On October 25th of last year it was announced that Matt Cook would be the new Artistic and Executive Director of the Sierra Madre Playhouse. This as the company’s home, once a furniture store and movie theater, is celebrating its 100th anniversary this weekend. What better way to bring much-needed exposure to the venue.

The scheduled events large revolve around great films by Harold Lloyd. His granddaughter, Suzanne Lloyd, is joining the celebrations. There is also a sold-out gala, The Bees Knees, which includes a 20s-themed party and access to all the films being shown. And if you haven’t seen Safety Last! you owe it to yourself to see one of the most exciting films ever made.

Cook joins the Sierra Madre Playhouse having been the Executive Director of Blue 13 Dance company and previously holding positions with Pacific Opera Project and Wild Up. Amongst the companies with which he has collaborated are Heidi Duckler Dance, Martha Graham Dance Company and Akron Khan company. He’s also a Grammy Award-winning performer.

Perhaps his biggest challenge is to find a way of making sure the Sierra Madre Playhouse makes it another 100 years and that people who live in Southern California who’ve never been to the playhouse, myself included, find out what they’re all about. Which is precisely where I started my conversation earlier this week with Cook.

What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: When you came to the Sierra Madre Playhouse beginning September 1st of last year, had the 100th celebration already been in the works, or is this something that you came up with as a way of reintroducing the Sierra Madre Playhouse to people maybe like me, who had never been? 

The board is full of stakeholders that have been in the community for a very long time, some of them 30 years. So they had it on their radar to celebrate it in some way, but it hadn’t been formalized. So this is step one, this weekend, but then we’ll hope to have a big birthday party in the summer; try to celebrate all year. So I’m just a piece of the puzzle. 

This weekend is centered primarily on Harold Lloyd’s films. What made Harold Lloyd the right person to anchor this first leg of this centennial celebration? 

He was one of the biggest stars of 1924. This whole weekend are comedies from 1924 that were either made then or released then. He was an easy choice. Our curator of the weekend is Laura Gabrielle, who is a film historian. She got in touch with Harold Lloyd’s granddaughter, Suzanne Lloyd, so she’s going to be a big part of it as well. We’re honoring that era. He was one of the biggest stars. 

I read an interview that Suzanne Lloyd gave to Variety last year. She said the following about her grandfather. “He, in a lot of ways, was very much like the character he portrayed on screen. He had a lot of interest in life and people and what made them tick and what he could do to make things better. He liked to promote people from writers to directors, saying, ‘Go out and do your own thing. Go and do your own movie.'” It sounds like she’s discussing the job of an artistic director at a performing arts venue. Does that sound a little bit like your job as well as his perspective of what he did with his career?

Yeah, in ways it does. With the exception that I’m also trying to look outward to the community and not just have it be what I want to do, but what do we want to do. What can be the bridge to the community and the arts. So it’s a little bit of both.

When you’re in a big metropolis or part of a metropolis that includes Los Angeles, which is a cultural center in this country, how do you balance out what is the best thing to service the immediate community around you, versus what is the thing that maybe will get more people to pay attention to you? 

That is a balancing act. We’re in a unique position that we’ve been an institution for 100 years, but this year we’re trying something brand new. That idea came up before I got here, which is why they hired me to transition into a performing arts model. What I’m trying to do is provide world class artists at a very accessible price point. This whole year is a proof of concept. What does the community want? What do they need? So we’re listening. We’re asking a lot of artists, asking a lot of community members, and we’re trying to represent not just Sierra Madre, but now Los Angeles County. We’re really trying to be the regional performing arts center in East LA. There are venues like us, in downtown, the Music Center or the Broad on the West Side and [The Soraya] in Northridge, but there’s no true performing arts space in East LA.

Those venues have 500 seats or more. They can pay an artist, if they wanted to, $75,000 for the evening. That’s not going to be us, but we can still have a world class version. We could even have the same artists, but instead of their opera, we can produce their string quartet or something. We want to have the same quality, but in an intimate setting right now.

