The grades 2-3 holiday show, titled “The Most Wonderful Time of Year,” packed the Bucknall Theater on Dec. 19, as the students in both grades celebrated the season with holiday songs both new and old.
Directed by Carena Montany, the show began with students in both grades singing the holiday classic “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” They continued with more seasonal favorites, including “Feliz Navidad,” “Little Drummer Boy” and “Winter Wonderland.” Their repertoire also featured nods to other cultures, such as the Liberian folk song “African Noel” and the Hawaiian Christmas anthem “Mele Kalikimaka.” The choreography by Kimberley Teodoro and amusing narration by students between songs kept the atmosphere light and provided smooth transitions between performances. Paul and Toni Woodruff accompanied for the singers on piano and violin, respectively.
The show ran smoothly thanks to the efforts of longtime technical director Danny Dunn and assistant technical director Carol Clever, as well as Dunn’s grade 5 technical theater students.
The 2013 lower school Winter Concert on Dec. 5 brought warmth and a bit of holiday cheer to the audience and showcased the diverse talents of Harker’s lower school musicians. Lower school musical groups, including the orchestra and jazz ensemble, were featured, with special solo performances and appearances by groups from the middle and upper schools.
The lower school orchestra, conducted by Louis Hoffman, kicked things off with “King William’s March” by Jeremiah Clarke. Next up was the lower school string ensemble performing Brian Balmages’ “A Beethoven Lullaby,” the first of two pieces it played that evening. The string ensemble then made way for the lower school’s jazz combo, also conducted by Hoffman, which played the somewhat odd but nevertheless well-liked “Summertime” by George Gershwin.
Though not a holiday-themed concert, a smattering of seasonal songs were included. “A Festive Holiday” was performed by the string ensemble and arranged by David Shaffer and Toni Woodruff, who led the ensemble. Bob Cerulli’s “A Christmas Sing Along: Traditional,” performed by the lower school orchestra, continued along the winter theme.
A number of individual students had the chance to shine at various points throughout the concert. Kailash Ranganathan, grade 4, performed a sitar duet with renowned sitarist Pandit Habib Khan. Astor Piazzolla’s “Libertango” was performed by cellist Angeline Kiang, grade 4, who was accompanied by pianist Chen Woo. Later, the lower school orchestra performed grade 5 student Paul Kratter’s original piece, “The Title.”
About midway through the concert, the grade 6 strings group, directed by Dave Hart, arrived to perform the “Spring” portion of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” as well as a string arrangement of Coldplay’s “Clocks.” The upper school string quartet, directed by Chris Florio, also showed up later in the evening, performing the first movement of Mendelssohn’s “String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor” and the Guns N’ Roses hit “Sweet Child O’ Mine.”
Following two more songs by the jazz combo and jazz ensemble, the lower school orchestra ended the concert with the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s “Messiah.”
Just days before the holiday break, people eager for seasonal cheer flocked to the Bucknall Theater on Dec. 17 for the annual grade 1 holiday show, titled “Our Favorite Time of Year” and directed by Carena Montany.
The homeroom classes of Imelda Kusuma, Cindy Proctor, Larissa Weaver and Rita Stone gathered on stage to sing a selection of odes to the holidays, including favorites such as “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” “The First Noel” and “Jingle Bells.” Other notable performances included the Hanukkah-themed tune “Spin a Little Dreidel” and “Christmas Everyday” by Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, which featured a dance routine choreographed by Gail Palmer.
Accompanying the singers during the concert were pianist Melissa Lin and violinist Toni Woodruff. Technical director Danny Dunn, assistant technical director Carol Clever and Dunn’s grade 5 technical theater students made sure the show ran well from start to finish.
If it wasn’t already obvious from the promotional copy on their website, PROJECT Trio’s version of Charles Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus,” their set opener at the second Harker Concert Series event of the season, drove the point home. For them, chamber music is the province of the classicists with season tickets to the local symphony, the vinyl hunters keeping brick-and-mortar record stores afloat, the knit cap-wearing cafe denizens, the college-aged millennials combing the depths of Bandcamp well into the night and every type of enthusiast in between.
