Last winter, the Emory University Visual Arts Gallery presented photographer Dawoud Bey’s traveling exhibition “Class Pictures,” which pairs striking portraits of high school students with text they have written. Now Bey, who is based in Chicago, is working on the Emory Project, a special photographic project commissioned by the university that is to be installed on campus this fall and then become part of the school’s permanent collection. Guest contributor Rebecca Dimling Cochran caught up with Bey during one of his recent photo shoots in Atlanta.

Rebecca Dimling Cochran: The exhibition “Class Pictures,” which Atlantans may have seen recently at Emory University, has been traveling the country now for three years and has generated a phenomenal amount of interest. Can you tell us how the project began?

Dawoud Bey: "Kenneth"

Dawoud Bey: I was invited to do an exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago. At that point, when I was invited to do an exhibition, I usually asked if I could do a project with them that would generate some new work, rather than taking work that I had already made and placing it in the museum. So I proposed to do a project with them that brought together students, over a period of eight to 12 weeks, from three very different educational cultures in Chicago: a public school from the south side, a magnet school and the Lab School at the University of Chicago.The larger project was to set up a situation for them to become more critical consumers of visual images. So along with looking at works from the Smart Museum’s collection, we looked critically at the idea of how the experiences of young people in particular are represented in popular media, and we went to the schools that the students came from to make photographs with them.

Dawoud Bey

I was collaborating with Dan Collison, who is a radio story producer for NPR. Listening to his radio stories, I thought there would be a parallel between the degree of intimacy of his stories and my photographs. With the photographs, [there is] a visual description that does not contain the literal voice of the subject, and in his case, you have the voice with no attending visual images.

So while I was photographing the students, he was doing audio interviews with them. The [final] exhibition ended up taking two forms: the exhibition that the students curated [from the Smart Museum’s collection] and then my photographs, with a parabolic sound dome over each so when you stood in front of the photograph, you also heard the voice of the student talking to you.

I knew I wanted to continue the idea of the visual representation brought together with the more literal voice of the person, so I decided to carry on that work in different schools around the country, with the idea of doing a book that took a very broad look at young people in America at that particular moment in history. It was the first time I really conceptualized the work as something that I wanted to do more broadly accessible and available than an exhibition.

Cochran: You ask each subject a specific question, to say something about themselves that people would not otherwise know, and this is presented with each portrait. How did you arrive at this particular question?

Bey: Initially, with the work that I did at the Smart Museum, the texts were transcripts of the audio and were lengthier conversations from which the most interesting or compelling piece was drawn. They have such a quality of introspection, a quality of intimate revelation, a quality that goes beyond the public description of young people in America. I wanted to see if there is one question I could ask them that might provoke an interesting, introspective response. So I came up with this question, which presumes that whatever someone knows from their public encounters with us, all of us are more than that one person.… There is always some aspect of one’s private self that is not necessarily on public display. I wanted to see if there was a way of getting at that information.

Cochran: Is this something you do verbally, or do you ask them to write their response?

Dawoud Bey: "Charles"Bey:

Bey: This is interesting. I thought because it wasn’t verbal that I was going to lose the intimate quality [Dan achieved], but in the second group of “Class Pictures,” which was done in Detroit, I said let me see what will happen if I ask them to write this. Not only did it not inhibit their responses, but what is fascinating to me was the range of responses. What they chose to talk about was pretty much as different as each kid that I talked to.

Cochran: This is something you ask them to do before you take their portrait, correct?

Bey: Yes, but I very specifically don’t read them before I make the picture. I don’t want to try to make a picture in response to what they’ve written. I don’t know that it is possible to do, but if it is possible, it’s not the kind of picture-making that I am interested in anyway.… I want to try to make the fullest, most interesting and compelling visual description of the person and then, hopefully, when you put the two of them together — my visual voice with their literary voice — you end up with this more dimensional third thing.

Cochran: You have done wonderful street portraits, in Harlem and elsewhere, in which the surroundings are an important aspect of defining the individual, whether it is in a barbershop or on the front stoop of a building. It gives a context to the subject. All of the “Class Pictures,” on the other hand, are taken in the neutral space of a school classroom. Why is this?

Bey: Because that is the place in which they spend a significant amount of their time. I wanted to have that aspect of their experience represented in the construct of the pictures, even if what the text revealed was outside of that experience. Visually, I wanted to situate them in the context of the space but not have that space dominate or even be equally as present as they are on the photographs, which is why they are more optically foregrounded. I have a very shallow depth of field, in which you can see that they are in a classroom but you can’t read the titles on the spines of the books. I kind of wanted to have it both ways, have a specific context but not have the context overwhelm them.

Cochran: You are also a professor at Columbia College in Chicago. Is there a connection between the work you do in the classroom and why you chose this same atmosphere for your artwork? Wouldn’t a trip to India or the Galapagos be a refreshing change? 

Bey: I have a certain notion about what I call the “passport tendency” in photography, which is this notion that you can use your camera as a passport to go someplace more interesting than the place that you are. I’ve never really bought into that idea. What I want to do is to take a closer look at ordinary surroundings.

