“We now have millions of veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of them have some form of PTSD. Many are unemployed. A disproportionate number are people of color.”
[THE INCEPTION] Iyer was drawn to collaborating with Ladd because he was less a rapper than a poet who lived with music. Iyer digs Ladd’s “spacious style, which is full of questions and mystery. He’s also very literary, global, with a punk-rock edge. He’s deeply grounded in African-American history and culture.” Vijay Iyer
as told to
Selections from “Holding It Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project,” by Vijay Iyer & Mike Ladd. World premiere performances at harlemstage.org Sept 19-22, 2012.
All selections recorded June 21-22, 2012 at The Bunker, Brooklyn, NY by Aaron Nevezie. Mixed August 2012 by Liberty Ellman & Vijay Iyer. *Tracks are not yet mastered.* Produced by Vijay Iyer.
HARLEM STAGE OPENS ITS 30th ANNIVERSARY FALL SEASON WITH THE PREMIERE OF HOLDING IT DOWN: THE VETERANS’ DREAMS PROJECT (SEPTEMBER 19-22)
Works Created by Vijay Iyer (Composer) and Mike Ladd (Poet)
with Maurice Decaul (Poet / Iraq Veteran),
Distill On-the-Ground Experiences of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars
Beginning its 30th anniversary fall season with work that highlights issues of national and global import, Harlem Stage will present the premiere of Holding It Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project (September 19-22), commissioned and produced by Harlem Stage’s WaterWorks program. Created by two longtime collaborators, composer/pianist Vijay Iyer (2012 Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Award Winner—Pianist of the Year, GRAMMY Award Nominee, five category winner in the 2012 DownBeat International Critics Poll and 2012 Greenfield Prize Award Winner) and poet/performer Mike Ladd (Easy Listening For Armageddon, Welcome To The Afterfuture, Negrophilia and Vernacular Homicide), together with poet / United States Marine Corps Iraq veteran Maurice Decaul, Holding It Down and Sleep Song shed musical and poetic light on two sides of the experience of war: what it means for American soldiers of color to return home from international conflict, and the impact of American soldiers and their missions on the lives of civilians in Iraq, respectively.
Performances of Holding It Down (World Premiere) will take place Wednesday-Saturday, September 19-22, 7:30 P.M. at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse (150 Convent Avenue, Manhattan). The institution will present Sleep Song (American Premiere) at the Gatehouse on November 30 and December 1 at 7:30 P.M. Tickets for each production are $30 ($24 for Harlem Stage members and Veteran’s) and can be purchased by visiting www.harlemstage.org or calling 212.281.9250 ext. 19/20.
Directed by Patricia McGregor (Hurt Village at Signature Theater Company, Blood Dazzler at Harlem Stage), and featuring a stellar team of collaborators, Holding It Down is a thought-provoking, sometimes harrowing, and ultimately exhilarating combination of music, poetry and song, woven from the actual dreams of young Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. The work explores soldiers’ internal battle with the psychological remnants of war, and their struggles to achieve dignity in an atmosphere of public indifference and widespread disillusionment.
The premiere of Holding It Down culminates three years of development in WaterWorks, the umbrella for all Harlem Stage-commissioned, -produced and -presented works. For Holding It Down, Ladd and McGregor interviewed American veterans of color about their dreams—both their aspirations and the visions they experience while sleeping, which are by turns disturbing, surreal and mundane. Ladd’s lyric adaptations of these accounts are juxtaposed with first-person poetic contributions by veterans Maurice Decaul, who served in Iraq in 2003-04, and Lynn Hill, who was tasked with remotely piloting drones over Afghanistan from a base in Las Vegas.
Both Decaul and Hill have become crucial members of the creative team. As Iyer said in a recent interview for the National Endowment for the Arts blog ArtWorks, “When you’re dealing with veterans in a performing arts environment, it’s not just a project that’s about them, or that’s depicting them; it is them. So you have the reality of their presence erupting into the work — intervening in this artistic experience. So it’s a different kind of feeling, which, for me, was always an important component of this project.”
This collection of veterans’ dream poems, alternately brutal, elegiac and joyous, are set to wide-ranging original music created and performed by Iyer and his electroacoustic ensemble, with video designed and edited by McGregor, forming an original, multidimensional evening-length work.