They reach for the most improbable of goals: To be adventurous, true to themselves and inclusive all at the same time. And they have a ton of fun doing it.
Best known for the percussive “beatbox flute” style of Greg Pattillo, whose videos have been viewed tens of millions of times, PROJECT Trio is as lively as any jazz combo. With their constant swaying, stomping and an eclectic range of influences, it would be easy for a new listener to call them one, were it not for their self-billing as a chamber music group. Their rendition of “Faubus,” led by Pattillo’s flute and anchored by the heavy warbling of double bassist Peter Seymour and cellist Eric Stephenson, even recalls the hip-hop pedigree referenced in Pattillo’s technique, which they carried into a playful revision of that familiar theme from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
As can be expected, their bag of tricks is full of neat surprises, such as their half-classical, half-bluegrass interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” and the serpentine melodies of “Raga Raja,” an original piece inspired by Indian classical music, punctuated by Stephenson’s slinky portamentos. On “Slowberry Jam,” another original, Stephenson switched to finger style, whipping his bowing hand across the strings of his cello like a flamenco guitarist.
Moe Zoyari of San Francisco, who had seen Pattillo’s videos prior to attending and plays the flute himself, called the concert “awesome” and was so excited about it that he made a last-minute attempt get his friends to attend as well, “telling them that, if you can come, just come over right now.”
“I had no idea who they were or what to expect,” said Ann Gazenbeek from Los Altos, “so I just came with an open mind and I’m very pleasantly surprised.”
After the customary intermission, the trio introduced their unsurprisingly non-traditional take on Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” relocating the action to a neighborhood in Brooklyn and providing their own amusing narration and unique musical signatures. Though long, the group’s keen sense of dynamics kept things fresh, and the tune didn’t overstay its welcome.
PROJECT later shifted several decades forward to pay tribute to perhaps one of the first rock bands to make classical instruments cool (to the extent that progressive rock was ever considered cool), performing what Pattillo called “The PROJECT Trio version of Jethro Tull’s version of J.S. Bach’s version of ‘Bouree,’” during which the flautist stood on one leg as a shout out to Tull’s Ian Anderson.
The show’s ender, appropriately titled “The Random Roads Suite,” was a sweeping summary of the band’s approach, starting with the busy and sophisticated “The Puzzle” before slowing the tempo and slightly darkening the mood for the contemplative “Adagio,” highlighted by delicate trade offs between Seymour and Stephenson. So as not to leave the crowd on a somber note, they finished with the Latin-flavored “Pelea De Gallos,” as Seymour and Stephenson again took the spotlight as the two combative chickens mentioned in the title, succeeding in bringing up both the tempo and the mood.
Spring break will be extra special for the students of the Harker upper school orchestra, who will be traveling to Chicago to perform at the Chicago International Music Festival. The festival will take place April 8 at the Chicago Symphony Center. “We auditioned for this festival last spring and were thrilled to be accepted,” said Chris Florio, upper school music teacher.
In addition to being invited to perform, the orchestra also was honored with the opportunity to premiere a composition commissioned for the festival. The orchestra is working with composer Jeremy Van Buskirk of the Boston Composers’ Coalition on the piece, which will be heard by an international audience for the first time at the festival, as performed by Harker students. Florio spoke to Van Buskirk to exchange information about the piece. “My interaction with Jeremy was a lot of fun. He was very curious about Harker and wanted to learn a lot about the school in general, in addition to our orchestra,” Florio said. “He opened our meeting by telling me how impressed he was with our orchestra and excited to work with them. He had done quite a bit of investigating on YouTube to view our past performances. On describing his upcoming work for us, he said ‘it would not be (Pierre) Boulez, but it would not be (Aaron) Copland either; it will most likely be somewhere in between.’ What a wonderful experience for our orchestra to be involved in the creative process of a large new work from beginning to premiere!”
Expect more news on this tremendous opportunity in the coming months!
“Where I come from, there was a war that lasted so long, people forgot what they were fighting for,” says Anon, the titular character in Naomi Iizuka’s “Anon(ymous),” the 2013 fall play for the Harker Conservatory. Lost in the United States, Anon is an undocumented refugee without a name, searching for his mother. She’s trapped at a run-down sweatshop, wooed by its slimy owner, whom she has promised to marry once she completes a shroud for her presumed-dead child.
