Genre Bashing in the Bardo
Demons, dancers, roller skaters and Sufi music at the PROTOTYPE Festival
If there’s an artistic collaboration you hadn’t yet imagined, there’s a good chance you might experience it at PROTOTYPE, the experimental opera & music theater festival that offers a provocative range of genre blending works at it’s annual lineup in New York City. Roller skating and Moroccan spiritual music? Why not? Yesterday evening at Art Bath, a performance salon at the Blue Building in Manhattan, the ensemble Saha Gnawa joined forces with Manuela Agudelo Roberts’s merry band of skaters. They danced to the trance-like rhythms of Gnawa – a genre of Sufi music that meshes North African and Arab melodies with West African polyrhythms. It was pure joy.
Earlier in the evening – which was curated by Mara Driscoll and Liz Yilmaz, the co-founders of Art Bath – the bass Solomon Howard, who is singing Sparafucile in the Met Opera’s Rigoletto, was accompanied by the brilliant jazz pianist Mark G. Meadows during an engaging rendition of spirituals and songs including We Are the World and Some Enchanted Evening. The puppeteers Julian Crouch and Saskia Lane offered the magical Birdheart, in which a piece of crinkly brown paper morphs into human and animal shapes in a transformation both tender and funny, an ode to freedom and the urge to fly.
The theme of transformation was even more acute in the choreographer Annie Rigney’s “…she was becoming untethered….”, in which a woman wearing a period dress with hoop skirt – her contorted expressions and movements conveying an internal struggle – danced to baroque music sung by the countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen and the soprano Danielle Buonaiuto.
As the thereminist Rob Schwimmer performed Saint-Saëns’s The Swan, the woman’s movements became more dramatic before she cast off her dress to expose a slim-fitting black negligee. I thought I was imagining things when I saw the discarded dress moving on the floor….. and then watched another female dancer emerge from the heap of fabric to take her place. It was like a contemporary incarnation of Mother Ginger's huge hoop skirt in The Nutcracker. I found the performance – which featured the dancers Motrya Kozbur, Celeste Goldes and Thomas Hogan – strange, powerful and deeply moving.
It really was some enchanted evening, and definitely more my vibe than the ghoulish opening night of PROTOTYPE’s Bardo + Black Lodge on January 11 at BRIC Arts Media in Brooklyn. I’m a total wimp when it comes to horror and frequently have to close my eyes during violent scenes in movies and television shows. But Black Lodge – a opera-film about a tormented writer composed for tenor, rock band and string quartet by David T. Little – marked the first time that I’ve had to close my eyes during an opera festival. When the decibel level of the amplified music reached painful levels, I also had to close my ears, using the earplugs thoughtfully provided to all attendees by the ushers.
Is this officially a sign of middle age? I’m now the person who has to wear earplugs at the rock opera?
Black Lodge, set in the Bardo – which in Buddhism is the place between death and rebirth – is inspired by the late filmmaker David Lynch, the surrealist writer William S. Burroughs and the French poet Antonin Artaud. Beat generation poet Anne Waldman wrote the non-narrative libretto. PROTOTYPE, co-founded in 2013 by opera visionary Beth Morrison and the HERE Arts Center, has explored mental illness with brilliant works such as Philip Venables’s 4.48 Psychosis and Ellen Reid’s Prism. But Black Lodge is by far the most disturbing piece.
The tenor Timur Bekbosunov (who usually goes by his first name) sang live on stage while viewers watched a film showing him being entombed in clay by a creepy nurse. She injects him with various substances as his expressive face contorts while strapped to a gurney. I believe a finger was sliced off at one point. Timur is mesmerizing vocally and theatrically, onscreen and off, but I’ll admit I was relieved when it was all over.
But if you’re in the mood for an intense, unsettling experience, listen to the music, whose rock and heavy metal elements are tempered with lyrical string quartet interludes. Little has spoken about the difference between art and entertainment: as a song cycle, Black Lodge is a powerful work of art that will wrench you from your comfort zone.
Opera, of course, is rife with delusions and hallucinations, not to mention a wide array of unpleasant deaths. Black Lodge was actually the second entombment I witnessed in a week. On January 14th, I saw Verdi’s Aida, which ends when the lovers Radamès and Aida are entombed together. I liked Michael Mayer’s new production at the Metropolitan Opera, with its glittering costumes and visual splendor. I even enjoyed the modern, muscular (and much-maligned) choreography for the troupe of male dancers.
I agree with other observers that injecting Indiana Jones-style anthropologists as silent witnesses was sometimes distracting, but I thought having them cart away artifacts in the Triumphal Scene worked well. The main issue is that this isn’t a cast for the ages: Angel Blue has a beautiful voice but doesn’t quite own the role of Aida yet. As Radames, Piotr Beczała had mostly recovered from his opening night cold and sang well, although a few notes went awry in the final scene.
And back to the Bardo: Black Lodge’s pre-show was as intense as the rock-opera itself. “What do you deserve? Punishment” scolded a crimson-clad dominatrix in the Tormented Writers room as two hapless writers tapped away on typewriters and stuffed their mouths with scraps of paper. I imagine that most writers and performers have had dreams about missed deadlines, mistakes and memory slips. I certainly have. But worse was the recurring dream I had many years ago in which I’d inexplicably shout “bravo” at random and inappropriate moments during performances. I have never dared utter a bravo since.
But PROTOTYPE isn’t really a bravo-ing type of festival. It’s more a “Hell, yeah!” type of festival. The Pakistani-American singer songwriter Arooj Aftab certainly deserved the approval shouted by audience members when I heard her perform excerpts from her album Night Reign on January 16th at HERE’s Dorothy B. Williams Theater.
According to her overwrought bio on the festival website:
She eludes categorical capture through an expansive repertoire of study, including the techniques of music production and engineering as well a sprawling vocal practice that moves with cunning intention through and alongside jazz, South Asian classical music, pop, and blues. With and from these living, mercurial forms Aftab labors in design of something that she adoringly refers to as “global soul.”
Genres be damned, Aftab’s music is gorgeous and deeply expressive. She sings in English and Urdu, her soulful vocals layered over virtuoso, introspective solos by the harpist Maeve Gilchrist, the percussionist Engin Gunaydin and the bass player Zwelakhe-Duma Bell Le Pere.
Aftab interspersed the music with funny, profanity laden observations about her dating life and offered whiskey shots to audience members, a nod to her melancholy, dreamy song Whiskey. She also performed Raat Ki Rani, one of her most popular songs.
Speaking of recurring nightmares…… There’s something Bardo-like about this moment in time, with the inauguration of you know who tomorrow. Is this really happening? Are we really doing this again? Will we experience a national rebirth after this tragedy? Am I just dreaming?
Monday is, of course, also Martin Luther King Day. In honor of Dr. King’s birthday, the pianist Lara Downes and the Los Angeles Master Chorale recorded Margaret Bonds’s I Believe in the Prince of Peace, Credo No. 5 at Disney Concert Hall in L.A.
A trailblazing Black composer who died in 1972, Bonds wrote the piece during the Civil Rights movement, inspired by a poem by the writer and scholar W.E.B. du Bois, a founding member of the NAACP.
And see you on the other side.
All photos and video are mine unless otherwise credited.
Hello, thank you for writing this article! Could you please update the information to note that the music for the Annie Rigney Choreography at Art Bath was performed by Kyle P. Walker (piano) and Katherine Dennis (violin)? They played with Aryeh, Danielle, and Rob. Thanks again!
Another great piece!