Big Venue, Rather New
“Classically Dope” by Wavelengths Winds et alia;
Copland’s “Billy the Kid” Suite and
“From the New World” i.e., Dvorak’s Symphony #9 by
The National Symphony Orchestra
The Anthem
Washington, DC
June 5, 2019
An anthem is a hymn in praise of joy. DC’s huge, fairly new venue for the performing arts – The Anthem – is being called a concert hall. It opened on The Wharf, the city’s renovated Southwest waterfront, in October 2017 and is being used for dance as well as for music. It has a movie house marquee facing the boardwalk and waters. Up a couple of steps under the marquee, there are doors into a low lobby that leads to the concert hall – a vast vault reminiscent of an aircraft hangar. At the hall’s front is a large, raised stage. The main floor is a flat expanse for comfortable folding chairs. At the rear, surrounding the control pit for sound and light, are tiered platforms for additional folding chairs. Two levels of balcony boxes embrace the hangar. All together, the audience can consist of as many as 6 thousand people! Decoration is provided by tiny light bulbs arranged as curtains. The place is kept dimly lit even when no performance is in progress so that it is difficult to read the printed program or see expressions on surrounding faces. What of sight lines for viewing dance?
Sitting near the front of the main floor gave a good view of performers at the lip of the stage. The first item, “Classically Dope”, featured two competing/collaborating hipsters (Tarik Davis and Rayshun LaMarr) plus seven wind players and pianist Brandon Felder in a medley of hip hop and classical music. How unemphatically the wind players stood compared to the pair of hipsters who pulsed, jerked and glided. I couldn’t see how the pianist sat. What I heard was superior to the sound bites and shrill music interludes on DC’s radio station WAMU.
Most of the evening’s performers were dressed casually. Some of the Symphony’s string players, though seated, waltz with their instrument. Such a one was the young woman who was first violinist. Others seem to crouch over their wood and strings baby as if it might fly away. Ginandrea Noseda, the NSO’s regular conductor, wore black. He danced like a string puppet on the podium except for the smooth motions by his arms and hands. Often he leaned forward on low demipointe. Once in a while, Noseda executed a deep plie as part of his conducting. He seemed at home both with the 20th Century’s Aaron Copland music and with the 19th Century sensibility of Antonin Dvorak.
A disadvantage for seeing dance at The Anthem is the main floor’s lack of incline, so viewers are aware only of performers who are at the very front of the stage. Seating in The Anthem’s balconies would undoubtedly show everyone on stage but might prove to be a bit far away.
copyright 2019 by George Jackson
