thursday, october 21, 2010 REAL ART D.C.


Last chance to vote Our contest to find the area’s most exciting undiscovered artists is in its final days. Polls close Friday at 5 p.m.


Go to www.washingtonpost.com/ realartdc.


“ ART REVIEW


‘The Last Newspaper’: Now that’s just scary Ripped from the headlines:


New Museum show reflects on the old magic of print


by Blake Gopnik Imagine a fruit seller wandering into


an exhibition of still lifes. He’d start off puzzled at the idea that anyone would want to paint his produce. Then he’d feel pride, at the thought that his goods de- serve a moment in art. And then he’d wonder whether the painters really cared about what matters in a piece of fruit — smell, taste, its feel in the mouth — or whether they are simply using fruit to their own ends. That’s rather how it felt to be a journal- ist adrift in “The Last Newspaper,” an art exhibition that launched last week in New York, across three floors of the New Museum. As the title suggests, we may be coming to the End of Days for news- papers. (For those in the business, selling buggy whips is starting to look like a cred- ible second career.) And yet, as the exhibi- tion demonstrates, artists seem to be


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Style ABCDE C S THE TV COLUMN


“Many children . . . are now being treated to seductive, in-your-face poses of the underwear-clad female characters.”


— Tim Winter, president of Parents TV Council, on an upcoming photo spread of “Glee” characters in GQ magazine. C6


3LIVE TODAY @ washingtonpost.com/discussions Got plans? The Going Out Gurus are here to help 1 p.m. • Celebritology Live with Jen Chaney and Liz Kelly 2 p.m.


FIRST LADY Arts program


awards Grass-roots groups engaged in youth education are honored at the White House. C10


PHOTOS BY ASTRID RIECKEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST THINKING ON HIS FEET: Dana Tai Soon Burgess’s new work, “Charlie Chan and the Mystery of Love,” was inspired by the cerebral film detective. RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA AND GAVIN BROWNS ENTERPRISE


OMEN: Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “Untitled” makes its message dramatically clear.


MUSIC REVIEW


Kicking it up a notch on Mahler’s 8th Valery Gergiev fuels


by Anne Midgette


Valery Gergiev is a conductor for our time. His is a multi-tasking, Internet- linked approach to music. He likes it loud and flashy; he loves big events; and he really prefers scheduling that other con- ductors would go out of their way to avoid. In March, you’ll remember, he offered


Prokofiev’s mammoth opera “War and Peace” and a run of concerts at the Ken- nedy Center at the same time he was con- ducting Shostakovich’s “The Nose” at the Metropolitan Opera and Berlioz’s “Les Troyens” at Carnegie Hall. This extends musical endurance almost to the level of a hot-dog-eating competition: It becomes about stuffing in as much as possible. So doing a selection of Mahler’s sprawl-


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spoken movie detective, whose politely delivered barbs carry a whiff of fortune- cookie wisdom. “In future, remember,” says Charlie Chan, tapping his No. 1 son on the shoul- der. “Tongue often hang man quicker than rope.” (Chan was forever carping at his son for too much talk: “You are like busi- ness end of waterspout — always running off at mouth.”) Chan was sort of Confucian, kind of ko-


No. 1 fan S


by Sarah Kaufman


unday afternoon in Santa Fe, maybe 1976, or ’78, or heck, any given Sunday into the ear- ly ’80s: In a little adobe house on Caliente Road, a boy sits glued to his television set. He’s captivated by a portly, soft-


any. He found the answer to everything. And he was Asian — at least enough to satisfy Dana Tai Soon Burgess, a Korean American child growing up in a Latino neighborhood. No matter that Chan, in his decades as a celluloid solver of glam- orous murders, was most popularly played by white actors. For Burgess, the Hollywood version of a Chinese sage of-


‘Symphony of a Thousand’ with the sound of 300


THEATER REVIEW


In Russian, a gripping ‘Three Sisters’ Brief Kennedy Center


stop features sparse sets, intense personalities


by Peter Marks


“Moscow, Moscow, Moscoooow!” murmurs sick-at-heart Irina in the closing minutes of Act 1 of director De- clan Donnellan’s gorgeously observed “Three Sisters.” It’s the play’s rallying cry, its articulation of eternal restless- ness, here uttered by actress Nelli Uva-


rova with a churning anguish — and a final “Moscow!” expressed as a sigh that gets caught wrenchingly in her throat.


An American ear may not recognize


many of the words spoken in this splendid production, performed in An- ton Chekhov’s native tongue by a su- perb Russian cast. But the heart surely connects with all the meticulously re- alized feeling, the sense of the air being let out of inflated hopes, in a house- hold of declining fortunes in a turn-of- the-20th-century Russian backwater. Donnellan’s “Three Sisters” — with helpful English surtitles — had its


CLOSED:“Three Sisters” played two nights at Kennedy Center.


AH, SO: Connie Fink of Dana Tai Soon Burgess & Company rehearses the work.


Choreographer Burgess, taking his clues from Charlie Chan


fered an escape from the confusion of life. Chan was an avuncular guide for a kid who felt different in many ways: a new ar- rival in a deep-rooted community, not a Spanish speaker, not a Catholic and, as he was beginning to realize, not interested in girls.


On Friday, Burgess — chair of George


Washington University’s department of theater and dance, and director of one of Washington’s foremost dance troupes — will unveil a work dedicated to Chan and the power of fantasy. Dana Tai Soon Bur- gess & Company will perform “Charlie Chan and the Mystery of Love” at Dance Place, Friday through Sunday, along with Burgess’s “Island,” a piece created last year that delves into the internment of Chinese immigrants at Angel Island off the coast of California. Asian themes have long been fruitful


territory for Burgess, 42. He moved here in 1988 to dance with various local troupes and founded his own company in 1992. In recent years, his works on the im- migrant experience and cultural divides have propelled him around the world on State Department-sponsored tours.


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North American premiere Tuesday night in a lamentably brief engage- ment in the Kennedy Center’s Eisen- hower Theater; the final Washington performance of the touring production occurred Wednesday night. Unlike so many other stagings of Chekhov, which can leave you with the impression that you’ve passed through a reverent mu- seum exhibit, this one exudes immedi- acy, the idea that these neurotic, excit- able people from another place and time breathe the same oxygen as you. The British director, whose creative-


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