Ready to Make the Turn

Despair, optimism and disinterest. Bring a group of creative people together to talk about the millennium, and a healthy dose of each emerges. Audiences, they say, are broadening and are receptive to a mix of media and information, yet it’s still hard to get significant quality work made. There’s the sense that new technology can provide greater access to music, dance, film, TV, visual arts and other new media than ever before, and yet the computer and all it signifies also have the potential to obliterate all that’s good about art.

Contradictions abounded in an animated and wide-ranging discussion this month among five leading figures in the fields of arts and entertainment, none of whom had met before being invited by The Times to gather for the 90-minute chat around a table in a room at the Four Seasons Hotel. Included were Donald McKayle, 69, whose choreography for “It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues” is currently on Broadway and at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood; Alexis Smith, 50, whose public art can be seen locally at the Getty Center and the downtown Convention Center and who just closed a solo show at Margo Leavin Gallery in West Hollywood; Darren Star, 38, creator and executive producer of “Sex and the City,” “Melrose Place” and “Beverly Hills, 90210”; Michael Stipe, 39, R.E.M. lead singer and lyricist and film producer; and Julie Taymor, 46, director of “The Lion King” and the upcoming movie “Titus,” based on Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.”

Despite their differences in background and interests, all of these artists move easily among different media, constantly taking on diverse projects. They also share an interest in observing the world around them, as source material for their work and as a means of staying connected with audiences. How that will play out in the next century, they’re not willing to predict.

Following are excerpts from the conversation:

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Question: We’re here to talk about what it is to be an artist as the millennium approaches. Do you think of this as a turning point?

Julie Taymor: I don’t think much about the millennium; it’s not the Chinese New Year--you know, what millennium is this? What I like about it is the notion of ritual, because as much as I hate organized religion, I think one of the greatest things about people is this constant search for something that is spiritual. The idea that people think towards the millennium, that there might be something that could possibly be a change and take us to another place--psychically, emotionally--is a good thing. It’s what keeps the positive energy of what being human is.

Michael Stipe: Like the “Age of Aquarius,” but on a bigger scale.

Q: So much changed at the beginning of the 20th century, Cubism, the car, the airplane. Maybe if there’s going to be any kind of renewal, it will come after we’ve moved on.

Darren Star: Yes, I think that right now we’re all kind of anachronistic. I mean, it’s kind of a joke among writers on my shows that everything before 2000 is going to seem pretty irrelevant to the generation that comes after 2000.

Donald McKayle: Most everything we think about really only becomes real in retrospect. I have no idea whether 2000 is going to be good or bad. I think that we will have a better hang on what 2000 means come 2001. But right now, I’m just ready to go to work tomorrow.

Alexis Smith: To be absolutely honest, I just turned 50, and people my age--baby boomers--are much more obsessed with their own half-century and less with the coming of the millennium, because it just seems so unbelievable that we went from the ‘60s to this. I think people of my generation had very high hopes in terms of a lot of social problems getting solved. Maybe things get worse before they get better, but I thought at the end of the ‘80s that we had reached a point where people were going to have more consciousness of excess and they were going to turn over a new leaf, but I can’t say that I really see this happening.

Stipe: There are signs of it though, here and there, if you’re an idealist and you’re looking for it. Like rave culture. I’m almost 40, I’m a rave dad, it’s completely not my peer group. But it’s a very different feeling from the kind of groups of young people that have come up since I was a young person. The nucleus of a lot of rave seems not so much to be drugs or the music itself, but really a coming together with peace, love, understanding and respect.

Smith: You mean like the ‘60s.

Stipe: Yeah, but it’s a slightly different take on it, I think. It’s post-AIDS for one thing, so you don’t have the idea that free love is really available. I mean, it is a part of it, but maybe a little more abstracted.

Q: How do those kinds of issues influence your work?

