INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES BERNSTEIN

Hollywood film composer Charles Bernstein has written scores for more than 100 feature films, TV movies and documentaries. Drawing upon a background in classical music (including composition studies at Juilliard) and a fluency in pop, world, jazz and electronic idioms, his career has spanned the film industry’s transition from the mechanical to digital age.

His credits include scores for the Dracula spoof Love at First Bite (1979); the horror flicks Cujo (1983) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984); the made-for-television drama Miss Evers’ Boys (1997); and the award-winning documentaries Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision (1994) and After Innocence (2005). His earlier music was also used by Quentin Tarantino in his movies Kill Bill (2003) and Inglourious Basterds (2009). 

A long-serving member of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Bernstein is also the author of two books of essays on film music and composers.

Charles Bernstein just before his Nov. 13, 2011 interview at La Bottega Marino Cafe on Santa Monica Blvd. in Los Angeles

Anita Malhotra interviewed Bernstein in Los Angeles on Nov. 13, 2011, shortly after he gave a seminar on film composing at the 2011 West L.A. Music Expo.

AM: Where did your love of music and film come from?

Bernstein: Last night I was with a group honoring the great actor James Earl Jones, and he told an anecdote about the first time he ever saw a film. He was a little boy of about five years old and it was in a gap between two buildings where they stretched a sheet and projected a movie. As soon as the movie came on, he dived under a bench and said, “Take those people away. Make it go away.” It scared him.

James Earl Jones speaking to guests at Winfield House, London on Jan. 18, 2010 (photo by usembassylondon, Flickr Creative Commons)

That was his first experience with a film, and mine was similar. I was in kindergarten and they were showing Tom Sawyer in the hallway on the wall outside the class. I was terrified – I looked behind the pull-down screen and I couldn’t figure out where the people were. It was creepy.  Here I am making my living in film, and some of the films are even scary films, and yet my first experience was, “I don’t want to have anything to do with it.” But little by little the magic of being in a theatre and seeing people responding in unison was very appealing to me. People would laugh together, cry together, and where else does that happen? And then, as I grew older, the idea of using that as a place for telling stories – it’s a storytelling medium, and I love stories – so eventually the idea of being a film lover just developed.

Music developed on a much smoother path. My mom would play the piano – Bach, Chopin, Mozart, Rachmaninoff. I’d sit under the piano and play with her feet, and just loved the music. Sometimes I’d look at her fingers dancing over the keys and it was like magic to me. So the music experience was very early and very strong. And then, of course, the two came together as time went on.

Charles Bernstein's mother, Mildred Wolf, celebrating her 100th birthday in 2010

AM: How did they come together?

Bernstein: It started in little bits and fragments. The first real professional job I had was during my college years, when I scored a documentary for a friend of mine, Alan Capps. He did a movie about the Washington State School for the Blind, and I wrote a little trio for him with clarinet, piano and cello, and it just felt so comfortable. I couldn’t figure out why it felt so comfortable, and many years later I realized that my mom had accompanied silent movies before the talkies came in. She was born in 1910 and just passed away at the age of 101, and when she was a young girl she was playing the Wurlitzer Theatre Organ. So I guess I came by it naturally. But I didn’t even know that when I went into it. I pieced that together later.

Theatrical poster for the 1973 film "White Lightning," directed by Joseph Sargent

AM: How did you enter the Hollywood film industry?

Bernstein: My first big Hollywood picture with a big star and a big studio was a Burt Reynolds movie directed by Joe Sargent called White Lightning.

I was in my late 20s and I got that by one person mentioning me to another. It was set in the Deep South, and I knew nothing about bluegrass music, so I very quickly educated myself. Bluegrass music is a fabulous kind of art form unto itself – a folk art form. So I hired a terrific mandolin player and some guys, and we made a demo, and I convinced the two producers, Jules Levy and Arthur Gardner, that I could do this. They brought the music to Burt Reynolds and Joe Sargent, and they both liked it and took a chance on me.

In that score I combined very loose authentic southern folk elements with orchestral elements. I hired a dobro player, a banjo player, a famous country fiddle player named Byron Berline, and I combined them with a Hollywood studio orchestra. Some of these guys couldn’t read music, so I had to work their part out independently and just point to them during the orchestra session. I’d hold up one finger meaning, “Play the first riff when I point at you” and then I’d hold up two fingers: “Play riff number two when I point at you.”

AM: Tell me about your work on Love at First Bite.

Bernstein: Love at First Bite is one of my favorite scores. Just lately we were putting together a CD of the score. I was listening to all the music in the course of putting it together for Intrada Records and it’s such a fun score. There’s this Romanian gypsy element and then there’s this film score element.

AM: Did you write some of the dance music as well?

Bernstein: Yes, I wrote two disco songs. One is called “Fly by Night,” which is appropriate for Dracula, and the other’s called “Dancing Through the Night” which is kind of a normal disco song. I wrote these two songs really quickly before breakfast one day. The whole movie is so humorous and fun. It’s very period, very ’80s.

AM: How did you get hired on A Nightmare on Elm Street?

Bernstein with director, writer and producer Wes Craven on the set of "Deadly Friend" (1986). Craven also directed the original "A Nightmare on Elm Street," the first "The Hills Have Eyes" and the four "Scream" films, and many other horror films

Bernstein: I was on vacation and my agent called me and said, “Can you come back in town? I’d like you to meet this guy Wes Craven. I think you guys would hit it off because he’s kind of an intellectual and he does these horror movies.” So I met Wes, and he liked what I was doing, and he hired me. I never thought it would be a hit movie. I just thought, “Oh, this guy Freddy with razor-blade fingers – this will come and go – this is a little too out-there for the public. Little did I know, 30 years later, the president of the United States would mention him. George Bush the first was giving a speech and referred to “Freddy Krueger economics” or something. You know your movie’s on the map when the president of the United States mentions the main character in passing.

AM: In general, how do you approach a film score?

Bernstein: I try to approach each movie on its own terms and not to reference other movies or other film scores. I try to ask the movie what it wants me to do for it rather than asking myself what I can do for the movie. And then I see if I can come up with what’s needed, and of course the director also has a number of requests.

Charles Bernstein in his studio

AM: Do you approach the score as a whole or as individual pieces?

Bernstein: Film scoring is the art of creating one singular score, which has many parts to it, but the parts are not the whole. The score itself has to make sense – each part has to relate to the other parts. I make the analogy of a pie. All the pieces have to be from the same pie. But having said that, you might want to serve one piece à la mode, you may want to sprinkle more cinnamon on another piece. And too often you’ll get a score where they “temp track” each section from a different movie, and you get such an eclectic score in the temporary music that it tempts the composer to imitate it, and you end up with something that isn’t as unified or powerful as those scores that really have a coherency to them.

Bernstein with the Italian film composer Ennio Morricone, whose credits include "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly," "The Mission" and "The Untouchables." Bernstein interviewed Morricone in 1994 for his book "Movie Music: An Insider's View"

All scores by John Williams – I say this without exception – all scores by Jerry Goldsmith, all scores by Elmer Bernstein, all scores by Ennio Morricone, have a unity within the film score itself. Each score is one pie. And I think that the art of film scoring is to let each film have its own unique taste and flavour; its own musical language and its own unique sound.

The Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1990s). Bernstein, a long-time member, is in the second row from the back, fourth from the right.

AM: How did your music end up in the two Tarantino films?

Bernstein: I had never met Quentin Tarantino. He chose some of my music for Kill Bill, and then I got a call from his music supervisor, and she said he was very interested in music from a couple of other movies – The Entity, with Barbara Hershey, and some more music from White Lightning. So I had still not met Quentin. And then I found that he’d used a good bit of my music in Inglourious Basterds.

Bernstein with Quentin Tarantino at the 2009 Governors Awards

And then, two years ago this day, I was at the event I was at last night, and Quentin was there to honor the great filmmaker Roger Corman, and that’s when I met Quentin for the first time. So we had this wonderfully happy meeting, and I told him how much I loved what he had done with my music in his picture, and he told me how much he enjoyed using the music. I think he’s a brilliant, brilliant man. His movies have a look and a feel to them unlike any other. You just know you’re in the hands of a master.

Bernstein with the Emmy he won for Best Music Score on the CBS Schoolbreak Special "Little Miss Perfect"

AM: When some people think of Hollywood they think of all the temptations and all the craziness. Did you find that you had to insulate yourself from that?

Bernstein: I’ve lived here most of my life. I find it to be a very family-oriented, serious-minded town, contrary to popular belief. I’ve served on the Board of Governors at the Academy for many years. All of the governors are family people, very decent and involved people – it’s just a wonderful group. I personally never experienced a lot of wild Hollywood parties or whatever the clichés are. Filmmakers are very hardworking, dedicated people, and like any profession, there are egotists and people that are more flamboyant or whatever, but I’d be hard-put to think of many people I deal with that fit that kind of a category.

AM: Of the 100 or so motion pictures and TV films and documentaries that you’ve worked on, what are the highlights of your career?

