In mid-August, The Exponential Pageant offered two new operas from thingNY: a composer-performer collective that fuses experimental and classical sounds with theater and artwork installations. In Joseph White’s You In opposition to Nature, the primary of the 2 works, the performers are seated in entrance of music stands in a starkly spare black field theater. Composer White was impressed by J.Okay. Huysmans’s 1884 novel, À rebours, which is normally translated as In opposition to Nature. White learn this textual content in the course of the pandemic and noticed parallels between the novel, often known as the apotheosis of the French decadent motion, and our mindsets throughout Covid-era social distancing.
In À rebours, the aristocratic protagonist, the rich aesthete, des Esseintes, who seems to have infinite time and recourses, takes us by his indulgent, luxurious redesign of his chateau. Every chapter is dedicated to a unique room or interest. Des Esseintes collects artwork, displays on perfumes, furnishings, journey and Catholicism, and torments and murders a tortoise by inserting gems into its shell. The place droves of 19th century naturalist authors strove to depict social realism or the lifetime of the poor, not less than nominally to drive social change, decadents like Huysmans or Wilde referred to as bullshit. Fact, their works declared, lies in fantasy and creativeness, in artifice and sensory pleasure: social realism with its hypocritical sallies in direction of Victorian wokeness be damned.
What was surprising to bourgeois tastes in 1884 feels extra anxiously acquainted post-2020. The hobbies, isolation, and nihilistic indulgences in White’s opera inform a Covid-era story of hedonistic self-exploration. Huysmans’s experiments in decadence are expressed by White as operatic life hacks. Utilizing a number of the most memorable alternatives tailored from Huysmans’s textual content, and including some good unique scenes of his personal, the textual content is partially sung and partially spoken, with digital and acoustic devices underscoring it. The opera goes at a quick clip, the scenes rushing by like a sequence of fast cuts in a montage sequence.
thingNY performs within the faculty of experimental composer Robert Ashley the place there’s little differentiation between speech and singing. Dave Ruder, thingNY member and a performer in You In opposition to Nature, described the phrasing in White’s opera, quite than the rhythm of the music, as dictating when folks sing. Singers ship the rating at their very own tempo, and the opposite performers discover throughout the phrasing itself a way of delivering their process musically. The impact is of a charged, steel, anxiety-ridden romp by the thoughts of 1 over-indulged wealthy sicko. It’s magical. You In opposition to Nature is a hilarious, grotesque, mind-altering delight from begin to end, from the “mouth organ” synesthesia scene during which our hero indulges in “solos of ouzo, duos of mezcal and rum, sonatas of grappa and wild improvisations of pink gin,” to the hygiene scene during which our hero knocks himself out, Michael Jackson-like, with laughing gasoline so a workforce of medical doctors can carry out all his bodily capabilities for him.
The second work within the competition was Mouthful: a staged exploration of meals, digestion, and bodily frailty, seen by the lens of colonization and ancestry. The stage is ready with a eating room desk laden with meals. The seats are all bathrooms, as in Luis Buñuel’s Phantom of Liberty, the place the diners excrete collectively and excuse themselves to a separate room to eat in non-public. With no single librettist, composer, or director, and a fluid methodology of collaboration, Mouthful’s dreamlike construction takes us on a kaleidoscopic thoughts journey by the digestive observe.
Within the “Garlic Aria” a singer opines on garlic, its preparation and associations, whereas performers on both aspect of him stuff items of bread into his mouth in-between phrases and typically in the course of phrases. Dave Ruder, who carried out the “Garlic Aria” one evening of the manufacturing, described it as “Inviting by meals or by bodily existence these ways in which a lineage, be it genetic or cultural, is invited into your physique and also you’re having these interactions whether or not you’re serious about it or not.”
Regardless of the collaborative course of that went into Mouthful, many items felt like a uncooked expression of the performer’s hyperlink to meals, household, and digestion. An particularly impactful piece carried out by Andrew Livingston expresses a hysterical vulnerability and rage when face-to-face with our ancestry. Riffing on a guitar he shrieks phrases like “you’re dumb, I’m good,” his lanky hair draped over his guitar strings. Mouthful is a uniquely technical feat. All members of thingNY are wonderful sound technicians and their productions are put collectively by technical triage alongside artfully generated musical and theatrical components. The performers put on in-ear headsets and obtain directions whereas performing.
Livingston’s cri de coeur, in the course of all this technical proficiency, is hilarious and efficient. Ruder described the piece as an expression of 1’s ambivalence in direction of one’s ancestors: a connection in addition to a horror at who they have been and what they did. “There’s a line in Andrew’s half that’s ‘my bowels are your bowels.’ We’re the identical individual. I’m shitting the identical factor you’re shitting. The great and the unhealthy is all wrapped up in an extremely messy portrait that’s probably each a bodily physique and an emotional state.”
Ruder’s “messy portrait” description may be utilized to most of the items in Mouthful, the place digestion, music, and household communication type the spine of this selection present of music, speech, and know-how. Each You In opposition to Nature andMouthful enjoin us to hang around awhile in a liminal house between sense and nonsense. This house isn’t at all times comfy, however time spent in it may possibly do a wonderful job of shaking free the cobwebs within the mind and rinsing us momentarily freed from the mundane.
Photographs: Joseph White