Author: rakemag

You might know them best as Paul Simon’s backing band on Graceland, the smash 1986 album that was many Americans’ first serious dip into the wide ocean of world music. But South Africa’s top choral group has too much musical grace to need to stand behind anybody. They’ve been championing the complex, lilting harmonies of Zulu singing for more than 40 albums, including the new Wenyukela: Raise Your Spirit Higher, which came out in January. Founder Joseph Shabalala formed the group after literally dreaming of children singing perfect harmony that he felt compelled to re-create in the waking world, blending Christian gospel with an African a cappella style called isicathamiya. The post-Graceland years have only cemented their status as South Africa’s ambassadors to the world, a rep untaintable even by less divine team-ups like their cover of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” with Dolly Parton.
Ted Mann, 2128 Fourth St. S., Minneapolis; (612) 624-2345

Despite a few lackluster albums during the nineties, we’re quite fond of Thompson’s studio releases—last year’s The Old Kit Bag stuck in our heads deeply enough that we wound up happily exploring further all the way back to his sixties work with Fairport Convention. But the deep-voiced king of British folk is really at his best live onstage, where his warmly sardonic sense of humor and improvisational gifts can come to the fore. He’s still one of the more innovative and nimble-fingered guitarists around, and has a fine feel for the surprising cover song—he might launch into a mock-serious version of Britney Spears’s “Oops I Did It Again,” or change the triumphal tone of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Woodstock” into a haunting, near-medieval lament.
Fitzgerald, 10 E. Exchange St., St. Paul, (651) 290-1221, www.fitzgeraldtheater.org

It has been the better part of a decade since the nation’s premier African-American dance company pirouetted its way onto the local stage, so you’re duly warned not to miss this performance. DTH leader Arthur Mitchell is a living legend of the dance world, having broken through the color barrier some fifty years ago to become a star protégé of the great George Balanchine. He and his company have shared three decades of unparalleled success, renowned not just for groundbreaking choregraphy but for such historic milestones as being the first American dance company to tour both apartheid-era South Africa and Soviet-era Russia. These two days of performance will be a greatest hits of sorts, selected by Mitchell from among DTH’s catalog of ten dozen works.

It’s a good bet that for most of us, our first exposure to surrealism was through the loopy imagination of Ted Geisel, better known to five generations of kids as the good Dr. Seuss. This touring exhibit features thirty-three panels of lithographs, serigraphs, and sculpture covering Seuss’s wide-ranging career, which included not just familiar favorites like Horton Hears a Who but innovative advertising and graphic design, and a wartime job as an army lieutenant colonel drawing anti-Hitler cartoons. The gallery complements that with seventy more Seuss works that will stay on display for another two months. Parents looking to introduce junior to the world of art-crawling will want to show up on one of the three Saturdays between January 31 and Valentine’s Day, when the Cat in the Hat himself will meet and greet.
Jean Stephen Galleries, 917 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis, (612) 338-4333, www.jeanstephengalleries.com

Kline-Misol’s puppet-populated still lifes use rich reds and blues to create an inviting air of mystery. There are elements reminiscent of Salvador Dali, of Hopi kachina dolls and New Orleans voodoo, of Pinocchio and gypsy fortunetellers. It is like wandering through the maze of twisty passages in some especially atmospheric antique shop, where beyond every turn of the corner is a jumble of images—say, a Buddha-head statue, a vase of dead flowers, and a cast-off marionette, as in Kline-Misol’s “The Alchemist”—that seem a little bit sinister and suggest tantalizing hints of stories whose beginnings you can only guess at.
Holzemer Gallery, 4810 Nicollet Ave. S., Minneapolis, (612) 824-0640, www.holzemergallery.com