The Sierra Madre Playhouse had been a furniture store for 16 years before it became a theater. That sounds to me like the people owned that property were seeing the writing on the wall; there were changes happening that they wanted to take advantage of. That doesn’t seem totally apart and separate from what we’re facing now. What are the challenges for you in competing, not just with some of the arts institutions that you’ve you’ve mentioned, but for things like a smart phone which seems to be the way a lot of people choose to indulge in whatever their particular passions are?

How do you face that moving forward into the next hundred years? 

I think places for people gathering will always be needed and I think the human experience will always be needed. There is a vulnerability, I think, to live theater or live singing of music you can’t replicate on a device. So I think creating an experience is the next step. So it’s like having that as a baseline but then an experience. Maybe not just a recital, but something where the artists talk to the audience to include them in the process – something they can’t get on YouTube. That’s the next step. Then making it accessible. That’s not just price point, that’s genre. That’s also day of the week, time of day. Also marketing efforts to make sure that anyone that wants to be a part of it can be. So there are many factors, but I’m not so worried about that. I don’t think theater will die. I think that we just have to be reasonable. 

We’re in an environment where Center Theatre Group has all but abandoned any sense of a season at the Mark Taper Forum. They’ve got occasional events in there, but nothing formalized like we are all become accustomed to them having. That’s the smallest space at the Music Center. Does that bode well for you?

That’s true and it’s one of the best theaters in the world. But we’re unique in that our overhead is much lower. It costs them so much money to open. I’m not sure of their exact business model and how they filter the revenue and philanthropy. But I would imagine that they need to reduce the amount of work that they put forward. Perhaps they’re too busy or [there’s] too much overhead. But I feel like we’re actually in a really good spot and that over the next five years we’ll grow a lot and then probably plateau to a really comfortable midsize range.

I was talking to Thor Steingraber at The Soraya a couple weeks ago and he was talking frankly about seismic shifts that are going on in the performing arts. For instance, there’s very little, if any, culture covered in the L.A. Times. There used to be regular sections for that. That an institution like The Soraya is competing for advertising dollars not in print, but online. But they’re competing not with other performing arts organizations, they’re competing with Nike. They’re competing with these big monolithic corporations that individual performing arts venues just don’t have the budget to do. What do you see as the main task ahead of you in finding a way of carving out that space so that people know about the Sierra Madre Playhouse? 

I think finding something that is so special that relates to them; being the individual patron for that genre, that it will cut through the noise for them. I think finding something that resonates on a human level and then trying our best to find out what marketing strategies connect with them. You know, this is brand new for me getting to present and market 60 shows at one time. 

I think part of the point for me similar to Thor is that we’re not just an opera company, it’s a performing arts center. So we have many tools to reach the communities. There’s not just one audience that we’re marketing to.

As a performer/musician yourself you’ve experienced the highs and the lows that come with this line of work. What inspires you most at this point today about the best events to produce and the best way to present them?

Problem solving in general is fun for me. My whole life of practicing was all problem solving every day. You go and you try to get better. I think being flexible and remembering that the audience taste does come first, and that’s not at the sacrifice for what I think is good. I would never present something that I don’t like, but I think really listening and thinking about audience impact is important.

Throughout my career I’ve been in many different projects, all of which I’ve loved. Early in my career, some of them were very critically successful and got awards and things like that, but they had a hard time pulling an audience in our own city. So I had to reflect on that. I think learning from the experience of my peers.

There will always be a place for what we do if we keep the intentions in the right place. We’re not a bank. The goal is not to make money. If we just wanted to make money, you know, we could do Chicago 12 months a year and do a really high Broadway quality style thing. But I’m not even sure that that would sell that long.

One of the reasons some are thriving is because they are not doing things the way you’re supposedly supposed to do them. Pacific Opera Project did a production of Madame Butterfly, seeing that in Japanese and English made me realize that I now want to hear Carmen in Spanish instead of French. How much do you think that kind of thinking is what’s necessary today?

