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    Review: In ‘Sun & Sea,’ We Laze Away the End of the World

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    Seemingly sweet yet insistently ominous, this opera installation turns a sandy beach into a spectacle of a changing climate.In May 2019, as the art world raced through the first preview day of the Venice Biennale, a tiny number of us set off for a naval base in the northeast corner of the city.There, inside a damp storehouse commandeered as an ad hoc pavilion for Lithuania, we ascended a scaffold and looked down on a startling sight: a large sandy beach. Beneath us, children played with buckets and shovels; dogs dozed and yapped; and a cast of more than a dozen sang of delayed flights and exploding volcanoes to a spare, insistently catchy electronic score.No one had pegged this as a highlight of the biennial. But it quickly became clear that it was a masterpiece of culture in a changing climate: a dismayingly rare subject for art, given its urgency. Three days later “Sun & Sea” (the title, like the music, is only superficially benign) won the show’s top prize, the Golden Lion, even as its three young Lithuanian creators — the director Rugile Barzdziukaite, the librettist Vaiva Grainyte and the composer Lina Lapelyte, working with the Italian curator Lucia Pietroiusti — hustled to secure funding to finish the run.Looking down from a mezzanine, you see the beachgoers sing solos or duets of a few minutes apiece, interrupted sometimes by errant children or a flying beach ball.George Etheredge for The New York Times“Sun & Sea” is now on tour, though the pandemic has not made it easy. The beach re-emerged earlier this summer in an empty Bauhaus swimming pool outside Berlin; in a warehouse in Piraeus, Greece; and in the orchestra level of an 18th-century Roman theater. It arrived this week at the BAM Fisher in Brooklyn, where its largely Lithuanian cast (some of whom have been with “Sun & Sea” since its first presentation at the national gallery in Vilnius in 2017) has been beefed up with New York-area supernumeraries who have substantially upped the beach’s tattoo quotient.Compressed into the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s black box theater, the opera has lost some of its vertiginous impact. And its reveries of carefree international travel have the slight feel of a prepandemic time capsule. But “Sun & Sea” remains one of the greatest achievements in performance of the last 10 years: wry, seductive and cunning in ways that reveal themselves days or years later. This is a performance that makes the extinction of the species feel as agreeable as a perfect pop song, and as unforgettable, too.The New York run is sold out, though standby tickets are available, and tickets are going fast for subsequent stops in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Bentonville, Ark. Here it’s being performed for five hours each day, and ticket holders can enter at half-hour intervals and stay as long as they wish. (The score runs in a loop of a bit over an hour.)“Sun & Sea” looks at climate change nondirectionally, immersively, with the same casual unconcern as most holidaymakers (or, frankly, most legislators).George Etheredge for The New York TimesLooking down from a mezzanine, you see the beachgoers sing solos or duets of a few minutes apiece, interrupted sometimes by errant children or a flying beach ball. Two lovers debate what time to wake up to get to the airport the next day. An older woman reads the multilingual label on her sunscreen tube. A nouveau riche mother (the soprano Kalliopi Petrou, on a chaise longue) extols her recent Australian family vacation, the free piña coladas and the coral with its “bleached, pallid whiteness.”Only gently, distantly, do these characters perceive that the summers are a little hotter than before, that the waves are a little scarier. A young woman with a yoga mat and a self-help book (Nabila Dandara Vieira Santos, lying on a beach towel) marvels at the red sundresses, the green plastic bags, the fish-killing algal blooms: “O the sea never had so much color!”This episodic structure, as well as its repetition over hours, is central to the force of “Sun & Sea” — which looks at climate change nondirectionally, immersively, with the same casual unconcern as most holidaymakers (or, frankly, most legislators). Soloists often sing the same melody two times, once with banal lyrics about their day at the beach, and once tending toward the poetic, the cosmic, the climatic.George Etheredge for The New York TimesGeorge Etheredge for The New York TimesOne perpetually irritated beachgoer (the mezzo-soprano Egle Paskeviciene) sings an aria about tourists who won’t clean up after their dogs; later, to the same octave-leaping melody, she marvels that last Christmas “it felt like it could be Easter!” A corporate workaholic (the tender bass Vytautas Pastarnokas, in maroon swim trunks) sings steadily on the beat with the score’s pulsing monotone — first about the difficulties of relaxing, and then, later, about the “suppressed negativity” that pours out “like lava, like lava, like lava, like lava.”The whole cast sings an adagio Vacationers’ Chorus — “You should not leave your children unobserved!” — that’s reset, at the tail of the