Hold your applause

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/05/2009 (6073 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IF there’s one thing this city can safely boast about, it’s a creative class that punches well above its weight on the national scene.

Supposedly self-deprecating Winnipeggers have no problem celebrating their own success stories in the arts and cultural industries, which is justifiable, considering the achievements of our city’s musicians, filmmakers, writers, designers and visual artists.

But if Winnipeg wants to continue to be taken seriously, its citizens must also observe the corollary of the self-congratulatory impulse: we must never give a free ride to bad art, even if it’s made by Winnipeggers for consumption by other Winnipeggers.

On May 21, about 2,200 people filed into the Centennial Concert Hall to witness the world premiere of I Believe, a Holocaust-inspired musical composed by Winnipeg music teacher and choral arranger Zane Zalis.

Most of the audience appeared to enjoy the performance, which some members of the city’s Jewish community have praised as a means of conveying a story about the Holocaust to an audience that may not know much about the Nazi horror.

But the sad truth is I Believe should never have been presented to such a large audience in such a professional context.

Zane Zalis’s creation may be one of the most poorly conceived and executed works of art ever presented on a Winnipeg stage, given the gulf between its weighty subject matter and the shallow nature of the composition.

Stylistically, I Believe employs a combination of classical bombast and 1970s-era Broadway show tunes to attempt tell the entire story of the Holocaust, the intellectual and spiritual watershed event of humanity’s modern age.

To call this work tonally inappropriate is kind of like saying it’s a bad idea to munch popcorn at a funeral. There are so many unintentionally comic moments in this piece, it approaches the form of biting parody you normally find in animated shock-satires like South Park or Robot Chicken.

Imagine an episode of The Simpsons in which the students of Springfield Elementary perform Holocaust: The Musical. That was close to the scene two Thursdays ago at the Centennial Concert Hall, where one imagined the talented members of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra struggling to conceal their contempt for the work they were obligated to perform.

While the esthetic crimes committed by this piece are too numerous to name, there are two particular moments that must be revisited.

Narrator Shelley Faintuch, who was handed the task of adding clumsy exposition to an already trite libretto, was somehow compelled to muster up a Snidely Whiplash sneer when she uttered the name "Hitler" — accompanied by a flash of blood-red lighting, just in case some dense member of the audience did not get the point.

And the decision to trot out a young boy to mouth the final words of clunking show-closer I Will Remember You (no, not the Sarah McLachlan ballad) was so comically manipulative, it led me to giggle instead of cheer.

To place this in a personal context: one of my great aunts died in a Nazi concentration camp. I may never forgive Zalis for creating a clumsy and vainglorious tribute not just in her name, but in the name of six million Jews and nine million other Europeans who died in ghettos and trains and camps and marches and gas chambers.

The problem is, Zalis didn’t just choose a wildly inappropriate medium to tell the story of the Holocaust. He bit off far more than he or any other composer could possibly chew in the space of the single piece.

Many works of art have been inspired by the Holocaust, the event that forever shattered humanity’s faith in itself. But the few successful ones deal with just a tiny chunk of this enormous, paradigm-shattering subject and use a mix of horror, dissociation and dissonance to set the right tone.

Arguably, the most successful musical piece inspired by the Holocaust is Different Trains, American minimalist composer Steve Reich’s 1998 juxtaposition of his own childhood travels across the U.S. at the same time Jewish children in Europe were taking locomotive rides to their deaths in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Architecturally, Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin has an appropriate design: Its jagged angles and zig-zag passages leave the visitor with a feeling of not knowing where they are.

Personally, I can’t recommend any Holocaust-inspired movie as entirely appropriate, despite the relative merits of blockbusters like Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. But it is possible to create a work of art about the Holocaust and do justice to the subject matter.

Unfortunately, for every tasteful Sophie’s Choice, there is more than one Black Book, Paul Verhoeven’s unwittingly offensive 2006 Dutch-language thriller whose mix of sexuality and genocidal violence may very well make it the world’s sole "Holocaustploitation" film.

I am not arguing I Believe is an exploitative work. It is just an amateurish, offensively lousy work, despite the best performance efforts of a decent choir and an excellent, if likely reluctant, orchestra.

In small communities, there is a tendency to praise all hometown creations in fear of upsetting artistic applecarts.

Winnipeg has a large, mature and robust arts community. Nobody need praise rubbish in this town, lest it be performed again.

 

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca