Capturing the life of an artist is always a challenge. So how do you take on a polymath like Denver’s Vance Kirkland?
Kirkland (1904-1981) was a nationally known artist and teacher whose career traversed realism, surrealism and the abstract. Three of his paintings grace Boettcher Concert Hall.
Harnessing the myriad elements of Kirkland’s career was the storytelling quandary facing Hugh Grant, overseer of the artist’s legacy through the Vance Kirkland Foundation and Museum of Fine and Decorative Art in Denver.
The solution: dance, one profoundly visual form interpreting another.
The result: “The Artist and the Muse,” a documentary saga fusing biography with choreo-
graphy. It airs at 8 tonight on KRMA-Channel 6.
First broadcast in 2000 as “The Artist and the Muse – Dreamspace,” the film won a Heartland Emmy. It featured the choreography of Martin Fredmann, then-artistic director of the Colorado Ballet, with company dancers portraying Kirkland’s life. The ballet’s only live performances were in the Buell Theatre in 1999.
Tonight’s show features departures from the original stage presentation and broadcast, including additional scenes.
Andrew Thompson, who choreographed the new scenes, said Grant felt the need to “explain some of the questions that weren’t answered the first time. Ballet is not, by its nature, very precise, so the more active your imagination is, the better.”
The ballet is now a creature of the broadcast medium; this means intercuttings, variable-speed images, overlays and interwoven commentary.
More telling are two new scenes, some new interviews with performers and revisions of the original documentary.
These came at the insistence of Grant, who wrote the scenario and devised the score, an amalgam of works by 20th-century composers.
Grant created a compact history of Kirkland in which the man must choose between success in his art or success as a social being. Kirkland proposed marriage three times, and was refused three times. As one perceptive erstwhile bride noted, “I know I’d always come second” to the art.
Grant interprets this as the influence of Kirkland’s muse, both nurturing and implacable. He wanted to probe deeper into this conflict between art and domesticity. Kirkland did marry, but the relationship was rocky.
Feedback from the first documentary indicated audiences liked the abstract segments, in which dancers wore brightly colored unitards that represented Kirkland’s vibrant palette. So Thompson brought deeper emphasis to Kirkland in the studio and his choices as an artist.
“I thought it (this new segment) added a more explosive scene, a climax in the center of the ballet, which I thought would be a good thing,” he said. “And it did explain some of the questions that weren’t answered the first time.”
Thompson, a former dancer with the Colorado Ballet and now the company’s principal répétiteur, portrays the elderly Kirkland as the ballet opens and closes. It is a revolving role with the youthful Kirkland danced by Dimitri Trubchanov, the mature Kirkland by Hesen Weiren, and the successful artist by Meelis Pakri.
Thompson found the task daunting but doable.
“It’s frightening, when you get that big piece of music and nothing’s happening, and you go, ‘Oh, my God,”‘ he said. “And you have three weeks to get it together. But eventually I get a handle on something, and everything grows from that. And then you say, ‘Where did that come from?”‘
Glenn Giffin, now retired, reviewed dance and music for The Denver Post for 32 years.