opera’s hourlong cycle, with Grainyte’s most poetic invocation of habitat change. “Eutrophication!” the beachgoers sing. “Our bodies are covered with a slippery green fleece; our swimsuits are filling up with algae.”Then the first chorus repeats. Fun follows on fear, fear follows on fun, neither with any great impact on the other. The world heats up, and the singers slather on more sunscreen. The forests burn on the other coast, and we queue for brunch with smoke in our eyes. Barzdziukaite, Grainyte and Lapelyte are among the few artists ready to engage with climate change at this scale, with this seriousness: not as a single coming disaster, but an entire epoch in which pleasures and disasters will bump up against one another and the end never comes.Through the audience’s omnipresent cameraphones, our critic writes, “this episodic opera gets further chopped into shareable snippets.”Jason FaragoGrainyte’s lyrics still invoke “our northern flatland,” a Schengen area idyll reached by discount European air carriers, though the beach at BAM has been New Yorkified in places: nestled in the sand, alongside a Lithuanian word-search booklet, are bodega takeout trays and a tote bag from the Park Slope Food Co-op. Not that the translation to New York has been seamless. BAM Fisher is the wrong venue for “Sun & Sea,” with the singers and supernumeraries crammed on too small a sandbar, pinned up against ugly gray walls.And the mezzanine is low, placing us too close to the singers and denying us the bird’s-eye — or drone’s-eye — view of the beachgoers so important to Barzdziukaite’s staging. “Sun & Sea” is choreographed to be seen overhead, from a forensic distance, as if we were sun gods looking down on our wayward creation. Yet that protective distance gets intentionally negated by new conditions of performance spectatorship: above all, by the phones wielded by the majority of spectators. (We might say that one working definition of performance art, as distinct from opera or theater, is that audience members are allowed to use their phones.)By placing us over the singers, Barzdziukaite sets up the perfect shot; she is, after all, a film director, and has used the same perspective in documentaries about habitat decay. First in Venice, then in Rome, and now again here, I watched my fellow audience members cradle their phones in their hands throughout the performance, as if compelled by the aerial view. They held them parallel to the stage below, so that the screen filled entirely with sand.By placing us over the singers, the artists have set up the perfect cameraphone shot.George Etheredge for The New York TimesBy design, then, this episodic opera gets further chopped into shareable snippets, or else merely into pictures we can scroll through later, as if they were our own holiday snaps. Though it’s a bit diminished at BAM, this overwhelming achievement of “Sun & Sea” endures: It brings our ecological disquiet and our technological derangement into registration, turning the opera’s endless vacation into our own. We have become new people, with new eyes and ears, in a new climate, and we are still just lazing away the days.Sun & SeaThrough Sept. 26 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; 718-636-4100, bam.org. More

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      A Climate Opera Arrives in New York, With 21 Tons of Sand

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      “Sun & Sea,” an operatic installation that won the top prize at the Venice Biennale, is being staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.On a rainy morning last week, a beach arrived at the front door of a theater in Brooklyn.Or at least the raw ingredients for one: 21 tons of sand, packaged in 50-pound bags, 840 of them. Wheeled into the BAM Fisher on pushcart dollies, they were unceremoniously dropped onto the theater’s tarp-covered floor with a dull thud.Once opened and spread around, the sand would form the foundation of “Sun & Sea,” an installation-like opera that won the top prize at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and has emerged as a masterpiece for the era of climate change. Neither didactic nor abstract, it is an insidiously enjoyable mosaic of consumption, globalization and ecological crisis. And its next stop is the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it opens on Wednesday and runs through Sept. 26.Over 20 tons worth of sand were brought to the BAM Fisher for the production in 50-pound bags.George Etheredge for The New York Times“The way it delivers its ideas, it’s totally surprising,” said David Binder, BAM’s artistic director. “It disarms you and lures you in. That’s not the way we’re used to receiving work about the issues of our day — what we’re all facing in this summer of fires and floods and what we’ve done to the planet.”For the work’s creators — Rugile Barzdziukaite, Vaiva Grainyte and Lina Lapelyte — the reception of “Sun & Sea,” only their second collaboration, has been something of a Cinderella story, as they said in a recent video interview. But as much as it is a fairy tale, the work is the fruit of a friendship that began in the Lithuanian town where they all grew up.Barzdziukaite eventually became a director; Grainyte, a writer; Lapelyte, a musical artist. In working