I think it’s essential. That’s not to say that there’s not a place for doing things how they’ve always done, but it should be a piece of a much larger puzzle. I think organizations like Pacific Opera Project are really creating the path for the future. They care about the audience and the art form. And there are a lot of problems of the art form. At a certain point you say, how do I fix them? They don’t have to be a library. All these performing arts organizations don’t have to just be a library. You don’t have to be Broadway. There is space in the middle.

Partnerships are at the root of what makes performing arts organizations really thrive. Through your career, we’ve already mentioned Pacific Opera Project, but you’ve been involved with Wild Up, with Martha Graham Dance, with Heidi Suckler and countless other organizations. Do you see opportunities to partner with these organizations as an opportunity for them to try out new work in a smaller, less eyes on them way or for them to do things that they can’t do as part of their regular seasons?

Absolutely. That is how a lot of this season already got booked. What I want to do is a lot more dance, which just takes longer to develop. One of the dance companies that I’m involved with is planning to do workshops. I can’t announce it yet. I can’t pay what The Soraya can pay for one night, but what we can do is offer space. We can offer community experiences in the space that they can bring students into workshop things. Certainly that’s on the table. I think that’s a very unique market position now as well. I control the building, I control the space. So until the money’s there, we can find different ways to partner and highlight voices that couldn’t otherwise get out there. 

You’re just at the beginning of celebrating the 100th anniversary. If you could foresee the Sierra Madre Playhouse of 2124 celebrating its 200th anniversary, what would you hope that anniversary would look like? What would you like your legacy to be as part of that anniversary?

I think an expanded audience, a more inclusive and diverse audience. That is also the genres they present. The Sierra Madre Playhouse is a welcoming space to be, regardless of who you are. I think that that would be a huge accomplishment, and I think it’ll happen. There are already so many community members that have been patrons and fans for 50 years that now their kids and their grandkids are patrons. I think it’s going to happen. It’s a unique spot in a unique community. I think it’s going to last. The building might change. I don’t know if the building will hold up another hundred years, but it’ll be there, I think.

To see the full interview with Matt Cook, please go here.

Main Photo: Matt Cook, Artistic and Executive Director of the Sierra Madre Playhouse (Courtesy Sierra Madre Playhouse)

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Given that Steingraber has had a long association with Jacques Heim, Founder and Creative Director of Diavolo, it should come as no surprise that he turned to Heim to create a performance piece that celebrates the perseverance required to rebuild the CSUN campus and the surrounding communities in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Joining Diavlo for this world premiere are vocalist Thana Alexander and drummer Antonio Sánchez who have composed the score for Existencia and will be performing it live.

There are two performances: one on January 17th and a second one on January 19th

Recently I spoke with Steingraber about the two very different earthquakes that are front and center in his world right now: the Northridge Earthquake that is the inspiration for Existencia and the seismic shifts in the performing arts that has Steingraber asking how many arts institutions will survive even this year.

What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: You told me many years ago that the word earthquake was verboten and not to be used on the Cal State University Northridge campus. What has changed that has allowed you the opportunity to explore the arts as a mechanism for acknowledging the 30th anniversary of the Northridge earthquake?

Places are defined by pivotal moments. Sometimes those pivotal moments are extremely positive and memorable. Sometimes those pivotal moments are disasters or catastrophes. I don’t think one will ever think of Tiananmen Square without thinking of 1989. Northridge, for better or worse – some would say for worse – has been defined by an earthquake for three decades. There was a real interest at a certain point after the long and challenging process of rebuilding, which took the better part of a decade, where one wants to be known for other things. However, it doesn’t change the history, right?

Then President Brenda Wilson, against all odds, actually reopened the campus two weeks later for classes. Then it took another decade to rebuild it. So what we’re celebrating, if you will, is that perseverance, that resilience that built back better in the months and years following the earthquake.

At what point did it strike you as the right time to reach out to someone like Jacques Heim to create something and how long ago did that happen?

It was about two years of planning. That’s what it takes to plan a major premiere of a new piece. 30 years is funny. You think of 25 or 50 or something like that, but it’s almost two generations. Many people who survived the earthquake are no longer with us. Any adult, even up to the age of, let’s say, 34, 35 years old, won’t have a memory of it. But there’s still a significant portion of the population of LA in the Valley who do have very vivid memories of it, but they’re now distant enough that maybe an evening of art isn’t painful or triggering for them.

