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    Opera Greets the Morning at the Prototype Festival

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    The offerings at this annual presentation of new opera and music theater tend to be politically charged, scrappy and stirring.“These people are not drunk,” a choir in quirkily customized blue robes sang on Saturday, “because it’s nine in the morning.”Watching these smiling performers in the light-flooded Space at Irondale in Brooklyn, I was surprised to discover that this startlingly contemporary sentence was a translation of a biblical verse, Acts 2:15. And it was an appropriate sentiment at, yes, about 9 a.m.In “Terce,” presented as part of this year’s Prototype festival of new opera and music theater, about three dozen choir members were praying, as Christians have done at that hour from the era of the early church. The work adapts and takes its name from the traditional liturgy for 9 o’clock, the time when the Holy Spirit is believed to have appeared to the apostles on Pentecost.In Brooklyn, there’s a twist, if not a wholly unfamiliar one: The divinity being celebrated in this folk-soul-gospel-medieval amalgam is, according to the script, a woman, a mother, “an undeniably female creator.”The singers of “Terce” celebrate “an undeniably female creator.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPolitically charged, scrappy, stirring, deeply earnest: “Terce,” created and led by Heather Christian, embodies Prototype, now in its 11th season and organized by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, the arts center in SoHo. (The festival runs through Sunday.)The hourlong performance had the intimacy that is crucial to this year’s best festival offerings. The members of the community choir that Christian has organized sing, dance and play instruments only steps from the audience that surrounds them. And, whether it’s the cold weather or the constant bad news, that closeness feels sweet and reassuring this January.It’s sweet and reassuring, too, in even cozier confines at HERE, where Prototype is presenting “The Promise,” a rock-cabaret song cycle that Wende, a Dutch singer, conceived with a group of collaborators.Wende’s “The Promise” at HERE.Raymond van OlphenAmong those creators is the composer Isobel Waller-Bridge, perhaps best known for scoring her sister Phoebe’s hit TV show “Fleabag.” And the lyrics of “The Promise” — the work of five writers — do reflect a kind of “Fleabag” sensibility. They are the voice of a modern woman, single, funny, dissatisfied, morbid, ambivalent at best about having children, prickly yet vulnerable. “I’m a lonely bitch,” goes one song’s rueful refrain.Restlessly stalking the tiny space and moving among the three other musicians, Wende has a mischievous grin that can swiftly give way to sneering anger and quiet despair. Her voice is tautly powerful yet quivering, a little like Fiona Apple’s — sometimes sultry, sometimes airy and wry. With resourcefully varied lighting by Freek Ros, the 19-song, 100-minute cycle keeps shifting its tone and pace; songs with pounding, propulsive jungle beats exist alongside vocals half-spoken to a piano.If the final minutes come close to being cloying without quite tipping over, they have that in common with “Terce.” But just as the physical proximity of the performers feels welcome this season, some sentimentality does, too. Wende somehow manages to create that rarity: anthemic crowd singalongs that even a hardened critic feels compelled to join.“The Promise” and “Terce,” the Prototype presentations that are sticking with me most this year, are both plotless and characterless. Also leaning abstract, but in a far wilder and more surreal mode, is “Chornobyldorf,” a sprawling production of well over two intermissionless hours at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater. It has bravely traveled from Ukraine as a kind of nostalgic reminder of the loud, messy, nudity-filled, often self-serious, generally baffling shows that were once fixtures of downtown New York.“Chornobyldorf,” at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater.Valeriia LandarThe many-page synopsis describes a convoluted genesis for this “archaeological opera in seven novels,” created by Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko. But the premise is similar to “Station Eleven,” the book turned TV show, and the play “Mr. Burns”: After an apocalypse — the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is the specter here — a society tries to rise from the ashes though whatever fragments of culture remain.In the case of “Chornobyldorf,” this takes the form of revived yet still-distant memories of Baroque opera and polyphonic chant, shot through with eruptions of blastingly amplified punkish rage. The texts are difficult to decipher. The costumes are cut in ornate antique styles, but dolled up with bits of electrical wiring, and the instruments, many hand-built, are seemingly a collection of whatever was left over when the world ended: percussion, trombone, fluegelhorn, flute, folk string instruments like the bandura and dulcimer, sighing accordions.The sonic landscape creaks and roars, squeals and simmers, as this little society puts on eerily robotic, intensely solemn rituals, building to a screaming Mass and a climactic, hysterical danse macabre around a huge medallion of Lenin hanging from the ceiling. On a screen behind the performers, film footage pans through outdoor scenes, with nature looking majestic — and almost entirely abandoned by humans.