A diverse cast of artists will perform the world premiere: Iyer (piano, laptop, compositions), Ladd (poetry, vocals, sampler, analog synthesizer), Decaul (poetry), Lynn Hill (poetry), Guillermo Brown (vocals, auxiliary electronics), Liberty Ellman (guitar), Okkyung Lee (cello), Kassa Overall (percussion) and Latasha N. Nevada Diggs (vocals, live electronic processing). The work features video design by Tim Brown, lighting by Alan Edwards, and costumes by Dede Ayite.
World Premier at the Sage Gatehouse in NYC.
Photo by Marc Millman Photography
In keeping with Harlem Stage’s commitment to work that addresses the issues of the world and brings them into perspective in ways that only art can, Holding It Down explores important questions: How is this new generation of veterans suffering and surviving, and what are they able to dream about? How do they go about their irreversibly transformed lives, moving from the unspeakable back to the quotidian? Using the condensed, universal logic of dreams to express and affirm their essential humanity, Holding it Down pays tribute to young men and women returning home and questions the impact of violence on them as well as indirectly on the victims of the war.
Through its Dig Deeper series, which offers audiences pre- and post-performance opportunities to interact with the art and the artists, Harlem Stage, in conjunction with Columbia University, will offer community programming and humanities events to foster deeper engagement with the issues explored in these works. These include visits by the poets to VA facilities; an open rehearsal on Thursday, September 13, for veterans and non-veterans, followed by dinner and discussion; and a post-performance talk on Thursday, September 20.
Holding It Down follows the previous award-winning Iyer/Ladd collaborations In What Language? (2003) and Still Life with Commentator (2006), as well as Iyer’s key role in the tremendously acclaimed, sold-out Cecil Taylor: A Celebration of the Maestro, which Harlem Stage co-presented with ISSUE Project Room in May 2012.
Funding Credits
Holding It Down is a Harlem Stage WaterWorks commission and is produced by Harlem Stage in association with Multiplicity Musics, LLC. Time Warner, Inc. is the lead sponsor of WaterWorks and the Harlem Stage 30th Anniversary Season.
Harlem Stage 30th Anniversary Season Partners also include American Airlines, Arts Engine/Media That Matters, Black Documentary Collective, Vinnette J. Carroll Fund, The City College of New York, Columbia University, The Council of the City of New York, The Ford Foundation, JPMorgan Chase, The Lambent Foundation Fund of the Tides Foundation, Maison Française Columbia University, Manhattan Beer Distributors, MAPP International, MetLife Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, SHS Foundation, Target, Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Corporation, Urban Word NYC, Reginald Van Lee, The Weill Music Institute of Carnegie Hall, and Yamaha.
Writing Workshops for War Veterans NY July 26 – 27, 2012
Performance Workshops for public audience in NYC – February 10, 7:30pm
As covered by: WYNC Radio (USA)
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been well-documented. But composer Vijay Iyer and poet Mike Ladd, along with Iraq war vetMaurice Decaul, are telling war stories in a new way, using the images and scenes culled from their dreams.
“Holding It Down” is the third major collaboration between Iyer and Ladd. It’s a commission from Harlem Stage, and very much a work-in-progress.
The score is stylistically similar to previous collaborations by the pair: ethereal vocals, piano, laptop, cello and percussion. “It has that same kaleidoscopic quality of dreams,” Iyer said. “Even a single dream can take you through a whole range of emotions.”
Maurice Decaul, a 29-year-old veteran, served in Iraq in 2003. Seven years later, his dreams are still littered with fragmented scenes from the country: the pop and crackle of artillery fire, an Iraqi woman’s green dress, the anxiety of night patrols in Nasiriyah.
Ladd is a civilian, but a military buff. Growing up, he said he “mythologized” his father, a decorated World War II veteran who died just after his first birthday. He developed a “perverse obsession” with war in an effort to connect with his father, and said the project is about “me as a civilian deconstructing my fantasy of war in the face of these veterans reconstructing the reality of their lives.”
Ladd and Iyer want more young veterans — especially women — to contribute accounts of their dreams. Here’s what they say:
“We envision developing a ‘dream database,’ in which veterans can contribute, share and communicate through these dream narratives. We also envision veterans telling some of these stories on stage in a creative dialogue with civilian artists.
At this juncture we would love to hear all submissions available describing any sorts of dreams that veterans celebrate or endure. They can be riveting or boring, beautiful or horrible. They can be submitted anonymously or with the intention of performing them personally. Anything goes.”
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