2004
CrossSound´s ¨Singing Pictures¨ Program to be part of ¨MoMa in Berlin¨ 2004
CrossSound Recital 2004: P'ansori: Park's perfect match
Fred Ho CrossSound Residency in Ketchikan 2004
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2004
CrossSound´s ¨Singing Pictures¨ Program to be part of ¨MoMa in Berlin¨ 2004
CrossSound Recital 2004: P'ansori: Park's perfect match
Fred Ho CrossSound Residency in Ketchikan 2004
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CrossSound´s ¨Singing Pictures¨ Program
to be part of ¨MoMA in Berlin¨ 2004
download (MSword)
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CrossSound’s program of commissioned collaborative works combining video/film and new music, “Singing Pictures”* has again been selected for presentation outside Alaska’s borders. The program, first performed in Juneau in 2002, was picked up by the Chicago 21st Century Music Ensemble the same year. Now, “Singing Pictures” hops the “pond” to be part of “MoMA in Berlin.” Integrated into the "American season 2004", “MoMA in Berlin” accompanies the exhibitions of the “MoMa” collections in Berlin while the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York is being renovated. CrossSound’s “Singing Pictures” will be presented on the 4th of September by the ¨Studio for Electro-acoustic Music¨ of the ¨Academy of the Arts¨ in Berlin, Germany in a program called ¨m-cluster 2004¨ after a computing environment that combines a number of computers into a large cluster.
* (CrossSound’s “Singing Pictures” program was produced in part with the support of the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council, the Ketchikan Area Arts and Humanities Council, the Ohio Arts Council, the Makioka Foundation (NYC), the Aleutian/Priboloff Islands Association, Inc., UAF Polar Regions Dept., UAA Archives and Manuscripts Dept., Anchorage Museum of History and Arts, the Alaska State Library, the National Archives Film and Still Picture Branch, Kenyon College, KTOO-FM, KRBD-FM, KCAW-FM, and Jim and Susan Clark among others.) |
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Web posted Thursday, March 25, 2004
Dr. Chan E. Park: P'ansori: Park's perfect match
By KORRY KEEKER of the JUNEAU EMPIRE
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As a middle school and high school student in Korea, in the 1960s, Dr. Chan E. Park and her classmates were taught the Western classical scale. Park could sing, but she was embarassed by her inability to hit falsetto notes.
"I was the only one in school who had that kind of very strange problem," Park said. And so she silently stewed, but stil sang, performing in English-American musicals and accompanying her folkie friends during the countercultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s. After college, in 1974, she "stumbled into" p'ansori - an ancient Korean narrative voice tradition separate from the Western classical tradition. P'ansori was, and still is, nearly obsolete outside of academia. But the style of singing - raw, sometimes dissonant, an expression of the body and thus dependent on the performer - can be cathartic. Park knew it was a good match for her voice. "It was something different, and something nobody with my background did," Park said. "It was kind of a very nice little secret, a venture that I could really enjoy and grow with. It was just that kind of luxurious curiosity that drew me to it." Now living in Columbus, Ohio, where she's the associate professor of Korean language, literature and performance studies at Ohio State, Park will give three presentations in p'ansori singing and traditional Korean music during the Second Annual UAS and Juneau World Affairs Council Pacific Rim Forum, Tuesday, March 30-Saturday, April 3. Park will demonstrate Korean music and song at noon Wednesday, March 31, at the State Office Building. She will give a lecture, "East Asia and the Korean Peninsula," from 1:30-4 p.m. Saturday, April 3, at the Egan Lecture Hall, room 112 on the UAS campus. And she will sing p'ansori and play traditional drum in accompaniment to Jocelyn Clark on the kayagum zither in a CrossSound Recital concert, 7 p.m. Thursday, April 1, at Northern Light United Church. The state building show and the lecture are free. The concert costs $10 for students, $15 for seniors. "Korean studies, in general in America, is severely under-represented in America," Park said. "It's put inside the context of East Asian studies, so there's Chinese and Japanese studies, and Korea is a poor cousin. It's there, but as a decoration. Of course, Korean studies is much more fortunate in comparison to some of the other studies, such as Vietnamese and Phillipine, that are totally silenced." "Humanities as a whole tends to pick up the regions and cultures that are somehow tied to economic and political gains, which is really a pathetic situation," Park said. "I believe humanities is a discipline where we're supposed to teach how not to do that. We're suppoed to educate, so that individuals get a better balance." Park came to America to work on her masters in theater after graduating from college in Seoul. She began studying Asian theater and realized that Korean theater was very rare in the United States. That brought her back to p'ansori, an art she feels "really represents Korea." Korean society is known today for its hyper-modernization. Park's upbringing, too, was heavily Westernized. P'ansori is not popular as a practiced art form, but has come to vogue in preservation and educational circles. "It's become kind of a cultural treasure preserved from extinction," Park said. "It's kind of a folk curiosity." "Modern Koreans have been so out of touch with their cultural roots," she saids. "P'ansori kind of brings them back in touch with their cultural roots, how their ancestors lived, what