THE ARTS PAPER – ARTICLES

Unrestricted movement across borders
Bernsen and Bynum mix, mesh, and match

Hank Hoffman

“I like to compose enough to push the improvisers out of where they’re comfortable and improvise enough to push the composition out of where it’s comfortable,” says Bynum. Photo by Hilary McHone

t takes a big room to hold big ideas. For married couple Rachel Bernsen and Taylor Ho Bynum, the blurring of boundaries between performance mediums and genres is a big idea they hope to showcase in Bernsen’s Erector Square loft, aptly dubbed The Big Room. According to a statement on Bernsen’s website, The Big Room “offers a low-tech platform for interdisciplinary collaboration, experimentation and research in dance and performance.”

Bernsen is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher of both dance and the Alexander Technique. The Alexander Technique, according to Bernsen, is “a way for people to find out what their own habits are, what patterns of use and misuse that might be contributing to chronic pain and stress,” and what changes and choices could be made to function more freely. Bynum is a composer and cornetist as well as a partner in the New Haven-based avant-garde jazz Firehouse 12 record label.

The Big Room is inspired, Bernsen says, “by what’s happening in the New York scene — an entrepreneurial guerrilla style. Artists are not only making work but curating roving artists’ series, producing events, and writing about work.”

She hopes to catalyze a community around interdisciplinary work, offering a semi-regular performance series called “Take Your Time” in the space. The first production, a co-presentation with Carl Testa’s Uncertainty Music Series, was scheduled for May 28. The idea is to showcase “two artists of different genres or two artists in the same genre working interdisciplinarily.”

Both in their mid-30s, they moved to New Haven from New York City two years ago. In an interview in The Big Room, Bynum says they moved here “with the realization we needed the time and space to create work.”

“I’ve got my ideas, got my collaborators. I need a chance to think and put ideas together,” says Bynum.

Bernsen adds that the fact that they could afford her Erector Square studio space was another factor, a space that would be out of their price range in New York City.

Genre-bending has become second nature to both artists in their respective mediums. Bynum considers himself indebted to the jazz tradition; he was mentored by bass trombonist Bill Lowe as a teenager in Boston and avant-garde jazz titan Anthony Braxton as a student at Wesleyan University.

“There’s a Braxton term that I love: ‘trans-idiomatic music.’ The idea is that you pull ideas from any genre or idiom but aren’t defined by them,” says Bynum.

As a performer and improviser, Bynum is interested in “the manipulation of texture of sound.” (He switched from playing the trumpet to the cornet because he believes the latter has more timbral flexibility.) His works mix structured composition, improvisational space, and a use of noise akin to the free mark-making of visual artists.

“I like to compose enough to push the improvisers out of where they’re comfortable and improvise enough to push the composition out of where it’s comfortable,” says Bynum. “I try and keep it fresh on both sides and use abstract sound enough to blur up melodies but have enough melodies so there is not just abstract sound.”

Over the past five or six years, Bernsen says, her relationship to dance has changed. From someone who started out interested in dance as a technical form and “being a dancer with a capital ‘D’,” Bernsen says that choreography is now her focus, “experimenting with movement ideas as opposed to just manifesting someone else’s movement ideas.” Her starting point in creating works, she says, begins with “very personal movement impulses and broadens out from there.”

Bernsen’s dancing background is varied — a short period with the Urban Bush Women, a brief stint with “really minimalist artists,” dancing with the art house pop band Fischerspooner, studying Afro-Haitian dance. Influences and inspiration run the gamut from “contemporary release-based work to being really interested in Afro-Haitian, Afro-Brazilian and hip-hop dance.”

The Alexander Technique was instrumental in changing Bernsen’s relationship to dance, she says.

“One of the issues I struggled with before studying the Alexander Technique was bringing too much tension to dancing,” Bernsen says.

The technique allowed her to “let go without feeling I was losing control. It sounds like a paradox but in letting go, you really gain total ownership of yourself and yourself in movement.” The technique, Bernsen notes, has general therapeutic applications; many of her students are non-dancers recovering from injuries or knee and back surgeries.

Both Bernsen and Bynum are staying busy. Bynum has two CDs slated for a fall release. He also plans an “acoustic bicycle tour” of New England from September 10-23 — “playing with the analogy of alternative means of transportation and alternative musical forms or acoustic transportation and acoustic music,” he jokes — riding his bicycle through each New England state and playing with a different group each night. Bernsen plans on teaching dance and the Alexander Technique at Dance Agency TsEKh, a two-week dance festival in Moscow this July. She will be a guest artist this fall at Wesleyan University.