Bernstein with documentary filmmaker Freida Lee Mock, who won an Academy Award in 1995 for her documentary about the architect Maya Lin

Bernstein: There have been some pictures that I have just really enjoyed and look back on fondly. One of them is the miniseries Sadat, the story of Anwar Sadat. It gave me a chance to write in a style that was very satisfying for me. I loved doing Love at First Bite. Almost every picture I’ve ever done with Joe Sargent, such as Miss Evers’ Boys with the African-American actor Alfre Woodard, Out of the Ashes with Christine Lahti, an Auschwitz World War II story – a very moving, brilliantly directed movie. I just so enjoyed working on these even though the subject matter was very painful. I’ve done some remarkable documentaries: Maya Lin, directed by Freida Lee Mock, won an Academy Award – an incredible, beautiful movie. I’ve done a number of documentaries with Freida and her husband, Terry Sanders – very fine documentarians.

Bernstein with composer John Williams, who wrote the soundtracks for the films "Schindler's List," "Jaws" and "Star Wars," among others. Bernstein interviewed Williams in 1992.

AM: How has the method of film composing changed technologically since you started working in the industry?

Bernstein: I’ve had the unique perspective of coming into the film scoring world at a time when it was still the golden age. The old studio system was still intact when I first became interested, so I remember and met a lot of the old-timers. From the time I started my career until the present, the revolution of technology has changed every facet of film scoring and filmmaking.

Bernstein speaking at the 2011 West L.A. Music Expo on Nov. 13, 2011

At the beginning, the editors were working on Moviolas and I was working with pencil and paper. Little by little, over a period of 15 years, which culminated about 10 years ago, there was a total transformation from a non-computerized set of tools to a computerized set of tools, and the people who survived that change have had to change their skill-set. The editors that were cutting on Moviolas and flatbeds are now having to work in software programs like Avid and Final Cut. The cinematographers who were working in 35 millimeter now are working in digital. The composers who were recording onto analogue tape are now recording onto drives. And all of the technology that records picture, sound and everything else – including scripts – is all computerized.

The ARP 2600 (photo by Rockheim, Flickr Creative Commons)

I don’t think of myself as a pioneer, but I was using a lot of these tools in the early 1970s. I did show Walter Mirisch what I had intended to do with Mr. Majestyk using some fairly crude tools at the time. I had an early Moog, a few early synthesizers. People don’t know this but there were actually some consumer-grade Moog products in the ’70s – a thing called the Moog Satellite – I still have one. I had the ARP 2600 – I still have that. Nightmare on Elm Street was recorded in a home studio, which was not very common in the year 1983. I was not uncomfortable with the technology. I was usually one step ahead as it came and I was very happy to have it.

There are colleagues of mine who still write the way they did in the old days and their music is fabulous. The great John Williams writes that way. All those guys will have their people mock things up for the director, but they still write the same way. Jerry Goldsmith did. Elmer did. They write like composers, and they’re so wonderful, so there’s nothing lost by not going with the technology. But it’s harder to do if you’re working on a very low-budget, quick thing.

Charles Bernstein with the musician Sting, whom he interviewed in 2002

AM: As a film composer it’s useful to be able to draw from a wide variety of musical genres. How did you develop that ability in yourself?

Bernstein: I honestly love any music that’s good whether it’s any country, any period, any style – if it’s good and it’s made in a heartfelt and skillful manner I’ll love it. So I don’t have a lot of prejudices to start with. I also see music very much as a human expression and I don’t think of it as a bunch of styles and places and times.

Charles Bernstein with composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, who passed away in 1990

I absolutely love Beethoven. I would have to say he’s the least cinematic composer, but he’s the guy I turn to when I really want to hear the string quartets, the late quartets. I know all his symphonies. I’ve spent countless hours with a symphony like the Eroica, and I’ve heard every great conductor – most of them in person, but at least recorded, on all the great Beethoven works.

AM: What instrument do you play?

Bernstein: I’m not a great instrumentalist. I play enough keyboard, as most composers do, to figure things out. I play a pretty good Doumbek, which is a little hand-drum. I played string bass for many years. When I was young I studied with the great bass virtuoso Gary Karr, who lives in Halifax, for five years. I’m not a bass player, but in those days I played orchestral bass. And then I played a little cello just for fun from my bass skills.

The CD cover of Charles Bernstein's 1999 composition "Mass: Voices of the World"

AM: Tell me about the world beat mass you composed.

Bernstein: All the composers through history have written masses. I don’t know why I was drawn to it but I just had to write a mass. I wanted to make it a rhythmic mass, and I wanted it to be ecumenical in the sense that it had different cultures in it – native American, Middle Eastern cultures, Greek, just a wide variety. I wanted each movement of the mass to have its own emotional connection – the Sanctus should be holy, the Credo should communicate the stability of belief, the Agnus Dei should be a cry for mercy, the Gloria should just be an absolutely all-stops-out cry of Glory to God in the highest. These are just emotional statements, kind of like film music, but I felt it really strongly. I wanted to say all of those things, said it, and then never felt the need to write anything else of this kind.

Bernstein with actor George Clooney after interviewing him publicly in 2011

AM: Is there a particular type of film that you like to compose for?

Bernstein: What I like best is to go from vastly different project to vastly different project. I love, for example, finishing a period drama and doing a contemporary comedy and then doing a horror movie followed by a high-integrity documentary. Anything that gives me a lot of variety satisfies me. And the only other thing that really is important to me is that that I’m working with good people and that the project is of high quality. If those things are there I don’t care what genre it is.

Lewis Teague, director of the film "Charlotta-TS," with the star of the film, European actress Laura Bayonas, and Bernstein, who composed the soundtrack

AM: What are you working on now?

Bernstein: Right now I’m working with Lewis Teague, who directed Cujo. We collaborated on Cujo 25 years or so ago. I’ve never had a better time working on a project, mainly because it’s a super low-budget thing that Lewis has written, filmed and edited himself, and we have no studio – no boss to tell us what the music should be. It’s strictly a director-composer collaboration and it’s wacky, it’s comedic, it’s silly and it’s fun. I’ve written five songs. The style is a fusion of Spanish gypsy and techno. I love all gypsy music and all of the different musical manifestations in the different countries and different periods. So it’s fun to have the Spanish gypsy element in this movie because the main character comes from Barcelona, and there’s a sense of Spain and wild gypsy guitar in it. So I’m just having a great time with that.

For more information about Charles Bernstein, his music and his books, please visit the website www.charlesbernstein.com.

INTERVIEW WITH NAOMI DUGUID

World traveller, writer, photographer and cook, Naomi Duguid is equally at home exploring the culinary offerings of countries like Thailand and Tibet as she is recreating them in her Toronto kitchen. She has co-authored six award-winning travel cookbooks (with former partner Jeffrey Alford) that explore the cuisines of Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Europe and Africa through photographs, recipes and stories. Two of the books, Flatbreads & Flavors (1995) and Hot Sour Salty Sweet (2000), were honoured with the James Beard Foundation Cookbook of the Year award and Hot Sour Salty Sweet has just gone into its eighth printing.

Duguid has recently completed work on a new book, Rivers of Flavor – Recipes and Travel Tales from Burma, which will be published next fall.  Anita Malhotra interviewed Duguid, who was at her Toronto home, via Skype video on November 5, 2011, a few days before she left on the latest of many trips to Thailand and Burma.

Naomi Duguid speaking at the Women's Culinary Network Woman of the Year Awards in 2009 (photo by Laura Berman)

AM: You have many interests – food, travel, writing and photography. How did each of these develop?

Duguid: I’ve always assumed that the whole world was out there to be explored or dreamed about. I was a reader as a child – still am. My grandfather had been to India as a young man, so the larger world was there. I remember going to England when I was 10 with my mother and brother because my father had a business trip, and my mother said to us, “Now, the people in England won’t be curious about you and your lives, but you have to remember to ask them about how they think and what they do.”  It was a very good lesson for travel – I’ve never forgotten.

When I was 17, I lived in France for a year, and then I did my third year away at the London School of Economics. I like being a traveller, wherever I am. I’m a person who likes to not know what’s around the corner and to move forward towards the corner.  And it turns out that travel is one way of doing that, but I can also do it walking or bicycling the streets of Toronto.

"Flatbreads & Flavors," the first of six travel cookbooks co-authored by Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford

AM: What about your interest in food? Does that date back to an early age?

Duguid: The things I’ve done the last 25 or 30 years arise out of travel, but my undergraduate degree was in geography. I really like to understand how things work – how things work for people emotionally and how things work in a geeky, practical way like, “Where does the rain fall?” and “What grows?” So food, of course, is, “How do people live? What do they grow? What do they have, what don’t they have? How do they make do? How do they work around the problem of a shortage of water or a shortage of fuel?”

AM: Did your writing and photography start with your travels as well?

Women transplanting rice in Karen State, Burma (photo by Naomi Duguid)

Duguid:  I used to work as a lawyer, and the law can actually ruin your writing. You’re writing clearly but there’s not much charm or grace to it, so it takes recovering from. So I would say I learned on the job. And photography – I got my first camera the day before I went on a trip to Ladakh in 1978. And it was just immediately comfortable. Some of the shots from that first trip were in Mangoes & Curry Leaves. So I learned by doing and also by meeting photographers on the road who said, “Oh, you might think about this, or you might think about that.”

