Eurydice: PURE Theatre, 10 Storehouse Row, North Charleston
Lobby Hero: Stelle Di Domani, Chapel Theatre
I Live Next to Horses, Piccolo Fringe, Theatre 99
It occurred to me today that there are a couple of things going on between the big festival’s Amistad and the small festival’s Eurydice. Both are concerned with memory and forgetting, and both make creative use of non-traditional performance spaces. Upon further reflection, I suspect that the latter — staging — divides our tastes more deeply than any other factor.
P&C overview critic Tim Pageknocked Amistad’s opera-in-the-round staging Sunday morning, noting that the singers can’t project their voices to everyone in the audience simultaneously. This was part of an overall lukewarm review that declared the opera disappointing. But here’s the thing: The people who decided to stage the opera that way knew going in that 360-degree opera would present these acoustic challenges. They said as much. You could have criticized Amistad for its acoustics without even attending.
The more interesting question to me: What did the audience get in the tradeoff? Because in the ever-shifting tension between form and content, in the ever-morphing context of a media-saturated culture, the design of a production has perhaps never been more important. I found Amistad’s set design fascinating, and the use of space in dress rehearsal got me excited about the story’s mythic aspects.
One moment I found particularly interesting during today’s artist talk at the Simons Center:
C of C composition professor Trevor Weston asked composer Amistad composer Anthony Davis and director Sam Helfrich whether they were trying to teach people something via their opera. My ears perked up because this issue — the pomo sensibility that says that art that tries to be about something is morally flawed — has been much on my mind this week.
Davis replied that while being didactic is bad, there’s nothing wrong with trying to convey ideas or emotions. He went on to tell a story about watching avant garde composter John Cage recoil in horror as he listened to one of Davis’ arias. Cage’s comment? “You’re trying to make me feel something!”
Said Davis:”I think we have to get past that sort of modernist, post-World War II feeling” that art that attempts to convey an emotion or an idea is somehow manipulative.
Here’s how Helfrich put it: “You don’t want to tell the audience what to think. You want to create a piece that’s so engaging you make the audience want to ask questions.”
So I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Amistad lately (not surprising, given that I’ve shot three Amistad-related events and interviewed a few of its principals), and with my print-edition advancer running Thursday morning before the opera’s preview performance, today seemed a good time to take some of my footage from the dress rehearsal and put together a video essay on the topic.
There’s an odd thing about this opera: It looks for all the world like an intentionally provocative, politically aware, socially conscious work of art. But there’s also this cautious vibe surrounding it, as if the festival wants to make sure talk about the controversial subject doesn’t overwhelm talk about the music, or the staging, etc.
My take? As composer Anthony Davis put it, art isn’t politics, but art can be political. And it sure sounds as if the people who put on this production delved seriously into their explorations of history and current events as they worked up the concept for this presentation.
Call it whatever you like: I say it’s ambitious, with all the mythic aspirations of classic European opera but deep roots in American (and African) soil. Let me show you why I think people will be talking about this opera all festival — and beyond.
There are plenty of reasons to pay attention to Amistad this season. It’s an opera — which always means a high profile at Spoleto USA — it’s leading things off with this year’s eve-of-the-festival preview, it christens the restored Memminger Auditorium, and the festival staff has clearly invested a lot of energy in building a program of related events around the production.
Earlier today I toted the camera down to Memminger Auditorium for a meet-the-press session with some of the big guns from Amistad. I came away fairly well impressed by the creative commitment I saw on display there. Read the rest of this entry »
Entries (RSS)