Category: Art & Theater

Gregorian puts new spin on medieval music

Few experiences are more soothing than listening to Gregorian chant, a form of liturgical plainchant dating back to the ninth century. It originated in European churches and is most often performed a capella, though sometimes there’s spare instrumental accompaniment. It’s spiritual music, with songs like “Jesus, Joy of Man’s Desire” in most programs.

Taking this idiom into the modern world is Gregorian: Pure Chants in Concert, which stops in Concord on April 20, part of the German company’s first American tour. First of all, there are way more lasers and dry ice smoke than any medieval monk dreamed up, and though sacred songs dominate the show’s first half, the second is filled with today’s hits.

Songs like Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” are perfectly suited for the ethereal chorale. Gregorian, founded by Frank Peterson 25 years ago, has adapted hundreds of contemporary songs, even covering R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.” The first was Eric Clapton’s “Tears In Heaven.”

In a recent phone interview, Peterson was asked to name his favorite.

“That’s a hard question,” he said. “One is ‘Chasing Cars’ and another is ‘Bravado’ by Rush, I think that came out great … but it’s hard to say. There are a couple of Pink Floyd tracks we covered that were perfect; it’s almost like they were written for Gregorian chants.”

An easier question is whether there are any that couldn’t be transformed.

“One of the first songs that we tried was ‘Human Behavior’ by Bjork and that’s just undoable,” he said, “Until this day, we haven’t managed to get our heads around it…. To give it a twist is not always that easy.”

The idea of updating Gregorian chants for modern audiences came to Peterson in the late 1980s, when he visited a famous monastery outside Madrid. At the same time the monastery’s monks were singing Gregorian chants, he heard a drumbeat in the distance. The synchronicity gave him pause.

“I thought, ‘This is an amazing combination,’” he said. In a nearby record shop, he found a few albums. “They were dusty because nobody buys Gregorian chant records, really. I took them home, sampled them, and put them together with loops. That resulted in this project called Enigma.”

Amazingly, the world was waiting for souped-up ancient music, and Enigma ended up spending six years on the Billboard charts.

“That was the first time that we combined drum loops, modern music with a chant, and we did original songs,” he said. “Ten years later I started Gregorian, which was the other way around.”

Along the way, they’ve made an album a year; the latest is Pure Chants II.

“It’s a classical crossover record,” Peterson said of the new disc. “We do a very stripped-down version of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah,’ for example, and a really thrilling version of ‘O Fortuna,’ which is obviously classical, but … it’s quite massive and sinister as well.”

Gregorian plays arenas in Europe, but growth was gradual. First, they performed in churches, later moving to theaters. Peterson was ambitious from the outset.

“I wanted to do a show that I would like to see,” he said, “I don’t want to see eight guys standing there singing songs, [so] we did special effects, great lighting and so on. Obviously, people liked it.”

The current tour kicked off to a full house in South Carolina. Accompanying the eight-voice choir is Anita Brightman, sister of famous singer Sarah Brightman, and two supporting musicians. Peterson is happy to finally play America.

“Some of the singers have never been to the States at all, not even as tourists,” he said. “So they’re really excited about exploring your country on the tour bus and doing concerts every night. It’s wonderful for us.”

Peterson thinks Gregorian’s success reflects the times. “It has a very calming effect, and people use it for meditation,” he said, “I just like to take this vibe of the calmness and the soothing aspect of this choir sound and turn it into something that’s familiar. I think that really is ringing a nerve with a lot of people.”

Gregorian: Pure Chants in Concert
When: Saturday, April 20, 7 p.m.
Location: Capitol Center for the Arts, 44 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $46.75 and up at ccanh.com

Featured Photo: Gregorian. Courtesy photo.

NSquared is home for modern dance

By Zachary Lewis
[email protected]

Dance, artistic movement of the human body, is one of humankind’s oldest forms of expression throughout all cultures. NSquared Dance, a contemporary dance company based in Manchester, believes in the power of dance and advocates for this ancient art form in the Granite State.