“Chornobyldorf” is reminiscent of the loud, nudity-filled, generally baffling shows that were once fixtures of downtown New York.Artem GalkinThe slow, stylized pace and insular symbolism, together with the vivid film element and arcane eroticism, evokes Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster” cycle. And though the work is baggy, a dreamlike atmosphere takes hold; it’s hard to tell the exact meaning of a statuesque naked woman being stripped of the cymbals that hang from her arms, but the sequence is nevertheless arresting.“Adoration” is the most standard-issue, proscenium-theater opera Prototype is presenting this year. Based on a 2008 Atom Egoyan film, the 90-minute piece — being performed at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture in Manhattan — trudges through a complicated plot involving a teenage boy’s announcement to his classmates that his father is a terrorist. (It turns out he’s not telling the truth, though to what narrative or emotional end is never quite clear.)Setting the story to music offers the promise of delving into the nuances of a group of troubled people. But the drearily expository monologues go on and on in Royce Vavrek’s leaden libretto. And while Mary Kouyoumdjian’s score offers some sinuous music for string quartet, its fevered quality feels generic and eventually tiresome; the drama, shapeless.More compelling than any character in “Adoration” is Dominic Shodekeh Talifero, the performer-protagonist of “Vodalities,” one of Prototype’s three short, online streaming offerings — and he doesn’t even speak words or sing pitches.Joined for the piece’s 16 minutes by the quartet So Percussion, he virtuosically yet subtly explores what he calls breath art, a delicate form of beat-boxing that inevitably, painfully suggests the Black Lives Matter rallying cry “I can’t breathe.” (The other digital presentations are “Swann,” a longing aria based on the true story of a 19th-century Black man who wore drag, and the antic, voice-processed “Whiteness.)Huang Ruo’s “Angel Island,” at the Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Maria BaranovaHuang Ruo’s “Angel Island,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, delves into the dark history of American discrimination and violence against Chinese immigrants, many of whom were processed on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.The 90-minute work’s structure is elegant: Sections of historical narration, as in a Ken Burns documentary, alternate with poetic pieces for chorus, with members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street singing the words of writings found on the walls of the island’s immigrant processing center. Filling the back wall of the stage is a screen for the film artist Bill Morrison’s trademark, haunting manipulations of scratchy, blurry archival footage, its ghostliness echoed by the choir’s floating, elegiac sound.The slow-burning patience of Huang’s score is a virtue, even if the sections tend to linger too long — particularly the nonchoral ones, with the narration on top of a string quartet sawing away as accompaniment to balletically aggressive duets for two dancers, an Asian woman and white man.But the gradual build to a hypnotic conclusion was moving, with choral repetitions as relentless as waves on a beach, punctuated by the slow, steady beat of a gong. It was reminiscent of “Terce,” which ends with the metallic shimmer of a gently shaken chandelier made of keys and cutlery.There was a sense, in both finales, of the potential of music and performance — of community — to cleanse. To help us both remember and move forward. More

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      A Penetrating Cry in the Dark at the Prototype Festival

