among the human and animal worlds. The Cunning Little Vixen has the full forces of the orchestra performing Janacek’s superlative, singular score with a top cast, which will be led by Canadian soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian as the foxy female protagonist herself.

No stranger to this role -- since understudying it in her hometown of Toronto for the Canadian Opera Company’s 1998 production -- she has performed it in the original Czech (these performances are in English), around the world.

Bayrakdarian discussed how she approaches this unique character while on a break from rehearsals at Avery Fisher Hall.

KF: How familiar are you with Janacek’s Vixen?

IB: In 1998 in Toronto, I was the cover for the Vixen. I didn’t sing in the production, but I did sing some of the rehearsals. I was a member of the COC [Canadian Opera Company] ensemble program for that season. 

There were a lot of tears the first time I learned to sing this opera because the Czech language is so difficult. But finally I realized that Janacek has written it with the idiom of his language in mind, and it’s wonderful to hear.

Now that we’re singing it in English, we have to take liberties within the framework of each bar and modify it so that English accents are highlighted instead of the Czech. We’re making modifications to the standard translation because it has to be singable and current, since some of the lingo needs to be updated.

Doing it in English takes a certain amount of changing gears in your mind, but I’ve done the most difficult part, which is the music. Structurally, it changes a little bit, you have to know just when to come in, so it’s a blessing that I’ve done the part many times.

It’s a very tricky score, it constantly changes from playful, animalistic lightness to lush long lines.

KF: Talk about your preparation to play a singing fox onstage.

IB: It’s a very difficult role: how do you prepare to be an animal? It takes a certain amount of stamina and physical fitness to run around literally on all fours and sing.

But it’s also strangely comforting, because you’re always close to the earth, and you gain strength from it: your center of gravity is as close to the ground as possible.

Janacek had a very good three-dimensional idea of who the vixen is. It’s not always written in very long lines, so that she must stand and sing all the time, and it’s not written in a chatty way to suggest that she’s always running around.

It’s a nice balance as she develops from a youngster to a teenager with opinionated ideals of equality and feminism to a woman falling in love and becoming a mother.

KF: It’s amazing what Janacek was able to do with essentially a comic strip when he turned it into an opera.

IB: This is one of the few operas that children would enjoy it, but the human world is painted very correctly.

And you know what? It doesn’t fare well when compared with the animal world, it’s so bleak and so real that you almost prefer to be in the animal world, as opposed to the human world where there are lots of regrets.

Animals don’t regret, they always look forward. Nowhere in the score does it look to the past, it’s always to the future. Whereas you see in the human world so many regrets about unexpressed emotions and bitterness. It’s true in many ways, it’s better to be an animal.

KF: What’s unique about this staging?

IB: For starters, there’s an extension into the audience up to row M, which means I’m in the middle of the auditorium, a most unusual place for a singer! But it’s an ingenious way of bridging the audience-performer gap, making the audience part of the action so sometimes they have to look back to see what’s going on.

It’s a good way to mirror what’s going on in the opera, where the human and animal worlds are intertwined and are changed by the actions in the other.

When I sing in the middle of the audience, the energy will be very different than when I sing in front of them.

There will also be lots of entrances and exits through the audience, which you can’t do in an opera house. It’s a very unique way of doing a very unique opera.

KF: Are you ready to sing more Janacek operas, most of which have central female characters [Jenufa, Katya Kabanova, The Makropulos Case]?

IB: I haven’t sung any other Janacek roles yet, but I started to become interested ever since I became a mom myself. I now want roles that are much more substantial, with a deeper dramatic scope that allows more exploration.

Also, now I can read Czech very easily, so it will be faster learning these roles than in the past. The Czech words and music are welded together in Janacek’s operas, which have a darkness that is particularly Czech.

The Cunning Little Vixen
June 22-25, 2011

Avery Fisher Hall
10 Lincoln Center Plaza
New York, NY
212-721-6500
http://nyphil.org

Horse Whisperer Buck is Subject of Sundance Award-winning Doc

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Monday, 20 June 2011 02:55

Written by Brad Balfour

Raised in Montana and Idaho, the young Dan M. "Buck" Brannaman was a rodeo star as a child, but suffered such abuse from his dad that he and his brother landed in foster care. He responded to that experience of pain by developing a kind of empathetic state of mind that helps him with handling horses and his own personal survival.

The legendary horse whisperer considers himself lucky despite the hard life he endured as a kid. He found a calling that some might call mumbo jumbo, but to a vast number of horse owners, trainers and grooms, he expresses an uncanny skill at natural horsemanship.

That talent has made him the go-to guy for working with difficult horses, the inspiration for a feature film, The Horse Whisperer (directed and starring Robert Redford), and the subject of a Sundance Award winning documentary by first-time director Cindy Meehl (a former fashion designer) titled Buck, which came out this week.

In this exclusive interview, this unique individual explains to a degree both how he gets to that state of mind and how it can be applied to one's own life.

Q: You had a rough background in your youth.

BB: My childhood was pretty dark, and we touched on it some in the documentary. It goes a little bit more in depth in my book.