Certainly the environment of a college or university classroom is very different from a high school classroom, not just in terms of the kinds of instruction but also, typically, what they look like. I think college classrooms are actually very neutral. There’s nothing in them. There’s no decoration. So they are different in that sense. But they are both instructional kinds of spaces, and I do see the work that I do having multiple functions. My practice as someone who teaches and my practice as an artist are certainly related.

But I wouldn’t want to teach in a high school five days a week from 9 to 4. Instead, I’m someone who comes from the outside, who expresses an interest in the lives of the students there, who apparently reciprocate my interest. I’m kind of the interested stranger who comes to your school for two weeks, who seems to be genuinely interested, who perhaps you can, in your writing, tell things that you probably wouldn’t want to say to the teacher whose classroom you sit in every day.

Cochran: You have photographed across the country, in both public schools and private boarding schools. If there was one characteristic that you have observed over the past few years about the youth of this country, what is it?

Dawoud Bey: "Omar"

Bey: Young people do have something that they do want to tell us, but they are as emotionally and psychologically conflicted as all of us who used to be teenagers.

The things that they told me really come out of my interest, my curiosity, my willingness to ask and their willingness to reciprocate by sharing something with me that in most cases they haven’t even told their parents or teachers. I’ve had teachers come and see the work with students that they know, and there are things contained in that text that they didn’t have a clue about. There was also a girl whose father had died when she was very young, and she talked about her father. That was at the point where [we were using the] audio. Her mother came, and it turns out that the girl had never been able to talk to her mother about her father’s death. So then [the mother] comes and she’s standing under this [acoustic] dome looking at the picture hearing her daughter talk about it. You can imagine, she was in tears.

I hope that the work I do is very deep and meaningful beyond what it is as formal objects. The thing I am interested in and the thing I believe is that, through a close engagement with other human beings, there is a potential to learn not only something about that person that you are looking at but, ideally, to learn something about oneself by extension. I am just trying to create this kind of conversation of the human community with itself, using young people as a catalyst for that conversation.  

Cochran: You are in town to do a project for Emory University that involves photographing the wider campus community, including students, faculty, administrators, maintenance staff, groundskeepers, cafeteria staff and others. How did this project come about?

Bey: Emory asked me to do [a project with them]. It was up to me to come up with some kind of interesting and coherent shape for it, and also something that allows me to raise and grapple with a new set of issues in my own work.

The work that I’ve done in the past has been primarily the individual. In this project, I’m photographing two people together in each photograph. I am bringing together people from different social segments of the Emory community to sit together momentarily to be photographed, as a way of each photograph visually representing the breadth of the Emory community. And then I am having each person write a certain self-reflexive text about themselves as a way of creating a kind of textual conversation overall.

Cochran: Is there a particular question that you have asked them?

Bey: The question that I came up with was “Who are you? What do you care deeply about in the world?”

One of the things that is interesting about this project, certainly, is that these are adults. There is actually, in this context anyway, a higher degree of self-consciousness among adults. You would think that would be true of teenagers, but that is not true. I can testify to it now. I think certainly within the context of the university community, adults have had a lot more time to invest in the constructing of an identity. They also probably have a lot more invested in it.  It might not be a good idea for people to know too much about you. So asking that kind of intimate question in this kind of context has been somewhat different. Originally I was just asking people, “Who are you?” With this expanded question, I was trying to gently direct them away from “Who are you within the context of Emory University?”

I’m always interested in the inner person, because I think what’s interesting to me about a portrait is the way in which you are momentarily able to make some aspect of the inner person visible on the surface. To me that’s what the portrait is.

Cochran: The resulting photographs will be permanently installed somewhere on campus, correct?

Dawoud Bey: "Shaheeda"

Bey: In yet another public institutional space.… Whatever venue it ends up being in, all of the people in the photographs will have some sense of ownership of those photographs. Because this is part of the permanent public collection, there’s no changing, ever, the configuration that these people are in in these photographs. I like that.

Cochran: How are the pairings being organized?

Bey: The pairings are being organized around the subjects not coming from the same social arena. So I’m not photographing professor with professor. It’s not the president and the provost, kitchen staff with kitchen staff, or student and student. I’m mixing that social equation up: president with student, provost with kitchen staff. People whose paths wouldn’t necessarily cross during the course of the day but who are, in the larger sense, a part of the Emory community. I’m trying to evoke a new picture, the broadest hint of what it means, or who it means, when you talk about the Emory community.

Note: All images except Bey’s self-portrait are from “Class Pictures” (Aperture 2007).

Brandon Sadler has traveled a long way conceptually in the past year, and he is about to travel an even longer way geographically. The SCAD graduate’s departure for a year in Korea confirms his fascination with Asian cultures, which has developed in conjunction with his involvement with graffiti and street art.

Brandon Sadler: Untitled (Tiger)

His newest work, at Wm. Turner Gallery through July 31 in an exhibition titled “Red Dawn,” is hard to divide tidily. The quickly but very skillfully executed drawings, in media ranging from ink and colored pencil to oil and acrylic, owe a great deal to the graffiti traditions out of which he emerged, and even more to traditional and contemporary Japanese art. A good many of them are overlaid on Japanese newspapers. Sadler’s signature, written to be viewed sideways, imitates the calligraphic appearance of Japanese kanji characters.