together, they were attracted to opera, they said, because it provided “a meeting place” for their individual practices. As a trio, Grainyte added, “we can listen to each other and dive into this process without fighting or dealing with egos.”The sand was used to create an indoor beach for “Sun & Sea,” which uses the setting for a musical meditation on climate change and globalization.George Etheredge for The New York TimesTheir first project was “Have a Good Day!,” which traveled to New York for the Prototype festival in 2014. Like “Sun & Sea” it approached its subject — the thoughts of supermarket cashiers, and cycles of consumption — with a light touch. The cast of 10 singers, all women to evoke a typical store in Lithuania, shared stories that charmed until, in their accumulation, they took on the nauseating excess of the photographer Andreas Gursky’s similarly themed “99 Cent.”“The idea was to have this zoom-in approach using micro narratives,” Grainyte said, “but also being conscious that we also belong to this part of buying and selling circles.”It was important to the three creators that, while bitterly ironic, “Have a Good Day!” was not polemical. “We tried to really avoid the ‘one truth’ because it’s never black and white,” Lapelyte said. “That goes the same with ‘Sun & Sea.’ When we talk about the climate crisis, it’s never coming with one view.”George Etheredge for The New York TimesGeorge Etheredge for The New York Times“Sun & Sea” is more ambitious: still subtle, intimate and haunting, but sprawling in scale. From a sliver of sand, Barzdziukaite, Grainyte and Lapelyte extract broad implications. The beach, after all, is a battleground of the Anthropocene that both embraces and defies nature. It’s a destination deemed worth flying around the world, expelling tons of carbon, to simply lounge on — though not without a heavy dose of sunscreen to avoid a burn, or worse.The characters in Grainyte’s libretto, which is both plain-spoken and poetic, are overworked and over-traveled, both self-righteously against technology’s intrusion in their lives and welcoming of it. Their stories are told as monologues and vignettes, broken up by choruses of sinister serenity.Often, the characters are oblivious. “What a relief that the Great Barrier Reef has a restaurant and hotel!” one woman sings. “We sat down to sip our piña coladas — included in the price! They taste better under the water, simply a paradise!” Her husband seems unaware that his burnout isn’t so different from that of the earth itself as he sighs melodically, “Suppressed negativity finds a way out unexpectedly, like lava.”“Sun & Sea” in Venice, where it won the top prize at the Venice Biennale in 2019.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesSome characters find beauty in the horrors of modern life. “The banana comes into being, ripens somewhere in South America, and then it ends up on the other side of the planet, so far away from home,” one sings. “It only existed to satisfy our hunger in one bite, to give us a feeling of bliss.”Another, in the most unforgettable image of the opera, observes:Rose-colored dresses flutter:Jellyfish dance along in pairs —With emerald-colored bags,Bottles and red bottle caps.O the sea never had so much color!“We didn’t want to be too declarative,” Barzdziukaite said. “At some point, Vaiva was taking off all the words which were dealing with ecological issues directly.” The final work amounted to about half of what was written.George Etheredge for The New York TimesGeorge Etheredge for The New York TimesWhat they didn’t want was to give the impression that they were climate activists. “It would be unfair to say that,” Grainyte said. “If we were activists, we wouldn’t create this work that is traveling the world.” (The production, like many in the performing arts, isn’t the most eco-friendly: For the BAM presentation, all that sand was transported by truck from VolleyballUSA in New Jersey to Brooklyn.)But that doesn’t mean “Sun & Sea” avoids responsibility by design. Political art is a spectrum, and its creators are aware that they are wrestling with unwieldy and urgent topics; they just want their opera to “activate,” as Lapelyte put it.Crucial to that effect are, beyond the text, the music and visual presentation. The electronic score — earworm after earworm — provides minimal accompaniment for the singers, and was written to reflect the ease of leisure.After “Sun & Sea” closes, the sand will be vacuumed up, sanitized and repurposed.George Etheredge for The New York Times“We wanted it to be quite poppy, that it would remind you of a song that you know well but you can’t say which,” Lapelyte said. “And at the same time it’s very much reduced to very few notes, and it’s also repetitive like a pop song.”The action, while largely improvised by volunteers who flesh out the cast, is obsessively managed by Barzdziukaite. Participants are asked to arrive wearing specific colors (mostly calming pastels). While the roughly hourlong opera is sung in a loop, they are instructed not to seem to be acting, nor to acknowledge the audience. For the performers, the experience shouldn’t be any different from a trip to the beach.