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      This year’s iteration marks a joyous return to theaters for the festival, which was canceled last year.A cry in the dark, gentle yet penetrating.At some moment in time immemorial, emerging from some creature, that sound must have been made: A voice was being used to make drama, and — eons before 16th-century Italy — opera was truly born.So it feels like a connection to the very roots of the art form when “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning],” Gelsey Bell’s wonderful, uncategorizable guide to what might unfold on Earth in the millions and billions of years after human history, begins with exactly such a gentle, penetrating cry in the dark; a slippery hum from singers, the barest shuffle of clapping, then lights.Presented by the bold, invaluable Prototype festival of new music-theater at HERE Arts Center in SoHo, “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning]” is an intimate storytelling ritual, a kind of campfire tale that offers a look far beyond the future as we generally perceive it.Dressed in commune-style thrift-store pattern clashes on a barely adorned cork stage in front of just over 100 people, Bell and four other performers sing and play modest instruments and objects including drizzles of water and marbles swirling in bowls; simple synthesizers; a hand-held Celtic harp and a bowed wooden daxophone.The group doesn’t ever make clear the catastrophe that has wiped out human existence. (“Within the first few hours,” we are told for a start, “millions of dogs have peed in places they’d rather not.”) But in song and speech, Bell, Ashley Pérez Flanagan, Justin Hicks, Aviva Jaye and Paul Pinto describe — poetically, prosaically, funnily, heartbreakingly — the stages of rewilding, decomposition and evolution to come.Obviously ominous but ultimately sly and sweet, wistful and winsome and altogether lovable, the 90-minute show, directed by Tara Ahmadinejad, recalls the wordless collective solemnity of Meredith Monk, the enigmatic texts and yarn-spinning ability of Laurie Anderson, and the folksy keening, shading into luminous pop sweetness, of the Duncan Sheik of “Spring Awakening.” Bell is also an experienced performer in Robert Ashley’s pathbreaking operas, to which she nods here with the use of wry, matter-of-fact speaking (sometimes in airily musical cadences) over gently woozy drones.Prototype began presenting small-scale but high-impact, carefully considered and often exciting work 10 years ago. Organized by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, it filled a niche for experimental yet professionally produced opera, much of it staged in intimate black-box-style venues, and its record of accomplishment has grown distinguished: Two Prototype shows, Du Yun and Royce Vavrek’s “Angel’s Bone” and Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s “Prism,” have won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.This year’s iteration, which runs through Jan. 15, marks a joyous return to theaters for the festival, which was almost entirely virtual in 2021 and was canceled last year because of the Omicron wave. The loss of Prototype 2022 felt especially sharp because classical music and its stylistic descendants were otherwise largely spared in an outbreak that wreaked more havoc on dance and theater.Emma O’Halloran’s “Mary Motorhead” is a monodrama featuring Naomi Louisa O’Connell in the raconteur title role.Maria BaranovaThe work Prototype has presented has ranged widely, but over a decade a kind of house style (or at least stereotype) has emerged. The subject matter leans toward the politically charged and emotionally brutal, extreme even by operatic standards of suffering. Electronics are often in the mix, as is amplification even in tiny theaters, and the music tends rock-inflected and intense — and often just plain loud, with a shouting-in-your-face urgency that can be thrilling from some artists, wearying from others.Despite a couple of crashing moments, though, the three premieres over this year’s first weekend kept the volume fairly moderate. (Silvana Estrada’s “Marchita” and David Lang’s “note to a friend” open later this week, and the animated opera “Undine” is streaming.)Even without (too much) screaming, the intensity rarely flags in Emma O’Halloran’s two-hour double bill about the down and out and desperate for connection, “Trade/Mary Motorhead” — to librettos by her uncle, the actor and writer Mark O’Halloran — at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side.Directed by Tom Creed, both operas offer virtuosic showcases for daring singing actors. “Mary Motorhead” is a monodrama featuring the vivid, charismatic Naomi Louisa O’Connell in the raconteur title role of a woman in prison for killing her husband. In “Trade,” set in a hotel room where two men — one older, one younger — are meeting for sex, the Broadway veteran Marc Kudisch and the tenor Kyle Bielfield are fiercely committed as they toggle between aggression and tenderness.With Elaine Kelly conducting the ensemble NOVUS NY, O’Halloran shapes lucid, communicative vocal lines; the text always sings out. “Mary Motorhead” finds its protagonist sometimes angry, sometimes exhausted; “Trade” has the relentlessly, effectively weepy emotionalism of Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” which recently played at the Metropolitan Opera, but is more affecting without the Met work’s overblown trappings.O’Halloran rides these stories’ waves of feeling with some squealing electric guitar riffs, but Du Yun’s “In Our Daughter’s Eyes” — a collaboration with the librettist and director Michael Joseph McQuilken and the baritone Nathan Gunn at Baruch Performing Arts Center