Bernsen and Bynum say they draw inspiration for their work from a wide range of sources. For Bernsen it might be the writings of French semiotician Roland Barthes. Bynum mentions the novels of Italo Calvino as one source; his CD Madeleine Dreams, released under the name Taylor Ho Bynum & SpiderMonkey Strings, incorporates text from the novel Madeleine is Sleeping written by his sister Sarah Shun-lien Bynum.

“Since a lot of our own influences come from places outside our disciplines, we use each other as sounding boards,” Bynum notes. “In some ways, though we are dealing with different mediums, we’re dealing with the same issues of improvisation and composition, form and freedom, individual and ensemble.”

His collaborations with Bernsen, Bynum points out, have impacted his music. Working with dance, he says, has enabled him to “embrace silence much more.” Where many of his musical influences such as trumpeter Miles Davis were known for “using space and silence,” Bynum says he has “always been much more hyperactive.”

“It’s much harder to not play than play in the same way as for a dancer it’s much harder to not move than move,” explains Bynum. Collaboration in dance performances “has allowed me to not feel like I have to play. Let the space sit. Appreciate the silence of the moment.”

Similarly, for Bernsen, working with musicians — bagpiper Matthew Welch, bass player and electronics manipulator Carl Testa, and singer Anne Rhodes, as well as her husband — has allowed her to “open up more space for improvisation and think about creating structures around improvisation more fully.”

Bynum acknowledges he gets “drawn into the dance” when performing with his wife. “Whenever you’re performing, your body is in space. It’s just that as musicians, we can ignore that,” he says. But in interdisciplinary work, “If you’re looking at one body moving, you have to look at the way the other body is moving. If you’re listening to the sounds one person’s making, you have to listen to the sound the other person’s making.”

“Because I’m a dancer, I’m thinking about the body first,” notes Bernsen. “It does create a certain democracy in the performance itself. It makes the fact that we actually do have different roles in terms of sound versus movement all the more exciting and dynamic. We’re all involved in the architecture of the piece but within that we all have different things to offer that create texture.

“It’s exiting to be asking musicians to be thinking of presence in relation to performance. It changes their relationship to what they’re doing,” says Bernsen. Her goal is “seamlessness,” structuring her work “so it doesn’t appear to the audience that that person is a musician.”

“What I love about interdisciplinary work is that it forces you to engage in every respect with the whole experience of the moment,” says Bynum.

For more information, check out their websites: rachelbernsen.com and taylorhobynum.com.



Artists in the kitchen

Lucile Bruce

	“Food to me is an artistic medium,” says Bun Lai of Miya’s Sushi. “I use it to express and explore ideas of what it means to be human.” Photo by James F. Oca, Jr.

“It definitely can be considered an art because we transform the ingredients,” says Jean Pierre Vuillermet, executive chef at Union League Café on Chapel Street in downtown New Haven.

It’s closing time at the restaurant, and I’ve asked Vuillermet to reflect on his art — the art of cooking.

“The plating can also be colorful, artistic,” he continues. “It can be considered an art. And we use our hands. There are a lot of senses involved in cooking. The taste, the smell, the feeling, also.

“You make some dough, for example. You make some sausage. You build things. The texture is very important.”

Chefs, like artists, work with ingredients. Meats, vegetables, spices, herbs, and oils are their clay, paints, plots, characters, and musical notes. And they use tools and instruments: Knives, pots, fires, and circulators are their paintbrushes, words, pianos, and lights that illuminate the stage. With ingredients, tools, and imaginations, they create new things.

New Haven is considered by many to be home to Connecticut’s foremost culinary scene, a city of food excellence and innovation. Cooking is one of the arts to be enjoyed and experienced here.

“It’s like a stage,” says Vuillermet of any restaurant. “My mother in law, she used to say when you open the doors it’s like opening the curtains. You need to be ready to perform.”

Different chefs have different philosophies, interests, and influences. Talk to the best in New Haven and you will uncover each one’s individuality as reflected in their culinary art.

“Art goes through many parts of the human body — through reason and through the senses,” says Anna Sincavage, chef and founder of Skappo Italian Wine Bar in the Ninth Square. “Cooking is not an intellectual form of life, but comes directly from the heart.”

