thingNY's Three Experimental Operas

This weekend, thingNY put on three experimental operas in three nights in Moe’s Taxi Garage in Long Island City, Queens. They played on a rotating double bill, so I got to see all three operas in just two nights! But after seeing one of them twice, I wished I’d gone to all three nights and seen them all twice. But hindsight’s twenty-twenty, and I’m glad I saw the shows I did. One of the great perks of living in New York is that I’ve got the opportunity to see things like operas in abandoned taxi garages, and I’d be a fool not to take advantage.

Jeff Young and Paul Pinto, Patriots, Run for Public Office on a Platform of Swift and Righteous Immigration Reform, Lots of Jobs, and a Healthy Environment: an Opera by Paul Pinto and Jeffrey Young

This is the opera I saw both nights that, and it made me wish that I’d gone all three nights! An intersection of music and political oratory, this copiously titled little gem created an aural collage of violin (played by Young) and xylophone (played by Pinto) tones, lyrical song, and the hyperbolically shallow speeches that we’re used to politicians defecating from their mouths. The first night I walked away with the sense that, while what they were saying was nothing new, the way they said it was fresh and engaging. The second night I got to see just how fresh! It turns out that, in addition to glad-handing and working the audience, they were improvising with each other, creating some of the answers to their opponent’s questions on the spot. In this context of this vibrant fluidity, I got to see a deeper level of their politico personas – while coated in copious layers of slime, and totally ignorant or indifferent to some issues, in regards to others they were really quite sincere. I’m sure it’s an ambivalently complimentary look at real-life politicians – while they may be dirtbags, they initially got into public office to make their communities better places. No matter how much they degrade their integrity to win the next election, a bit of that altruism still exists.

ADDDDDDDDD

It’s pronounced like the psychological condition, not the mathematical process. This piece was hit and miss: where Young and Pinto’s piece was engaging in its extroversion, ADDDDDDDDD was alienating in its introversion. Ostensibly to show the way an ADD mind works, it began with the discontinuous ramblings of four performers, later to be joined by a fifth. It seems intent was to frustrate the audience with the jarring lack of continuity, but my personal reaction was to check out. They were more successful, in my case, later in the show when they incorporated music into their monologing: then it felt as though they were pushing this frustration right into my lap. It made me sit up; snap out of my daydream. When they were demonstrating something that takes place exclusively in another’s head, my reaction was to go into my own. It took a rhythm to bridge the gap between minds. As long as the rhythm was there, but the melody discordant, I was uncomfortable – I felt the frustration I was only shown in the beginning. When the melody and rhythm slipped into the rollicking familiarity of a drinking song, I became comfortable. By nature or nurture, my brain is wired to respond favorably to that kind of traditional composition. How it aligned with the disjointed parts of the play, I’m not entirely sure. But if “disjointed” is to be the operative word, then that’s probably it. It fit by not fitting.

Un Jour Comme Un Autre

This one’s a classic. A 1975 composition by Vinko Globokar, this tells the story of a young female dissident’s arrest and torture. I knew that going into the opera, but for maybe the first half I couldn’t tell very clearly from the context of the performance that that was what was happening. At fault, I believe, was a weak use of visuals. Besides dramatic lighting, and a close-up feed of the soprano’s (Gelsey Bell) face played on a small screen in front of her, I felt like I was at a recital. A very good recital, perhaps, but certainly not a theatrical event like an opera. It started to become more alive when Pinto (who was the music director and percussionist for this) rolled the cellist (Isabel Castellvi) up under a tarp, and she began to play with one hand. Bell fell to the floor and sang into the floor, the feed still on her face. Pinto thrashed the ground with heavy chains. The abandoned taxi garage, with its cavernous white cinderblocks, took on the austere immobility of a torture chamber. It was all a move in the right direction, but I couldn’t help feeling that there could have been more. I don’t mean anything graphic – the representative nature of the performance really augmented the harrowing aesthetic of the piece. The more you show, the less the audience has to imagine, and imagining torture is so much more horrifying than having it drawn out for you in gory detail. But any kind of movement, even to the extent of hiring on a dancer, would have made Un Jour Comme Un Autre so much more alive.