After 101 operas Chornobyldorf was a needed jolt of theater, less a palette cleanser and more like a hit of acid.
A vibratory fresh start.
I’m reading Catherine Lacey’s “The Biography of X” now about a fictional avant-garde artist from the NOHO neighborhood of New York City in the 1970’s and Chornobyldorf feels like a throwback to the performance art of that era: noise, spectacle, nudity, and glitter.
It has that bygone vitality of leaving it all on stage. Not for posterity but for us in the room art-hungry enough to venture out on a windy 16 degree evening. Just for us.
It feels like a happening.
Hard to believe that just a few month ago it was 103 degrees in Portland where icon Patti Smith gave us a sweaty full throated performance, her tough persona from the 1970’s fully intact. I love her as a writer and storyteller. Her memoir chronicling her friendship and romance with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is very lovely, so much so I often gift it to friends.
“Just Kids” is a beautiful love letter to art and being an artist.
It makes me think about the kinds of art and artists who push against the grain of popular culture. Her soulmate Robert Maplethorpe comes to mind also and in particular his photograph “Self-Portrait with Whip” from 1978.
The photo is a shock. Some might pose a savoir faire attitude that such a prurient photo is yawningly blasé. But it is a shock, and meant to be a challenge to sensibility and warning to complacency.
It’s art with a social function. It pushes boundaries so far the messaging almost overshadows the formal composition of the photo, a masterclass in contrasts and chiaroscuro and when coupled with the history from “Just Kids,” comparing his devilish Calibus pose to his earlier religious iconographical art is just…
Art gives people the opportunity to push themselves beyond their circle of conformity to breathe freely and deeply without fear of judgement, then on return to their sphere of routine maybe work a little more to accept and a little less to judge. Art can be a tool for personal calibration.
The spheres of anglo-corporate-patriarchial-hierarchy that most people navigate are rooted in some real fucked up bullshit. Mapplethorpe’s photo presents a real harmless innocence when compared to the socially acceptable carnages witnessed nightly on the news.
His freedom to celebrate himself with such confidence just a decade after the Stonewall riots expands the parameters of freedom for everyone and calls out the conformity and repression of a hypocritically violent society.
Freedom is to live and let live.
Art can bring into question what we accept and what we don’t and where our programming may be more harmful than helpful for us individually and for the community.
After tonight’s opera i’m feeling a reinvigorated belief in the power of art. I’m trying to say too much in too little space here to do it justice, but there was something about the nudity and noise in tonight’s opera that many people I know would find offensive and that makes me want to celebrate tonight even more.
It makes me think of the 70’s again. I was just old enough at the tail-end to compare culture then to our now (popular culture) Quick to be shocked, quicker to gossip, safe, overly self-conscious. More gravity found in artist statements than the art itself.
I’m being critical and maybe it’s me, maybe my world has just gotten safer and smaller and I’m not seeing the exciting and provocative art that is happening. Somewhere there must be a new “Howl” being read for the next group coming up, the best minds of my generation leaving so much undone; I’m sure it’s happening. Still, there was a freedom before the first iPhone.
This generation just can’t know the freedom thjey’re missing from back before the first iphone. To just leave the house and suddenly be anonymous and not accountable, to be where and with who you choose and no other distractions. To perform in basements and on stages secure that it would be an ephemeral happenstance, no need for false poses, an act for the moment that goes unrecorded, unless by choice, like a Maplethorpe, Ono, or Abramovic.
I shout at clouds about the good ol’ days, but in many regards they really were; certainly less data driven, more personal and more experiential.
For a moment it felt like the internet might democratize humanity, equal voice to all, but the old hierarchies are just been replaced with newer algorithmic hierarchies. Interesting changes that no doubt this generation will leave for the next after them to untangle.
Chornobyldorf is about when the changes go far too wrong, a story about the next three hundred years told in seven finales, one utopian and six dystopian. The big question of the show by proxy is which of the seven finales are we heading for.
Chornobyldorf begins with the fictional Chornobyldorf Anthropological Museum, an institute of the future trying to recreate an opera based on fragmentary artifacts of the past, but still my current future.
The opera is broken up into 7 Acts each beginning with a video instillations that documents desolate and disused places like Chernobyl. Sometimes the actors inhabit the spaces exploring the remnants of three centuries of societal breakdown.
The world building of Chornobyldorf is a totalitarian matriarchial one, a post-nuclear world that emphasizes ritual and performance with a (literal) instrumental hierarchy.
Their hierarchies and rituals are all messed up because of the incompletence of their references and end up doing things like combining the Roman Saturnalia with late communist ideas. Elektra becomes the goddess of electrodynamics worshiped by nuns. The charming accordion girl, is the only nun allowed out into the world to commune with others and what she finds is a world as mixed up as her own.
The opera grows into a great speculative fiction. How would I hold an accordion if I didn’t know what one was?
The music isn’t just noise, but also referential that intertwines exploratory noises with more familiar like the Vocal Cycles of Franz Schubert, Jacapo Peri’s Dafne, Radio Head, and Ukrainian folk all coming together in an amalgam of sound and made up words that never gets predictable.
The dancers fully commit to their characters striking iconographic poses that hold in my mind like the Mona Lisa or a Vogue cover: the goddess of cymbals and the warrior trombone particularly.
One pose consisting of three tangled bodies, reminds me of the ending of another bold work I came across recently, the book “Earthlings,” by Sayaka Murata (don’t let the cutesie cover full you, along with Maplethorpe some might prefer it to come with a trigger warning). An important distinction to be made is that all these works I reference aren’t gratuitous, it’s essential expression.
Art like this expands the parameters of humanity, it is the spirit of Dionysian release and the emotional articulations of Orfeo.
A memorable chapter titles “Eurydice”is based on a classical Greek tale and opera. The character Eurydice is carried out in a funeral procession and during the procession a naked man (Orfeo or Priest) screams with volatility ‘Eu-ryd-ice! Eu-ryd-ice! There is no Eurydice, Eurydice is gone…’ It ends with a nude woman applying glitter to a nude Eurydice. The references to classical opera are obvious and the ritual reminds me very much of Philip Glass’s Akhenaten.
The show ends with a cheer to Ukraine, the home of the performers.
On a lark after the show we walk over to a bar referenced in “Biography of X” called Big Bar (a joke not appreciated until standing in the quaint one room bar. The bartender looking like Mark Hamill’s little brother asks everyone to be quiet. He’s taken back by the spontaneous quiet and laughs a thank you. In a nice parallel with the show he wants to talk about the Ukraine conflict and shows us t’shirts with Ukraine colors and writing that say Putin is a Dick, which he said is technically translated as “taint.” Following his lead everyone lifts their glass and gives a simultaneous Ukrainian toast. “Budmo” followed by “hey, hey, hey.”
Sixteen degrees and blustery breeze outside, he turns on the air condition because the small cash-only bar is so hot.
We spin the cube on the way home twirling forward in time and descending into the warmth of civilization and the subways.