AM: How did your first book, Flatbreads & Flavors, come about?

Map showing location of Kashgar, a city in the autonomous region of Xinjiang in Western China

Duguid: Jeffrey and I had met and we’d read that the pass between China and Pakistan was going to be open to foreign travellers in the spring of ’86, so we thought that’s a trip we could make. We got bicycles, travelled to Western Tibet, and then we went to Kashgar and Xinjiang in Western China. It’s a vibrant country – all those oases. Those Turkic peoples – the wheat growers and others – flatbreads are their basic food. That’s where the idea came from. It was like, “let’s do a book about flatbreads – this basic, staple food.” The Roman armies marched on it, you know. And then it was how to go from there to the actual book. So we started writing articles for food magazines and we self-assigned some travel. I went to Soviet Central Asia, and Jeffrey went to Yemen, and then we felt we knew enough to put in a proposal, and we were lucky enough to sell it. We got an agent, and everyone thought it was a very weird topic. Then it became mainstream. Flatbreads started to be in breadbaskets because the book came out, and chefs would come up to us and say, “This is so great because we should have thought of this but we didn’t.”

AM: How do you travel in these countries and research your recipes at the same time?

Duguid: The main thing is to not move quickly – to stay somewhere and hang around. I’ve got a book on Burma coming out next September. Starting in on it was a reminder of what it’s like to arrive in a place that you don’t know very well. So I might go to a town in Burma and then poke around in the markets and just walk and take pictures of the food. I become familiar to people because they see me the first day and on the second day and I’m still there the third day, so they relax. So I’m eating things, and I might ask somebody, “What do you put in this?” or “Is there this in that?” I would never ask for a recipe.

Woman carrying donuts in Kalaw, Shan State, Burma (photo by Naomi Duguid)

I think that just stopping and watching the daily patterns and occasionally being able to be in conversation with people, gradually things seep in. I don’t take notes out in the street – only back in my room, because there are many places people are going to think you’re a tax collector or a spy if you’re taking notes in the street. And the camera is also a note-taking device. Then I get back home and try to figure out how to do that thing.

AM: Can you give me an example of how you might recreate a recipe once you get back home?

Woman winnowing Barley in Lalibela, Ethiopia (photo by Naomi Duguid)

Duguid: In Home Baking there’s a recipe for Portuguese Mountain Rye that comes from the highest village in Portugal – Sabugueiro. There’s a stone house in that village that’s got an oven and a couple of long tables and nothing else. I went there and luckily they were firing the oven up the next day. The woman whose house I found a room in ended up being one of the women who fired up the oven. At the end of an incredible day, I sat with the woman in her kitchen eating the bread she’d made the night before. I had watched her make it, but how would I check the taste and the balance once I got home? Well, with the bread was a soup, a cheese and a local honey. So I bought some honey and cheese so that when I got home and was making the bread for the first time, I could taste how the bread went with the honey. And it worked. I got it right the first time.

Woman weighing green beans in Karwa, Karnataka, India (photo by Naomi Duguid)

It’s almost like a science experiment – you’re just trying to problem-solve. Sometimes the ingredients are not the same – a tomato here is not the same as a tomato in Thailand or a tomato in India.  So what you’re wanting is the same balance. What would a person from there do if they were here and making that dish?

AM: Tell me about your upcoming book.

Duguid: The book is called Rivers of Flavour – Recipes and Travel Tales from Burma and it’s being published in September of 2012 in Canada by Random House Canada and in the United States by Artisan Books, and it has stories and photographs and recipes and a map. I think the thing that people are going to find easiest as an entry point are the Burmese salads. They’re kind of brilliant. But it’s not difficult food. It’s very straightforward – it’s a rice-based culture. And I think people will find it interesting to see how different it is from Thai food.

Buddhist Monk in Karen State, Burma (photo by Naomi Duguid)

AM: Why did you choose Burma?

Duguid:  It’s kind of the keystone, if you think about the geography. It lies between China and India, it’s part of Southeast Asia, but it’s quite distinct. And so it was really interesting to me. And it also felt important politically to make this place that’s been so cut off be a real place to people. So the book is not full of stories of political oppression. I want to have the place breathe on its own because even though people may be afflicted by the lack of rule of law and other traumatic things that have gone on in the country, they’re still living with dignity. They’re still taking care of their children. They still have an extraordinary food culture. And now, in these last few months, the political situation seems to be loosening and improving. Hopefully that will continue and more people will go and visit Burma to see for themselves what an interesting, culturally rich place it is.

AM: Do your books have a political agenda?

Buddha caves in Karen State, Burma (photo by Naomi Duguid)

Duguid: Beyond the Great Wall is overtly political just because it’s talking about issues of cultural appropriation in China, but all the books are political. I’m not out there on a barricade, but I try to work against our natural tendency to pigeonhole other people or other cultures. We need to categorize things, and the most basic version of that is there’s us and there’s the others. I see all these books as tools for helping make the “other” less “other.” The stories can do that for some people, and then if they make the recipe, maybe the story echoes with the recipe and gives them more dimensions. And so it’s no longer just a place they’re never heard of on a map or a place they think is weird and foreign.

AM: Tell me about your “Immerse Through” culinary tours in Thailand.

Man in oxcart at harvest time - Shan State, Burma (photo by Naomi Duguid)

Duguid: If you really stop and pause, you can get huge cultural insights through food, so we kind of immerse. I’ve got a close friend in Thailand and she and I are the bridges. Her mother teaches village-style Northern Thai cooking for two days, so people are doing hands-on cooking using local tools – cleavers and knives and mortars and pestles and cooking over charcoal. And we go to the market each day with a shopping list, and I’m there encouraging and helping them. Then we go up north for two days, and we’re cooking this time at a farm, making Shan food. And by the time they get back to Chiang Mai for the last day, people are full of confidence and knowledge. It’s really phenomenal. So for me it’s exciting to see them understanding the culture from the inside, because when you get a grip on the food, you also understand a lot of other things.

Xiapin market in Yunnan Province, China (photo by Naomi Duguid)

AM: How has travelling changed you?

Duguid: I think I always was appreciative, but it’s made me more knowledgeably appreciative about what other people manage to do in their daily lives. It’s not just “other people have it worse” – it’s the reminder to be grateful for what you do have. Also, it’s to think that those people are still living with dignity even with problems that are mountains. They still are themselves – they’re not victims. Everyone has a dignity and a capacity for creativity and engagement, whatever their circumstances. And so for me it’s just a constant reminder to never take anything for granted and always to look for that something special, and try and make a connection with that something special with people that I encounter.

Woman in Assam, India (photo by Naomi Duguid)

AM: Is there one memory of all your travelling and writing and learning that stands out?

Duguid: I always want to be able to tune back in to the sense of thrill and excitement every time I get on a plane, so I try and tune back into my 17-year-old self going off to France, and the feelings I had when I got there. There were some letters from friends who’d started university, and I remember reading them and having a little moment of homesickness, thinking, “Oh, have I made a terrible mistake? I’ve stepped out of the groove, what am I missing?” I had this ten-minute pause, and then that was it, and I’ve never been homesick since. And so that first memory of that homesickness, and then thinking, “That was a good little bounce I got off that!” I’m still up there.

More information about Naomi Duguid can be found at immersethrough.com.

INTERVIEW WITH DENNIS DORTCH

Dennis Dortch is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker whose debut feature – A Good Day to be Black & Sexy – is a series of vignettes that aim to portray Black sexuality realistically. Screened at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, the film has aired on Showtime and The Movie Channel and is also available on DVD and by Netflix video streaming. Anita Malhotra spoke with Dortch, who was at his L.A. home, via Skype video on September 2, 2011.  

Filmmaker Dennis Dortch

AM: How did you get into filmmaking?

Dortch: It was at college – Loyola Marymount. I was a recording arts major and shared some of the same classes as the film majors, so I took the “intro to film” class and I liked it so much I decided to change my major and try it out.

AM: As a child, did you have an interest in film?

Dortch: I wrote a lot of short stories and made up characters, but I didn’t really think about it as film. It never really occurred to me.

AM: Did you grow up in L.A.?

Dortch: No, I grew up all over the place. I grew up in El Paso, Texas, of all places, up until the age of 10. And my mother remarried a military man, so we travelled the world and went all over the United States and the world from there.

Dortch at the age of 4

AM: Tell me about your earliest films.

Dortch: I made a couple of films in college. One is called Honey. It’s sort of a surreal Blaxploitation movie, and there’s one I did for Slamdance, called the White Girl Theme.

AM: I’ve read that you used Super 8 to shoot Honey. Why did you use that format?

Dortch: At the time the school was still using Super 8 and my girlfriend and partner uses Super 8 a lot because she likes that look, but it’s a lost art. I still would use Super 8 now for different things because you can’t really beat that look. You don’t really want to fake it either.

AM: How did A Good Day to be Black & Sexy come about?

Postcard for Dortch's short film "Honey," which was shot on Super 8

Dortch: My short film, Honey, was at Slamdance, and one of the questions I got was, “What is your next project?” I didn’t have one, so I made up something. “A Good Day to be Black and Sexy” sounded like a catchy title. After that, I wrote a story, which was really short stories in a short film.