“I try to combine flavors to see if the flavors work,” says Manuel Romero, Ibiza Restaurant’s executive chef. “If the flavors work, I try to work with textures.

“If you do creative cuisine,” he explains, “I think that is like art.”

At Miya’s Sushi on Howe Street, Bun Lai rejects the notion that flavor comes first. “Food to me is an artistic medium,” writes Lai in an e-mail. “I use it to express and explore ideas of what it means to be human.”

Lai’s menu reads like a short-story collection — the intersection of food and narrative. “Many of my dishes tell stories about people,” he continues. “My Tyger Tyger Roll talks about the unity of human beings using East African ingredients that the Queen of Sheba might have eaten with King Solomon.”

Other chefs have regional sensibilities. Their work is grounded in the seasons — the here and now. At Zinc on Chapel Street, chef Denise Appel shops regularly at area farmers’ markets. The focus on locally grown ingredients gives her cooking a structure, not unlike the meter in a poem. Sincavage of Skappo has no recipes; she recreates traditional foods of Umbria, the region in Italy where she grew up. In Umbria, she says, food is deeply linked with nature.

Appel was the chef at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford before opening her enterprise in New Haven. A painter, sculptor, and furniture collector with a passion for the visual arts, she doesn’t equate cooking with visual art.

“I just don’t really look at it and think, this plate, this canvas. You start getting into the seasons and you know what combinations go. You’re always thinking of old combinations with a twist.”

Like all artists, chefs learn from different sources and their influences are diverse.

“I’ve been learning about Afro-Cuban food traditions since I was a child helping my abeula (grandmother) sort and clean black beans in her kitchen,” writes Jesus Puerto, chef and owner of Soul de Cuba Café, in an e-mail. “She would tell me what to do and I did it without question.”

Now, Puerto writes, his ongoing investigations into different cuisines begin “by simply asking questions.”

Grandmothers play a special role in the transmission of cooking knowledge.

“In Europe, the parents, when they work, they rely on the grandparents to help take care of the children,” explains Vuillermet, whose parents ran a restaurant in France. “My parents were pretty busy so my grandmother took care of me and taught me how to cook.”

Sincavage is a grandmother herself now, imparting knowledge and a way of life to the younger generation.

Jeff Caputo of Scoozzi Trattoria and Wine Bar attended the Culinary Institute of America. Appel, Romero, and Talamelli never went to cooking school. They worked in kitchens, learning on the job from accomplished chefs with a commitment to teaching. Kitchens are part laboratory, part rehearsal room, part performance space. Several of the chefs I spoke with reflected on their roles as teachers.

“We really do define ourselves by the things that we eat in the most basic way,” says Jason Sobocinski, who studied gastronomy — “an anthropological look at food culture”— and learned about cheese through his full-time job at Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The founder and owner of Caseus on Trumbull Street, Sobocinksi teaches school kids about cheese and runs a series of classes at his restaurant.

“If you know more about what you’re eating, you can taste it better,” Sobocinski explains. “When you know more about a painting, or a score you’re listening to — or if you’ve studied Shakespeare and you go see one of his plays — you’re going to get a lot more out of it. If you know more about what you’re eating and what you’re cooking with, the experience is so much bigger and better.”

Then there are questions of (re)interpretation.

“Cooking has a lot to do with modernization and interpretation of old dishes, which can’t happen unless you know the basics,” says William Talamelli, the young chef at Press 200, newly opened on Crown Street. “You can’t modernize unless you know what you’re modernizing. It’s the same thing with music. You can’t write jazz if you’ve never heard a Miles Davis song. I mean, you can, but will it be worth listening to? Will people pay to hear it?”

“If I have a beautiful cheese,” comments Sobocinksi of Caseus, “I’m not going to take that cheese and put it in a dish in the form of a foam. That would be a beautiful technique, and there’s artistry in that. But that’s not my artistry.”

Sobocinski is referring to “molecular gastronomy,” a major cooking trend that originated in Spain in the 1990s. Chefs “deconstruct” meals or dishes, transforming ingredients at the molecular level. It is a scientific approach to food.

In New Haven, chefs aren’t too interested in molecular gastronomy, although they borrow techniques here and there. Appel, Vuillermet, and others use a technique called “sous vide” to cook meats at low, even temperatures with succulent results. Appel’s pastry chef does molecular cooking. But for the most part, you won’t find many foams here.