in Kips Bay — has more of the chamber-metal spirit that is a Prototype trademark.Structured as a series of diary entries written by an expectant father who struggles to avoid falling off the wagon after learning that his unborn child has catastrophic health problems, the work (and Maruti Evans’s set) has a naturalistic core but also dreamlike flights. Gunn, once a hunky star in Mozart and Britten, is now in his early 50s and the physical and temperamental embodiment of the earnest American dad. He’s masculinity incarnate, in all its confidence and anxieties — direct, sonorous and conversational even as the tragedy builds.The score is intriguingly varied and eccentric: sometimes spare yet warm, as in a clever passage bringing together cello and muted trumpet; sometimes noirish Badalamenti-style cool vamping; sometimes chilly instrumental squiggles and shards; and sometimes exploding in raucous, frantic energy.Du Yun’s “In Our Daughter’s Eyes” is a collaboration with the librettist and director Michael Joseph McQuilken and the baritone Nathan Gunn at Baruch Performing Arts Center.Maria BaranovaThe more blaringly rock passages have much in common with “Black Lodge,” McQuilken’s recent, wailing collaboration with the composer David T. Little, which premiered in Philadelphia a few months ago. As in that piece, the music here is rather more interesting than the text, which could use a little more subtlety. And the 75-minute length is palpable in a one-man show; “Mary Motorhead,” by comparison, lasts a compact 30.Despite a bit of lag toward the end, “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning],” felt considerably tighter, without losing its charmingly patient way of unfolding. One of its most memorable scenes is a wittily nostalgic look back at humans and their habits, once the Anthropocene has been left far behind: “I liked their sustaining fealty to two-dimensional imagery in rectangle frames,” one line goes.The quiet climax of the piece is a song that relishes the moral that “nothing lasts forever.” Climate change is the work’s unspoken context, of course, and Bell offers a considerably more accepting (indeed, Zen-ly optimistic) vision of its deadly consequences than the current liberal consensus — something closer to that early-pandemic fantasy that “nature is healing.” Disaster is a fait accompli, Bell seems to be saying, so why not embrace what’s to come?But is the piece’s implication that control over our destiny is an illusion and resistance is (at best) futile complicit in climate denialism? I’m not sure, and that question is why “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning]” left me smiling yet unsettled. And wanting to hear it again: Bring out a recording, please. More

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      Prototype, an Essential New York Opera Festival, Turns 10

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      “There are all these unbelievable artists who are creating work that’s really hard to define,” Beth Morrison, a music theater impresario, said during a recent interview. “It’s the work that falls between disciplines, that is beautiful and strange and challenging, and there’s so little space for that in New York right now.”Morrison, the leader of Beth Morrison Projects, produces exactly those types of works — operas and other pieces that can approach cabaret, concert or musical forms but defy categorization — with white-hot fervor, particularly as one of the founders of the Prototype Festival, which started 10 years ago and returns on Thursday with seven shows as idiosyncratic and fearlessly strange as ever.The niche that Prototype occupies on the New York performing arts calendar — something of a purely musical cousin to the Under the Radar theater festival, also this month — has become increasingly essential as Lincoln Center moves away from presenting festivals that would have hosted chamber and avant-garde operas, for example, or as small theaters nurture new works with an eye toward Broadway.Things weren’t much better when Prototype, created by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, took shape with the help of a Mellon Foundation grant. “There wasn’t much,” said Kim Whitener, a founding director (and formerly of HERE), who is now an independent producer. “There didn’t seem to be a space for this really important work.”Over the years, Prototype has put on black box productions and works in progress, and expanded to theaters across the city as its operas grew in scale, like “Dog Days” and “Breaking the Waves.” During the pandemic, it commissioned streaming projects. And last year, when the Omicron variant’s spread led to the festival’s cancellation mere days before its start, it adapted yet again, finding ways to salvage much of its programming.Du Yun and Royce Vavrek’s “Angel’s Bone” (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. This year, Du Yun has a new chamber opera, written for and starring the baritone Nathan Gunn.