The tension between street art and Asian tradition (which Sadler is by no means the only artist to have exploited) makes for some excellent visual moments, mingled with an insignificant number of immature ones. At $400 each, there are works here that admirers of emerging talent might well consider owning.

Brandon Sadler: "Bath of Unfamiliar Waters"

Sadler’s website, www.risingredlotus.com, shows us Sadler as the graffiti artist of 2009 also known as “Lean.” The show at Wm. Turner gives us a glimpse of the artist he may become in the course of his Korean sojourn. He is clearly en route in more ways than one.

Fernbank Museum of Natural History has always included art-oriented photography in its presentations of the natural world, so it’s fitting that the five-story-tall praying mantis in its “Bugs” Imax film should be complemented by oversized butterflies in the more-than-macro photography of Bill Harbin.

Bill Harbin: "Great Southern White"

Parents taking their offspring to Fernbank’s “Bug Out Festival” this coming Sunday (or to anything else at Fernbank through September 6) can contemplate the astonishingly velvety texture of butterfly and moth wings (plus a grimly beautiful shot of one in the grasp of a spider) in Harbin’s enormously detailed images.

The patterns on butterfly wings have long inspired artists and designers; this is a whole new look at the artistry of natural form. To do it, Harbin inventively stretches the limits of available technology, stabilizing a macro lens without benefit of tripod and otherwise taking hundreds of photographs in hopes of acquiring one good one.

Bill Harbin: "Hummingbird Moth"

It comes as an unanticipated extra that the butterflies’ colors are so often complements of the coloration of the flowers they’re feeding on. This might have something to do with survival strategies in nature, but in Harbin’s photography it simply gives us a feast of gorgeous form. Visitors seem to be completely delighted by these small bursts of aesthetic moments in the middle of the competing attractions of the giant dinosaur bones in the atrium and the geckos in the main exhibition downstairs.

We’re pleased to introduce Daryl Foster, founder and co-artistic director of LIFT, a new organization built to attract and retain male dancers in Atlanta through performances and mentoring. Foster danced professionally with Dayton Contemporary Dance Company 2 and Opus Dance Theater New York, and he holds an MFA in dance from Florida State University. As choreographer and teacher, Foster (at left) remains deeply invested in the local dance community, and he offers a unique perspective on some of the challenges Atlanta dance artists face. — Cynthia and Pierre

By DARYL FOSTER

It’s a quiet Monday, late in the day, and things are beginning to slow down for most of us. Many dancers in Atlanta, however, are just beginning to shift into gear.

One is Quincy Lamar Wills. Affectionately known as “Q,” he is meeting me to discuss his love for Atlanta and his commitment to serve our dance community. It hasn’t always been easy for him. He has struggled with a dilemma that many Atlanta-based dancers and choreographers face — whether to stay in Atlanta and build the community or leave for larger cities with more opportunity like New York or Los Angeles. (Wills in second photo, with purple hat. All photos by Lynne Cymone.)

Dressed in athletic attire, a quiet, strong and muscular Quincy agrees to sit with me before his evening hip-hop classes at Gotta Dance Atlanta. He tells me of a simpler time in Atlanta, when hip-hop dance work was limited to backup dancing in an occasional music industry video or tour. Although Q moved to Atlanta with hopes of dancing with female hip-hop sensation TLC, he landed his first gig with R&B artist Evelyn “Champagne” King.

He eventually left Atlanta for Los Angeles, where he had to start from the beginning in a city with a more competitive and developed entertainment industry. Over time, he carved out a place for himself there, signed with a talent agency and became a working, thriving artist. But a series of unusual events led him back to Atlanta.

Following a visit home to Dallas, Quincy missed his flight back to L.A. Without money to rebook a flight, he was stranded at home for six months, until fate landed him a job in a fitness video by Donna Richardson, the wife of radio host Tom Joyner. With money from that, he planned to return to Los Angeles to get back into the game, after a trip to Atlanta to catch up with friends. But he never left Atlanta. It felt like home. And this time, instead of building a career for himself, he set about making opportunities for young dancers in the city he loves. He found his passion here, developing talent.

Partly because of Quincy’s influence, Atlanta now has dance talent agencies of its own, and studios filled with young, hot hip-hop dancers vying for a piece of the pie. But there are a lot of hungry dancers and a very small pie. The concert dance community isn’t much different. Outside of Atlanta Ballet, stable, paying jobs can be scarce.

Atlanta native and Tri-Cities High School graduate Juel Lane (below, at right) was encouraged by teachers like Dawn Axam to leave Atlanta to get training, culture and opportunity. Lane earned a degree from the prestigious North Carolina School of the Arts and then danced in New York with Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE. Brown’s choreography informed much of Lane’s athletic, Afro-modern movement style. 

Lane’s time in the North contrasted greatly with his life in Atlanta. “Everyone, from what I recall, was trying to have the power,” he said. “I didn’t remember people working together. I just remember all these talented elders, but no one was collectively taking the weight.

“As an artist you have to be able to share with your community, and that’s why I returned to Atlanta!”