Maybe this is the right amount of time to sort of put it in context with all the other things they know about disasters and about human behavior and human recovery.

Why Jacques? Why Diavolo?

Jacques Heim lived through the Northridge earthquake. He had just established his company here in Northridge, funny enough, on Proscenium Avenue in a warehouse. He lived in Hollywood, and he has very, very clear memories of the Northridge earthquake. He said, in fact, that the Northridge earthquake influenced what Diavolo the company became. Which was about danger, about confronting danger.

They do things that are very physically challenging. Those are the qualities in the work. But it’s so much more than that because he’s also someone who uses structures, he uses architecture, he uses the built environment to both destruct and reconstruct. He created a company influenced by that moment in his life.

I spoke to Jacques in 2020 during the pandemic. He said, “I know we are in the middle of a complete disaster. But behind disaster, eventually we will see the light, but we have a long way ahead of us.” In your role as Executive and Artistic Director at The Soraya, what role does art play in your own life, apart from the venue, in allowing you to get to the other side of a disaster, to find that light that he talked about? 

Whether it’s a performance or, for some people it’s temple or church, people have to be together. And we live in a world where people are not together, at least not in a meaningful, substantive, positive way very often. Any difficult or raw human experience or emotion that a community or disparate peoples experience, I feel like in order to really process it you can’t be alone. I view that as one of the primary functions of a performance venue.

As we announced this performance, people became very emotional about participating in it, coming to it, being in the audience for it. What we’re not doing is recreating an earthquake. This is an artistic response to it. One of the things that’s been really interesting in the last two years working with Jacques on this, is that he has decided that the most interesting thing about challenges or catastrophes or disasters is that they do bring people together in a way that our ordinary lives don’t. That by coming together we have the opportunity to build something better. So that is very much his artistic rendering. It’s filled with, as you would expect from Diavolo, things falling and coming apart and wildly athletic and physical performances by dancers who are top of their form and accomplishing things that become these bigger than life representations of what a human undergoes when the Earth beneath them is no longer reliable, when gravity is no longer reliable.

Maybe there is something that that’s a bigger picture about what we can still learn about how we can be better or how we can respond post-pandemic. It seems like Existencia is not just about 30 years ago. It’s about 30 days ago. 

The pandemic is particularly insidious in this way because it was, first of all, global. No corner of the globe was exempted. We often think of disasters as being very specific to a location. It was kind of insidious because it didn’t destroy the world in an instant. It destroyed the fabric of the human experience in the world, which is a much more subtle thing to both recognize and to repair. So there is definitely that relativity to the current moment. The pandemic is no small part of that for sure. 

One thing the the pandemic did do was create enormous challenges for people who are in your position because the arts have had an incredibly challenging time getting people back into the theater. To paraphrase the last line of Putting It Together from Sunday in the Park with George by Stephen Sondheim, what is, from your perspective, the state of the arts right now?

Perilous. No one in my position ever wants to be honest because there’s no benefit to being honest. You don’t attract ticket buyers by saying the theater’s half empty. You don’t attract donors by saying it’s all on the edge of the cliff. But when we are honest, and I just roll that way, it’s going to take a miracle for the performing arts in Los Angeles to persevere through. I would say during 2020 that we will be able to maintain the illusion through 2023, and in 2024 it will all come unraveled.

What I mean by that is that’s when all the relief dollars would run out. That’s when the reality of whatever the future is for ticket buying, for philanthropy, for all of the things. Even on the artist side, so many artists, artistic organizations, have not reconvened or regrouped. An entire generation of young artists lost a really important formative time of their training and their practice.

This is what I know because I speak to all of my colleagues. There are very few in private who will say that everything is just fine. There are very few. There are some. But for the most part, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Los Angeles or New York or anywhere else. It’s a challenging moment because costs are as much as 30% higher and revenue is as much as 20% lower. It doesn’t take a genius to know that 50% gap has to be filled by something. And for most organizations, for the last to two-and-a-half, maybe three years, it’s been filled by relief dollars which are now gone.

