Unholy Wars is a musical theater piece about love and hate and how those conflicting emotions sometimes overlap in undesirable ways.
The creator and also the tenor for today’s show is Karim Sulayman.
This is clearly a passion project for him and throughout the show he walks an amazing line of celebrating “Western” music, while simultaneously critiquing its content. The critique is how the “West” reduces and caricatures other people and cultures, without giving them equal voice in story.
The central feature of the show comes from Monteverdi’s song about the Christian knight Tancredi who loves an Islamic warrior named Clorinda. During a nighttime battle he slays her not realizing until too late that it is his heart and love he has killed. The song is the transcending “Il combattimento di Tancrdi e Clorinda SV153.”
The four characters on stage pull and tug on one another while singing. They also work with physical symbols of earth, water, and rope, separated but also entangled with one another in the shared and fought over space. Behind them is the projection of a map that tears and rearranges itself over and over again into different configurations.
This won’t be included as one of the “101 operas” only because the artist didn’t describe it as such. It is more a collage. The projections, drama, and pastiche of music combine to call-out the orientalist caricatures by “The West,” while also celebrating the beauty of the music. It was handled not so much as an accusation but more like a conversation between cultures; a conversation Tancredi and Clorinda might have had before it was too late.
It all felt extra prescient in this moment because the news channels are currently filled with war images between both Ukraine/Russia and Palestine/Israel. War between neighbors.
Of the many operas I’ve seen recently as part of the opera Philly festival it is this one that kept poking at my heart and thoughts for days and days afterward.
Plus, I try to never miss the opportunity to see a theorbo in action, and tonight there were two!
Notes on the Production:
Tenor/creator……………………………… Karim Sulayman
Soprano……………………………….…….. Radha Mirzadegan
Bass-baritone………………………….….. John Taylor Ward
Dancer……………………………….……… Coral Dolphin
Music: Mary Kouyoumdjian, Guilin Caccini, Claudio Monteverdi, Francesca Caccini, Nicolas a Kempis, Sigismondo d’india, Salamone Rossi, George Frideric Handel
09/24/23