Chosen because it features an incredibly diverse cast of characters and a political spirit ripped from the headlines, “Anon(ymous)” is a 21st century retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey,” the epic familiar to all students at Harker’s upper school. In place of Odysseus is Anon, who wanders across America, from the beach house of a wealthy congressman where he has washed ashore to the kitchen of a drunken, one-eyed cannibal with an operatic songbird. Along the way, he frolics in the ocean with a goddess, races through sewage tunnels past afflicted drug addicts, and crashes a vehicle of trafficked people. His adventures are told in a theatrical style that borrows from traditions all across the world: a Bollywood dance number welcomes Anon to a friendly Indian restaurant, and Balinese shadow puppetry conveys a flashback of Anon and his mother.
The production is replete with these ultra-theatrical moments. In one instance, enormous hoops suggest an underground system of tunnels that Anon and a companion bolt through like a maze. Undulating teal cloths form frothy ocean waves, into which Anon and his goddess dive, only to resurface elsewhere in the current to share a watery kiss.
All the while, the audience is ever-present. Director Jeff Draper has split his audience in two, on either side of a long runway, facing each other. Reflecting the blue light which beams down onto the runway, a sea of the audience’s eerie, aquamarine faces is a constant presence behind Anon, implicated witnesses to his exhausting journey.
When we first meet Anon, he is with the spoiled and ebullient daughter of a smug congressman and his yoga-obsessed trophy wife, who, despite an anti-foreigner attitude, have taken Anon into their home, offering him food and shelter. The sugar-high, smartphone-clad daughter, played with side-splitting comic aplomb by Shenel Ekici, grade 12, has taken a fierce fascination with Anon. Indeed, how could she not? As she is keen to announce, “Exotic is very in right now.” But Anon, feeling himself a novelty, very far away from his real home and real family, is unmoved and out of place. When a beautiful goddess who reminds him of his roots emerges from the ocean, he is all too relieved to leave the shelter he has been granted on the beach and join the goddess in the abyss of the waters.
That launches Anon into his adventure across the United States. A storm separates him from the goddess, and when we meet him again, he is scavenging for food in the garbage outside of an Indian restaurant. Once again, he is offered shelter, and the goddess revisits him to egg on his memory of the cataclysmic event that parted Anon from his mother: the two had fled their war-torn country on a boat, which was torn asunder by a storm at sea. That’s right, even in a year without Shakespeare, Harker gets a play where a shipwreck breaks apart a family.
Next thing we know, Anon is in the underground tunnels, racing with a new friend, Paco, from immigration police. The two escape on a boxcar and finally find themselves searching for work when they encounter the one-eyed butcher Mr. Zyclo, the updated cyclops equivalent, rendered with delicious sophistication by Damon Aitken, grade 12, whose every word drips with intoxicated erudition. Mr. Zyclo’s culinary sensibilities call for a special ingredient for his sausages: people. The butcher takes Paco’s life first, then comes for Anon, who escapes when Zyclo’s captive bird exacts revenge against her master, tearing out his remaining eye.
Anon slips away, hitching a ride in a dusty, worn-out truck. He’s mid-journey when he comes to a startling realization: the back of the truck is filled with people, trafficked against their will. The conditions are hot, too hot, and Anon fears the captives will suffocate. In what is intended as a heroic gesture, Anon grabs the wheel. His efforts backfire in devastating fashion when Anon crashes the truck. In this moment, the theater is filled with the cacophony of the crash, and an eerie soundtrack backs a chorus of the refugees, spilling out. They tell us their names, their backgrounds, and that they have now died.
This tragedy is unsettling and poignant. In a play of hardships, the sudden deaths of these nameless victims – at Anon’s unintended hand, no less – hits home the hardest. For every Anon whose story will end joyfully, there is a chorus of refugees whose odysseys do not end in tearful family reunions, who never escape their twisting roads of peril except with a final moment of pain. Our fictional Anon is not alone; he is one of many, with names, with faces, with lost families. And our innocent hero now has blood on his hands.