Lane is ecstatic to find an eager community of young artists here, working together on exciting projects. He recently choreographed and danced in the premiere of “LIFT,” an all-male dance showcase, and “I Dream,” a new musical about the life of Martin Luther King Jr.

The key to Lane’s success in Atlanta is flexibility. He has been able to flow seamlessly between concert dance and musicals, making appearances in Atlanta and New York. He has maintained connections with New York choreographer Camille Brown and recently performed her work at the Joyce Theater and Jacob’s Pillow. Lane is performing in “I Dream” this month at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre.

Georgia native and University of Georgia dance graduate Carrie Couch (above and below) is another home-grown young Atlanta dance artist. She’s smart, talented, beautiful and extremely frustrated.

She received a premium Georgia education and forged a career spanning ballet to ballroom, with experiences as varied as dancing en pointe in “Giselle” as a UGA student to MTV’s “Chi Rocks” with singer-actress Adrienne Lau. Couch made a choreographic splash in her November 2009 Dance Canvas premiere of “As I Am” at the 14th Street Playhouse. But this hot hip-hop diva must travel between Atlanta and Los Angeles just to remain relevant in the business. For her and many like her, who seek to book music videos, national tours and major commercial work, L.A. is still the capital. As I write, Couch is planning to return there for more opportunities and for support that only a larger, arts-friendly city can provide.

The reality is that great nations and cities produce great art. New York is synonymous with Broadway, major ballet companies like New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, and the Metropolitan Opera. You can’t think about Paris without recalling images of historic architecture, fashion, the Musée D’Orsay and the Louvre. Atlanta is culturally behind these cities. Until we, as citizens, take responsibility for supporting great art, and purchasing tickets, we will forever be seeking culture someplace else.

Like Couch, hundreds of artists leave Atlanta, or worse yet, never come. But Quincy and Lane have found ways to make Atlanta work. They are committed to making great art here, and so far it is paying off for them. Many artists such as these contribute to making our city a cultural hub, bringing economic benefits for all.

Currently part of “Incendiary Exposure” at Hammonds House Museum, Daryl Harris’ “The Greatest Fear” (2009) may read like a one-liner about the sources of white racism, but Harris practices equal-opportunity satire. His paintings make pointed comments about the ills of both the white and black communities, and it is unlikely that anybody can see this whole show without squirming at some point.

Daryl Harris: "The Greatest Fear"

Michael Morgan’s box assemblages commenting on the boxed-in condition of African-American homosexuals are equally incisive. They may use toy action figures, but there’s nothing playful about them.

Curator Kevin Sipp has brought these two together in hopes of starting a dialogue about issues that most Atlantans would prefer not to address too directly. Despite Harris’ sense of humor, this show was not meant to be entertainment.
 
On view through June 27.
  

By JONATHAN LERNER

Perhaps it’s fate that Atlanta is hosting the 2010 Congress for the New Urbanism, as world-famous as our burg has become for its ever-metastasizing suburbanization. One of its themes this year is transforming those dispiriting suburban non-places so that they will no longer send you screaming back to your traditionally laid-out intown neighborhood (should you be lucky enough to inhabit one).

Smyrna's Town Center exemplifies New Urbanist principles.

“Adapting Suburbs in the 21st Century,” the exhibit the Museum of Design Atlanta has mounted to coincide with the congress, gives a glimpse of ways we might reclaim “dead malls, zombie strip centers, see-through office park buildings, ‘ghost’ big boxes and the acres of parking lots that surround them.”

It’s a small, didactic show, displaying images of half a dozen successful projects where such bleak suburban sites have been turned into thriving communities in the New Urbanist mode. These case studies are taken from “Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs,” co-authored by Georgia Tech associate professor of architecture Ellen Dunham-Jones, who is the co-chair of this week’s congress.

The exhibition also displays a conceptual study, “Sprawl Repair, Anytown, USA,” which illustrates how, for example, the excessively vast interior spaces of a McMansion could be reconfigured to make it a viable lodging house for singles or seniors, and how a cul-de-sac subdivision could become more livable with the insertion of a mixed-use neighborhood center and cross-connecting streets.

from the CNU's "Urban Sprawl Repair Kit"

Alas, none of the case studies is of a transformed place in metro Atlanta. Nevertheless, while you’ve had your mind on other matters, this region has come to have one of the highest concentrations of New Urbanist projects anywhere. These range from redevelopments of dead industrial sites like Atlantic Station (a former steel mill) and Glenwood Park (once a cement factory); to reinvigorating new master plans for old town centers that had been rendered moribund by big-box retail, like those of Smyrna, Acworth and Woodstock; to entirely new islands of compact urbanism at the metropolitan edge, including Vickery Village in Cumming and Serenbe in the Chattahoochee hill country.

If you’re not used to deciphering master plans or picturing the built environments of unfamiliar places, you may find the case studies less engaging than the display of two projects by students from Dunham-Jones’ just-concluded Master’s of Architecture studio at Tech. In that course, each student selected a real — and really dysfunctional — suburban site in metro Atlanta and created a vision for its reinvention. Side-by-side before-and-after models illustrate how these places, where today you want only to do your business and flee, might become places where you actually want to settle down and live.