The Jungle kicks off their new season with a trip north of the border and quite literally down memory lane. Michael Healey’s acclaimed play takes inspiration from the real-life 1970s people’s-theater project The Farm Show to tell the story of two isolated Ontario farmers whose quietude is disrupted by a nosy city-boy actor who wants to create a theater piece based on their lives. Imagine The Simple Life with a naïve, well-meaning hippie instead of the spoiled rich girls. The farmers, Angus and Morgan, aren’t so sure they want their pasts put onstage—Morgan’s standoffishness masks deeper issues, while Angus barely recognizes the past anymore since the wartime head injury that robbed him of his short-term memory. (In case you’re tempted to groan “not another Memento ripoff,” know that Healey’s play debuted the year before the movie did.) Casey Stangl, late of the much-missed Eye of the Storm, directs.
Jungle, 2951 Lyndale Ave. S., Minneapolis, (612) 822-7063, www.jungletheater.com

May we have this dance? Our favorite Franco-American experimental theater revives their 1992 production exploring American life in the 20th century through a series of vignettes set in a Midwestern dancehall. Given that this is a play that uses a physical space as its central metaphor, it ought to be interesting to see how the Jeune Lune company will stage it—the nineties version was one of the last productions they did before moving into their own ballroom-sized space in the Warehouse District. Jeune Lune, 105 N. First St., Minneapolis, (612) 332-3968, www.jeunelune.org

Hairspray
Orpheum Theatre, February 17-March 7
With the third season of American Idol under way, two things have never been more apparent: Big is in, and just about anyone these days can get fifteen minutes of fame. This is no new concept to 16-year-old Tracy Turnblad, heroine of the Tony-winning musical Hairspray, which chicken-dances its way into Minneapolis this month. Tracy makes big beautiful, with a big heart, big hair, and big dreams of a spot on the local TV dance program The Corny Collins Show. If this sounds like the all-too-familiar big-girl-makes-good story, rest assured: This ain’t no ordinary Big Fat Greek Wedding. (For starters, it’s based on a freakin’ John Waters movie, albeit his most sweet-natured one.) Things were more complicated in 1962 Baltimore. Tracy will have to outdress and outdo the reigning dancing queen, and win the heart of heartthrob Link Larkin in the process. Can she do it? More important, will her ’do hold up? Of course. Any musical with dance numbers that include the Handjive and the Pony must end happily.
Orpheum, 910 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis, (612) 339-7007, www.hennepintheatredistrict.com

Few things are worse than a British pub passing off grilled pita as naan. Uptown now offers yet another great refuge from this kind of fraud, and it’s a cheap date, too. Taj’s naan is exactly what it should be—barely leavened, slightly charred on top and a little glossy with a brush of ghee. At the lunch buffet we found nothing as scorching to the palate as the output from the old Sri Lanka, which inhabited the same space in a previous incarnation. But the milder spice temp lets you actually taste the wonderful mosaic of flavors in their chicken masala, beef curry, and a good selection of vegetarian curries and dals. A new treat (to us, anyway) was French-cut potatoes deep-fried with spinach clinging to them. Another nice surprise: ras malai for dessert. This is a disc of soft, white cheese served in a pool of sweetened, creamy milk. Scout’s honor, you’ll like it. They promise beer and wine are coming soon.

You’ll remember Mark Mothersbaugh as the leader of Devo, the New Wave band with the red plastic ziggurat hats who stormed MTV with clever synth-pop songs like “Whip It” and “Girl U Want.” Though the band is semi-dormant, Mothersbaugh has continued to produce new work at a jealousy-inspiring pace. He and his bandmates stay busy at his Mutato Muszika studio with film and commercial soundtracks ranging from Rugrats to The Royal Tenenbaums. But he has also been a visual artist since before the formation of Devo in the early 1970s, and in the last several years he has embarked on an ambitious serious of small-gallery shows across the country. His latest, a series of photomanipulations called Beautiful Mutants, kicks off at Ox-Op Gallery in Minneapolis on January 3.

THE RAKE: Tell me about the Beautiful Mutant series.

MARK: It’s a collection of pieces I’ve been working on since 1998 or ’99. They’re somewhere between Rorschach prints and a literal portrait. I’ve always been kind of obsessed with symmetry in human form. It’s actually a lie, because we aren’t really symmetrical, we’re only vaguely symmetrical. We’re as close to the potato as we are to a perfect mineral or a snowflake.

THE RAKE:How many photos have you done?