Anon’s story does end happily. He finds his mother, whose sweatshop is across town from the Indian restaurant. This is a story, after all, and serendipity intervenes. Anon’s mother is reluctant to believe he is who he says he is, that her child could possibly have survived, until a song from his childhood begins to put her mind at ease and open her up to the miracle of their reuniting. It is a powerful, and theatrical, conclusion to this swift and swirling epic, which packs a lot of ground into a crackling hour and 30 minutes.
The largest cheers are reserved for spectacular comedic turns from two of the plays’ thickly-accented characters: the jovial proprietor of the Indian restaurant and the snakelike, sleazy, Slavic sweatshop manager. Sophomore Rishabh Chandra’s Ali, the restaurateur, is a delight, boisterous and full of warmth. The sweatshop manager and suitor to Anon’s mother, named Yuri Mackus and played by Jeton Manuel Gutierrez-Bujari, grade 11, is a consummate schmoozer, sweet-talking his guests even as he dismisses concerns about the work environment he has created. When these actors work their magic, it is hard not to crack a smile. Both charm their audience with outsized portrayals, balancing out the oppressive odds facing Anon.
Indeed, for all of the serious matters which challenge Anon, “Anon(ymous)” is a very fun piece. It is a joyful, spirited adventure where harsh reality and mythical fantasy collide. As Anon, Vishal Vaidya, grade 11,carries the play on his shoulders. He is more than up to the task, imbuing the role with dignity, grace and bravery. The production is full of moments that wow, from the gorgeous, elegaic song that begins the play to the shooting of a silhouetted soldier, from the first moment a sparkling blue butterfly puppet constructed in the Balinese wayang kulit style interacts with one of the shadowed actors to the full-cast, show-stopping Bollywood dance number. All of the show’s incidental music was composed by Harker students for this production. The Harker Conservatory does a beautiful job in weaving together disparate elements and many worlds to breathe life into an amazing journey, scoring a stirring triumph with Naomi Iizuka’s “Anon(ymous).”
Watch for the full review and more photos from “Anon(ymous)” in a few days!
“Where I come from, there was a war that lasted so long, people forgot what they were fighting for,” says Anon, the titular character of Naomi Iizuka’s “Anon(ymous),” the Harker Conservatory’s 2013 fall play. Lost in the United States, Anon is an undocumented refugee without a name, searching for his mother. She’s trapped at a run-down sweatshop, wooed by its slimy owner, whom she has promised to marry once she completes a shroud for her presumed-dead child.
Anon wanders across America, from the beach house of a wealthy congressman to the kitchen of a drunken cannibal with an operatic songbird. Along the way, he frolics in the ocean with a goddess, races through sewage tunnels past afflicted drug addicts, and crashes a vehicle of trafficked people. His adventures are told in a theatrical style that borrows from traditions from around the world; a Bollywood dance number welcomes Anon to a friendly Indian restaurant and Balinese shadow puppetry conveys a flashback of Anon and his mother. With an ultra-theatrical approach, the ensemble brings to life a powerful rendition of this present-day retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey.”
The Harker Conservatory’s 2013-14 fall play, “Anon(ymous),” is loaded. It features an original score created by students, original choreography by students, Balinese shadow puppetry, a Bollywood dance, fog, smoke, lights, and an all-new audience configuration.
Then there is the content. “Anon(ymous)” is a new, gritty, mythic exploration into cutting-edge, modern-day political challenges. The piece blends Homer’s “The Odyssey,” the epic read by all Harker freshmen, with the diaspora story of an undocumented immigrant finding his way across America, searching for his identity and his family.
“’Anon(ymous)‘ is a celebration of tradition and culture,” writes the director, Jeff Draper. “The epic adventure story is based on Homer’s “The Odyssey,” but this retelling reveals universal themes about our own contemporary world. This play is about the love and connection infused in the family, a love that is found in every culture, all around the world.”