Alysha Erin Buck focused on Perimeter Pointe Shopping Center, a site whose only urbanistic feature right now is the adjacent Sandy Springs MARTA station. Her idea is a long-term plan, inspired by the organic evolution of medieval towns. The present acres of parking lot would be divided into small residential lots, lining new streets laid out in a loose, deliberately irregular pattern. For the existing strip-retail buildings, Buck would stipulate adaptive reuse rather than demolition. For the whole project, she prescribes construction techniques and materials intended for longevity and which lend themselves to acquiring patina — load-bearing walls of brick, for example, instead of glass curtain walls.

Her models show the place now, at an intermediate phase, and fully built out. Looking down on the last of those, you see a close, connected, slightly crooked village. It’s not too different from an aerial view of, say, an Italian hill town — but with a rapid-transit link to the world’s busiest airport just a few steps away.

Jessica Toal's plan for Toco Hills Shopping Center

Jessica Toal’s project would transform Toco Hills Shopping Center. Everything presently standing must go! Retail space equivalent to what’s there now would be rebuilt along the edges of newly plotted streets, with residences above, and most of the site would be given over to low-rise multi-family buildings. The focal point of her community design is a park that doubles as a transit node where bus routes would intersect. The residential buildings would not provide parking, because in Toal’s vision of a bus-riding future, it wouldn’t be needed.

If that last suggestion seems radical, consider the idea for Toco Hills that another of Dunham-Jones’ students, whose project is not in the exhibition, came up with. This too would do away with today’s aging strip center and outparcels, and replace them with housing for 2,200 residents plus a row of high-rise, high-tech greenhouses that could, supposedly, produce enough to feed both them and the 10,000 other people who live within a mile.

Yet another student project not on display also chose Perimeter Pointe and looked to historical design, taking inspiration from classical gardens. It would consolidate parking at the center into a couple of structures, allowing the rest of the asphalt to be remade as parterres, allées and such; even the Home Depot garden center would become a quasi-public park.

City centers including our own are reviving and drawing people in, while suburban places are losing value and staying power. As the center — hopefully — continues to grow more urbane and livable, it could find itself encircled by zones of increasing economic and aesthetic poverty. (What’s uglier than a big-box retail strip? A dead big-box retail strip.) But we can figure out ways, like those suggested in this exhibition, to retool and reuse what’s out there.

By JONATHAN LERNER

The Congress for the New Urbanism will hold its annual convention this week in downtown Atlanta. Organized with the assistance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it has the theme “New Urbanism: Rx for Healthy Places.”

A considerable part of its program will investigate how the ways places are designed and built affect our well-being. The CDC and others have been busy putting numbers to cause-and-effect relationships between things like access to greenspace and depression; street design and traffic injuries; and the “nutritional deserts” of inner cities where the only food sources are convenience stores and Mickey D and his pals, and where conditions such as obesity and diabetes flourish.

Smyrna Town Center exemplifies New Urbanist principles.

The New Urbanists’ mission is to create communities that are compact and walkable; incorporate retail, recreation and employment as well as residential uses; are served by public transit; and where you might find it pleasurable to be, or even to become, rooted. They look to this public health research to help them refine their designs.

Both they and the public health folks hope to influence policy in areas such as zoning, transportation planning and affordable housing, so that conventional, sprawl-pattern development will join the Edsel and the high-rise public housing project in the Museum of 20th-Century Mistakes.

Attending the congress requires a $1,000 registration fee. One session, however, is open to the public, and it will challenge you to envision a more livable metropolis. David Byrne — current bicycle activist and former rock star whose lyrics asked “Where is that large automobile?” and declared, “This is not my beautiful house!” — will join Ellen Dunham-Jones, Glenwood Park developer Charles Brewer and Scotty Greene, executive director of the Buckhead Community Improvement District, to discuss “Healthier Circulation: Bicycles, Cities and the Future of Getting Around.” 8 p.m. Wednesday, May 19, at the Tabernacle. Tickets are $25 in advance, $30 at the door.

By JEFFREY BAXTER

Last week, the Berlin Philharmonic gave a semi-staged, or “ritualized,” performance of Bach’s “St. Matthew” Passion, which was webcast live on the orchestra’s exceptional window to the world, their Digital Concert Hall. The April 11 performance is now archived on the Philharmonic site. 

In anticipation, I was reminded of an amusing story involving a disastrous attempt at staging the work in New York in 1943 at the Metropolitan Opera, with conductor Leopold Stokowski, dancers choreographed by George Balanchine and a chorus prepared by Robert Shaw. The production, which was uniformly panned, involved a representation of Jesus as a wandering beam of yellow light; the character Mary Magdalene was pantomimed by the silent movie star Lillian Gish.

Shaw recalled that his association with this event caused an awkward silence from composer Paul Hindemith, a few years later, when Shaw first approached him about commissioning a major choral work that became “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” The implication was clear: How dare you mess with Bach?

