While Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is among the most familiar pieces in the classical musical repertoire, it might surprise more than a few just how little we actually know about what the composer’s expressive intentions were when he composed in 1874 the piano score in memory of his friend, the Russian painter and architect Viktor Hartmann. It was Vladimir Stasov, a Russian critic, who organized the exhibition of Hartmann’s artworks and who solidified the popular imagery associated with the music.
For example, the opening Promenade movement, according to Stasov, signified the composer “as he strolled through the exhibition; joyfully or sadly recalling the talented deceased artist.” The image stuck as scholars and biographers of Mussorgsky in later years amplified Stasov’s contention: “a portrait of Musorgsky, now of considerable bulk, shambling through the gallery” (Michael Russ) and “there is an ebb and flow in the phrasing that indicates his gait is subject to constant slight irregularities” (David Brown, who wrote a definitive biography of the composer). It was the composer’s last major work (others were unfinished or were published posthumously), as the decline of his mental and physical health accelerated rapidly and he was dead seven years later at the age of 42.
More productive, however, are the words of Alexandra Orlova, who explained that Pictures “is far from being a simple ‘illustration’ of Hartmann’s drawings. It is a profoundly philosophical work, a meditation on life and death, on history, on the people, and on man in general.” Thus, the musical canvas in Pictures opens up a wide ranging spectrum of expressive and interpretive possibilities.
In the collective hands of the six Performing Arts Coalition members at the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts, Orlova’s words are taken earnestly, in the forthcoming world premiere of Pictures at an Exhibition: ReFramed, an hour-long production, on August 24 at 8 p.m. in The Rose’s Jeanné Wagner Theatre. The companies featured are Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation, Plan-B Theatre, PYGmalion Theatre Company, Repertory Dance Theatre, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company and SB Dance.
For the 13th edition of the Performing Arts Coalition show, which has become a late August fixture for whetting the audience appetite for a new season of shows, concerts and productions, ReFramed represents the most mature evolution of the programming concept. The companies agreed on setting their respective contributions upon a framework that was scripted by award-winning Utah playwright Melissa Leilani Larson, who incorporated input from everyone. Larson explained in a Plan-B Theatre blog the two creative tasks she was assigned, “First, to write a short play based on one of the movements in the suite and the painting that sparked it. Second, to write a few bits of dialogue to serve as connective tissue between performances. The idea was of docents in a museum, troubled by obnoxious visitors and learning about the art.”
Plan-B’s Jerry Rapier worked with Larson on the script for the production, which is directed by PYGmalion Theatre Company’s Fran Pruyn. In addition to the dancers from the Repertory Dance Theatre and Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, SB Dance members will perform as museum patrons. Cast members include Anne Decker, Tamara Howell, Corinne Penka, Niki Rahimi and Benjamin Young. In addition to choreographing for his company’s dancers, Daniel Charon, Ririe-Woodbury’s artistic director, designed the projections of the museum gallery space Larson chose to set the narrative and the paintings, which represent other artists in addition to some of the Hartmann works. Last but certainly not least is, as the script directs, “our gifted and long suffering pianist.” Serhiy Salov, who won the silver medal in the 2010 Bachauer International Artists Competition, will perform.
For 11 years, it was Rose Exposed!, where the six companies agreed on a broad thematic concept and created their own 10-minute contributions, initially on the day of the performance and later in advance. The best realization of Rose Exposed! came in 2022, with the Birthday Suit(e) theme, to mark the building’s 25th anniversary. Last year, it was rebranded as Mix Tape, frankly a better title for the event at the time.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Charon explained once everyone agreed on Pictures as the “jumping off point, we said let’s go for it and we now had this deeper collaboration.” Larson, in the same interview, added that once she separated out the idea of scripting out and ordering the short pieces according to the music and the paintings, a story with a cohesive line quickly formed. Set in a small museum’s gallery space which is about to open a major exhibition, the head docent is finalizing details for the opening reception and is committed to monitoring the patrons whom she worries will try to destroy the paintings. Characters include a casual volunteer, who is clever, observant, good at charades and exudes elegance in her dance-like movements. There is the total art geek, who is thoroughly knowledgeable about the paintings but could stand to polish up his talks to visitors.
Of course, what would a museum docent crew be without at least one entitled veteran who wears her snobbishness with aplomb. There is a brand new volunteer, who yearns for an acting career but is held back by her extreme stage fright. She is sweet enough but also almost too eager to please, which is not helped by the sense that she is a little kooky. Unlike the arguable assumptions about what Mussorgsky intended to express 150 years ago when he wrote the piano score for Pictures, Larson’s storytelling canvas gives the six companies a fully collaborative opportunity to leverage their expertise in their artistic missions. That is, remove cherished institutions from underneath the glass dome and place them in more naturalistic settings where, for example, patrons of art and culture can happily and confidently experience old and new work, without being told assumptions about their meaning which more than occasionally can dampen the true energy and personalized connections that the art inspires.
In reframing a classic, Larson noted in the Plan-B blog that it was a good sign that she cared about the characters she created and what they wanted in telling their story. “One of the things I love most about working in the theater is the opportunity we have to embrace the unexpected. For theater to work, there are things that have to happen, things you count on: sound cues coming on at precisely the right time; performers hitting their marks; certain fabrics diffusing light. We rehearse so that things are perfect. But sometimes things happen beyond our control — and sometimes those things are actually quite wonderful.”
Tickets for the one-hour production are $15 for general admission and $10 for students.For tickets and more information, see here and here.
1 thought on “An exciting twist to the annual Performing Arts Coalition show at The Rose: Six resident companies fully collaborate on forthcoming Pictures at an Exhibition: ReFramed”