And then I decided to have family and kids, and from there I had to support them and get a job. After a while I ended up taking it out and developing it into a feature. But I liked the idea of having vignettes and not having one full story – not having to commit to one thing. I thought it was easier to shoot, too. Instead of having to go for an entire six or seven weeks for one story, I could just do a weekend of shooting, go a couple of months, then do another weekend of shooting. So that’s how it developed into that format.

Dortch (front right) with the cast of "A Good Day to be Black and Sexy" at the 2008 AFI Fest (American Film Institute film festival) (photo by Frazer Harrison)

AM: What was your day job?

Dortch: When I had the short film I was working at Sony Pictures Interactive – I was a producer for the website for movies and TV. And then I got fired from that. So I ended up working at night with delinquent kids who were in the system. That freed me up to be able to write at night and have my days free for meetings. So I had that job for a long time all the way up to while developing and shooting and editing Black & Sexy.

Dortch at AFI Fest beside the "Black & Sexy" poster, which features Nana Hill

AM: Is sexuality and relationships the topic that most interests you, or is it just one topic of many that you’re interested in?

Dortch: That’s the only topic. My girlfriend was just saying that about me this morning. It seems to be the topic I gravitate towards the most. There are other ones – race is a big one – but I haven’t hit it completely as far as shooting anything yet.

AM: How is Black sexuality portrayed in the mainstream media, and how is your film a departure from that?

Still from the vignette "Her Man," which features Marcuis Harris and Chonte Harris (photo by Simion Cernica)

Dortch: It’s not always across the board, but we’re usually portrayed as raping, or there’s something to be feared about our sexuality, or as oversexed. You know, Black people just want to be regular human beings – same issues, same concerns, same pleasures as other people portrayed in the media. So it wasn’t really a mission of mine, but I knew that I wanted to express that we’re regular people.

Some people thought that we put too much sex in one film. I thought I was doing something that made perfect sense and was a lot about our humanity. But others – even Black people, especially very conservative ones – felt like it was just too much. You really can’t win. Any social-political purpose I had was always skewed by the perception of what I was doing.

Still from the vignette "Tonight" with Natalia Morris, Mylika Davis and Alisa Sherrod (photo by Jerome Ware)

AM: What about other reactions to the film?

Dortch: This happened to me at every major screening – it started at Sundance. People would ask, “Why do they have to be just black people?” “Why did it have to be about sex?” That’s kind of the other side of the coin.

AM: Can you give me a quick rundown of the short films within the film?

Dortch: “Reciprocity” is about a college girl who likes to receive but not give. “Her Man” is a married man’s affair with his mistress, and his mistress realizing that he’s not really her man – that he belongs to someone else. “Tonight – Part I” is about a 17-year-old girl on her birthday who wants something special to happen to her, and the guy she’s kind of with comes on to her strong and they ended up having an issue.

Alphonso Johnson in a still from the vignette "American Boyfriend" (photo by Jerome Ware)

“Reprise” wasn’t in the original script, but because I liked the actress who auditioned for “Reciprocity” so much I made something for her. And then there’s “Tonight – Part II,” which is a play between the same young girl in Part I and an older guy, a sort of familiar story that happens almost every day. “American Boyfriend” is last, and that is a Black dude who’s stuck in the house because his Chinese girlfriend’s parents and family came over and he wasn’t able to get out in time.

AM: What I found really interesting about the film was how close you get in to the actors and how intimate the film is. How did you work with the actors?

Dortch on the set of "Black & Sexy" with cinematographer Brian Harding (photo by Jerome Ware)

Dortch: By being as hands-off as possible. I had a cinematographer who went to school with me, whose style is very much that. His camera work is very handheld, very intimate. He’s a documentary filmmaker himself. When we get into a room with the actors, we see where they want to be. We don’t say, “Actors, go there, and stand there, and do this.” We see what naturally comes to them and then we shoot around that. We figure out how to capture whatever they’re giving off.

AM: What about the dialogue? Was there some improvisation?

Dortch: Yes, about half of it is improvised.

Dortch working with actors Nana Hill and Kareem J. Grimes shooting the vignette "Reprise" (photo by Jerome Ware)

AM: How do you get your actors to improvise?

Dortch: The first vignette we shot was “American Boyfriend,” and that’s the one where we stuck to script completely. And then from there I got bored, so after shooting two or three, I took a chance. We really started improvising with “Tonight – Part II.” It was half script, half winging it. So I would have certain set pieces that I really wanted to have in there, and then I would sit down and talk about it with the actors: “This is what the scene is about. What are your experiences that bring you to being familiar with this, something in your life that happened like this?” The right actors would love to be able to not be held back by a script. It’s nice to have something to fall back on in case you don’t know what to do, but a lot of times you can capture some things that you can’t write when you bring in actors.

Dortch discussing an unscripted scene for the vignette "Her Man" with actors Chonte Harris and Marcuis Harris

When we got to “Her Man,” which was the last part I shot, I said, “Let’s just throw it away.” So that’s kind of how we approached it – it was kind of gradual.

AM: Was it hard for you to get distribution for this film?

Dortch: The first couple of months you think it’s going to be impossible, so I had times when I didn’t know what was going to happen. But once I got into Sundance, people were there to see it and the buyers were there, so it wasn’t really that hard. But I can’t say that I was trying. I was just making a film. So I think nine times out of ten people try and figure out what they can get into Sundance with or what they can sell, but you really you just have to make the film you want to make.

Dortch and his cast at the first Sundance film festival screening of "Black & Sexy" in 2008

AM: What was the budget of the film and how did you finance it?

Dortch: The original budget that I went to Sundance with was $65,000, and by the time I finished, it was $100,000 with music licensing samples, paying for everything else, post-production. And I pulled the money out of my house at the time. The market was really great and I just pulled the equity out of the house to make the film.

AM: Who are some of your filmic influences?

Dortch: Fellini is a strong one and Melvin Van Peebles  is probably the second one.

AM: How did Fellini influence you?

Melvin Van Peebles at the Tribeca Film Institute in 2010 (photo by David Shankbone - Flickr Creative Commons)

Dortch: He took personal stories, which is what Black & Sexy is to me, and really expanded upon them and put his personal life and his feelings and his fears and what he observed of other people into his films. He wasn’t afraid to be creative, and his whole genre was surreal. And Melvin Van Peebles. I saw Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song at a Blaxpoitation film fest, and I was amazed that this film was done in 1970 and self-financed, or financed by his friends – Bill Cosby and others. It wasn’t the first Black independent film, but for me it was my sensibility. It’s very musical, very melodic, very surreal, very message-oriented, but not really a narrative per se. So those things always attract me – something that’s not normal or straightforward.

AM: Will you be making any other films on the same theme?

Dortch: We have some people who are looking into making a film in Atlanta. I want to make an international one, too. The African diaspora is huge, and I think it is a niche that’s not really being served. This will involve different writers, because I don’t know international stories enough to be able to correctly come up with something.

"Black & Sexy" logo (photo by Brian Harding)

AM: Are you working on anything else right now?

Dortch: I have a TV pilot that we are just getting out this week. We decided to take a leap into TV, and it feels very freeing because you can develop characters over time and don’t have to tidy up in 90 or 120 minutes. It’s something we’re looking to sell.

AM: How is the distribution of the film going?

Dortch: Rarely does an independent filmmaker make any money, but I’ve been fortunate enough to be in the black now. So it’s travelled. I’m not huge, I’m not rich. Will I ever make all the money back? I doubt it, but it’s not really why most filmmakers make films, and I didn’t make it for that reason. It would be nice if I was making a living off that film, but I think for the most part I am lucky to be in the black. But distribution is very tricky. It’s really skewed in their favour. They hold all the cards, they have all the numbers, you know. You just play the game so you can get in the game.

For more information about Dennis Dortch and A Good Day to be Black & Sexy, please visit the website theblackandsexymovie.com.  

INTERVIEW WITH COLIN MACK

Ottawa-based composer Colin Mack’s evocative pieces for piano, chamber ensemble, orchestra and voice have been broadcast and distributed by CBC Radio, Radio-Canada, Galaxie and the National Film Board. On July 11, 2011, a concert dedicated to his work was held at Ottawa’s Music and Beyond arts festival. Anita Malhotra spoke with Mack at his home on July 22, 2011.

Colin Mack at his house on July 22, 2011 following his Artsmania interview

AM: Tell me about your earliest experiences in music.

Mack: My mother was my first piano teacher, so I began piano at the age of five, and three or four years later – I was living in Victoria at the time – I started taking piano lessons at the Victoria Conservatory of Music. We moved to Ottawa when I was about 12 or 13 and I continued piano lessons with Douglas Voice and later with Jean-Paul Sevilla at the University of Ottawa. Although I did some composing as a teenager, I didn’t seriously begin writing music until university. In my third year I decided to stop piano performance and concentrate on composition, studying with Steven Gellman.

Mack at work composing in his studio

AM: Where did the impetus come from to express yourself as a composer?