Yet the “St. Matthew” Passion has a long history of dramatic interpretations — from grandiose Victorian performances (often with cuts and expanded orchestration) to one-to-a-part deconstructions from the early-music revivalists. Hans von Bülow, the first music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, described the “Matthew” as “an oratorio in operatic clothing.” Even in Bach’s lifetime his church employers were wary, recommending upon his hiring that he abstain from writing “theatrical music.”

The Berliners’ decision to engage American stage director Peter Sellars for this “St. Matthew” stemmed from their earlier successful collaboration in John Adams’ opera “A Flowering Tree.” In addition to his collaborations with Adams, in various guises – from “Nixon in China” to “Doctor Atomic” – Sellars is well known as a polarizing director, for his infamous modern-day settings of the three Mozart-da Ponte operas (“Figaro” set in Trump Towers, Don Giovanni as a ghetto drug dealer) as well as dramatic presentations of Bach cantatas for the late American mezzo soprano Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson.

Hunt-Lieberson’s supreme dramatic gifts inspired some of Sellars’ greatest work, including the iconic 1996 staging of Handel’s “Theodora” at Glyndebourne, which is luckily preserved on video. Until this Berlin “St. Matthew” Passion performance, “Theodora” was seen by many as Sellars’ most memorable production.

But why a “ritualization”? In program notes, Sellars explains his idea: “Bach wrote his masterpiece, the ‘St. Matthew’ Passion, not as a concert work, and not as a work of theater, but as a transformative ritual reaching across time and space, uniting disparate, and dispirited communities.…” In Germany, the piece has a history of performances in liturgical settings, not in the concert hall, where it’s most often heard in the U.S. “A secular context, perhaps, offers this work other possibilities, and other audiences,” Sellars writes. “The ritual ‘staging’ for these performances is primarily focused on Bach’s spatial imagination and the moral energies that his [rhetorical] dialogues and juxtapositions release.”

He continues: “Bach represents the universe in this piece with 360 degrees of cosmic forces — two orchestras face each other, two choruses face each other, with the hovering high altitude aerial presence of children singing on behalf of the unborn.… He begins with a spectacular image of the divided self, our divided selves, distance and separation calling across a void. We are of two minds, and out of sync with ourselves. But with the chorales, which embody the process of realization that somebody else’s story is in fact our own, Bach holds out the promise of unison on the way to unity. Bach’s plan of narrative, call and response is interrupted by spontaneous moments of inspired individual breakthrough, and shocking moments of collective impulse followed by second thoughts and complete reversals.”

Sellars took advantage of this in the in-the-round setting of the Berlin Philharmonic, a unique venue ideally suited for such a conception. He placed the performers in the center of the action at all times, not facing “out” to the audience, but drawing the audience in to the inner world of the music’s drama.

The costume and set design — performers in dark street clothes moving about a few unadorned wooden box-podiums — had a look similar to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s “Theater of a Concert” presentation of the Bach “St. John” Passion a few seasons ago, with Anne Patterson’s scenic designs and Robert Spano conducting. In Berlin, a solitary glaring light bulb suspended above center stage lent the effect of both a simple stage rehearsal light and a hanging ecclesiastical fixture.

Most notably in the performance, all the singers (chorus and soloists) performed from memory — no small feat, especially in the case of English tenor Mark Padmore, who  brilliantly sang the role of the Evangelist. This role — which consists almost entirely of declamatory secco recitative — was not conducted by Simon Rattle and, moreover, Padmore physically portrayed all the dramatic “business” that he sings about: Jesus’ scourging, Judas’ betrayal with a kiss, etc.

The most noticeable part of Sellars’ “ritualization” involved having the baritone Gerhaher, who sang one of the few named “roles” (that of Jesus), perform his part stationary from a balcony just above stage right. He never interacted physically with any of the cast, thus enabling an atmosphere of reflection and remembrance — and allowing the emphasis to be put on the “remember-ers.”

The excellent Berlin Radio Chorus (about 60-strong, with 30 per choir) mostly sang from their respective right and left stage positions (sometimes seated, sometimes standing by section in certain fugal passages), except in several key dramatic moments. They began and ended the Passion surrounding the Evangelist at center stage, and — most surprisingly — “fled” at the end of Part I (on cue, as the Evangelist describes the Apostles’ fleeing Jesus in Gethsemane) in a noisy, fast stampede to the upper reaches of the house, where they surrounded the audience with a moving, distant rendition of “O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß” (“O man, bewail your grievous sin”).

But perhaps the most gripping and innovative element crafted by Sellars was the integration of the instrumental obbligato players into the inner drama of the reflective arias and duets performed by the vocal soloists. As Sellars writes: “Bach’s vocal soloists take arduous journeys through winding, twisted, extreme vocal lines, encountering obstacles, hesitating, starting again, trying another way, gathering force, repeating, reinforcing, losing, and finally gaining the repose that they have been searching for which was awaiting them all along in their own hearts. Bach offers each exposed and vulnerable soloist extraordinary companions for the road — courageous instrumentalists who match the vocalists in daring, intensity, and tenderness, offering radiant examples of sustained compassion.” At many points these instrumental “companions” stepped forward, both with and sometimes directly to their vocal counterparts in very close physical proximity.

