Rebirth is messy business. The process of transformation is –– to put it bluntly –– agony. From getting out of bed each morning after our little deaths of sleep to the large-scale revolutions of unjust societies, rebirth can be violent, heartbreaking and necessary. And most times, it’s ugly. There’s a large, city-block-sized hole in the ground on the east side of downtown illustrating this.
The rebirth of Arts Commons into Werklund Centre and the Olympic Plaza reconstruction are projects poised to transform not only our city’s centre but the way we relate to the arts in Calgary. There are blueprints, gorgeous renderings, and exciting language painting a picture for Calgarians as to what we can expect, but I am of the mind that they are merely shells of the transformation potentially housed inside. The true power of this transformation does not lie in the hands of the administrators, the architects or even the construction workers whose hands will shape the glass and mortar into these structures.
It is in the hands of artists. And we’re an unruly lot.
Welcome to Why We Create, an ongoing collaboration and partnership with Arts Commons that endeavours to explore the creative processes of artists working in Alberta. My name is Kenna Burima, musician, songwriter, producer, educator and writer. I am also a lover and cheerleader of artists.
Artists are constantly birthing things into existence. Any artist regardless of discipline can attest to the simultaneously painful and validating experience of endings and beginnings. We release a creation into the world and hope it finds its way. And then we hope to do it all again. Rebirth requires relinquishing control of what and who we are and what our creations mean to us. We leave old things behind; selves, ways of being, ways of doing and attempt to step into something new, hopefully better, but the problem with rebirth is that we just never really know, do we?
We may have a blueprint. We may have a meticulously laid out plan, but we are not ever truly in control. The movement of creation itself cannot be ordered or contained. The best we can do is throw up our hands and agree to move with it. This constant ever-evolving process of creativity is both beautiful and heart-breaking. And the most maddening thing of all is that it seems the only thing we can rely on, is the most uncontrollable of things, our emotions. How we feel is a message. Feelings give us an indication of the truth, and how we feel about a building or a piece of music, tells us more about ourselves than it does about the hole in the ground or a symphony written more than a hundred years ago.
I love talking about feelings. I’ve spent a lifetime convincing myself feelings don’t matter, that they weren’t facts, and at best were nuisances to be ignored and suppressed at worst. Nasty thing about feelings though, is that they can only be subjugated for so long before they bubble up and overtake one’s life. Then BAM! You’re in a rebirthing process.
Metaphors of construction sites aside, endings and beginnings seem to happen simultaneously. Just as I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra’s Rune Bergmann, who's wrapping up his artistic directorship and conducting his final concert at the end of May with Mahler’s Resurrection. Let’s be honest here, one cannot talk of Romantic composer Gustav Mahler without talking about feelings.
“Mahler writes music in a way that doesn’t feel composed, it's felt,” muses Rune. “I think that everything he writes just comes from the heart, from his soul. It's his emotions you can feel in his music on every level.”
Mahler’s Second Symphony is a massive thing for a large orchestra and chorus; a universe unto itself, clocking in at 80 minutes with five movements. It is no small feat to undertake its performance, but the Calgary Phil and its doting audience love their Mahler as proven by the composer’s inclusion in programs for the last thirty years. Rune’s not mad about it. His birth as a conductor and the music of Mahler are intertwined. You can’t have Rune without Mahler.
“It was always my biggest dream to conduct Mahler,” admits Rune. “It started with me being quite young and going to a concert and hearing his music for the first time. I didn’t really understand it. I just got sucked into the atmosphere. I left the concert a better version of myself. I would say, I was probably twelve years old and that is where it all started.”
Decades later, Rune has lived a life that, like most of us, has doled out his share of hardship, grief and loss. We can’t talk about rebirth without talking about death and Rune and I ponder how it seems we can’t grieve things in isolation. New grief piggybacks on grief already there and we grieve again and again. We always hope that’s the last of it but there’s always more to grieve, and I wonder aloud with Rune that perhaps Mahler gifts us a container to put that overwhelming feeling into. The cycle of grieving becomes more manageable when we have a container to hold it in and Mahler gives us 80 minutes to let it all hang out.
“I remember I met one of these old conductors years ago,” recalls Rune, “and he said, ‘Oh, Rune, you're not ready for Mahler, you don’t have enough pain in your life yet.’ And that was quite interesting, because the way he was seeing it is you can appreciate it, you can feel it, you can have the wish to conduct it, but still, you need some years and some bad experiences in life…you need to feel pain to really understand it. But also I feel that you don't have to fully understand it, you don't have to have the same story. So you’ll sit down with me and the orchestra and Mahler will just tell his story. You can be 14 or you can be 84, but you would still feel something. You will leave the concert hall different than who you were before you entered.”
It is the nature of time that gifts us the opportunity to be one thing but also look back and see we were something else. Kimberly Cooper, the artistic director for Decidedly Jazz Danceworks (DJD), has been mining the past for her final offering of a 40-year anniversary program this season with Reminiscing in Tempo running April 24 to May 11. It is always an epic treat to talk with Kimberly who may be known as a dancer and choreographer but to me and many who collaborate with her, she is a musician through and through.
“It's why I dance,” admits Kimberly. “It’s why I make dance music, because of jazz music and with this show, I'm standing on the shoulders of some incredible women who are real artists. This show is truly how community is built and nurtured and celebrated.”
Back in 1984, teacher and choreographer Vicki Adams Willis founded the Jazz Dance Department at the University of Calgary. Two of her graduating students, Michèle Moss and Hannah Stilwell, then took it upon themselves to co-found what Calgary lovingly refers to as DJD. Talk to some crusty local jazz musician and perhaps you’ll hear the phrase “jazz is dead” fall from their lips, but tis not even remotely true within the shiny new walls of DJD’s beautiful new building. But, as Kimberly and I agree, time is a weird thing.
“Yeah, it's slippery,” laughs Kimberly. “You know, we talk about how sense is like a smell or a sound, or like a light or something that can send us back in time. Just listening to music can be like time travel. Yes, beats-per-minute is a thing that is real, but time is slippery. Regardless of how many beats per minute, it might take me a year to make a dance or an hour, and I’m left wondering, how did that happen?”
Talking with Kimberly about the process of rebirthing choreography that happened decades ago is a bit of a trip. Technology isn’t what is now and by peering into the past through grainy tapes and old audio, Kimberly has reconstructed the past for audiences now. And it’s been a bit of a trip.
“For my creative process, I feel like in the beginning ideas are kind of like fireflies that I'm trying to catch,” admits Kimberly. “Then I sort of have this moment of going into the studio and playing with ideas, and then I call it the flood, where just all these ideas kind of pour out of me, and then there's still process beyond that. We bring in the dancers and we work it. We do a run-through, make wild orders, try different transitions. It’s all pretty nebulous until it’s show time and then even after that, there’s the reality of opening night and then the reality of closing night and things change in between.”
Considering the nebulous nature of any artist’s creative process, I am struck by how the very process itself speaks to the experience of rebirth. Rebirth, honestly, is just change, pure and simple. And Kimberly gets it.
“There's a past,” muses Kimberly. “There's a huge history behind me, and things evolve and change. It's never nothing comes from nothing.”
Image: Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra Music Director, Rune Bergmann. Credit to www.calgarphil.com.