MARK: I’ve done quite a few experiments, one or two thousand, and I’ve done about 350 that I think are really compelling. The ideas behind Rorschach art were intriguing to me, that people are compelled to attach meaning to abstract forms.

THE RAKE: Though the band’s often remembered for the robotic dancing and the wacky hats, Devo was always more than just a novelty band.

MARK: Everybody in Devo has always felt this attraction to come up with something so strong that it couldn’t just be confined to “weirdo art.” Devo at its best was always able to straddle that line between commercial art and fine art. We were hoping popular culture was going to take a quantum leap. Our surprise was that it was so easy to misuse sound and vision and turn it into something banal. When we were first making films, we had high hopes [for MTV]. What it turned out to be was a less interesting version of Home Shopping Network, because it had a smaller range of products—they were all just records.

THE RAKE: Are you happier as a visual artist than a musician? You’re completely in control of your message that way, and don’t have to worry about your record label passing you off as a novelty act.

MARK: Well, you know, it’s two-sided. Obviously, music is such a big art form. And I do like the challenge of being able to make something that’s relevant to you personally into successful public art. With Beautiful Mutants, it may not be as important to people as if I was showing at the Museum of Modern Art. But I’ve found an audience [at small galleries] that’s fervent about ideas and challenging imagery. The last tour was really satisfying.

THE RAKE: The cliché about artists is that they hate doing commercial work, but you seem to get a charge out of it.

MARK: It goes back to being influenced by Andy Warhol. He played with that edge between commercial and fine art and attacked it very overtly with things like the Campbell’s Soup can. I grew up with the hippies, and watched them get crushed at Kent State while I was there, and became aware of the fact that in this country, rebellion was obsolete. The ironic thing about the punks is that they never learned that lesson from the hippies and became a commodity so quickly. We always felt like the best way to change something was through subversion.

THE RAKE: You’re swinging through Minneapolis twice in 2004, returning for a December show at Creative Electric gallery. What keeps drawing you back here?

MARK: We love Minneapolis. That’s where we first worked with Chuck Statler on the very first Devo film. I remember going up to his place about 1975, and we got to his house and his garage had been crushed by snow. You have a number of good galleries—what can I say? Most cities in the world can’t get one good gallery, so I’m counting my blessings in Minneapolis.

If you go to a movie at the Heights Theater and there’s a man in front blocking your view of the screen, check to see if he’s playing a pipe organ. If so, he might be Karl Eilers. He’s one of three organists who perform on weekends and during silent-film screenings on the Heights’ lovingly restored Wurlitzer pipe organ, one of the few of its kind left in the U.S. Eilers knows his work literally from the inside out—for decades, he not only played organs, but also built them. These days, he worries that there aren’t enough new players to replace the old guard, but he loves performing for theatergoers as much as ever, savoring the improvisational skill it requires. “Sure, you’re playing standards, but like jazz, it’s new every time,” he says. “Even if it’s written by Duke Ellington, when I play it, it’s mine.” Here’s what Eilers would bring along if cast away on some lonely Pacific island.
1) The Heights organ, of course. This would have to be a very well-planned shipwreck, because that took three years to put in. But that’s the only entertainment choice I can think of that’d do me forever. That, or a big Steinway grand piano.
2) I’m going to cheat—I’m going to burn my own CDs. CD one: Mozart’s and Gabriel Fauré’s requiems. The Mozart, it’s universally regarded as one of his greatest works, even though half was written by somebody else because he died in the middle of it. The Fauré Requiem isn’t like any I can think of. It’s sometimes called the “Dream Requiem,” all peace and light. Very nice. You should try it.
3) CD two: Alicia De Larrocha’s Spanish piano stuff. Spectacular and extremely well played. I’d tack on “The Chairman Dances” by John Adams, something he wrote but didn’t use for his opera Nixon in China. It has everything—emotion and complex structure, but also superficial charm.
4) CD three is a bunch of stuff. Piano jazz from Sergio Salvatore, Brian Setzer, Don Henley, and actually a cut or two from Justin Timberlake. Now, if I’m marooned forever I’ll get tired of those, but at the moment they’re still fresh.
5) Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. You can read it ten times and still find worthwhile stuff. And also a boxed set of the Harry Potter books.