Q: Do you have different relationships with different kinds of horses or is it consistent throughout?

BB: As far as horses go, people will ask about one breed versus another. I have to tell you, I really don't have any prejudice one way or another. I treat every horse at face value, how he/she is as an individual.

That's the cool thing about horses -- they don't have prejudice. They don't care if you're tall or thin or if you're dark or if you're light, or if you're rich or you're poor, if you're handsome or not so handsome. They don't care about that. They care about how you make them feel, and if that's the only damn lesson that someone has learned from horses, they'd be way ahead of the game.

Q: Do different horses respond to different kinds of touch or tones?

BB: I often talk about presence. Some people who have worked stock dogs -- say, border collies -- say they will have a presence in working stock. There might be two dogs that are exactly the same size, but one dog will have quite a bit of presence. He'll walk into a pen of sheep and boy, they're all paying attention to him and honor him.

Then you might have a dog the same size without much presence that the sheep will chase him out of the pen. And that's true with horses and people as well, but the human theoretically is supposed to be the smart one.

Q: I doubt that.

BB: As a horseman you'd get a sense of what kind of presence you needed for the situation. You may have a horse that has been sort of spoiled and he's disrespectful, [so] that you may need to have the presence as if to appear to be 10 times your size. But then five minutes later, you might be dealing with a horse that's very timid and very fragile and very emotional that you might need to have the presence of being 1/10th your size.

It's for the human to be able to adjust that, and a lot of it is your posture and your body language and the way you move around the horse that gives him the message whether or not he should be threatened or not threatened by you.

Well, of course you're trying not to be threatening at all. But the way you present yourself on one, you might have to adjust it on another horse in order to be able to fit the situation.

My teachers used to tell me you need to learn to adjust to fit the situation. Don't just do what you've always done because it might not always work.

Q: That's true in the broadest sense, right?

BB: Yes, it is.

Q: That works when you have a conflict with people. Do you take a similar approach with horses?

BB: I do, particularly someone who might be difficult to be around. You'll get some people that sort of get caught up in a lifestyle, or they create conflict and they deal in conflict and they're making war with other people constantly.

Well then, they're sort of wired in a way that they set you up to kind of pull you in because they know how to deal with you in a real adversarial relationship. But I might think of it like this: I try to treat someone not how they are, but how I'd like them to be.

You've got to be careful not to get pulled into something and play the game they're always used to playing. So a lot of times you can sort of take them off their game by approaching them in a way that they're not used to.

Maybe they don't even deserved to be approached that way, but they might really appreciate it in the end that you maybe give them a little extra rope to work with.

Q: In making the film, were there moments where you applied your philosophy to the process of making the film?

BB; I have to say it really wasn't that difficult in the process with Cindy. Early on, I said, "The way we have to do this is, I'm not going to be your actor and I'm not going to stand on a mark for you to focus everything the way you want it, and I'm not going to rehearse it and I'm not going to do it over.

Because things happen in the moment in working with horses, and once that moment is passed, it's gone forever."

So I said, "You're going to have to be kind of clever and learn how to anticipate some of the cool things that happen with these horses so that you're in the right place at the right time."

It made it especially challenging, really, to be able to film something like that and have it work, because it's hard enough when you're doing a feature film and you can tell the actors exactly where they're supposed to stand and where they're supposed to do their business. She didn't have that luxury in doing this, and by golly, she did a good job.

Q: Especially when the horses aren't ones trained to perform, they're there to be themselves. So they're being themselves and that's what she's got to document, as opposed to when you do a movie like The Horse Whisperer.

BB: Exactly.

Q: Did you have to do anything to get the horses to stay or behave in a way that suited the camera situation?

BB: No. She just filmed life like it is for me. So other than having to pack an extra microphone on me, that was about the only inconvenience. I was glad to get that second microphone out of my pocket after two and a half years, but other than that, I didn't have anything different in my life, really.

I got used to those guys being around and got to be friends with them. So I missed them after they left, actually.

Q: How did you meet Cindy? Did she own the horses?

BB: I first met her years ago at a clinic here on the East Coast, and I don't even remember where. I want to say Pennsylvania.

Q: You go everywhere, don't you?

BB: Yeah. You name it, I go there. I didn't see her again for four or five years, and then she came to a clinic in Texas with her aunt, and there was kind of a little handful of ladies there and I knew the other ladies pretty well, so we spent a little bit of time together. We'd have dinner in the evenings after the clinic and they were kind of a pretty good bunch of gals, fun to be around, so we'd visit a little bit in the evenings.

And then she ended up going to a friend of mine's ranch in Montana -- McGuiness Meadows Ranch -- as a guest, and that's where she came up with the idea of doing this documentary.

To be honest with you, there were a few people over the years that asked me about doing a documentary, and I just said, "Fine, go ahead and do a documentary, but just leave me out of it."

As to why I said yes that day, I guess I just trusted her. We were friends by that point and I knew that she wouldn't do anything to disappoint me, that she really had a great intention.

Yet still it's a little risky letting someone tell the story of your life when you've devoted your life to trying to do something good. Someone could just tell the story wrong and wreck years of devotion. But thank goodness, she did me right.