If this is something that you were forecasting a while ago, how do you mitigate that? How do you move beyond it?

I don’t think you do. I think we’re going to see lots of arts organizations simply shut down. Look, there’s no arts section left in the L.A. Times. There are obviously important journalists doing work like you’re doing, but not reaching the same number of doorsteps. We were given arts news every day. And now most Angelenos get none, ever. Zero. Marketing is 2 to 3 times the cost that it used to be, because you’re not just competing with another arts organization on the arts page of the L.A. Times, you’re competing with Nike for digital space.

I do think that certain arts organizations emerge. Certain trends start to favor certain alternatives and hopefully live performance alternatives. Certain things rise to the top. When we say cultural or artistic Darwinism, what we mean is that only some survive and the rest don’t. I think we’re going to be in that moment and we’re going to head into the 2028 Olympics in a city with a field that is a shadow of its former self. It’s too bad because the 1984 Olympics were one of the most important moments, pivotal moments, in the arts in Los Angeles.

We will have 44 years between Olympics and in that 44-year time, we will have seen the arts rise in Los Angeles, and we will see the arts reach some sort of pinnacle and then decline to some degree or another. That’s just the reality right there. Not enough dollars in Los Angeles to fix it.

I hope that that things improve, because I, for one, can’t imagine living life without the arts, whether it’s here or anywhere else.

The things I love most: the performing arts, all the arts, public radio, mom and pop restaurants – these are all things that are imperiled right now. When you put them all into a bucket together, what do they represent? They basically represent all of the things that are not mass market, large conglomerate, call it whatever you may. They’re the very human side of creation that are not driven solely by a profit margin. There are people who say without a profit margin, maybe you deserve to be imperiled. Obviously I can immediately provide a retort, which is any human being may look at the things that they love most and see that they’re not actually attached to a profit.

Hopefully as Northridge did, as CSUN did, you can rise out of a tragedy or circumstances that seem to imperil your very existence and still find a way to to come out of it better and stronger. 

No choice. You have to try.

To see the full interview with Thor Steingraber, please go here.

Main Photo: Diavolo rehearses Existencia: 30 Years after the Northridge Earthquake in their LA Studio (Photo by George Simian/Courtesy The Soraya)

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One result of his soul-searching was the creation of a brand new work called This Is Me: Letters from the Front Lines. Heim’s work will have its world premiere on July 31st on The Soraya website at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT. It will also be available on the Diavolo website shortly thereafter.

This Is Me was created specifically to be filmed at the suggestion of Thor Steingraber, Executive Director of The Soraya.

“When Thor asked if we could do something, I said yes. We created this little film. Is this film good or not? I don’t know, but I do know it helped us physically, mentally and emotionally. It gave us new blood and new directions.”

Diavolo has long been active in partnering with veterans organizations. It was through conversations with both veterans and first responders that he found the qualities they shared and also the foundation of This Is Me.

“What kind of human beings are they? They are these amazing warriors,” Heim says by phone on the way to finish editing his project. “They fight wars with guns, missiles, tanks and now we fight an invisible enemy with medical personnel and medicine. There’s an interesting parallel. When you ask if they consider themselves heroes, they all say ‘absolutely not.’ If you ask if they are warriors, they say ‘yes.”

That distinction serves as the foundation for This Is Me.

“In the film I reverse the perspective. I put the warriors in pedestrian clothes and I put our dancers in kind of army clothes because it is really now the citizens who are the warriors. All of the dancers were wearing masks, but my warriors and first responders did not wear masks. I wanted to be able to see their faces. The mask, covering our faces, became the theme.”

Veterans and first responders appear as themselves in the film. Since they were not wearing masks during filming and the dancers were, Heim, his film crew and the Diavolo company were carefully monitored.

“We spent more time cleaning the structures, disinfecting, taking temperatures than shooting the film. We put the dancers in full quarantine living with one another. That’s the only way we could do the film. Every 18 minutes we had to stop for the dancers to go outside, take the mask off and breathe.”

