Gelsey Bell’s piece, the title of which, a phonetic alphabet rendering of the phrase pronounced both morning or mourning, is past the textual content show capabilities of parterre field, is a candy and kooky piece of speculative fiction that stretches its imaginative powers to a distant future, lengthy after some unnamed disaster has wiped humanity from the earth.
Staged within the catacombs of Brooklyn’s Inexperienced-wood Cemetery, this iteration of [morning/mourning] was a trimmed and simplified model of the piece that premiered finally 12 months’s Prototype Competition—the “MTV Unplugged model” as Loss of life of Classical Creative Director Andrew Ousley referred to it earlier than Thursday’s efficiency.
About these catacombs: Loss of life of Classical has fulfilled the spirit of its title by staging live shows in crypts and cemeteries, and the Inexperienced-wood Cemetery, with its sprawling hills, its serene timber, and its centuries of historical past makes for a very compelling venue. Slender, largely unadorned, with curving partitions and low ceilings, the catacombs date to the 1850s and resemble the inside of a submarine carved from cool grey stone.
The catacombs weren’t solely a visually putting locale for [morning/mourning]; the lengthy stone hallway proved an acoustic match for Bell’s densely textured compositions. Sung by 5 voices and accompanied by an eclectic mixture of devices together with accordion, handheld harp, and synth drone, the piece’s music was heavy on sweeping hums and tone-clustered waves of overlapping sound. This wide-open vocal high quality was amplified by the catacombs, with the resonating chambers of the singers’ chests mirrored and magnified by the resonating chamber of the stone partitions.
Elsewhere, Bell’s music was folksy and melodic, approaching the themes of extinction and catastrophe with a surprisingly buoyant have an effect on. In truth, the ensemble introduced the piece’s lightly-sketched narrative—human extermination adopted by the emergence, evolution, and eventual collapse of a brand new, post-human species, all traced throughout a number of million years—with an oddly upbeat directness.
In moments of spoken monologue, the place the performers narrated the trajectory of the Earth’s ecosystem or the rise and fall of the “Blueklungs” (a sort of clever octopus), the impact was that of a very surrealistic Nature Channel documentary. It was an sudden tone for the chilly stone and moody ambiance of the catacombs—an odd juxtaposition that I’m undecided actually labored. The acoustic worth of all that marble apart, the piece’s expository tone appeared to desire a planetarium, not a mausoleum.
Easing the best way was the forged of 5 singers, together with Bell herself, in addition to Aviva Jaye, Brian McCorkle, Mia Pak, and Paul Pinto, who introduced this materials with an eerie sort of allure, smiling placidly on the viewers whereas they relayed the migratory patterns of the ever-evolving Blueklungs. All 5 singers had strikingly distinctive vocal tones—and extra putting nonetheless for his or her capability to mix seamlessly collectively in moments of ensemble singing.
Usually, the piece’s grand-scale narrative was supplemented by a sort of montage aesthetic, presenting picture after picture of life after human society: a yard plagued by damaged tile, fragments of a tea-pot with the paint rubbed off, an animal naively crossing a former nationwide border. In a single track, a playfully nostalgic tackle the human customs of the world that was, a singer reminisces, “I appreciated their sustaining fealty to two-dimensional imagery in rectangular frames.” A charmingly alien description of images, sure, however “a sustaining fealty to two-dimensional imagery” additionally makes a good description of Bell’s libretto.
This mixture of an unfathomably giant timescale and an consideration to single snapshot pictures accentuated what I think about is the first idea of the piece: the concept that on a protracted sufficient timeline, all seeming disaster subsides into stability, simply as all seeming stability is definitely slow-moving disaster.
Maybe it is a comforting thought, notably in a geopolitical second given to disaster that feels very fast-moving certainly. Maybe, however, that is the consolation of nihilism—there is no such thing as a want for pressing motion if catastrophe is so inevitable, so pure. It’s a thorny contradiction, one properly suited not solely to our ongoing lives within the shadow of encroaching local weather disaster but additionally to a present that locations whimsical invention inside the quiet halls of the long-dead. No matter comes subsequent, [morning/mourning] appears to claim, it would as properly be lovely.
Images: Steve Pisano