Zackery Betty, Artistic Director of NSquared Dance, spoke about how it’s “a company that’s really driven to bring awareness [of] the joy of dance but also the art of dance and be able to share it through empowerment, encouragement for community members, for other dancers and also for audience-goers.”

NSquared Dance is a nonprofit that Zackery Betty and his husband, Nick Neagle, who is the founder and creative director, brought up from New York City. Neagle is a New Hampshire native and both Betty and Neagle are “excited to make [New Hampshire] our home,” Betty said. “You don’t need to go to this giant metropolis in order to fulfill a life for dance. It is viable within the smaller communities and the cities [in New Hampshire] that still have a lot to give.”

Betty and Neagle both graduated from Marymount Manhattan College in New York City, he said, and “[NSquared Dance] was [Neagle’s] senior thesis … to create a company, and he did the business plan … based out of Boston but then he just really transposed it to fit more in the New Hampshire area…. Through trials and tribulations we’ve now come to have a brand new outlook.”

That outlook involves a myriad of dance styles.

“We actually are pretty happy to capitalize on our different types of genres,” Betty said. “We specialize in contemporary dance and modern but we do have a very strong tap background. We also can do jazz, ballet … checkmark [all] the dance genres except for no folk or ballroom dance, that’s not our specialty.”

They do have a specialty in their choreography, which springs from unique starting points.

“Sometimes it starts with a costume. Sometimes it starts with a music inspiration and other times it will start with either a story or an idea,” Betty said.

NSquared’s next performance will be on Saturday, April 13, at the Amato Center for the Performing Arts in Milford for the New England Inspirational Dance Festival run by Saving Grace Dance Ensemble.

“The New England Inspirational Dance Festival is a celebration of dance through inspiration,” Betty said. “Saving Grace Dance has presented several different platforms for dance companies and dance crews to come perform. We’re bringing one of our works that we did in February … it’s just a duet, but it’s a duet that brings light to what possibly could bedance in another realm … a higher realm.”

Betty and Neagle are selective yet open-minded about who becomes an NSquared Dancer.

“We are a very open and encompassing group…,” Betty said. “We look through a lens of joy mixed with technique. We have a very strong technical background underneath for all of the dancers. That doesn’t necessarily mean that all of our dancers have gone to college for dance, but we do have a large group of them that have…. We look for storytelling in relation to being able to use your voice within a room as a creative and as an advocate for the art of dance. We look for someone who can bring both of those aspects into the studio and the stage.”

After the Festival, NSquared will premiere The Lavender Scare in collaboration with dancers through New Hampshire Dance Collaborative at the Rex Theatre in Manchester in June.

As it happens, at NSquared “all of our dancers were born and raised here in New Hampshire except for myself and our rehearsal director,” Betty said. “It’s really nice to have that local group of people…. It’s nice to pride ourselves that we are locally born and raised for dancers.”

NSquared Dance also holds drop-in classes for professionals and college students on Sundays at the New England School of Dance (679 Mast Road in Manchester) for $15.

“We’re excited to invest,” Betty said, “in the best stories that have helped create us and helped create our community … to put that on the stage and not have to use words for it.”

Dance Dance
New England Inspirational Dance Festival
Where: Amato Center for the Performing Arts, 56 Mount Vernon St., Milford
When: Saturday, April 13, 6 p.m.

The Lavender Scare
Where: The Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
When: Thursday, June 27, 7 p.m.

More: nsquareddance.org

Featured Photo: Courtesy photo.

Currier curates a conversation

When Lorenzo Fusi joined the Currier Museum of Art in February 2023 as Chief Curator, one of his first exhibitions was “Distant Conversations.” It looked at the elective affinities between painter Ella Walker and ceramicist Betty Woodman, by displaying their works side by side.