“We are very much using this documentary approach in every aspect,” Barzdziukaite said. Observant audience members might notice how casually plastic fills the space; a pair of partially buried headphones, or some abandoned toys, will be familiar sights.George Etheredge for The New York TimesIn Venice, audiences left “Sun & Sea” to be confronted by countless cheap souvenirs and towering cruise ships. When the run ended, the city was flooded. Heavy rain will also have preceded the piece’s arrival in Brooklyn, with the storm carrying the remnants of Hurricane Ida having killed over 40 people in New York and three neighboring states. None of this is lost on the creators, who find themselves wrestling with what it means to make subtle art in a world whose natural disasters increasingly have the heavy-handedness of agitprop.“I feel like I’m living in a dissonance and asking myself what’s next and how I should behave,” Grainyte said.Those who attend the BAM production might find themselves asking similar questions. They won’t see tchotchkes crowding Venetian shops, but perhaps on the way home they will take another look at the garbage on the subway tracks or the shelves of miniature Empire State Buildings in Midtown.If there’s any waste they shouldn’t be worried about, it’s all that sand. After “Sun & Sea” closes, it will be vacuumed up, sanitized and repurposed as a beach volleyball court, maybe, or as a playground. But probably never again as an opera.Sun & SeaWednesday through Sept. 26 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; bam.org. More

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      BAM’s Fall Season Kicks Off With a Beach Opera

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      “Sun & Sea,” which won top honors at the Venice Biennale in 2019, will make its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this fall.The Brooklyn Academy of Music is bringing the beach to you.The star of its fall season, announced Thursday, is a theatrical installation — a surreal opera set at an indoor imitation beach — that paints a portrait of sunbather tranquillity with menacing undercurrents (did you catch the aria about a boyfriend drowning in the ocean?). The production, “Sun & Sea,” which will open at BAM Fisher and run for two weeks before touring the country, won the top prize when it debuted in the Lithuanian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. This will be the American premiere.“It’s an incredible spectacle,” David Binder, BAM’s artistic director who saw it in Venice, said in a phone conversation on Wednesday. “The beachgoers are just passing the day away as things are coming to an end.”Those attending will watch from a 360-degree balcony as 13 singers and approximately 25 local community members who act as beachgoers scroll on their phones, play cards and fill in Sudoku puzzles. In Venice, lines stretched down the canal and around the piazza to see it. In a New York Times review of that installation, Joshua Barone wrote that the opera, created by the filmmaker and director Rugile Barzdziukaite, the writer Vaiva Grainyte and the artist and composer Lina Lapelyte, has a “haunting simplicity that insinuates itself into your memory and, possibly, your opinions.” The audience watched from above on the upstairs mezzanine of a warehouse, he wrote, “as if observing animals at a zoo or creatures under a microscope.”“Within a single hour of dangerously gentle melodies, it manages to animate a panoramic cast of characters whose stories coalesce into a portrait of an apocalyptic climate crisis that goes down as easily as a trip to the beach,” Barone wrote.The fall season continues with creations by artists from Japan, Brazil and Portugal, all of them New York premieres.Later in September, the Japanese sound artist ASUNA will perform his site-specific sound installation, “100 Keyboards,” in which the same note is simultaneously played and sustained on 100 battery-operated toy keyboards arranged in a circle, creating waves of overlapping notes until they climax to what BAM calls “a singular resonant reverberation.”In October, the Portuguese playwright-actor Tiago Rodrigues will stage his collaborative theater experiment “By Heart,” in which 10 audience members are asked to memorize a poem. It will be his first performance in the United States since being appointed the next director of France’s Avignon Festival, the storied annual arts festival that turns the city into a giant theater each July.“The theme is that if we can remember words or texts by heart, they can never be taken away, or suppressed, or censored, or destroyed,” Binder said. “It’s very simple, but also deeply political.”It will be followed in November by the Brazilian choreographer Alice Ripoll’s dance piece “Cria.” Ripoll and the 10-member group Suave, an all-Black company that includes transgender performers, will mix funk, samba and break dance with passinho, the dance craze that grew out of Rio’s favelas, in the company’s first United States performance. It is billed as an experience that “relocates the wild exuberance of adolescence.”While BAM typically announces its fall season all at once, Binder said that, this year, additional programs will be announced on a rolling basis as details are finalized.“There’s just a huge appetite, I think, for artistic adventures right now,” he said. “And I’m so excited to see how artists respond to that hunger.” More