Composer Ted Hearne and videographer Jonathan David Kane’s Miami in Movements couldn’t have
happened anywhere but at South Beach’s New World Center, for more than just the
site-specific reasons.
The work was presented in a revised form on February 3 (after
receiving its premiere the previous October) as a part of a concert in New World
Symphony’s New Work Series. Composed as a love letter to a city struggling in the
aftermath of Hurricane Irma, it’s a huge piece of work, employing multiple
screens and projectors and an orchestra of some 80 musicians. Witnessing the
production in the impressive New World Center theater was something of a double
immersion: a weekend in Miami Beach peaking with the remarkable performance.
Opening rather sweetly with swamps, birds and lizards moving
across the large, overhead screens, we were soon on the highway traveling in to
the city. Within minutes, we were meeting Miamians and hearing them tell their
tales, their prerecorded voices threaded into the live music. The score was
conceived to complement, not overwhelm, and it seemed as if there was so much
information already being presented that Hearne didn’t need to resort to the
sensory overload he often favors. What he wrote was effective, evocative
soundtrack music, themes befitting the beauty and the bustle of a diverse and
growing city.
Like the film, the orchestra was physically fragmented, with
at one point a brass band appearing above the audience on the highest of the
four smaller stages that ring the room. They built an unexpected cacophony
along with the orchestra: layered, orchestral loops and slapped evoking the
electo patterning of dance music while on screen people danced—ballet, jazz,
hip hop, Latin, even fire dance. At these moments, when the music was about
music, it became the most effective.
Neither, the movies nor the music of Miami in Movements would stand alone, nor were they meant to. What
Hearne and Kane have crafted is interdisciplinary and interdependent, a time
capsule of the growing metropolis that likes to call itself “the magic city.”
Miami in Movements occupied
the final portion of the February 3 program, which was divided into three
sections with an interval between each, allowing for reconfigurations of the
flexible stage in the multi-faceted, 756-seat theater. The first part of the
program was given over to sections of NWS co-founder, artistic director conductor
Michael Tilson Thomas’s Glimpses of the
Big Picture, an in-progress musical memoir. With three grand pianos and an
electric bass guitar, the orchestra bore plenty of muscle, although most of the
music was fairly restrained behind Tilson Thomas’s reading of his own anecdotal
texts. A melancholy solo piano, often with left and right hands in isolation,
supported the first section, the pianist shot dramatically from above and
projected behind the stage while Tilson Thomas recited from a podium.
Light and enjoyable music, reminiscent of a Leonard Bernstein score, supported
the narrator’s move to New York City in the late 1970s, a surreal dream about
an auction house and adventures in dog walking. The middle section of the
program featured a rather beleaguered one-act play about a recluse and the
imaginary musicians who provided his life soundtrack.
The Cultural Tourist soon learns that Miami Beach is a
separate municipality from Miami, but also that in local parlance, all 1,898
square miles of Dade County count as Miami. The city is a growing metropolis,
in recent years building an international reputation as a hub for Latin and
Caribbean art, attracting Chinese and Russian investment. It’s a place where no
one is indigenous —as native Miamian Jonathan David Kane pointed out in a press
meeting—built on a swamp and populated by numerous transient cultures.
It’s also easy, at least for the Northeastern breed of the
Cultural Tourist, to assume that Miami is all beach volleyball and neon-colored
drinks. But it’s the host city of the influential Art Basel America, a major
event on the national arts calendar. The city’s Nu Deco Ensemble is a chamber
orchestra dedicated to 20th and 21st century works.
Together, Miami and Miami Beach boast beautiful examples of Deco and modern
architecture, impressive museums. Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center for the
Performing Arts also receives accolades for its design, but the New World
Center across Biscayne Bay is no less impressive.
Within the center’s Frank Gehry—designed walls, the students
who comprise the New World Symphony orchestra and center work in three-year
fellowships, specializing in performance, conducting archiving and
engineering. Beyond the opportunity to
prepare and perform works like Miami in
Movements, the performance fellows get experience in community engagement,
audition preparation, speaking onstage and on-camera and entrepreneurship (as
well as receiving housing and a livable stipend). The faculty is comprised
entirely of visiting professionals, including business instructors from the Kellogg
School of Management.
The center is also committed to community engagement and education,
with concerts projected in real time on an outside wall. The “Wallcast” system,
with 20 outdoor speakers and seating for up to 2,000, is also used for
commissioned video murals and popular movies. It’s exciting to visit such a
vibrant space, from all appearances committed not just to its programming but
to building orchestras and audiences for the future.