Its success led to this year’s exhibition, which pairs painter Filippo de Pisis with photographer Robert Mappelthorpe. The latter is better known, mainly due to his often controversial photos. In a phone interview with the Hippo, Italy-born Fusi said he included de Pisis “to present and premiere the work of an Italian artist who I think is very influential and important beyond the borders of Italy.” Here’s an edited version of the interview.

Separated by years, Mappelthorpe and de Pisis never met. What do you think connects them artistically?

Mapplethorpe traveled multiple times to Italy, and I think most of these affinities originated by looking at the same work and the same monuments, the same kind of archaeological references which are basically sitting deep in Western art history. I think that most likely is the reason why there are so many uncanny similarities between the two of them.

What are some of the other elements linking them?

Each of them came from some form of prejudice. I would say de Pisis at one moment in time has been considered a bit too delicate … maybe too soft in his representation. By imposition, I think Mapplethorpe was considered too hard, too in your face, too confrontational. I think both of them have been stigmatized for this almost opposite way in which they come into art. And ironically, [via this] completely opposite or antagonist approach, they do produce work which is actually very … similar aesthetically. So I think this is not only an opportunity to discover de Pisis as an artist who has not been shown extensively in the United States, but also an opportunity to revisit Mapplethorpe’s work from a different … perspective.

They were both very purposeful in their approach.

Yes, intentional, and very deliberate in the way they wanted to represent something. If you start entering into that mindset, even the more graphic images of Mapplethorpe, and we have only one image from the more controversial portfolios … Joe Rubberman, the very famous picture of a man wearing a vinyl outfit laying down flat on a bench. It’s a very classical pose [and] although it looks very morbid and very sexual, as a matter of fact, this pose can be seen in hundreds of examples of art historical references, even though it might be very much in your face when you start looking at it…. The idea [is] to create an image that is transtemporal and it stays as an almost art historical testament. You don’t see the sexuality of it anymore. You don’t see the reference to this very murky underworld of gay life in New York in the ’70s and ’80s, you see a very iconic image of a body that could be Etruscan, could be ancient Roman or Greek. That’s where I think he stops being controversial and starts being an artist in a sense.

When did you know you were on the right track and this would be an impactful exhibition?

The Currier Museum of Art has a quite substantial collection of photography, going back to Lotte Jacobi, the first photography curator… I was surprised when I first moved to the Currier that we didn’t have any Mapplethorpe in our collection because undeniably he’s an American master of photography. I was looking at [how] we could incorporate some work by Mapplethorpe into the collection, but also … overcoming the prejudice associated with the more controversial reception of his photography. At the same time … I wanted to do something with de Pisis in the United States because he was an overlooked artist who I think should be represented. The moment of realization [came while] separately looking at the work. In my mind I had this crystallization that some of the images were very, very similar, and the more I delved into that, the more similarities I found. I think the moment for me when I became absolutely sure that it was a good exhibition or a good approach was when I showed it to a colleague of mine in Italy who immediately saw the poetry and the lyricism in this association, and he asked me to continue to do that research. Then I shared it with my team. They all saw how close the elective affinity is between these two artists, which is most surprising considering the time gap and geographical gap between the two of them. So it has not been a single moment of revelation, but multiple moments of affirmation that have happened from people who were not as yet in the project but could see immediately how powerful the association was.

Filippo de Pisis and Robert Mapplethorpe: A Distant Conversation
When: Saturday, April 13, through Sept. 2
Where: Currier Museum of Art, 150 Ash St., Manchester
More: currier.org

Featured Photo: Filippo de Pisis, Fiori di Villa di Maggio. Courtesy photo.

‘A voice worth having,’ says Emmy-winning actor

By Zachary Lewis

[email protected]

Gordon Clapp, a New Hampshire native, is no stranger to the stage. He will be performing the role of Robert Frost in A.M. Dolan’s Robert Frost: This Verse Business at Stockbridge Theatre at Pinkerton Academy (44 N. Main St. in Derry) and will be in residence starting on Tuesday, April 2, at Pinkerton Academy with a public performance on Thursday, April 4, at 7 p.m.