While the themes of “Anon(ymous)” may be ancient and universal, there is a lot that is new and mold-breaking for The Harker Conservatory. The play is a new one, written in the last few years — there is no Shakespeare here. The audience is arranged on either side of a runway, a configuration never before seen at Harker. A handful of student directors are assisting Draper and rehearsing an alternate cast. A whole host of students are composing new music and choreographing new routines. There are more hands on deck and more moving parts than ever before, all to create a play that is not only epic but also searingly contemporary. Here are a few of the innovations taking center stage at Harker this fall:
A NEW CONFIGURATION
“Metamorphoses”featured a pool. “A Christmas Carol”had a live pre-show Dickens Faire. “Anon(ymous)” will split its audience into two and face them against each other across the stage, like fans on two sides of a football field, in a configuration known in the theater world as tennis court-style.
“I always like to mix it up,” says Draper. Because Harker lacks a theater, the performing arts directors flex their creativity every year, reinventing the Blackford auditorium when they can. Until Harker has a real performance space, he says, “I’m going to keep taking advantage of it.”
Draper named The National Theatre of Scotland’s “Black Watch” and Cirque du Soleil’s “Corteo”as his influences for the new design. In “Black Watch,” which toured the world before finally reaching San Francisco in May of this year, a partitioned audience watched a dozen soldiers race up and down a central runway connecting two structures resembling army bases at either end, acting out the Iraq War and their lives afterward. In “Corteo,” the audience wrapped circularly around a central disk, with exits and entrances also proceeding from two opposing poles. Both productions created immersive experiences that Draper was keen to emulate.
The year’s new setup is filled with exciting challenges for the actors, who now face an audience on all sides. “It makes you act three-sixty,” says Draper. “There’s no hiding,” shared one student at the cast’s retreat this month. “You feel like you always have eyes on you.” Draper, for his part, has enjoyed the new challenge. “We’re learning a lot,” he says. “It’s very different.”
A PIECE OF THE ZEITGEIST
“Anon(ymous)‘” treatment of contemporary material is startlingly new to Harker’s drama wing of the Conservatory; for a program that has made its name on classics like last year’s “Hamlet,” a freshly-written epic ripped from the headlines is a bold departure. When the actors were asked at their retreat whether this was the first time any of them had ever embarked on a project this much in the zeitgeist, the team responded with an almost-choral “yes.” “It’s not anything in the past,” one student chimed in. “It’s happening now. It’s part of our job to make people aware.”
On how they found their research for the play, the students were clear: rather than head to the library and search the catalog for critical essays as they might with a classic, they took to Google News and YouTube to develop deeper understandings of the predicaments and lifestyles of their characters.
For Draper, it was critical that the students examine their own lives and ancestries as well. So the director asked his actors to research their own lineages. He also gave each student a piece of foam core, and asked them to place information about what they uncovered on one side and their family trees on the other. That art, accompanied by the students’ personal stories, will hang in the lobby when the audience comes to view “Anon(ymous).”
The actors looked into their family histories with immigration and political and personal turmoil. One, whose character in “Anon(ymous)” must be the “man of the family,” told of an ancestor whose father was felled by an earthquake in Japan, leaving him to become that “man of the family.” Another told of a divide in the older generations of his family over allegiances with British prior to the partition of India. Those stories became a pretext to learn about the refugee camps spurred on by the political turmoil.
The exercise succeeded in casting the play as a piece of very personal reality for the actors, allowing them to see their characters in the context of their own lives. One student confessed that his heart was not in the play until he sought out his family and heard tales of their past. That made the play personal for him. “The play is resonating with students as I’d hoped it would,” says Draper.
Indeed, that “Anon(ymous)”is a tale of a diaspora journey was one more reason Draper chose the play for Harker. “It’s about home. It’s about immigration. It’s about leaving one place and going to another,” he says. “I think a lot of Harker families, within a generation or two, have left home and made a new home in Silicon Valley, in California, in the U.S.A.”
ULTRA-THEATRICAL
In many ways, “Anon(ymous)” is more than just a play, it’s a multidisciplinary theater event. In one love scene, two characters tread water in a sea of fabric. In another moment, moving hoops cascade down the runway to conjure up images of the characters dashing through tunnels. A shadow dance, in the style of Balinese wayang kulit shadow puppetry, tells the story of Anon and his mother.