“I think it’s a trend,” says Vuillermet, “but it’s good to explore different things and try different techniques.”

A meal — like a play, a concert, or a trip to a museum — is a time-bound experience with a beginning, middle, and end. Time is important in the kitchen, too.

“There are different art forms within the art form,” reflects Jeff Caputo, executive chef at Scoozzi on Chapel Street. His kitchen — next door to the Yale Repertory Theatre and the Yale Center for British Art, across the street from the Yale University Art Gallery — has the most art-infused location of any restaurant in town.

“In theater, there’s an art form to the cast and crew, the sets,” Caputo continues. “There are really a lot of art forms that make up the culinary arts. There’s the art form of plate presentation, the art form of movement … if you watch people in the kitchen, everyone moves with a purpose.”

“It really is like a weird little ballet,” he says. “It all starts with training — telling people what to do and how to react in certain situations.”

“It’s got a rhythm,” says Romero of cooking in a professional kitchen. “Everybody’s got to keep the same rhythm. If you’ve got four or five people and somebody messes up, it’s hard to get back. To make food like art, you need time.”

Of his players in the kitchen he notes, “You’ve got to teach them how to follow you, how to work in the same way at the same time.”

While time races forward in the kitchen, good food slows us down, suspending us in the present moment.

“Food, visual art, music — they’re great memory devices,” muses Talamelli. “Food helps you feel at home. It helps you remember things.”

All arts begin with the body. Food, like dance, is physical.

“I am a manual guy,” says Vuillermet. “I love to take the product and break it down. The leg of lamb, the fillet of fish. I even have some pleasure doing that sometimes. You go around the brains and the bones and things like that, and then the cooking is always interesting because you want to make the flavorings and the seasonings work out.”

And then there’s the question of purpose.

At Skappo, Sincavage cooks to bring people together. Her restaurant is like a family dining room, small and filled with personal affection. We, the audience, bring our hearts to her stage.

“We’re all searching to be together,” says Sincavage. “This is life, with a simple ‘l,’ not a big ‘L’ — to be together and to live this moment and to go to the next.”

As for Vuillermet, his heart’s desire is a simple one.

“I don’t know what I would do if I was not doing cooking,” he reflects. “I just feel better when I have my chef clothes and I’m in the kitchen.”



Innovation must be more than a buzzword

OluShola A. Cole

OluShola A. Cole

Call it the weather melting a sun-starved artist, and giving me a brighter perspective, but I’m commenting on how wonderful it is to see so many warm-weather activities here in New Haven. Not quite sure if the sight of people frolicking and lounging about on the New Haven Green itself has softened my “grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side” view, but I get great pleasure knowing that for most neighborhoods in New Haven, the heat brings out the “unity” in community, and neighborhood and city events, programs, and activities start to pop up all over town.

And most of all, from the perspective of someone experiencing her first summer here in New Haven, I am ecstatic about the amount of city and neighborhood arts activities, events, and programming. Better yet, the “starving artist” side of me is absolutely impressed and positively thrilled that a good portion of these programs are free. I would also like to add that the free activities, events, and concerts that were programmed by the International Festival of Arts & Ideas were truly something worth taking advantage of, because free, world-class programming — here in New Haven — does not come by often.

I’m an urban nomad, programmed to roam from city to city with a spirit of creativity. For now, I like being in one place, especially when I get to see New Haven uncurl from the crouched position it’s in during the cold months. It’s like seeing the city stretch in the warmth of festivals, street fairs, farmers markets, concerts, recitals, exhibit openings, and graduations. The temperature rising brings a creative fervor to New Haven, infusing artistic energy into a community that is truly innovative.

The topic of innovation, especially in New Haven, has been on my mind — and by “innovative” I mean ideas or theories that are introduced as new and creative in concept, unique and cutting-edge. I happened to glance at one event in the paper that included a well-known, local yet world-renowned drama school working with an Edgewood Magnet School program. The drama school was putting on one-act plays that the students from the Edgewood Magnet School had created. Given the reputation of the drama program, I found myself pleased to see this collaboration within the community and education system. What struck me as innovative was not the fact that it was the drama school, but that it was a collaboration between a highly respected drama institution and the community, the education system, and young students now immersed in and exposed to the dramatic arts. I saw it as cutting-edge because a program like that carries an organic and long-lasting influence (well past other required institutional/demographic outreach requirements), while creating a new generation of artists who want to be involved in theater.