Clapp is known for his Emmy-Award-winning performance as Detective Greg Medavoy on NYPD Blue, and was also nominated for a Tony award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in the revival of David Mamet’s Pulitzer’s Prize-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross as Coach Mad Maxx in 2007, among a myriad of other film, television and stage credits.

Performing Robert Frost has been on Clapp’s mind for some time.

“This was something I had thought about doing since right after college. I read the biographies, and Frost was a voice that had been in my head since high school, since the inauguration of Kennedy,” he said.

“Also,” Clapp said, “I wanted to bring an older Frost to the stage, so I wanted to wait till I was old enough to be believable as the older Frost.”

As luck would have it, Clapp’s patience paid off.

“I stumbled across a script just at the time when I was thinking about writing, putting together a script.” So Clapp and Dolan “worked on it together. He’s actually more familiar with some of the talks and he knows where all the treasures are in the talks. He started working on this probably 20 years ago. We’ve been doing it for 15 years, on and off,” Clapp said.

While the Frost estate is protective of the late poet’s image, Clapp and Dolan “managed to get an endorsement from Peter Gilbert, who is the executor of the estate,” Clapp said.

During the presidential election week of 2016, Clapp and Dolan “went to Edinboro, Pennsylvania, where there was a meeting of the Frost Society. One of Frost’s granddaughters [Leslie Lee Francis] was there and she gave us a thumbs up … hoping we could make him a little younger and more energetic. It’s a very energetic performance in terms of presenting an 88-year-old,” Clapp said. “She just had a very strong memory of that. She spent a lot of time with her grandfather.”

Clapp is excited to bring the show to Derry.

“Derry was the most fertile ground for him for writing. He spent 10 years there. … He raised a family there. Many of the best poems he ever wrote were written in Derry or about his time in Derry or inspired by his time in Derry,” Clapp said.

Shannon Myers, Director of the Stockbridge Theatre, “came to see the show in Portsmouth in January of 2023,” Clapp said, “and she loved it and spread the word. We decided to do a three-day program.”

Frost taught at Pinkerton Academy. The performance for the students is “more about his thoughts on education. It’s the first time we’ve done something like that.”

Diving into the little and lesser-known details of Frost’s portfolio is what makes Clapp’s performance memorable.

“The first Frost poem that really captivated me outside of ‘[The] Road Not Taken’ and ‘Stopping by Woods [on a Snowy Evening]’ was a poem called ‘Out, Out—,’ which is not one of the ones that I say in the show,” Clapp said. It is not a poem that Frost ever recited either.

“He never read the poem in public and it’s a very short poem about the sudden accidental death of a teenage boy working on a farm sawing wood with a buzz saw and having his hand cut off and the response of everyone around him, so the family and friends. That poem really resonated with me…. There was a coldness to it but at the same time there was this kind of stoicism, ‘the show must go on’ feeling….”

That poem, which gained its name from the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy delivered by Macbeth in the Scottish play,was based on a real event in Franconia. According to Dierdre Fagan’s Critical Companion to Robert Frost, Frost was friends with the victim of the accident, a 16-year-old named Raymond Tracy Fitzgerald.

These tragedies rhymed with Frost’s own life. “There were all these dark, dark things and he kept overcoming them in his writing,” Clapp said. “All that’s subjective, but objectively … there’s a depth to Frost that I don’t think people appreciate because people think of him as a Hallmark card poet. But some of his work I think is profound…. We try to keep his voice alive because it’s a voice worth having at this point.”

This Verse Business
When: Thursday, April 4, at 7 p.m.
Where: Stockbridge Theatre in Derry
Tickets: $25 to $30; see pinkertonacademy.org/stockbridge-theatre
More info: Visit thisversebusiness.com for future show dates including
April 23-28 at Calderwood Pavilion in Boston

Featured Photo: Gordon Clapp. Courtesy Photo.