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesA scene from Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s “Prism,” another Pulitzer winner.Maria BaranovaAlong the way, it has been an early supporter of artists like Taylor Mac and Rugile Barzdziukaite, Vaiva Grainyte and Lina Lapelyte — the Lithuanian trio that went on to global recognition, and critical adoration, with its opera “Sun and Sea.” Two Prototype shows, the Du Yun and Royce Vavrek opera “Angel’s Bone,” and Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s “Prism,” have won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.Du Yun is back this year with the chamber opera “In Our Daughter’s Eyes,” written for and starring the baritone Nathan Gunn; other productions include Emma O’Halloran’s double bill “Trade/Mary Motorhead,” the vocalist Gelsey Bell’s “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning],” Silvana Estrada’s “Marchita,” David Lang’s “note to a friend,” the streaming opera “Undine” and the 10th anniversary celebration “The All Sing ‘Here Lies Joy.’”Morrison and Whitener — along with Kristin Marting, HERE’s artistic director, who was among Prototypes founders and leads it with Morrison today, and Jecca Barry, a former director who was on the 2023 edition’s curatorial team — discussed Prototype’s past and present in a group video call. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Over the past decade, what kind of influence have you observed Prototype having on the industry?JECCA BARRY We’ve seen, across the country, other opera companies that have started their own festivals or explored the idea of second stages — other venues, like black box theaters. The first partnership show that we did with Los Angeles Opera was “Dog Days,” and that was at Redcat [a 200-seat theater]. L.A. Opera told us that 70 percent of the audience that came to see that had never set foot in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion [the company’s much-larger home]. It’s actually about creating a totally different audience, and really, that’s so important for opera companies these days.KRISTIN MARTING That’s about both form and content. I feel like the festival spans this spectrum of work. There’s a crossover thing that’s happening, and that’s because so many of the artists that we’re working with are not trying to stay within the lines. Then the second thing about content: I just feel like what we’re really interested in is socially relevant work that resonates with people — a whole range of people, told by a whole ranges of voices. I think that’s also something that the industry has been incorporating, happily, after so long of it being monochromatic.How would you say the New York cultural landscape changed during Prototype’s history, and what has that meant for the festival’s mission?BETH MORRISON It’s almost impossible right now to get opera programs at any of the venues in town. With Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Metropolitan Opera is doing new work, finally, but there’s a whole host of work that is being created for smaller stages and other kinds of stages that the big presenters aren’t doing here. And for a company like us, that doesn’t have a performing space, it’s freaking hard. Our stuff used to be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and that’s completely shifted. Lincoln Center is not doing opera. The Shed’s not doing it. That means we can only get our stuff done in our festival when we self-present it, and I think that’s a real shame.BARRY The creative impulses are there. I mean, it’s incredible how many young composers want to write their first opera right out of the gate.KIM WHITENER They’re finding their niches elsewhere. I just think that we’re in a time of such great sea change; it’s really more that what we’re talking about with the loss of New York is the sense of a real footprint, you know, for opera theater in the way we used to have.Thinking about the pandemic, changing audience habits and new ways of presenting opera, how has the festival adapted?MORRISON We were really proud of what we did in ’21 with the commissions to composers to create work in a digital space, and making sure that we had a presence and an impact in our community’s lives at a time when we were all so locked down. Last year really sucked, though — to have the festival canceled a week before we opened was completely devastating. We lost a couple hundred thousand dollars because we paid all the artists. We managed to do three of the shows later in the year and then moved other things to this January. But I think that this year’s festival has come together really beautifully as a result.What effect, if any, has the festival’s success with awards like the Pulitzer Prize had on how it operates?MARTING I think we’re taking the same risks.MORRISON What we’re committed to is letting the artists lead and sort of walking hand-in-hand and bringing their visions to the fore. That recognition’s incredible, and I think we’re all thrilled that we were able to produce and