Stipe: I wrote my millennium song before anyone else did, except for Prince. I thought I’d better get this thing in now and seem prescient, rather than a bandwagon jumper, so I wrote a song called “Electrolite,” which is about Los Angeles, flying in at night and seeing the lights and how beautiful it is. But I somehow worked the end of the 20th century in there and made it seem archaic and, really, beyond us. It’s a little preachy, but from that particular pulpit of that part of my work, I’m able to talk about things like separation of mind, body and spirit as something very much of the 20th century, something that’s very much behind us, and of a generation that’s long gone.

McKayle: I think the thing that people think about is Y2K, that’s why they’re thinking about 2000, but other than that, I don’t think there’s a great deal of thought about it.

Q: So let’s forget about the millennium, and let’s talk about now.

Smith: Shall we use it as an occasion of stock taking?

McKayle: When I think there are people in the world that are living as they lived centuries ago--I mean we are a very privileged group of people here. But there are people who have never changed, right here in this country--as you travel through Appalachia. I think that we need to be aware of both sides of the future.

Q: Does that influence your work?

McKayle: Always. I remember doing a work in ‘62, and I had just traveled with the Graham company around the world. It was my first time out of New York City, and the thing that was most revelatory to me was that we grew up thinking about strange and exotic places, but there was so much more similarity in the places we went to. Everywhere I went I heard jazz music, in places where their musical scales had nothing to do with what we’re hearing. I heard it in Japan, heard it in Thailand, heard it in Burma. So that led to a work on jazz. Those kinds of things do influence me very much. And I don’t know when those influences are going to happen; I’m just open to it.

Q: Julie, your work also draws very much from the world as a whole, not one place. Do you think people are more fluent in moving between cultures these days?

Taymor: There’s an openness; I mean, something that’s as commercial as “The Lion King” is such an odd fish, because you’re seeing Asian styles of theater mixed with African styles. It’s a commodity, but it’s introducing people to what are not commodious things; these are ancient theatrical forms. What for me is very important in my work, whether it’s “Titus” the film or an opera or something like “The Lion King,” is how basic and elemental it is.

“Lion King’s” success is about things that are not high-tech, even though it is really a high-tech show. People keep talking about the Internet and how it’s going to change us, and I just don’t buy it because, to me, it’s the content, and that has nothing to do with technology.

Star: I agree with you, I think it’s like the Holy Grail, searching for entertainment on the Internet.

Taymor: There’s nothing. It’s still a bunch of garbage. I use technology in my work--I use it as a tool, but I find that people have become so excited and obsessed; I find it extremely distracting. I know I sound very old-fashioned, but I think it’ll all keep coming down to sweat and blood and sex and things passing from one mouth to another, and airspace and things that just don’t change about what it is to be human.

Smith: You [once] said something [gestures to Stipe] which is absolutely true for what I do. The gist of it was that the form and the content is inseparable. That your form and the thing you do with it, the gesture and the meaning and its embodiment, whether it’s physical or in space or in music or whatever, those things have to be seamlessly wedded together, and that’s the art. And you can’t separate them. I think that’s probably true for all of us, and some people will do really great things with electronics, and some people will do really great things with all kinds of technologies that we can’t even envision right now, and with their bodies in terms of dancing and musical instruments or whatever. It’s the level to which the desire finds its form that makes these things distinguished.

I mean, it’s off the subject of the millennium, but . . .

Stipe: Maybe not so much. How many people at this table feel like they’re doing exactly what they were born to do? Which raises the idea of fate, or what have you.

Smith: Well, I do.

Stipe: I read it in your bio [gestures to Star] that from Day One, or from a very early time in your life, you had an idea that this was the trajectory that you were going to be sent off in.

Star: Yeah. And I think that’s a gift when you have that, and I think that the terrible thing is the people [who] never get to realize what they want to do. And their entire life’s frustrated.

Smith: Did you notice that you both said--and I’ve said it myself--that you started doing it because it was fun.

Stipe: Is that in my biography?

Smith: It’s in yours [gestures to Stipe] and yours [gestures to Star].