Mack: I remember being struck by Debussy’s Hommage à S. Pickwick, where he cites God Save the Queen in his tongue-in-cheek prelude, and I wrote a pastiche of this when I was 12 or 13. Later, it was the influence of Olivier Messiaen – my first pieces were definitely influenced by his music and his modes. I was also influenced by the freedom of being able to improvise at the piano, and taken with the fact that the music that you see on the page begins this way – in the mind and often in a very vague way.

It was only after performing music for a while that I began to understand that I could write music, or at least aspire to write music like some of the classics that I’d been playing for 10 or 15 years. I think the idea that that music is not written in stone – that there are many, many choices that go into writing the music that ends up being performed – interested me.

AM: Which other composers and teachers influenced you during your studies?

Mack: I went on to study at the University of Montreal with André Prévost and Michel Longtin and Serge Garant, so for example, one piece that I’ve written is definitely influenced by Serge Garant. It’s Starry Night, a piece for piano solo, and it’s a mixture of jazz and 12-tone music. If I hadn’t studied with him, I don’t think I would have thought of the music or attempted to write it. Another influence I had was Ligeti, particularly in an orchestral piece that I wrote called Fête des Couleurs – October’s Night.

Composer Serge Garant conducting

AM: As a student with Michel Longtin, you conducted interviews for your piece Winterseen about the relationship between the composer and the performer. What exactly were you exploring with those interviews?

Mack: I had interviews with Robert Cram, the flutist, and my piano professor, Jean-Paul Sevilla. These were performers that I have a lot of respect for and who have large repertoires, and I used that as a springboard to get some ideas for what I might do to write music that was easier to relate to for performers.

Pianist Andrew Tunis, violinist Marcelle Mallette, cellist Julian Armour and clarinettist Kimball Sykes perform "A Canadian Gallery" on July 11, 2011 at Ottawa's Music and Beyond festival

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, new music was somewhat ghettoized. There were a lot of new music performing groups and that’s what they specialized in doing. And the performers that played traditional classical music often didn’t know much about the repertoire that these groups would play, or they weren’t interested in it.

That has certainly changed in 20 or 30 years. In the classical music world, musicians realize that they depend on composers to breathe new life into their repertoire, just like composers depend on performers to give life to their creations. So there’s a lot to be learned from each other, and the idea that creating new music is all about doing something completely new and untravelled is less of an issue now. I don’t think the audience is interested as much as composers in “new” discoveries in composition for their own sake. I think one of the reasons for that – certainly in North America – is that composers tend to be tenured university professors, and their raison d’être is they need to be constantly discovering new things.

AM: Have you consciously adapted your style over the years to make your music more accessible to audiences?

Mack: I’m definitely aware of the difficulty of getting things performed, so I’m always trying to find ways to minimize difficulties during rehearsal. It’s amazing what things performers can get bogged down in that you don’t think of. I write at the computer now – it’s very easy to play things back on the computer that aren’t necessarily as easy to play back live on an instrument.

The first page of Mack's piano composition "Starry Night," completed in 1995 and dedicated to Serge Garant

In the ‘90s I began to use a music program to compose, and that’s influenced how I write. Something you have to be careful with working on computers is that you don’t get trapped in writing music that is too easy because you’re writing for something that is set up to be written a certain way. For instance, it’s pre-set to write with time signatures and key signatures – traditional notation. It’s a lot harder to use a computer to come up with graphic notation if you want that it in your piece. By hand there’s a lot of freedom to do, so in that sense maybe it’s easier to be more obviously original. There’s definitely a trade-off involved, but there are benefits to using computers, and most composers my age and younger have made that transition.

AM:  You’ve composed a fair amount of vocal music. How do you go about composing music to accompany text?

Still from a 30-minute operatic version of Isis and Osiris, by Mack and librettist Sharon Singer, performed in Toronto on March 31, 2010

Mack: There’s a lot of poetry that I like that doesn’t speak to me musically, so I think there’s something to do with what I consider to be the musicality of the text that makes me want to set it to music. That being said, once I get the text, there’s a rhythm in the text that doesn’t always mesh with the rhythm I have in the music, so adjustments have to be made, and usually they involve cutting or altering words. But I try to be as respectful as I can be of the text. Working with something that’s from a poet like Gwen MacEwen, who died in 1987, I didn’t make very many changes to the text, but working with a poet or librettist who’s alive, there are many more possibilities for interplay.

Still from Isis and Osiris, produced by Opera in Concert, Ariaworks, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Egyptian Tourist Authority

AM: How did your series of pieces A Canadian Gallery come about?

Mack: That began in 2010 as an initiative between the CBC and the National Gallery of Canada and Julian Armour. The National Gallery of Ottawa wanted to promote their Cybermuse online artwork collection, and the CBC came up with the idea to commission 10 composers. That got cut to five and I didn’t make the cut, but was still part of a concert. Because I wasn’t part of that five, I had the freedom to find a painting that I wanted. I ended up choosing Maligne Lake by Lauren Harris. My wife Claudia and I, for our honeymoon in 1978, went to the Rocky Mountains, and saw our first live moose at Maligne Lake. It’s a beautiful lake in Jasper National Park, apart from the fact that I love Lauren Harris as an artist. That one movement got performed in 2010 at this concert of Canadian composers. And then I received a commission from the City of Ottawa and decided to extend that idea, so I chose three other paintings and wrote that music, and the full quartet was premiered this year.

The painting "Maligne Lake" by Lauren Harris is the backdrop of a performance of Mack's composition of the same name, part of his piece "A Canadian Gallery"

AM: To what degree are you conscious of yourself being in the Canadian tradition – of being a Canadian composer rather than simply a composer?

Mack: The fact that I live in Canada will have some bearing on the music that I write, but I don’t think about trying to be Canadian or even trying to be minimalist or traditionalist. I think about it more as there’s something in me that needs to compose and I just try to write music that speaks to me. And in Canada I think there’s such a wide variety of styles when I listen to them – music that I hear live or through the Canadian Music Centre – that it’s difficult for me to summarize and say, “Oh, that’s Canadian.”

AM: What are some of the challenges of being a composer of the type of music that you write?

Mack chatting with an audience member after his Music and Beyond concert on July 11, 2011

Mack: Classical music is not a huge part of the musical market, and new music is a small part of the classical music market, so finding space in that is a huge challenge.

I certainly don’t write music for money – you don’t pay the bills with composing. I have to supplement my composing with other musical activities: teaching and piano tuning.  That’s true for virtually all classical composers – either they’re earning their living teaching at a university or music school, or some other way.

So I guess the challenge is, “How do you find the time to compose? How do you find that necessary time to create, because you still have to earn a living?” And there are more composers in my field than there were 30 years ago, and there’s less money for commissions, so that’s a challenge for everyone in my field. I feel fortunate in that all the music that I’ve written has been performed and I make a point of trying to get it performed and getting feedback from performers before I publish it, because I think I have a lot to learn from the performers and what they might have to say about making something more effective or easier to play.

The cover of Mack's 2009 CD "Imprints"

AM: What was your reaction to attending the concert of your work at the festival Music and Beyond?

Mack: I was honoured to have such great musicians performing my music. It’s hard enough to get one piece performed. To have a concert of your music performed by top-notch musicians is kind of unreal, actually. It wasn’t as much of a retrospective as my CD Imprints, but still it was a good cross-section of my music. Most of all it’s very gratifying to get that kind of recognition, to be plugging away for 25 years and have an impresario like Julian Armour put his seal of approval on your music – to say it is worth listening to for an hour, and know that an audience will sit and listen to it.

For more information about the music of Colin Mack, visit www.colinmack.ca or the Canadian Music Centre website.

INTERVIEW WITH YVON SOGLO (CRAZY SMOOTH)

Yvon Soglo (Crazy Smooth) is a Benin-born, Ottawa-based dancer, choreographer and teacher who specializes in b-boying, the original form of hip hop dance. He is also the founder and director of the dance company Bboyizm, which will present “Izm,” a one-hour work he created, at the 2011 Canada Dance Festival on June 18, 2011.

Anita Malhotra spoke with Soglo on June 11, 2011 at his rehearsal space in Ottawa’s west end, just before one of his final rehearsals.

Yvon Soglo at his rehearsal space for "Izm" before his Artsmania interview

AM: What is a b-boy?

Soglo: A b-boy is a “break boy.” The “b” stands for “break,” so when you’re practicing the dance you’re b-boying, and if you’re a girl you’re b-girling. The break in the song is when there are no more words. The melody goes down and the song is carried by the drummer. That’s why we’re called b-boys and b-girls, because we dance to the break. So my name being Crazy Smooth, in the dance world they would call me “B-Boy Crazy Smooth” or “Break Boy Crazy Smooth.”

Bboyizm promo shot

AM: How did you get that name?

Soglo: It was another dancer named T-Swift – Technical-Swift, a famous b-boy from Montreal. After we did a battle and he beat me, he asked me what my b-boy name was and I didn’t have one. Then he saw me dance and said, “We’re going to put ‘Crazy’ in your name because you move very fast, but even when you mess up, you can’t really tell because the way you move always looks smooth,” so “Crazy Smooth.” When he gave me the name, I didn’t think of it, but today I definitely think that it’s the one that defines me the best.

AM: How would you describe b-boying?

