Duke Performances looks at “A Nation Made New”

There are a number of Duke institutions that have significance beyond the bounds of campus. Naming them all would make for a tricky parlor game, a project in and of itself. But one thing becomes increasingly clear with every new season of programming and each successful evening: without Duke Performances, this list is incomplete.

Having created a schedule for the upcoming 2010-11 academic year fit to burst with essential artists and creators, Duke Performances seems poised to build on the run of accomplishments the organization has strung together since Aaron Greenwald was appointed interim director at the beginning of 2007 and took over as director a year later.

Duke Performances’ programming is clustered into series, giving it both a thematic and organizational coherence. This year, the classical offerings remain the same as last—the Piano Recital Series, Duke Artists Series, Chamber Arts Society and Ciompi Quartet—and the non-classical are contained under the greater umbrella of “American.”

“What the season is looking to do is to sort of have a conversation about these unique artists who each have different varieties of relationship to American traditional art or the avant-garde,” Greenwald said. “If you have this panoply of voices, which we do, what’s the message each of them is offering about the nation?”

More principally, the American programming has been divided up into five series: Witnesses, Inventors, The Sanctified, Travellers and Liars, Thieves and Big Shot Ramblers, all of which group artists “by the trajectories in which they engage a conversation about American tradition,” Greenwald said.

The numbers behind this programming have been trending up: Greenwald said attendance in 2008-09 increased by 17 percent overall from 2007-08, and 18 percent among Duke students, who made up 27 percent of overall attendance—32 percent if you remove the Ciompi Quartet and Chamber Arts Society from the equation, series whose audiences tend to skew older and more from the outside community. And this is after decreasing the number of offerings by 12.5 percent from the previous year.

“Before Aaron took over... I think student attendance at Duke Performances was around 11 to 12 percent, and the total number of tickets sold was quite a bit lower as well,” Vice Provost for the Arts Scott Lindroth said. “We have seen with this greater investment in Duke Performances, as well as Aaron’s very imaginative leadership, it can become a major presenter in the area and attract not only the campus community but the surrounding community as well.”

Attached to all this is the tagline “In Duke, at Durham, a Nation Made New,” which speaks to an intimacy with a target audience that extends far outside the university’s bounds. As if to put this connection in concrete, Duke Performances will be conducting two immense projects entirely off-campus in 2010-11: the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s two performances in the Durham Performing Arts Center and the three-day “Lomax Sounds of the South” at the Hayti Heritage Center, presented by Megafaun and featuring Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and special guest Sharon Van Etten.

In fact, the project’s conception came from Megafaun’s Bradley Cook attending the Hallelujah Train performance and then asking Greenwald if he could do something similar. Megafaun subsequently joined forces with Virginia guitarist Matt White, who arranged horns for the performance, Greenwald said. The group then enlisted Justin Vernon of Bon Iver (who played with members of Megafaun in an earlier band) and vocalist Sharon Van Etten as additional musicians.

“Lomax Sounds of the South” fits into The Sanctified series, which also includes a performance by the Books, the Bad Plus’ reimagining of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and an experimental take on Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie by Lee Breuer and the Mabou Mines theater company. Featuring a workshop, the Mabou Mines’ involvement embodies another plum aspect of Duke Performances which Lindroth stressed the importance of: artists’ working with academic departments and Duke students.

“We’re developing collaborative projects where arts programs will develop programs within their departments that will somehow connect with Duke Performances events,” Lindroth said. “And by doing this I think we’re able to expand the impact of artists who are presented by Duke Performances.”

As for the other series, Inventors features a performance Oct. 5 in Page Auditorium by Dirty Projectors, a contemporary indie-rock outfit that Greenwald describes as “the most interesting band I’ve heard over the last couple of years.”

And Liars, Thieves and Big Shot Ramblers, certainly the most adventurous in name of the series, is highlighted by one of the most adventurous events: Loudon Wainwright III’s “High Wide and Handsome,” a tribute to Eden, N.C. banjo player Charlie Poole.

“What Wainwright has done is he’s taken some Charlie Poole songs and he’s sung them, and that makes sense as a tribute project,” Greenwald said. “And then he’s gotten into the character of Charlie Poole, who was tawdry and fun-loving and a drunkard and kind of a badass, and he started writing songs from the perspective of Charlie Poole and the people in Charlie Poole’s life. Which, as a tribute project, is totally nuts.”

Duke Performances specifically invited Wainwright to perform “High Wide and Handsome” with a full band here—which is not a request Wainwright normally gets, Greenwald said. But the interest is unsurprising, as the piece, and the rest of Duke Performances’ slated programming, fits perfectly into one of Greenwald’s statements about art.

“Artists are not museum pieces,” Greenwald said. “And if they’re going to be interesting, they’re going to be creating something new.”