Star: I don’t recognize what I say the next week.

Smith: I know you [Star] said you “started doing it because it was fun,” and [Stipe] you’re only going to do it as long as it’s fun.

Stipe: That’s right.

Smith: I mean, it’s only fun when you haven’t got it quite all figured out and squared away yet, and you haven’t exactly done it before in this way. The millennium is kind of an arbitrary thing. I think we’re all more involved with what’s the next thing we’re going to do and how is that going to fit into the world.

Stipe: Right.

Smith: And then, is it going to help? Is it going to hurt or what does it mean in terms of what’s going on?

Q: How much do you think about your audiences when you’re having “fun.” Making art is very private--any of the activities that all of you do is at least partly private.

Smith: But you’ve purposely selected artists with big audiences.

Q: Right. All of you have big audiences. So where does the audience fit in when you’re working?

McKayle: Well, with me, I know that when I get a response from an audience, I get information that I sometimes find very valuable. Sometimes I’m surprised. Sometimes disappointed, sometimes happy, but I get the information, and I think that’s very important.

Star: Audience is definitely important. In TV, you have to have it. Doing a film, music or anything, it’s the same thing: You’re first doing it for yourself, and before it goes out there, you have to reach the point where you like it.

With a show like “Sex and the City,” I love the idea of putting in my view of the world, and the other writers’ [views] that I work with, and that people are getting it. We can reference everything, from the music you do [looks at Stipe] to the art that you guys do [looks at Smith and Taymor] to Buddhism and whatever anyone’s into at any given time. I think the audience out there is much more sophisticated than people give them credit for.

Smith: The barriers between high culture and low culture and entertainment and art and good taste and bad taste are really getting eroded in a major way in terms of the typical definitions. Which is great for artists, but it’s making a lot of other people really nervous.

Stipe: What people?

Smith: People who are relying on their ability to do the right thing and purchase the right thing and own the right thing. There are no rules, and I think in a way that’s really good. It’s really threatening, and then in some ways it’s also really good, because it means that people can put together a real eclectic mix, and they have to decide what they want to be themselves.

Q: Let’s come back to the topic of feeling like you’re doing what you were born to do.

Stipe: I would like to say that I like to think that that is not particularly elitist or particular only to artists. The idea that you’re born with an idea of what you are going to be. You know, it’s very romantic, and we all have pretty sexy jobs compared to Joe Grab-a-Sandwich.

Smith: But I don’t think we all knew what we were going be. I just think that it worked out, that we managed to find something that was really perfectly tuned to us. I’m not sure that that’s elitist at all. A lucky hand to draw.

Star: It’s great to have a zooming career, but I think that passion could be for anything.

Stipe: Towards repairing Hondas.

Taymor: I mean, you wanted to be a fireman, surely, when you were a kid? And I wanted to be an ice-skating ballerina--they have nothing to do with what I’m doing now.

McKayle: Are you sure?

[Laughter]

Taymor: [Laughs] Well, I’m going to do my next show on ice, so I think I’m coming close.

Stipe: I do like the subversive element that being creative includes. I find more as a singer, less as a film producer, and maybe I would include as a photographer, that I’m very selfish about what inspires me and why I’m doing the work that I do. And I think I have a pretty good check on my view, all things considered, but I very selfishly do most of my work for myself and then for a very limited group of people in music, the two guys that I’m creating music with. And beyond that, I’m hoping that there’s an audience. I’ve come to the point that I don’t feel like I’m the only person that has these particular thoughts or ideas, and if something occurs to me, it’s probably occurring to a lot of other people. I like to think that by pleasing myself in that work that I’m going to throw out to the world, there’s going to be some people that are going to get it and they’re going to respond to it.

Star: But you’re also in a much better position than most to get it out there. I’m sure a lot of people have a lot of the ideas at any given time that I might, but I have a platform to get stuff out there.