On the subject of the conceptually forward, watching a carefully planned event unfold on May 8 on four city buses in New Haven still didn’t prepare me for “innovative-ness” until I sat and watched Sarah Bleasdale and Colleen O’Shaughnessy of the Hillhouse Opera Company literally serenade an audience on a city bus with popular operatic arias. I might add that this bus was coming back from BJ’s Plaza, straight down Grand Avenue toward the New Haven Green, and was full of Asians, Latinos, and Blacks. It didn’t occur to me how truly unusual the concept of Exact Change (performing arts on city buses) was until I saw real, everyday transit-dependent faces process and grasp the idea that for 40 minutes, real, live opera was accessible to them and included in their bus fare.

“New and creative” came to mind when I saw the “D” bus pull up next to the New Haven Green and the whole, entire bus (including the driver) was jamming and chanting along with the Carlos Hortas Collective, hands raised, and singing along. “Innovative” was watching Noteworthy, a female barbershop quartet, float off a bus euphorically (surrounded by smiling passengers of color) after performing along a route from West Haven to the New Haven Green — with an attentive audience throughout the whole journey. An event like Exact Change has the makings of a successfully innovative program because it uses public transportation as an arts venue and exposes the community to the arts. Along the same lines, I also had the pleasure of seeing sketchbooks handed out, at the beginning of the Arts Council’s recent exhibition Through Nick’s Eyes: A Tribute to Nicholas Ohly (1938-2007), to community members who were inspired by Nick Ohly’s own sketchbook collection, and had their sketchbooks displayed and celebrated at the closing reception. Groups that would not usually come to the Arts Council set foot in an environment that celebrated their own creative contributions through their sketches. The exhibit went beyond the walls into communities that benefited from this opportunity, and, again, created another path of access to the arts. Finally, I had the pleasure of watching a phenomenal performance of Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, directed by up-and-comer Hillary Brown, in a refreshingly different performance space that complemented the stark theme of the play and captured its celebration of the human spirit.

“Innovation,” a buzzword (generally) that’s used to impress and lure a potential consumer market, sometimes bypasses several time-tested tools, especially when it comes to developing and engaging a community. To me, newfangled ideas and concepts loose their luster if the basic concepts of a group striving to nurture, educate, trust, include, learn, and love its members are lost. A new idea will fall flat on its face if the basics aren’t established. Just from my brief time here in New Haven, there are so many innovative things here in the city that grab my attention as an artist and a community coordinator, yet the mistrust among many city residents shows me how some of these new ideas won’t take if New Haven as a whole doesn’t build on those basic concepts.

Addressing the topic of space in this discussion about innovation, the challenges and difficulties of booking, renting, and finding venues in New Haven has made artists become quite creative. Where some cities use nontraditional spaces like storefronts, libraries, and galleries as a way to break the mold of traditional venues, storefronts and other nontraditional spaces here in this city are utilized because they are quickly becoming the most affordable and are the only realistic option for artists who want to find a viable performance venue. Call it creative desperation born of artistic frustration — a call for space and action. But in this situation, a move toward using nontraditional spaces doesn’t seem like an innovation that will be successful. If a community is upset, frustrated, tired, mistrustful, and broke (especially from booking space out of sheer necessity at the last minute), this doesn’t creative a positive structure for or support an innovative movement within a city.

Some of the most amazing and cutting-edge performances, events, and activities take place here in New Haven. Each of the city’s neighborhoods and communities does an amazing job of making them unique and relevant to its area, yet accessible to the public. And in doing so, they include, they build trust, they mobilize, they debate, teach, create access, support, learn, heal, and, most of all, they listen. Innovation cannot function with out this. With these qualities in place, there is a foundation for each of these groups to try new things, to receive new ideas and grow, thus becoming an innovative, creative community. Panning out, I’m watching these individual communities create unique new things and struggle for support from the city. New Haven, until it decides to consistently foster its artists, neighborhoods, and creative groups, will always be seen as a place possessing world-class, brilliant, innovative people and resources; instead of standing on its own as a thriving artistic landmark of innovation.

OluShola A. Cole is the Arts Council’s coordinator of community programs. This is her opinion.

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