In Part I, Sellars has oboist Albrecht Mayer stand next to tenor Topi Lehtipuu to perform “Ich will bei meinem Jesu wachen” (“I would be with my Jesus watching”). He plays above the antiphonal choirs like a “solitary wakeful shepherd,” in Sellars’ description.

In Part II for the aria “Komm süßes Kreuz” (“Come blessed cross”) — the moment in the drama where Symon of Cyrene bears Jesus’ cross for him — Sellars positions bass Thomas Quasthoff in a seated position, on the large box-podium, directly behind Hille Perl, the solo viola da gamba player. Toward the end in what appears to be unbearable grief, he leans his head on her shoulders.

Here are the bass’ lines (in Robert Shaw’s singing translation): “Come, blessed Cross, I’ll not forswear it: My Jesus, give it here to me. And if the burden be too great, Then help Thou me to help Thee bear it.”

As so often with Bach, one of the most stunning musical moments occurs at precisely 0.618 of the piece (the so-called proportional “Golden Mean”), the suspended-in-time soprano aria “Aus Liebe” (“For love”). It is a reflection on the moment when Pilate asks the mob, “But what evil has he done?”

Sellars explains: “The answer arises in a woman’s voice borne across the waters with the sound of a flute. It is a list of miracles, giving sight to the blind, making the lame walk, raising the poor, welcoming and sheltering people who have lost all sense of self-worth — the miracles that are at some level the day-to-day unpaid work of most women on the planet.”

Is this a clue to why Sellars has the two female soloists perform barefoot? Nonetheless, for this heart-stopping moment, flutist Emmanuel Pahud stands and weaves his long melody behind a motionless soprano (Tilling), while the two oboe da caccia players accompany, further behind Pahud. It is a moment of heartbreaking stillness at the emotional and dramatic center of the piece.

Perhaps the most gripping of all is the staging of the famous aria “Erbarme dich” (“Have mercy, Lord”), a tearful reflection on Peter’s guilt over denying Jesus, set musically as a pulsing 12-beat siciliano for alto and solo violin.  At this point, Sellars has mezzo Magdalena Kožená remain collapsed on the floor after the intensity of her previous aria that opened Part II, “Ach! Nun ist mein Jesus hin” (“Alas, now my Jesus is gone”).

Concertmaster Daniel Stabrawa slowly walks downstage and, half-seated next to her, begins to play. She gazes toward him slowly, her hands sometimes on his knees, and sings the entire aria to him and with him from a kneeling position. She seeks some inexpressible compassion in his amazing wordless music, and by extension, so do we. There are few singers who could accomplish this, both vocally and dramatically; Kožená is one. (One can imagine Hunt-Lieberson in this role.)

Equally impressive is Kožená’s singing of the aria “Können Tränen” — a reflection on the scourging of Jesus — where, singing of Jesus’ wounds, she hesitantly touches the Evangelist’s back (he, enacting Jesus’ receiving of the wounds, is face-down, pantomiming his hands bound behind his back). She seems to bloody her hands and yet tries to console: “Could [my heart] bear the precious flooding Of his wounds, so mildly bleeding, It would heaven’s chalice be.”

The conductor Simon Rattle was also integrated into the drama, though noticeable not so much for what he did as what he didn’t do. First, his hands-on, in-touch approach was to conduct the massive work baton-less (as the female soloists were shoe-less?). He was mainly stationed at his desk with Orchestra I, but from time to time would wander to Orchestra II (to conduct pieces only they played). As mentioned, he did not conduct any of the Evangelist’s secco recitatives — and even very few of the arias — but sat down with his arms crossed on the railing behind him watching the proceedings as an observer in the drama.

From a musical standpoint, this performance reflected Rattle and the Berliners’ recent successful embracing of historically informed performance. There were, however, a few interesting and strange choices, including:

1. The use of modern metal flutes in Orchestra I and Baroque wooden flutes in Orchestra II. Perhaps in the hall one could better discern their distinction, especially in the antiphonal dialogue of the opening number. Also, two small positive organs were used (the organ in Orchestra I joined by two lutes), rather than an organ pitted against a harpsichord.

2. Rattle chose, or perhaps took some odd advice, to employ a strangely pedantic use of rhythmic values for the appoggiaturas in the soprano-alto duet “So ist mein Jesus nun gefangen” (“Alas, my Jesus now is taken”). For each triple appearance of the eighth note grace-notes (in the strings, winds and two solo voices), Rattle imposed a strict descending pattern of sixteenth note — eighth note — quarter (followed by two eighths). Was this a musical allusion to Father, Son and Holy Ghost? It seemed to weaken the figure as it went along and drew more attention to itself than it heightened the musical drama.

3. The pair of “Crucify him!” crowd choruses that surround the aria “Aus Liebe” were performed with two very distinctly different characters. Since Bach gives no specific tempo or dynamic indications, Rattle made the first one soft and the second one loud, although they are almost always performed forte.

4. Probably the strangest choice was to go against all performance history of the piece and perform softly and sustained the mob chorus, “Sein Blut komme über uns” (“His blood be on us and on our children”). This biblical text, of course, has long been viewed (and used) as a justification for anti-Semitism. Was Rattle trying to evoke some sense of contemporary German guilt? Sellars had the chorus look at their hands in horror — Lady Macbeth-like — while they sang. Mostly, it was a musical misstep that slowed things down and made it sound as if Palestrina had dropped in for a moment.