Part of Heim’s standard description of Diavolo is “movement with architectural bonds.” Filming during the pandemic meant the relationship between these architectural structures and his dancers necessarily changed.

“When I was driving from my house for the first day of the shoot, I was thinking of Covid-19 as an obstacle – the same kind of physical obstacle we deal with when we work with physical structures. I ask my dancers when you see an obstacle in front of you do you get scared or do you find a way to understand the obstacle? Covid-19 is the most dangerous obstacle I’ve had to face. It’s around you but you don’t know where it is. We’re going to work with it. We work as a team and that’s how you do it in the trenches.”

French artist Edgar Degas, who is primarily known for his images of dancers, said that “Art is not what you see, but what you make other see.” Heim agrees and creating This Is Me not only allows him to express his gratitude to members of the military and first responders, but also to send a message to viewers about how we can each navigate our way through this crisis.

“Human beings are powerful and beautiful. Sometimes in tragic moments it is easy to criticize and put each other down, but at the end of the day we need each other and we have to have one another. If we do that we will not be defeated. We cannot use violence. We cannot use racism. We’re all from the same family called humans. Look at those beautiful vets and first responders who sacrifice for us. If they can do that, we can also do it.”

Four months after finding himself adrift, Heim’s film is done and ready to be seen. In other words, he found out that he, too, could do it.

“As artists we want to work with humans. We want to create. We want to help people. I want to do work with social impact. It’s when you are in this kind of situation that interesting art gets created. I know we are in the middle of a complete disaster, but behind disaster eventually we will see the light. But we have a long way ahead of us. I have no money or power. The only thing I have is my art form, so I have to do my own part and create work like This Is Me. The next project will have some kind of impact, too. That’s my part.”

Photo: France Nguyen-Vincent and Dancers (Photo by George Simian/Courtesy of Diavolo)

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New York Times critic John Martin said of the work, “Not since the eloquent and beautiful Frontier, first presented three seasons ago, has she given us anything half so fine as Immediate Tragedy.”

This work was never filmed and was considered a lost masterpiece. Until now.

After a considerable amount of material was discovered by Graham biographer Neil Baldwin (including photos, reviews, letter and musical notations), Martha Graham Dance Company has collaborated with Wild Up’s Christopher Rountree and Thor Steingraber at The Soraya to come up with a new version of Immediate Tragedy that speaks to our time.

This reimagined piece features 14 dancers – all performing separately and safely from their own space – dancing to new music written by Rountree.

To help create their individual choreography, each dancer was given four photos and was tasked with designing specific movement phrases. The dancers, all members of the Martha Graham Dance Company, are So Young An, Alessio Crognale, Laurel Dalley Smith, Natasha Diamond-Walker, Lloyd Knight, Charlotte Landreau, Jacob Larsen, Lloyd Mayor, Marzia Memoli, Anne O’Donnell, Lorenzo Pagano, Anne Souder, Leslie Andrea William and Xin Ying.

Rountree and Wild Up (Jiji, Richard Valitutto, Jodie Landau, Brian Walsh and Derek Stein) used what little remains of Cowell’s original composition as their inspiration.

Cowell was an American composer who wrote 20 complete symphonies with significant work completed on a 21st (later finished by Lou Harrison.) His work inspired, amongst others, Bartok and John Cage. He published New Music Quarterly and was an ardent supporter of many composers including Charles Ives.

The video elements were edited by Ricki Quinn who has been working with Janet Eilbert, the Artistic Director of Martha Graham Dance Company, Wild Up and Steingraber on the world premiere of Immediate Tragedy.

You’ll be able to watch the end result of all these efforts when The Soraya premieres Immediate Tragedy on Friday, June 19th on their Facebook page at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT. The next day it will also be available on the Graham Company’s YouTube Channel at 2:30 PM EDT/11:30 AM PDT.

Photo of Martha Graham in Immediate Tragedy by Robert Fraser (Courtesy of Martha Gram Resources, a division of the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, Inc.)

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