present that work.BARRY But I think it’s also a testament to flexibility. So many companies that are developing new work, especially big institutions, are very rigid in their structures of what that looks like and what that timeline is, and that is not the way any producer on this screen works. Both of the pieces that won the Pulitzer took more time than we originally thought they were going to and got rescheduled and rescheduled.There’s this wonderful point when an artist says, “Can I really do that?” And to be able to say, “Yes, you can try that idea,” and then, on the flip side, to have the audience come in and say, “I didn’t know you could do that with opera.” Being able to empower artists to take those risks and then being able to see the audience, it’s so satisfying.MORRISON With “Dog Days” in particular, and with what Jecca just said — it reminds me of the phone call that I got from David T. Little when he was writing it, saying: “I don’t think the last 20 minutes has any words. Is that OK?” I love that phone call. That’s the best phone call ever, because they want the permission to go in a completely boundary-pushing direction, and that’s what we want.WHITENER When you really trust the artist, they in turn trust you. They’re putting this really raw, alien thing in your hands and trusting you to see it through.BARRY And from that, we then trust the audiences. We are putting that work out there and trusting audiences to come on that ride with us, and we certainly have no expectation that everybody who shows up to every Prototype show every year is going to love it all.There are a lot of world premieres at the festival this year. But we’re still dealing with Covid and flu outbreaks. How confident are you that Prototype is truly back?BARRY We have community agreements that we’re asking everyone to adhere to to keep themselves as safe as possible. We do daily testing. We do PCR weekly. Anyone who is not performing is masked in rehearsal. So, we take a lot of precautions. Our fingers are crossed that we’ll be able to offer all the performances that we want to offer audiences this January.WHITENER The opening night kind of thing — the big gathering of all the artists, getting together and partying — that’s definitely not happening right now. As a field, we are missing that a lot. You hear everybody saying that: how much they miss the community. More

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      Review: In ‘Book of Mountains & Seas,’ Puppets Embark on Mythic Quests

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      Huang Ruo and Basil Twist’s new choral-theater piece at St. Ann’s Warehouse borrows from traditional Chinese tales.The giant is immense and craggy-limbed, like some primordial creature hewed from the earth or forged from lava. His name is Kua Fu, and in Huang Ruo and Basil Twist’s new choral-theater piece “Book of Mountains & Seas” he is a puppet, towering above his team of puppeteers. When thirst strikes, he lies prostrate to lap up a whole river of white silk, which slips down his gullet and disappears.This is splendid puppetry, imbued with poignancy and the pulsing, drum-driven drama of mythic quest. A figure from Chinese legend, Kua Fu desires one thing above all, and he will chase it as far as he has to: He wants to capture the sun.We should be rooting against him, then, if we want the planet to survive. But at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Tuesday night, as “Book of Mountains & Seas” made its American premiere, I found myself solidly on Kua Fu’s side — and feeling consequently like I had aligned my sympathies with Thanos, the ultra-bad guy in Marvel’s “Avengers” movies, which also borrow from mythology to tap into something ancient in us.Originally scheduled for January at the now-postponed Prototype festival, “Book of Mountains & Seas” is the aesthetic opposite of that blockbuster film franchise — live and handmade, harnessing the power of music, puppetry and human gathering. With a dozen choral singers from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, two percussionists and six puppeteers — excellent, all — the show retells four Chinese tales borrowed from “Shanhaijing,” a text that is often called in English “The Classic of Mountains and Seas.”If you’re not already versed in those legends, or fluent in Chinese, you may be lost if you don’t read up on them in advance. The physical program provides two pages of clear, concise synopses. Presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse and Beth Morrison Projects, the performance is sung half in Mandarin and half in a language of the composer-conductor-librettist Huang Ruo’s invention, without English supertitles. Projected Chinese titles give the full text of the stories, but the English text is much briefer — occasional plot updates that generally do the trick if you’ve absorbed those program notes.For non-Mandarin speakers, it makes for an impressionistic experience, your mind allowed to drift a bit as the vocal tones wash