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By BEN RATLIFF
Published: September 20, 2012
“Holding It Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project,” the third long-form collaboration between the jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyerand the poet Mike Ladd, is a multimedia work about minority veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It’s from the inside: about divided selves and awful dreams, the opioids the ex-soldiers take to sleep, and their desire to return to who they were before they reported for duty. It’s dense, intense, provocative and honorable.
“Dolophine Methadose Lortab Norco Vicodin” went the rapped rhythmic chant in “REM Killer,” one of the production’s 18 songs, set over vamps and acoustic or electronic grooves that kept stuttering and catching themselves up short. And later:
Cast spells little fairy
push the poachers of sleep
out of my heart beat
away from my pillow
out of the forest
the underbrush blocking
my meadow of rest.
It was a poem by Mr. Ladd, inspired by an interview with a soldier named Kirk, from Lexington, Ky.
The words in “Holding It Down,” directed by Patricia McGregor, which opened a four-night, world-premiere run at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse on Wednesday night, come from various places. Some were purely the poems of Mr. Ladd, who is not a veteran but who formed part of the project’s singing-reciting-vocalizing front line. Some were purely the poems of Maurice Decaul and Lynn Hill, who are veterans as well as poets and also took their places in that line.
Some were adaptations of words from soldiers identified by first names: Rashan from Queens, Brad from Chester, N.C. And some were nonpoetic video monologues from still other soldiers, talking about how they coped in war and after. Two more performers interpreted the poems, singing and processing their voices: Guillermo E. Brown and Latasha N. Nevada Diggs.
Behind the voices were video montages, and through it all was music, played by Mr. Iyer on piano and electronics, Okkyung Lee on cello, Liberty Ellman on guitar and Kassa Overall on drums. All were given some time, in Mr. Iyer’s arrangements, to be heard at one point or another. (Mr. Iyer, the best-known musician on stage, held back in deference to the torrent of words. You could identify the music as his through its restlessness and rhythmic turns, but he didn’t let you hear his true piano sound in a proper, self-possessed solo until nearly the end.)
Mr. Brown — who’s otherwise been known as a free-jazz drummer and electronic-music producer — emoted lines in a vulnerable, rangy, new-R&B voice, sometimes like a less-polished Frank Ocean. Ms. Diggs, a poet and curator, is an imposing reader whose singing couldn’t reach the level of her charisma; she almost hijacked the work a couple of times — especially in “Mess Hall,” performed as a solo vocal work with delay and loop effects.
“With all the stainless steel/from all of my meals/all my short life,” she talked and sang through her character, “I could build a bridge home.”
The 90-minute show is jagged by design, but it finally coheres — through the strength of the music, through the balance between the level Mr. Decaul and the passionate Ms. Hill, and through the echoing of ideas from poems and monologues. At one point a soldier on video mentions the change in how one experiences joy before and after military service; at a few other strong moments, references are made to the joyful or violent meaning colors in the imagination, and the notion of a “monster” inside us.
Ms. Hill, especially, seemed to be stepping forth and tying these themes together. Her poems “Capacity” and “Name” addressed what it’s like to operate Predator drones, the unmanned aerial vehicles that fire missiles by remote control, and the desire for the soldier doing it to separate the name on her badge from the name she calls herself.
“Dreams in Color,” her final poem, set out her ideal of a psychologically healed postmilitary life. “When I dream, I dream of normalcy,” she read. “I dream the color of peace.”
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