Soglo teaching a class

Soglo: Hip hop is the name of the culture, and within hip hop there’s b-boying, which is hip hop’s first dance. In the ‘80s, they used a wrong term to describe this dance – breakdancing. Breakdancing was an umbrella term that encompassed every type of street dance there was, so when you said you were breakdancing, you would do the moonwalk, then you would do a body wave, then you would spin on your head, which technically is nothing because each dance has its own history.

Soglo in triplicate demonstrating some b-boy moves

For b-boying and b-girling, the foundation of the dance is doing “toprock,” which is dancing when you’re standing up, a transition to go down on the floor – some people call it a “go-down,” some people call it a “drop.” Once you’re on the floor you do what we call footwork – shuffles, kick-outs and a bunch of footwork moves. And then there are what we call freezes, which the crowd usually likes, when people stop in a certain position for a second. And then traditionally what we call power moves would be the spinning – so spinning on your head, spinning on your back. So these are the main core elements of b-boying. Now, there are other street dances such as popping, locking, and waacking, so there are a whole bunch of other styles.

AM: Can you tell me a bit about the history of b-boying?

Soglo: B-boying started in the early ‘70s, got very popular in the late ‘70s, and got its media explosion in the early ‘80s. When it started, it was mainly the African American community in New York doing it, and as it got more popular in the late ‘70s with block parties, more communities were exposed to it. The two main communities were the African American community and the Latinos of New York, heavily influenced by the Puerto Ricans.

B-boy crew competition at Platform 3 Hip Hop Festival at the Eveleigh Carriageworks in Sydney (Andy Tyler, Flickr Creative Commons)

And then movies came out in the early ‘80s, like Beat Street, Wild Style, even Hollywood movies like Flash Dance. That’s why it became an international phenomenon. B-boying being a part of hip hop culture, there’s also DJing, there’s MCing, there’s graffiti, and then there’s the dance. And when people would see this they were like, “Wow. What is that? I want to be part of that.” And then, in the mid to end of the ‘80s, it died down and other dance forms came forward. As it was dying down, it became big elsewhere – Europe picked it up in a major way. And now today, the same phenomenon is happening where the media’s getting into it and you can see it everywhere.

AM: Who have you been inspired by?

Soglo: I have different types of inspirations, and they don’t necessarily come from the b-boy world, but I can name groups that pioneered this movement. There’s the Rock Steady Crew, which is from New York. There are the Floormasters, which later became the New York City Breakers. There’s another group called Dynamic Rockers. In Europe, there’s a very legendary crew in England called Second to None and there’s a crew in France called Actual Force. So, there are crews all over the world, but definitely Dynamic, Rock Steady Crew and New York City Breakers are probably the three most influential crews in b-boy history.

AM: When did you start b-boying and why?

Soglo: My first memory of dance would be Michael Jackson’s Thriller, when I was a kid, my Dad showing me some of the videos, and so I can say that I’ve always been dancing. But when I was in high school, one of my friends got one of those ‘80s movies from a friend called Breakin’, so when I saw that movie, something clicked and I told myself that that’s the type of dance that I would like to do.

From then on – I must have been 16, 17 – we started watching videos, putting the dancing in slow motion so we could try to imitate the moves. And then in 1997, we did a performance at this talent show called Hip Hop Fest. And after that show, we continued dancing and practicing and getting more videos and getting a bit more into the culture. And then, in 1999, I went to New York for my first Rock Steady Crew anniversary, which is a kind of jam/convention that goes over three or four days. When I was there I saw a lot of people that I saw in the movies, so it was a big revelation. And just being in New York where this culture started, it really clicked. After I came back, I started researching, studying the dance, and practicing hours and hours and hours.

AM: Tell me about your studies in New York.

Soglo: In 2005, I got a grant from the Canada Arts Council to go to New York to study the dance, and that’s when I had the opportunity to meet some of the pioneers. When I say study, it’s not necessarily that they showed me how to dance, but for me, which is essential, I had the opportunity to “kick it” with them, which is basically to just chill out, ask questions and hang out. And they’ll tell you about how it was back in the day – “When we were at the jam, this happened,” or “We went to this club, this crew came in and we battled them, and this person made this move up.”

I also managed to take workshops in Philadelphia with Rennie Harris, who’s a famous choreographer in the States, and with Crazy Legs, who’s a legendary b-boy and president of Rock Steady Crew. So when I say study, it’s deeper than just somebody showing you how to do a trick or a technique for a move. It’s understanding the dance and somebody’s perspective of the dance.

Soglo teaching a class

AM: What are some of the biggest technical challenges of b-boying?

Soglo: I would say it is very physically challenging. So for the floor stuff – you kneel down or you crouch down to really try out how to do the footwork – the challenge is adjusting all the foundation moves to your body. And some people are naturally stronger, some people are naturally more flexible. It’s when you stick with it and discover how your body works, how you’re going to have to adjust your body in order to be able to perform these moves. It’s hard, but at the same time it’s really a matter of conditioning and training.

AM: Do you train just by doing the moves or do you have other ways of keeping yourself in shape?

Soglo warming up before a rehearsal

Soglo: Everybody has a different regimen of training. I’m an athlete and I’ve been in sports before, so I train to dance but I also train a lot of calisthenics, push-ups, sit-ups and yoga.

AM: What is unique about your style of b-boying?

Soglo: The essence of hip hop culture is to aspire to be unique, and this is in every aspect of the culture, whether it’s fashion, dance, whether you’re an MC or a DJ. I’ve been told, by some older pioneers from New York, that when they look at a certain b-boy, they can tell, “Oh, you studied with this guy.” But one of them said to me, “You, I can’t say, I’ve never seen anybody move the way you do.” I’m from Benin, West Africa, and I think I have an African way of moving, and so my movement is very unique, and my philosophy of dance is also a bit different from other people’s. I truly believe in expressing yourself honestly, and that if your expression is honest it’s always going to be impressive. I’ll always do something that comes from the heart.

AM: Is there a particular type of music you like to dance to?

Soglo: I really like James Brown, but classic songs would be “Apache” from Incredible Bongo Band, Jimmy Castor and the Funky Bunch “It’s Just Begun,” “Hot Pants” by Bobbie Byrd, so there’s a lot.

AM: What do you express through your dance?

Soglo: Dance for me is one of the best ways to express myself, so that could be expressing joy, being really angry, being very emotional, you know, feel like crying, so it’s the one way that I express pretty much all the emotion that I have. It also comes through the music too, so some songs can give me that dark feeling that I have, and some songs just express joy and the love dancing and the love of moving my body. Some stuff could be political – it varies.

Still from "Izm," Soglo's first piece to be presented in a performing arts setting (photo by Jonathan Maher)

AM: When did you found your dance company, Bboyizm?

Soglo: After I came back from New York in 2005 I had the idea of the name Bboyizm. I had a crew with some of my best students and some of my friends, and as we grew, and I grew in terms of my personal career, it was the smartest thing to do because I wanted to start doing stuff in theatres and I wanted to be known not just as my crew but as a company.

AM: What is your show, Izm, about?

Solo: Izm is our first piece in a performing arts setting. The “izm” represents expressing yourself honestly, not letting other things influence you too much, because we dancers sometimes want to impress people. When you’re on stage and everybody’s whooping and hollering, you want to impress, so when you wanted to impress, you will compromise your artistic integrity to do whatever they want to see. So Izm talks about the fact that there is an entertainment part to what we do, but then there is a very deep substance and artistic part to it too. The piece also has a bit of history of the dance. It pretty much sums up everything that we do.

AM: What role does teaching play in your life?

Soglo: I love to give back and in that sense I’m a purist about my art form and I don’t think you should learn from somebody who doesn’t really know. It’s also the mandate of my company to be authentic and not just teach 1-2-3-4-5, but to teach where it comes from. So the teachers that work for me have to know their stuff too, because we’re making sure we’re going to carry on tradition. Also, it plays a role in the community because we’re educating the kids about dance and about hip-hop culture.

Soglo and a child in the community of Pond Inlet, Nunavut

AM: You’ve done some social work related to dance. What was that about?

Soglo: I was part of a crew called Canadian Floormasters, which is one of Canada’s oldest b-boy crews. The leader of that crew is Stephen Leafloor, who has a Master’s in Social Work but is also an old-school b-boy. And so he combined both of his passions and created a company called Blueprint for Life that does social work through hip-hop. I was part of the first group that did the pilot project in Iqualuit, Nunavut. We did this program with 100 kids from the high school. The project was such a success that Stephen ended up quitting his job and doing this full-time. Blueprint for Life basically changed people’s lives out there. We’re talking about places with probably the highest suicide rate in Canada and a lot of violence, and to bring something positive and something that the kids identify with is tremendous.

AM: Do you find it a struggle to get people to accept b-boying as a legitimate form of dance?

Soglo: Things are changing slowly, but people associate us with acrobatics and tricks, so if you’re with a friend and you tell them that you do ballet and you’re walking in the mall, they probably won’t say, “Okay, show me a pirouette.” But if you tell them that you do b-boying or b-girling, they’ll be like, “Oh yeah? Let me see you spin on your head.” So to make people understand that this is an art form just like ballet, jazz or anything else, takes work, and it’s part of my company’s mandate too. I want people to understand that this is an art form that has substance – it’s deep, it has history.