Smith: It depends on what your medium is. For example, in television and film, I think you can do the world a service by doing things that are stranger, weirder, more personal, because the audiences are already built in. Doing things that are more unusual and artistic and eccentric just educates this audience that already exists.

About 20 years ago, I started dividing my time between doing the work in my studio which goes to galleries and museums, and doing works in public places, and now I spend at least half my time trying to put big, permanent architectural artworks into public situations. I think it really means something to put something out in the world that’s free, that somebody really cared about, and obviously put a lot of time and money into, that anybody can stumble into whether they have the taste or the knowledge. And I think the same is true of popular entertainment.

Taymor: Just the word “artist” sounds antiquated. In the movie business, it’s the kiss of death to have an art film.

The road to “Titus” . . . in the 19th century, it was considered over the top and not in polite taste. But it’s very much a 20th century piece. And it’s sort of an amazing phenomenon, but not without absolute torture to get it [made]. And then the next thing is the marketplace for it, and it’ll be interesting to see how that’ll play out.

Stipe: See, this is where what you were saying about the Internet seemed a little, slightly, close-minded. I don’t have a computer, I gave mine away. I was on the Internet really early on, and I found it to be incredibly tedious. But I see the Internet and emerging technologies as something that can dramatically alter distribution of what’s out.

Taymor: That’s OK. That’s a marketing tool.

Stipe: To me it’s such a great thing. The distribution systems that are set up, whether it be Hollywood or records, are so limited and so closed down, and so formatted that you don’t make a major film that’s under 20 minutes or it’ll never make a scene, period. And now with the emerging technologies or cable TV or what have you, at least you can put it out there and you know that there might be an audience somewhere that’s going to know that you’ve done this thing. I find that exciting.

Taymor: But I think that’s a good use for it. It’s an information network. But where it’s not good, and potentially even dangerous, is when it is instead of [the real thing].

Stipe: I don’t think it can be, though.

Taymor: But the people don’t bother to go. I mean it’s the same, in a very simple way--if they can get the videocassette at home, a lot of these people aren’t going to bother with the movie.

McKayle: There is something about the beauty of what you do which cannot be put into digital modes. Maybe, in the near future, something will come out from it that will be absolutely wonderful. I know in dance we’re doing a lot of motion capture now [digitizing motion for use in animation and other recordings], and I think something is going to come out of that. But it’s not going to be like seeing those muscles on the stage.

Taymor: We started this discussion saying that we’re going to look at this as an antiquated era, which I don’t agree with at all. I think it’s going to be looked at with longing.

Q: Isn’t art a form of play for the audience too?

Taymor: Art is really more entertainment. Nobody really thinks about art. They think about entertainment.

Star: It’s the critics who decide what’s art and what’s not art, and for everyone else it’s a form of entertainment in one way or another.

Taymor: And leisure. I was in Indonesia, this was in my early 20s, for four years, and I was in a culture--Balinese and Javanese culture--where there wasn’t a word for art. In Bali, there was no word for “art” because that’s what people do. It’s just part of your devotion as a human being.

McKayle: It’s a part of life rather than apart from life.

Star: This is a commercial culture, not a religious culture, and the art came from commercialism here. In Europe, it has its roots in religion. I think the fact that there’s a tradition of art in Europe and funding for arts is something that goes back to the days of the church. And here it’s all about what the market’ll bear in terms of greater product.

Smith: Yeah, but there’s an irony, which is that while I’m not sure that America is a really good place in terms of the appreciation of art, because it isn’t really built into the culture, it’s a really great place to work as an artist, because you don’t have the weight of history hanging over you. You can take what you want, you can appropriate and collage things and take things from different cultures.

Stipe: And especially in Los Angeles.

Taymor: When I’m in Europe, there’s excitement about America. They say there’s an energy in American art. There’s an enthusiasm and optimism. It’s very hard to find young artists in Italy because of this weight.

Smith: After I’ve been in Europe for a few months, I know this is really crass, but all I want is to see an Elvis impersonator parachute into the Chuck E. Cheese parking lot. I mean it’s so cultural and it’s so beautiful and it’s so whatever that there’s some kind of popular culture, like extreme Las Vegas fix, that is missing, and that I need to feel stimulated.

