E2 Reading
Books that inspired art, from sculpture to rap
The creative process is synergistic. “When we go to other books or other art forms, what we’re trying to do is to loosen up the tight frames we have put around our work,” as Anna Deavere Smith puts it. “I call it the oh-I-see! moment. Then you have a new energy charge, and you can follow another trail.” Stories by Sarah Kaufman.
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SUNDAY, AUGUST 15, 2010
SUSAN BIDDLE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST Septime Webre
As a choreographer, Septime Webre has adapted several books into ballets, among them Maurice Sen- dak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” But some of his abstract works have roots in books, too.
Some years ago he DOMINIC BRACCO II FOR THE WASHINGTON POST Shodekeh
Beatboxer The Baltimore beatboxer Sho-
dekeh spends his days mimick- ing sounds with his voice, coax- ing all manner of drumbeats, sandpaper scrapings, didgeridoo warblings and a seemingly im- possible variety of percussive rhythms from his vocal cords. Reading is his sanctuary. “There’s a very important si- lent quality to it,” he says. Among his favorite books are
that 6th-century B.C. bestseller “The Art of War,” by Sun Tzu, and
Tabi Bonney Rapper
If it weren’t for “Think and Grow Rich” — the classic moti- vational manual by Napoleon Hill — Tabi Bonney might be draped in a lab coat and stetho- scope right now instead of rid- ing the airwaves as one of the area’s hottest musicians. Bon- ney, born in Togo and raised in Northeast Washington, says he didn’t read anything but science texts on his way to earning a master’s degree in biology. Then he picked up Hill’s book — and made a screeching U-turn. Hard. “That’s the reason I went after
my dream and went into enter- tainment, instead of being a doctor,” he says. “It’s about all the greats, from Rockefeller to Ford, and how everyone had these obstacles but they kept pursuing and were persistent about what they felt they could achieve when every- one else thought they were crazy. It’s mainly telling you not to be afraid to step off that cliff after what you want.”
Once he started
rapping, Bonney was in for another wake- up call with “The War of Art” by novelist Ste- ven Pressfield. Subti- tled “Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles,” this book “completely changed my creativity,” says Bonney. “It’s a struggle to create, and you have to get in the rou- tine every single day. Prior to it, I would only create when it hit me; I would go maybe a month till I felt like writing. Then I got in the habit of every single day at least writing something so it becomes second nature.”
the more recent “The 48 Laws of Power” by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers. Being a musician is no easy thing, not in this econ- omy, not ever. Shode- keh has armed himself with survival strategies. For instance, he says, one of the 48 laws of power reads: De- spise the free lunch. The real-life application: “One day this person approached me
and said, ‘I bought you lunch; would you like to have it?’ ” Sure, said Shodekeh, forgetting the law. “Okay, now I need a
favor,” said the lunch lady. “Can you beatbox ‘Happy Birthday’ for me?” Then there are the books that remind him of the magic in life.
Such as “Too Marvelous for Words,” James Lester’s biogra- phy of jazz pianist Art Tatum. Shodekeh retrieves his copy so he can summarize his favorite passages. “His hearing was so ex-
Antony Walker
act he could listen to a coin drop and tell which coin it was,” says Shodekeh. “He could tell the dominant note in a flushing toi- let.”
Kind of like a beatboxer being able to imitate a thunderstorm? Maybe, he says. At least, he can dream up the similarities . . . let his thoughts wander as he flips the page . . .
“If there was ever a waking life
experience that’s akin to the state of dreaming, it would be read- ing,” he says. “Reading, to me, is just as powerful as being in an enormously chaotic, beautiful, amazing dream. . . . Your imagi- nation is going at full throttle.”
created a ballet called “Fluctu- ating Hemlines” after reading Camille Paglia’s provocative dis- section of what drives Western culture, “Sexual Personae.” “It was a very incendiary, out-
rageous book,” says Webre. “The central thesis is we are all essen- tially raw, animalistic beings.” Webre was in his 20s and “com- ing into my own as an adult. I was starting to feel we all had an underground life, inaccessible to anyone else. That seemed like an interesting notion for a dance.”
Artistic Director, the Washington Ballet
In the piece, the dancers start out dressed up in 1960s cocktail dresses and suits, which they soon strip off, finishing the night in their skivvies. Webre’s works are
often colored by vivid images and high emo- tions — and fittingly, so are his reading choices. Virginia Woolf’s 1928
gender-bending novel “Orlando” — about a young man who be- comes a woman and ceases to age —inspired his take on Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana.” “I thought this notion was interesting in terms of the cycle of the search for love,” he says. So the ballet “begins and ends with this search.” “I’m interested in theatrical-
ity,” Webre says. “I come from this big Cuban family where there was lots of drama, so heightened drama is a natural state.”