Bboyizm will present Izm at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre as part of the Canada Dance Festival on Saturday, June 18 at 7:30 p.m. For more information about Yvon Soglo and Bboyizm, visit the website Bboyizm.ca.

INTERVIEW WITH PAULINE OLIVEROS

Composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros has been experimenting with sound for more than six decades. She made her name in the 1960s as a pioneering electronic music composer and member of the San Francisco Tape Music Centre. Since then, she has continued her explorations as a composer, performer/improviser, professor, and most notably as founder of the Deep Listening Institute, based in New York State, which is dedicated to the heightened appreciation of sounds through performances, workshops and new technologies.

Anita Malhotra spoke with Oliveros after she performed a series of improvisations on the digital accordion with percussionist Jesse Stewart at Ottawa’s Glebe St. James United Church on March 17, 2011.

Pauline Oliveros after her concert at Ottawa's Glebe St. James United Church

AM: Where did your interest in music and sound come from?

Oliveros: From my mother and my grandmother, who were pianists, and they taught.

AM: What was some of the music that made an impression on you when you were younger?

Oliveros: All the music that I heard.  And I heard a lot of different kinds of music. I heard country music, I heard jazz, I heard symphonic music, opera, everything you can think of except very modern music.

AM: Did you start playing the accordion when you were young?

Oliveros: Yes, I was nine years old.

AM: Why did you choose the accordion?

Oliveros performing on digital accordion with Ottawa percussionist Jesse Stewart in Ottawa on March 17, 2011

Oliveros: My mother brought one home. She was going to learn to play it so she could teach it and increase her income. And I got fascinated with it, so she backed off and let me do it.

AM: What did you find so fascinating about the instrument?

Oliveros: The sound and just the fact that it was different from the piano, yet it still had some familiarity.

AM: How did you get interested in electronic or tape music?

Oliveros: In the ’60s my friends were interested and we were hearing electronic music coming in on community radio from Europe, so that’s where it started. And I had a tape recorder and started making things with it.

AM: Can you tell me about your work at the San Francisco Tape Music Centre?

Oliveros. The San Francisco Tape Music Centre was a kind of collective non-profit that my friends and I got started so that we could pool our equipment and make tape music. There  is a book called San Francisco Tape Music Centre:1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde and  this book describes everything that you want to know or don’t want to know  about it, with a lot of documentation.

AM: Did you feel it  was challenging being a female composer at the time?

Oliveros: Well, I  felt a challenge to compose music. That’s where my challenge was, for the most  part. I had to cope with attitudes that were not supportive all along. I mean,  you still have that. I think the worst thing is stereotyping. You run into  stereotypes so that the stereotype filters who you are and what you do, and  having to deal with that was the most frustrating thing for me.

AM: What was the  stereotype – that women cannot be good composers?

Oliveros: Well, that  certainly was the paradigm, but I think it’s changing.

Oliveros at work in an early electronic music studio (Center for Contemporary Music Archives)

AM: In your work  there’s an intersection of music and technology. Has technology always appealed  to you?

Oliveros: Yes, all  the way from the first thing that I can remember, like our Victrola – a wind-up  record player – and my grandfather’s crystal radio, and my father’s shortwave  radio. Radio in general. You know, radio broadcasting was only 25 years old  when I was born in 1932.

AM: What was the  originality of “Bye Bye Butterfly”? What were you doing with that piece?

Oliveros: I had  invented my own system, my own way of making electronic music at the San  Francisco Tape Music Centre, and I was using what is now referred to as a  classical electronic music studio, consisting of tube oscillators and patch bays. There were no mixers or synthesizers. So I managed to figure out how to  make the oscillators sing. I used a tape delay system using two tape recorders  and stringing the tape between the two tape machines and being able to configure the tracks coming back in different ways. And one day I decided I would like to put a record into my system. So I picked up a record that was lying on the table, and put it on. I didn’t bother to look at what it was because I didn’t care, and it turned out to be Madame Butterfly. So I processed the aria from Madame Butterfly in my system and I played with it.

AM: What state of mind would you have been in when creating a piece like that?

Oliveros: Well, I used to go into the studio around midnight and stay all night. First of all I had to teach myself how to use the studio because there wasn’t any classes in electronic music. So I’d stay there all night and leave in the morning, observe the sun rise and have a lot of different kinds of sounds in my mind. But it was a quest, it was a search. It was research, it was learning.

AM: Is music a spiritual activity for you?

Oliveros: Yes, of course. What else could it be?

AM: Tell me about your concept of deep listening.

Oliveros: Deep listening is experiencing heightened awareness or expanded awareness of sound and of silence, of quiet, and of sounding – making sounds.

AM: In one of your interviews you talk about a “tuning meditation.” Some involved only a few people and some as many as 6,000. Can you tell me about the one that involved 6,000?

Oliveros: That was at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in about 1989. There were 6,000 women there, and they were out in a meadow, and I offered the tuning meditation and they did it.

AM: What did it consist of?

Oliveros: Singing a tone from one breath with the option of tuning exactly to somebody else, or contributing a tone that nobody else is singing.

AM: You’ve said that music affects the mind and the body. Can you tell me more about that?

Oliveros: I’ll just say that I made my own explorations of tone by listening to a tone for a long time until I began to understand what my sensations were, what my mind was doing with tone. So that’s something that I did, and I developed out of that sonic meditations, which were pieces that I composed in the ‘70s that now are very well-known and used in many classrooms all over the world, but at the time were outrageous.

AM: What is Improvisation Across Abilities?

Oliveros: That’s software in the States that I helped to develop. It enables people with disabilities to improvise. So those people who don’t have any voluntary control, or hands, can work with the physical movement that they can do – whatever voluntary movement they have, even the slightest.

Ann Hamilton's tower at Oliver Ranch in Geyersville, California (Joseph Readdy, Flickr Creative Commons)

AM: What led you to create it?

Oliveros: A conversation with a friend who was an occupational therapist in a school for disability. She needed help.

AM: What is the role of improvisation in your music?

Oliveros: It’s been with me all my life. We all do it. Everybody improvises their way through every day. And so I do that with music.

AM: What are some of your upcoming activities?

Oliveros: I have a commission to do a piece in a place in California, Oliver Ranch, which has an eight-storey structure called The Tower designed by the visual artist Ann Hamilton. She designed it as a performance space, and I have a commission to do a piece for that, which I’m working on. It will be a benefit for the Deep Listening Institute and there’ll be audience participation. There will be performers, chorus, choir, and a big gong suspended from the top of the tower. Quite a big project.

Pauline Oliveros’ composition “Tower Ring” will be performed at Oliver Ranch in Geyersville, California on June 4 and June 5, 2011. For more information about Oliveros and her projects, visit the Deep Listening Institute website. 

INTERVIEW WITH LEE DEMARBRE

Director Lee Demarbre’s films are infused with a passion for B movie genres: Hong Kong action flicks, horror movies, musicals, Blaxpoitation films and Mexican wrestling films, to name a few. A 16mm short – Harry Knuckles and the Treasure of the Aztec Mummy – launched his career in 1999, garnering a Slamdance film festival award. Demarbre followed up with a string of genre-bending films, from the low-budget 16mm cult film Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter (2001) to the big-budget horror film Smash Cut (2009).

Anita Malhotra spoke with Demarbre on April 19, 2011 at Ottawa’s Mayfair Theatre, where he is co-owner and programmer.

Lee Demarbre in his office at Ottawa's Mayfair Theatre after his Artsmania interview

AM: When did you start making films?

LD:   When I was very young, when Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, that was the first film that made me think, “This is something maybe I can do when I grow up.” It wasn’t the movie itself, it was the poster, because the poster said, “From the makers of Jaws and Star Wars.” The poster made me think, “Oh, that’s a profession. The guy who made Star Wars and the guy who made Jaws are teaming up to make Raiders. That’s gonna be a good movie.” And I learned about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and starting buying books and reading them at a very young age.

AM: How old were you when Raiders came out?

LD: Eight.

Demarbre speaking at the 10th anniversary screening of "Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter" on March 25, 2011 at Ottawa's Mayfair Theatre

AM: When did you actually start shooting films?

LD: Spielberg’s story of how he got into filmmaking as a young boy is inspiring. He borrowed his Dad’s camera. He just started shooting stuff in 8mm. And I said, “Dad, do you have a camera I can use? And he’s like, “No.” My Dad was a military guy.

I started playing on tape recorders. I’d record movies off the TV, or plays, and I’d edit them. I would take Monty Python albums and I would choose one of the characters I wanted to be and remove all that dialogue and then record my own dialogue. In a way I was constructing a narrative, you know, without visuals.

When I moved to Ottawa I wanted to afford a video camera, so I started working at this Chinese restaurant in town that was controlled by the Italian mob. I was washing dishes and they were running prostitutes out of the kitchen. It was kind of scary. These cooks got into a fight one day and one of the cooks cut off the fingers of the other cook, and I was asked to replace the guy with the missing fingers. It was really frightening. I was young, too. I was working with pimps and gangsters. But as soon as I afforded my camera, I quit. So now I had a camera. I could use my VCR as a playback machine and I could edit on my camera. One of the first things I did was take movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and cut my own trailers, having fun like that.