Star: And then, you know, you wonder what effect American culture has. I mean it has an enormous effect worldwide because it gets exported in such a huge way. I was in Indonesia a couple months ago, and I had a guy that was taking me to a great Buddhist temple in Java, and this guy had grown up there, and just spending an hour with him got me incredibly centered. And then I discovered he was a huge fan of “Melrose Place.” First of all, I didn’t even realize that “Melrose Place” was on there. But it was interesting to me. He can embrace both; he was enjoying it as just pure, wacky entertainment.

Q: Isn’t technology what’s allowed that to happen?

Stipe: Four generations down the way, you know, is that kid going to be the same?

Star: As us?

Stipe: Well, I’m fascinated by that kind of cargo cult thing, you know, it’s what’s happening in Indonesian music right now, and also in North African music, in Morocco, specifically. They’re starting to sample hundred-year-old melodies and songs that have been around for forever. And starting to work them into kind of more of a trip-hop beat, which is kind of amazing.

I mean the music alone is amazing, but it’s also amazing what’s happening now. I just hope that somewhere down the road, four generations, eight generations, 12 generations from now, we haven’t as a culture completely decimated every other culture there.

Maybe it’s a little conflated, but an example of technology moving us away from one thing and towards another. And maybe we don’t know where that’s going, or whether it’s a good thing. In the course of my lifetime, or even as a musician--our first record coming out--it was still referred to as a “record.” It’s barely a record anymore, it’s gone through the cassette, then to CD, then to DVD or mini-disc.

The music that’s being chased for this new technology has come full circle, to where it’s very dependent upon 12-inch records in order to get the sound that you want, for DVD or mini-disc. So in a way it all comes right back around.

Smith: Isn’t that an argument for real objective experience, as opposed to electronic experience, in a weird way, because the bad part of all this musical innovation is that you can’t play the music when the hardware changes, right? Isn’t that what you’re saying?

Stipe: Right. Keep the hardware. *

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THE PANELSITS

Michael Stipe

The lead singer and lyricist for R.E.M., Stipe, 39, and his Single Cell Productions also are becoming known for producing films, including “Velvet Goldmine” (1998) and the current and acclaimed “Being John Malkovich.” Also, with R.E.M., he scored the upcoming movie about Andy Kaufman, “Man on the Moon,” whose title is taken from an R.E.M. song Stipe wrote about the comedian.

Julie Taymor

Director Taymor, 46, whose roots are as an avant-garde designer-director for theater and opera, gave Disney Theatricals credibility. Her “The Lion King”--still the biggest hit on Broadway--arrives in L.A. next fall. “Titus,” her film of Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus,” is due out at Christmas, and her theater production of “The Green Bird” will be on Broadway next spring.

Alexis Smith

Known for using found images and objects in poetic assemblages, Smith, 50, was one of the first three artists commissioned to make a major permanent public work at the Getty Center in Brentwood. She’s also done permanent works in La Jolla; Columbus, Ohio; and for the L.A. Convention Center, among others. She just closed a solo show at Margo Leavin Gallery in West Hollywood.

Donald McKayle

Having created more than 50 works that are in repertories of companies ranging from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and San Jose Ballet to the Lula Washington Dance Theater, the work of choreographer McKayle, 69, can be seen in “It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues,” on Broadway and at the Geffen Playhouse. His “Death and Eros” premieres at UCLA’s Royce Hall in February.

Darren Star

Executive producer of HBO’s “Sex and the City,” Star, 38, is among the sharpest chroniclers of the younger set. He os a creator of Fox’s hit series “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “Melrose Place” and CBS’ short-lived “Central Park West.” He’s scheduled to produce pilots for an hourlong Wall Street drama for Fox, and a half-hour twentysomething sitcom for Warner Bros., for the 2000-2001 season.