TBA:19 FESTIVAL
Bernard Marie-Koltès described his 1985 work “In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields“ like an encounter between a bluesman and a punk. Perhaps more than an exploration of mercantile activity or the transaction of late-night cruising, his play is a speculation on the individual’s capacity to know another.
Adam Linder’s new creation with a score by Ethan Braun, and staging by Shahryar Nashat, is an opera inspired by Koltes’ preoccupation with ‘the deal’.
“The WANT“ is an exchange sung by four performers, with a libretto that is littered with interjections from Jacques Derrida to Missy Elliott. Linder approaches the business of language as the Self’s gateway drug between rational thought and rhapsodic expression. Doesn’t the interplay of language rendered in vocal music parallel the dynamics of various markets?
The singers, actors and dancers Jess Gadani, Justin F. Kennedy, Jasmine Orpilla, and Roger Sala Reyner are ‘Offerors’ and ‘Offerees’ enrobed as the key archetype of mercantile Europe. Engaging a virtuosic performativity, these players embody the spiritual tradition of that figure: a constant trade between a reflexive mind and sensuous being.
Evolving from a calculated and tense attraction of opposites in Act 1, to an intriguing collective intimacy in Act 2, these four figures surrender to their individual desires and the grandest of theatrical desires: the contract between performer and audience.
Direction: Adam Linder
Music: Ethan Braun With Jessica Gadani, Justin F. Kennedy, Jasmine Orpilla, Roger Sala Reyner
Stage & Light: Shahryar Nashat
Costume: Adam Linder
Libretto in cooperation with: Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Dramaturgical Advise: Ariel Efraim Ashbel
Management: Andrea Niederbuchner
Production Assistant: Anna von Glasenapp
Technical Director: Sebastian Zamponi
Production: Adam Linder.
Coproduction: HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, Los Angeles, Kampnagel Hamburg.
Funded by: Hauptstadtkulturfonds.
NOTES ON THE MUSIC by Ethan Braun
Opera works hard to hide how it's made. There's a history to that: Wagner would not stand looking at "the mechanical movements of the band [...] the whole peculiar working apparatus of an orchestral production." The sounds that comprise the opera were to seem as though they came from nowhere; the posturing and ornamentations of the voices that sing it, the virtuosity with which the musicians play, and the traditions of musical transcendence on which each relies contributes to opera's mystification, to its desired sense of transportation elsewhere once the big red curtain's pulled back.
„The Want“ works hard to show its bodies in motion, while its music dreams of them. Its orchestra is made up of digitally reproduced audio samples of violins, synths, pianos, saxophones, guitars, of me playing Monteverdi's "Lamento della Ninfa," and of various debris found in the Santa Monica mountains north of Los Angeles. With nobody in "the pit," I wanted the orchestra to play outside so to speak, at a periphery of Opera, the Theater, and New Music from whence it might remember what it used to do.
The Offerors (Justin Kennedy and Jess Gadani) and Offerees (Jasmine Orpilla and Roger Sala Reyner) sing through, sing to, and sing along with the orchestra, moving with ease amongst operatic, spoken, sung, intoned, and other kinds of voice. They flirt with this orchestra of disembodied sounds, but can it do the same with them? Can it recover something from them? They from it? The score's dedicated with admiration to its performers – Justin Kennedy, Jess Gadani, Jasmine Orpilla, and Roger Sala Reyner, and to Adam Linder.
Adam Linder (b. 1983, Sydney) lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin. He makes stage works, provides Choreographic Services and creates costume. The survey exhibition FULL SERVICE (Services No. 1 - 5) was presented by CCA Wattis Institute (San Francisco, 2018) and Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (2019). Linder also recently created She Clockwork, a commission from the VAC Foundation, which was presented in Venice, Italy. His upcoming projects include an exhibition of new work at MoMA New York in 2020. Recent solo or two person shows include South London Gallery, Kunsthalle Basel, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. More generally, Linder's works have been commissioned, presented or hired by HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Kampnagel, Hamburg; Sadler’s Wells, London; American Realness, NYC; MoCA, Los Angeles; 356 Mission, LA; Frieze LIVE, London; and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Linder participated in the 20th Biennale of Sydney, Liverpool Biennial and Made in LA at the Hammer Museum. He has performed with the Michael Clark Company, Meg Stuart’s Damaged Goods, and The Royal Ballet London.
Ethan Braun (Los Angeles) writes music reliant on processed audio samples, sampler instruments, and live performance. Current projects include an opera for NYC ensemble Contemporaneous for the 2020-21 season with artist Kenturah Davis and librettist Vikram Devasthali; a commission by The Shed (NYC) with jazz pianist Richard Sears, filmmaker Clara Cullen, and architect Yael Ginosar (2019); recordings of chamber and solo music with Figureight Records (NY), an evening-length work for Ensemble Klang (NL), and an album with Sam Gendel. Braun has written for the LA Philharmonic, Ensemble Klang, Shanghai Symphony, Albany Symphony, New York Youth Symphony, and Talea Ensemble (NYC). His work has been presented across Europe, in Mexico, the US, Argentina, and China, including Carnegie Hall. Braun was nominated for the 2017 Gaudeamus prize, and is a doctoral candidate at Yale University.
With support from the Center for the Art of Performance, UCLA. Production Adam Linder. Coproduction HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance, Los Angeles, Kampnagel Hamburg. Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.