5. Lastly, a blatant nod to the Romantic era that actually proved particularly beautiful: the final appearance of the “Passion” chorale tune, “Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden” (“When comes my hour of parting”) was performed softly by the voices alone — an old-fashioned “a cappella” choral rendition that, in its simplicity, was heart-stopping.

The Berlin Tagesspiegel reviewer described Rattle’s approach to the piece as “half inspired by the insights of musical rhetoric and half from an Espressivo-style not normally associated with him. That Rattle elicited such sparks from these opposite poles was the real event of this Passion.”

Peter Sellars also weighs in: “More recently, the brilliant instrumental and vocal insights of the Early Music movement have brought a freshness of articulation and deftness of touch that have both sharpened the astringencies and filled the ["Matthew" Passion] with new light and air. Perhaps some of the fast speeds of their performances reflect the Internet age and our easy consumerism. Organized religion is increasingly no longer part of most people’s lives and church services themselves have often become more lightweight and entertainment-oriented. In our world today, we have much to regret, to deplore and to repent of, but we have very few examples of sustained, collective self-reflection and mourning. 

“Perhaps what we can do as artists is offer an approach to the piece that is for each of us individually, and for the shared moments of our short time here together, in a concert hall, and on the face of the earth, very personal.”

These thoughtful artists have done just that.

J.S. Bach: “The Passion According to St. Matthew.” Tenor Mark Padmore (Evangelist) and baritone Christian Gerhaher (Jesus) with soprano Camilla Tilling, mezzo Magdalena Kožená, tenor Topi Lehtipuu, baritone Thomas Quasthoff. Rundfunkchor Berlin (Simon Halsey, chorus master) and Boys from the Staats- und Domchors Berlin (Kai-Uwe Jirka, chorus master). Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. Ritualization by Peter Sellars.

Marcus Printup, a trumpeter best known for his 17-year tenure with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, knows all the right things to say about his hometown crowd. Just as generations of performers before him have used variations of the line “I love you [insert city here],” the Conyers, Georgia, native can compliment an audience like a pro.

“The best audiences — and I can truly, truly, truly say this — the best audiences, the most soulful audiences in the United States, are in Atlanta, Georgia,” Printup told me over the phone recently, his nose stuffed up with oppressive New Jersey pollen. Anyone who’s ever gone to a concert has heard that line before. But it’s easy to take Printup at his word.

Two years ago, the trumpeter left the New York City area and moved back down to Atlanta to be closer to his parents. His few performances in the city included a show at Churchill Grounds and a house concert put on by the Southeastern Organization for Jazz Arts, and Printup found appreciative, knowledgeable crowds at the shows.

Printup will perform in Atlanta again today, backed by a collection of local musicians — pianist Kevin Bales, bassist Craig Shaw and drummer Che Marshall — as part of the High Museum of Art’s monthly Jazz at the High Series. The concert starts at 5 p.m. and is part of the museum’s $18 admission.

The preponderance of seasoned jazz consumers in Atlanta is something Printup has discussed with Wynton Marsalis, the leader of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. They agree that a shared Southern church history — participatory and jubilant — is prevalent in the city and makes for a better crowd. When the orchestra comes to Symphony Hall, as it did most recently in March — read my review here —  Printup says its always a welcoming experience. “If I play a certain lick,” he explains, singing a short melody, “you’ll hear people in the audience go, ‘Yeah! Yeah!’ It’s just like in church. That’s something that the South, and specifically here in Atlanta, has that not many other places have.”

Printup came to jazz relatively late in his education. He played classical trumpet in high school, but was more interested in playing football than practicing. When he met Bales while attending Georgia State University, the pianist helped convince Printup to pursue jazz more seriously. The two soon transferred to the University of North Florida to enroll in the jazz program, and, after befriending pianist Marcus Roberts and meeting Marsalis and moving to New York, Printup became a member of the country’s most visible jazz band.

Of course, as Printup is quick to emphasize, jazz musicians don’t have to live in New York to lead a fulfilling career. He rattles off a list of names of veteran artists who call Atlanta home, including saxophonist David Sanchez, bassist Reginald Veal and trumpeter Russell Gunn, to emphasize his point. “It’s a comfortable place to live, and you can just get on an airplane and fly up [to New York] whenever you want to,” he adds.

During his time spent playing all over the world, Printup has run into many types of audiences. Listeners gathered for a LCJO concert at Symphony Hall might applaud only after each number, whereas the club crowd at the Village Vanguard in New York may get a little vocal. The experience of playing for many different types of listeners means Printup doesn’t really mind a noisy audience.

That’s a good thing, because Jazz at the High, which is held in the museum’s boomy atrium, is usually part listening room, part cocktail hour. It can get quite loud, but Printup realizes that whatever gets people interested in paying for an evening of jazz music is ultimately a good thing. “It’s just really fun,” he says, reflecting on his four previous performances at the High. “And that’s the type of energy I want from the audience; it lets me know they’re having fun too.”