Korea was like, the sights and sounds. It makes them laugh, makes them cry." P'ansori used to be a mostly rural tradition, when "folklore was more of a living lore," Park said. P'ansori singers, and performing artists in general, were treated as outcasts in Confucian society, which came into being in the late-14th century. The social hierarchal arrangement placed performers a step below peasants, and two steps below farmers. "It's not like the people in the aristocratic class didn't practice any art," Park said. "But they were more into high art, like calligraphy or writing poetry. Performance was considered a very low and vulgar activity." Long before Confucianism became the standard, the Silla Kingdom (57 B.C. -668 A.D.) and Unified Silla Dynasty (668-935 A.D.) celebrated performance. Aristocratic youth often sang and danced as part of their cultivation to become the leaders of society. The p'ansori style of singing uses different muscles and parts of the face. In Western classical signing, the nasal chamber is used as a resonating chamber. In p'ansori, instead of elevating and enlarging the nasal chamber, you do the opposite. When she began singing as an apprentice, Park would often lose her voice. Now, she must sing consistently to maintain the strength of her chords. "It's your real voice, that comes out of your gut," Park said. "It's the kind of voice when a baby is newly born. They don't cry with a falsetto voice. The cry is an expression of their existence in the whole body, and p'ansori is very often like that. It really reflects your whole body's strengths and your physical and mental strength. You push it out, and push it out, and see how much you have." At the CrossSound show, Park will sing the traditional Korean tale of Shim Chong, a loyal daughter who sacrifices her life for her father and later resurrects. The story is still sung during shaman rituals in coastal villages. The tale begins as the blind father pledges a large sum of rice to a Buddhist temple to satisfy monks who promised to grant him sight. His family can not afford to give away so much rice, so the daughter sacrifices herself when sailors arrive in town looking for a virgin to buy. • Korry Keeker can be reached at korry.keeker@juneauempire.com. |
 Dr. Chan E. Park |
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By KORRY KEEKER
JUNEAU EMPIRE German director Michael Kerstan grew up with opera. But when it came time for college, he turned away from the stage and studied education, politics, psychology and sociology. He had earned his doctorate in cultural sciences from the University of Tubingen when he met composer Hans Werner Henze. "He got me back into opera," said Kerstan, 49. "He showed me this idea of community operas, where operas are not made only for the rich, fancy people, but for everybody in a community, village or city." Since 1983, Kerstan has directed, written and assisted with community theater and opera productions throughout Germany, Italy, Austria, France and the United States. He was the public relations manager for Germany's world-famous Nuremberg Opera House from 1999 until September 2004, at which point he resigned to dedicate his time to freelance directing of operas and plays. Kerstan has been in Juneau for most of February. He taught opera and acting workshops for Opera to GO! and has been working the company on its upcoming presentation of "Mozart Reimagined," opening March 4. He is also collaborating with CrossSound co-directors Stefan Hakenberg and Jocelyn Clark and Opera to GO! director Joyce Parry Moore on "The Children's Crusade," scheduled to run in September 2006 in Juneau. "I like this town very much," Kerstan said. "The weather is not so different from German weather in February, and the cultural life in town is far more than I had ever expected." "In Germany and Austria, a town of 30,000 people is more or less dead, except every Friday there might be a concert," he said. "Every day there is something going on here, and it's such a huge variety of things." "The Children's Crusade" premiered a few years ago in Cologne, Germany. The opera chronicles the true story of two chidren's crusades in 1212, one in England where 12-year-old Stephan of Cloyes convinced 30,000 of his peers to march to Marseilles; another in Germany, where a boy named Stephen convinced 20,000 to take Jerusalem for Christ. Both crusades were spectacular failures. Kerstan hopes to recruit 10 soloists and a choir for the presentation. He met CrossSound co-founder Stefan Hakenberg more than 20 years ago. Hakenberg was a student of Hans Werner Henze. Kerstan was the assistant. "We did a couple projects together, and we've gotten to know each other quite well," Kerstan said. "Each of us knows what he can expect from the other." "I'm very interested in community opera projects that combine children and local people," he said. "Community operas get people involved in actual signing and acting on stage, and they give people confidence, even if they won't become professional singers." Kerstan has a commission from the city of Salzburg to write a play for its Mozart Jubilee in 2006. He's written four plays, "Merlin," "The Abraham Experiment," "Paradise Can Wait" and "My Fish and Me." He has also recently written a biography about a Jewish woman, Bella Rosenkrantz, who was shuttled from Poland to Siberia by the Nazis and kept in a concentration camp for six years. She eventually returned to Frankfurt, her hometown, in 1961, after 23 years. The book will be released in Germany this spring. |
 Photo courtesy of Michael KerstanAn artistic crusade: Opera director Michael Kerstan, pictured, is working with CrossSound directors Stefan Hakenberg and Jocelyn Clark and Opera to GO! director Joyce Parry Moore on "The Children's Crusade," which is scheduled to run next year. |