Music Director, Washington Concert Opera How does a conductor
breathe life into his baton and make an orchestra truly sing? How does he best express his ideas to the musicians so they, in turn, can conjure them for the audience?
A lot depends on the image you hold in your head as you’re conducting, according to Anto- ny Walker. And to feed his imagination, he turns to books. Last year, Walker was taken in
by “The Scandal of the Season,” by fellow Australian Sophie Gee, a novel based on the real-life sex scandal that inspired Alexander Pope’s famous poem “The Rape of the Lock.” At the time, Walker was conducting Handel’s “Acis and Galatea” for Opera Aus- tralia — for which Pope had been one of the librettists. Through Gee’s book, steeped
JOSHUA COGAN
Bonney is also a big fan of Iceberg Slim’s tales of the under- world, especially “Pimp: The Story of My Life.” But he re- mains so keen on self- help books that he even features one in the video for his single “Duhhh” — the cam- era zooms in on a man
with his nose between the pink- and-green covers of Lisa Ham- mond’s “Dream Big.” Bonney got turned on to this book by “a significant other,” he says. “It’s about women making it in business.” (Ahhh . . . If you don’t mind us saying so, we rather like a male rapper who’s into female empowerment.) “I just want people to dream
it,” Bonney says, “and go after their dreams.”
in London life of the early 1700s, Walker absorbed de- tails about English gardens of the time — especially relevant, because “Acis and Gal- atea” was originally performed outdoors. “Acis is turned into a water nymph at the end, and I’m sure it’s because they had a fountain there,” said Walker. He was conducting the opera in the distinctly modern Sydney Opera House, and it was a decid- edly modern production. But because of Gee’s richly atmos- pheric book, “I had in mind an English formal garden,” says Walker. “And it makes your physicality more specific and therefore the music that flows from you and from the musi- cians is very specific.”
At the moment when the BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST
nymph Galatea trans- forms her murdered lover Acis into a foun- tain, so he can be with her forever, “there’s a beautifully rippling ac- companiment in the orchestra,” says Walk- er. “And you have to conjure up some sort of water imagery and garden imagery, and
the sadness of death. You have to, as a conductor, embody all of that.
“So the more background you
know, the more research you’ve done, the more images and col- ors that you have in your mind, the more that transmits itself through your body language to the musicians.” And into the ears of the audience. Or if you’re lucky — and you’ve done your home- work — straight into their hearts.
MARCUS YAM/THE WASHINGTON POST Jim Sanborn Sculptor
Jim Sanborn’s father was the head of exhibi- tions at the Library of Congress, and San- born, one of the re- gion’s preeminent sculptors, says he just about grew up in that institution. “All my high school papers were written in the rare book room,” he says. There, Sanborn thumbed through Adam Smith’s original “Wealth of Nations” (wearing white gloves, of course), as well as some of Gali- leo’s manuscripts. He has held a Dead Sea Scroll in his hands. Lit- erature, Sanborn says, “is ex- tremely close to me.” So it’s no surprise that his met- al and stone creations often in- clude written words, albeit en- crypted — as in the encoded text that perforates the graceful cop- per panels of “Antipodes,” out- side the Hirshhorn Museum, as well as “Kryptos,” at the CIA headquarters in Langley. Lately, Sanborn has been mak- ing works that tell the story of the atomic bomb, and in the process has been pushing at the boundaries of art. A recent example is “Terrestrial Physics,”
at the Denver Mu- seum of Contempo- rary Art: Using old sci- entific texts, Sanborn reconstructed the first big machine to create nuclear fission. His fascination with
physics stems from Richard Rhodes’s 1986 Pulitzer Prize- winning history, “The
Making of the Atomic Bomb.” Sanborn was so impressed with the book that he got in touch with Rhodes; the two struck up a friendship and the author helped the artist track down original source material. In fact, Sanborn got his hands on actual bomb parts from the Manhattan Project lab at Los Alamos in the 1940s. One of the resulting artworks, “Critical As- sembly,” was a re-creation of the lab, using the artifacts and Rhodes’s photos and descrip- tions.
With it, the sculptor brought the literature he loved to life — a creative act that lifted history off the page. “Going from the written, flat word to the three- dimensional object,” Sanborn says, “that was one of the more enriching things that I’ve done.”
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