Poster for Demarbre's film "Smash Cut" (2009), featuring fomer adult film actress Sasha Grey, who later appeared in Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience" and the TV show "Entourage"

AM: What were your earliest movies like?

LD: I met a friend in high school who shared the same passion, so we started what we called “Basement Wardrobe.” Basement Wardrobe was either my basement or his basement and we would raid our parent’s wardrobes, and based on what we found in the closet, we would create these little skits. Just a few years ago I digitized a lot of them to DVD – 88 short films that I made before I finished high school. Just before I graduated, we made a short feature film called The Hacker on VHS. We both worked at a video store, and I had friends who worked at other video stores, and we were able to release this movie independently in video stores.

AM: Did you go to film school?

Demarbre at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, where "Harry Knuckles and the Treasure of the Aztec Mummy" screened as part of that year's Best of Slamdance tour

LD: After The Hacker, I went to university to take film studies, and for four years I didn’t pick up a camera. After four years of not being hands-on with film, I really needed to get my hands wet again. I joined the Independent Film Cooperative in Ottawa because I discovered the films of Frank Cole, and spent two years shooting a five-minute short film on 16mm called Harry Knuckles, which was a fake trailer for a non-existent feature-length film.

After Harry Knuckles played in all these festivals in Canada, I shot Harry Knuckles and the Treasure of the Aztec Mummy, a 30-minute film on 16mm. This time we got into Slamdance and we won the Spirit of Slamdance Award. That win, and getting on the Mike Bullard show, and going to the Cannes Film Festival – because we became part of the Best of Slamdance and we showed our film at the Egyptian Theatre in L.A. – was the kick in the pants to say, “This could be a life thing.”

AM: How did film genre influence your films?

LD: When I was taking film studies and learning about international cinema – the French New Wave and all this national cinema – I also discovered, in my leisure, Chinatown and Chinese video stores. I rented a movie called Police Story starring Jackie Chan. I was blown away by this movie because Jackie Chan is both an amazing entertainer and incredible filmmaker. And I found out that he had made many other films that I needed to catch up on. I asked my friend’s father where I could get them and he said, “Let’s go to Chinatown.” He dropped us off, and I lost my friend because my friend wasn’t a big movie buff and I got immersed. I’d spend hours in the back rooms getting through not only all of Jackie Chan’s films but discovering John Woo and Sammo Hung – falling in love with Hong Kong cinema  and this action style.

Poster for "Harry Knuckles and the Pearl Necklace" (2004), starring Phil Caracas

So, I said, “I’ll try to make a Hong Kong action movie.” I didn’t end up making a Hong Kong action movie, but a melting point of a lot of things. There was a film society at university and I found Bettie Page, and I found Russ Meyer, and I discovered Blaxploitation films. Discovering Black cinema changed a lot for me because a lot of it was independent and made in New York City without any permits, and I learned about guerrilla filmmaking. So Harry Knuckles – instead of becoming that Hong Kong action movie that I wanted it to be – became all these other things. It was a melting pot of genre. And I guess that’s why when I followed up Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter with the feature film Harry Knuckles and the Pearl Necklace, it was hard to peg and it was hard to put it in a video store and say, “It’s an action film, it’s a horror film, it’s a musical, because it’s all these different things.

AM: What led you to make Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter?

Publicity still from "Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter" (2001), which features Phil Caracas as Jesus fighting lesbian vampires

LD: I went to Toronto and I bought John N. Smith’s 16mm Steenbeck, which is a big machine – bigger than a refrigerator, and is what Canadians used to edit film. Transporting the Steenbeck to Ottawa in a cargo van with my writer, Ian Driscoll, who wrote the screenplay for Harry Knuckles and the Treasure of the Aztec Mummy, said the four words in the truck on the way back listening to Michael Jackson’s Thriller album. He said, “Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter” and I said, “Wow, that sounds like a really great movie.” And quite literally, the title came first, and we wrote a movie around the title. While I was editing Harry Knuckles, Ian wrote the script. In May 1999 we started shooting, and it came out in 2001.

AM: How did you get to Cannes with the film?

Demarbre at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival with filmmaker David Cronenberg (centre) and actor Josh Grace (left)

LD: I went with another filmmaker, Derek Diorio. He was going there to the market to pitch and raise money for his movies and he invited me to stay with him and piggyback off one of his screenings in the film market. So we had three market screenings of Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. What was better than the market screenings was what we came up with as a publicity stunt. From Ottawa to Nice, in an airplane, I carried a 20-foot wooden cross in a ski bag.  I put it in my hotel room for a week, and then I convinced this woman from Toronto to come to Cannes, so she became my lesbian vampire. One morning we set up the wooden cross on the beach at Cannes and I crucified this lesbian vampire. And man, did we ever get attention. Christina Ricci was promoting her new movie on the beach at the same time and we took all of her press. So that led to me to my U.S. distribution deal with Music Video Distributors. And Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter became the best-selling DVD in Music Video Distributors history.

Publicity stunt for "Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter" on a Cannes beach featuring Robyn Whaley on the crucifix

AM: Up until that point, had you financed your own films?

LD: Yes. Vampiro and the The Dead Sleep Easy were the first ones I made with other people’s money.

AM: How did you end up making these films?

LD: Harry Knuckles and the Pearl Necklace caught the eye of an Ottawa producer by the name of Robert Menzies, and Robert was trying to convince me to make an action film in Jamaica. So I spent a year trying to make this action movie called Black Kissinger. While Robert and I were at the American Film Market in Los Angeles trying to raise money for it, I noticed that Vampiro was wrestling in Anaheim, the only American city where you can see real Mexican wrestling. I said to Rob, “Do you know who the biggest name is in Mexican wrestling right now? He’s a guy by the name of Vampiro. And Vampiro’s from Thunder Bay. And Vampiro’s life story is incredible. It involves drugs and crime and rock ’n’ roll, and I always thought it would make a good narrative film. So I convinced Rob to come to Anaheim and meet Vampiro and see if we could pitch him on this idea of making a movie about his life. Vampiro says, “Let’s not do a movie, let’s do a documentary. I’m about to go to Europe on this European tour. Why don’t you come with me and I’ll tell you my life story.” So weeks later I was in Europe making this documentary about Mexican wrestling. Technically, pound for pound, it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever made.

While making Vampiro we took 30 days off and made The Dead Sleep Easy.  Ian wrote the script fast and we found ourselves 30 days in Guadalajara, Mexico. Dead Sleep Easy was the first time I’d made a film with a Hollywood movie star. Rob said to me, “I think we can afford one guy. Who would you want to play the villainous character?” And I said, “Martin Kove from The Karate Kid and Rambo.” And we hired him. It gave me a taste of making a real movie with a real budget.

AM: What about your latest film, Smash Cut?

DL: That’s sort of my dream project. I’ve mentioned I was inspired by Mexican wrestling movies, Blaxpoitation films, Hong Kong action movies, but the one thing I left out is the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis. Herschell Gordon Lewis was a Florida filmmaker who invented the gore movie. He was someone I really admired and got to know over the phone, and then going to Florida and him inviting me to his house. I always told him, “I’d love to make a movie for you.” I wanted to make a tribute film, but at the same time I wanted to make a movie the way he would make a movie. I can’t go back in time, to Florida, in the ‘60s, but maybe what I can do is at least put myself in that state of mind.

I made Smash Cut with a lot more money than I thought I would ever have the chance to make it with. I was able to afford David Hess in the lead role, from the original The Last House on the Left and Michael Berryman from the original The Hills Have Eyes.  I was able to cast Ray Sager, who played the Wizard of Gore in Herschell Gordon Lewis’ The Wizard of Gore, and then finally, kind of out of left field, when looking for a female lead, I went to Los Angeles and met with Sasha Grey and asked her to be in the film. And she graciously offered to be a part of it just before her career exploded. I think what attracted her to it was it had nothing to do with her taking her clothes off or sex. She’s not making pornography anymore, and she’s going down this road that has nothing to do with that. But everyone thinks there’s a mistake in the movie that Sasha Grey’s not naked.

AM: What’s different about directing a big-budget as opposed to a low-budget film?

LD: It’s less hands-on. I always find I have too much crew, I always feel there are too many people on set, there’s a little less control – there’s other cooks in the kitchen. And that’s fine too, but it’s a little bit more fun when you’re the chef.

AM: What are you working on right now?

John Malkovich plugging "Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter" at the Slamdance film festival in 2002

LD: I’m working on two different things. One of them’s an Italian co-production. One’s to be shot entirely in Los Angeles. So they’re big ideas. If those films happen, that’s good. If they don’t, then maybe I will go back and make a sequel to Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. Everyone’s dying for us to make a movie on a shoestring budget again and go back to having fun making movies. You know, I made Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, my first feature-length film, and all the movies that came after it, but if you go on IMDB and look at the number of people who have seen and voted on them, nothing comes close to Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, the little independent film that did.

For more information about Lee Demarbre and his films, you can visit his website, Odessa Filmworks.