The characters are outsized as well. “It’s not naturalistic or realistic,” says Draper. “One of the characters from “The Odyssey,” the cyclops, is, in this story, a demented butcher who eats people. He’s trying to kill our protagonist with a big butcher knife.”
“Anon(ymous)”is larger than life, in order to take the audience on a journey that is ripped from real life and even their own lives. With the actors being stretched in so many new ways, and with so many taking on extra responsibilities like choreography and puppeteering, it’s been a made dash to the finish, and an incredibly rewarding one for the collaborators. “You never know what’s going to happen next,” one student says. Another chimes in, “none of us knows exactly what we’re doing, but we know it’s going to be amazing.”
“Anon(ymous),” by Naomi Iizuka, plays Thurs., Oct. 31 through Sat., Nov. 2 at the Blackford Theater.
Harker upper school female group Cantilena took part in a special concert at San Francisco’s historic Grace Cathedral on Oct. 2 to help rebuild and replenish the resources of The Holy Trinity Music School in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The school was destroyed in the 2010 earthquake that devastated much of the country.
The group was invited to perform at the concert by Ben Johns, the educational director for the world-renowned men’s choir Chanticleer. During the concert, Cantilena joined a group comprising 10 other choirs, which sang Mozart’s “Laudate Dominum,” from the composer’s “Vesperae solennes de confessore,” and “Wondrous Love” by Joseph Jennings.
Nace reported that the audience in attendance was “very enthusiastic” about the performance.
“Our visiting opera singers were astonished at the amazing show of strength and enthusiasm from all of [Harker’s] students,” said concert organizer Bruce Garnett. “(Soloist) Susan Graham remarked that she will never again hear ‘Laudate Dominum’ without remembering the experience of being surrounded by the future of music in this place.”
This story originally appeared in the fall 2013 Harker Quarterly.
“Family Party,” the independent film starring Harker students and alumni, finished filming over the summer and is currently in post-production.
The film stars Vishal Vaidya, grade 11, as Nick, who wants to escape a boring family party with his friend Arti to attend a local concert. The film also stars junior Jai Ahuja and 2013 graduates Rahul Nalamasu, now attending the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and Cecilia Lang-Ree, who starts at Stanford this fall. During production, performing arts chair Laura Lang-Ree and upper school drama teacher Jeff Draper acted as advisers to the cast and crew.
Vaidya said the character of Nick appealed to him almost immediately. “When I first got the part, I read through the script and got a weird feeling of déjà vu,” he said. “The kinds of interactions that Nick had with his parents were completely similar to the daily conversations and arguments I have with my own mom and dad.”
The part of Nick was a new challenge for Vaidya, as it required him to channel a different set of emotions. He previously played Laertes in the Harker production of “Hamlet” and
a troubled teenager in last year’s Student-Directed Showcase. “Nick was a much harder character to play because I couldn’t always rely on strong emotion to carry me through his scenes but rather had to utilize my scene partner, as the majority of my screen time was conversational,” he said.
Ahuja, who plays Nick’s friend Sahil, found the challenge of playing a down-to-earth character was a new experience for him. “Toning down the energy that I normally use for a theater so that it would work well on film was challenging,” he said. “I found that just being around on set was an amazing experience over all. I enjoyed watching everything get set up, the camera being operated, the lights being put in place, and our directors working together. It was exciting to be out in front, and simply to be acting with such a great cast and crew.”
“Everyone in the cast and crew were completely bonded by the end of the shoot,” said Vaidya. “The fact that most of the crew were either in college or had just graduated made it even easier to connect because the age difference was so small.”
The makers of “Family Party” are currently seeking additional funding to get the film through the post-production phase. Once it is finished, it will be submitted to several notable film festivals, including Sundance, South by Southwest and the Toronto Film Festival.
Vaidya said the way the film depicts Indian-American culture is an important reason for it to receive the funding necessary to be completed. “It’s really the only film about Indians I’ve ever seen that views them as normal people with normal problems,” he said. “On top of that, it’s just a really sweet touching story that all sorts of people will connect with.”
“I truly believe that it will help society to get past the stereotypes that we have today, replacing them with a current idea of what life is really like for us,” Ahuja said.
More information about the film, including instructions on how to donate, is available at its website, www.familypartythefilm.com.