over you. Huang Ruo has said that the combination of song and percussion is as old as humankind, and certainly it feels that way in the first slender myth, about the birth of Pan Gu, who created the world: Out of the primal darkness come the voices, and softly lit faces, of the singers, with percussion sounding from both sides.Twist, the production’s director and designer, keeps the puppetry minimal in that opening scene, but the pieces he uses to make Pan Gu’s enormous visage — rice-paper lanterns; large, rough pieces of what look like driftwood or fossils or bones — recur throughout the evening. They are building blocks of this show’s world.The performance is sung half in Chinese and half in a language of the composer-conductor-librettist Huang Ruo’s invention.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe second myth, “The Spirit Bird,” is about a princess who drowns, transforms into a bird and becomes consumed with her attempt to get revenge on the ocean. But the puppetry — a silken bird, a silken sky that becomes a silken sea — is too simple in its repetition. When an undulating sea creature (made of those driftwood-like bits) swims by, the variety is welcome.This is also the one section of the show where the precision of Ayumu Poe Saegusa’s otherwise extraordinarily meticulous lighting gives way, allowing an errant shadow — of a singer, possibly? — to break the illusion of the ocean.The last two myths are where “Book of Mountains & Seas” gets exciting. That’s partly because they, unlike the others, have built-in drama There is no conflict in the creation of the world, and the fight between the princess and the sea feels nebulous. But “The Ten Suns” and “Kua Fu Chasing the Sun” have stakes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow is it that the 10 puppet suns — rice-paper lanterns bobbing high in the air on long, slender stalks — are quite so charming and mesmeric? Glowing cherry-red when they first appear one by one, they are a happy band of siblings who share the duty of lighting the planet. Their fatal error is to go out together one day, which wreaks disaster. Twist makes it a menacing confrontation, with the suns aggressively approaching the audience — the show’s one real echo of climate change. Yet when nine of the suns are killed to save the Earth (the program, too, gives this away), the music and the moment have a mournful beauty.The pièce de résistance, though, is the appearance of Kua Fu, the giant we see awakening in the final myth. Never would anyone confuse this stony-looking creature with the mammoth King Kong puppet we saw on Broadway, yet as Kua Fu looks around, getting his bearings, that’s exactly who he resembles.With propulsive, high-tension music to match his urgency, Kua Fu runs in place at center stage, as the sun, a rice-paper lantern, moves around him, out of his long arms’ reach. It is mysteriously gripping: this huge, wordless being so filled with longing for what he cannot and should not have; this giant who, if he keeps going, will drink all of the fresh water of the Earth.He fails in his quest, of course; the program tells you that as well. But here the projected English text, at least, hedges a bit. Because in the legend, when Kua Fu dies, forests of peach blossom trees grow from his walking stick.The puppet has no walking stick, and no puppet peach blossom trees grow. But wouldn’t they have been magnificent?Book of Mountains & SeasThrough March 20 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Theater to Stream: Festivals, Festivals, Festivals

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTheater to Stream: Festivals, Festivals, FestivalsThe Under the Radar, Prototype and Exponential festivals are ready to open our minds with experimental work, even if their doors are shut.Alexi Murdoch in “Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists,” part of the Prototype Festival.Credit…Pierre-Alain GiraudJan. 6, 2021Updated 12:41 p.m. ETSet dates for previews, openings and closings. Fall and spring seasons. Heck: turning up somewhere on time!Until the pandemic occurred in 2020, many of us perhaps did not realize how much theater relies on appointments. Now that most of them have vanished, with theater — and time itself — becoming somewhat amorphous, it’s comforting to see that the January festivals are still happening.Once cursed as the sluggish period of the year that follows the holiday rush, January has slowly turned into a hyperactive showcase for experimental work. And so it remains this year. While the doors remain physically shut, our minds can still open up.Whitney White and Peter Mark Kendall, the creators of “Capsule,” part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival. Credit…Melissa Bunni ElianUnder the RadarIn a way, going online was a natural step for Under the Radar (through Jan. 17). Hosted by the Public Theater, the 17-year-old event has always questioned the very nature of the art form: “What makes something theater?” the festival director Mark Russell pondered in a recent video chat. “Can an exhibit be a theater piece? Does a story have to be a part of it? This is a lot of hubris, but I felt like the whole world turned into UTR,” he added, laughing.One thing that has not changed is Under the Radar’s international bent — this year with a mix of on-demand and appointment shows, all of them free. Among the on-demand offerings are works in which two wildly creative women take on roles different from the ones they’re known for: “Capsule,” in which the rising director Whitney White (“What to Send Up When It Goes Down”) steps on the virtual stage; and “Espíritu,” which was written and directed by the prominent Chilean actress Trinidad González (“A Fantastic Woman”).As for the livestreams, mark your calendar for Piehole’s “Disclaimer”; “Borders & Crossings,” by the Nigerian-British playwright and performer Inua Ellams (“Barber Shop Chronicles”); and “A Thousand Ways (Part One): A Phone Call,” by 600 Highwaymen.Shara Nova, left, and Helga Davis in “Ocean Body,” which is part of the Prototype Festival.Credit…Mark DeChiazzaPrototypeThe experimental operas and musical-theater pieces that the Prototype festival presents can take three to five years to gestate. So when the artistic directors Beth Morrison and Jecca Barry (from Beth Morrison Projects) and Kristin Marting (from HERE Arts Center) decided in June to jettison the entire slate they had planned for the 2021 edition, which runs from Jan. 8-16, they knew they would have to change tack, and fast. Especially since they did not want to simply adapt pre-existing projects for the digital world.“A bunch of people came in with stuff that was like retooling things that they already had,” Marting said. As curators, they felt that this “wasn’t the way that we can serve our audience right now,” she continued.The new 2021 festival centerpiece, “Modulation” — a commission made up of brief vocal works by the likes of Sahba Aminikia, Juhi Bansal, Yvette Janine Jackson, Angélica Negrón and Daniel Bernard Roumain — emerged as a pure product of the new moment.“We saw the opportunity to ask a lot of composers to respond to 2020, but in short bursts,” Barry said. “The three of us developed different themes for what we were interested in having them respond to, and we landed on fear, isolation and identity. Then we thought of a fourth theme to connect all of those things, and that was breath.”Except for “Ocean Body,” a ticketed video installation at HERE that features the performers Helga Davis and Shara Nova, all of Prototype 2021’s offerings are on-demand. This includes Geoff Sobelle and Pamela Z’s “Times³ (Times x Times x Times),” which can be streamed anywhere but was conceived to be heard while walking through Times Square. For Marting, the experience is typical of Prototype’s ever-questioning approach. “We’re trying to craft the conversation,” she said, “because one of the things the festival is really interested in is interrogating this line between opera and music theater, and why people think they like one and not the other.”Nathan Repasz is taking part in “The Unquestioned Interiority of Humankind,” as part of the Exponential Festival.Credit…via Exponential FestivalExponential Festival“We didn’t want to do a single Zoom reading because they’re the bane of my existence,” said Theresa Buchheister, the founding artistic director of the Exponential Festival.This is pretty much the only guarantee we can get about the 2021 edition of a fest that reliably supplies the nuttiest, most unpredictable programming of any in January.In normal years, the festival takes place at such funky Brooklyn venues as the Brick Theater, Vital Joint and Chez Bushwick. But from Jan. 7-31, each of the 31 shows on the 2021 slate will debut in one place — YouTube — and will remain available for the foreseeable future. While this is convenient for viewers, it is giving Buchheister an extra headache. “We’re dealing with nudity on YouTube, which is hard,” she said. “Performance artists are always naked, they just are. So it’s one of the many difficulties this year.”Indeed, challenges abounded. Another, for example, was figuring out how to present Panoply Performance Laboratory’s “Heidegger’s Indiana,” which Esther Neff originally envisioned as a choose-your-own-adventure show made up of distinct vignettes.“What we ended up doing is that Esther will create a work where she’s put the pieces in the order that she wants,” Buchheister said. “And I was like, ‘You can draw tarot cards, you can throw axes into a tree — I don’t care how you choose what order they go into.’ But then we’ll also create a playlist on YouTube of all of the different segments.”One of Exponential’s singularities is its emphasis on curated bills, often pairing a better-known — at least in avant-garde circles — with an up-and-comer. Buchheister was excited to link the writer-performer Jess Barbagallo and the musician Nathan Repasz. “Nathan did one of my favorite performances of 2020,” she said, “a percussion piece to Mitt Romney saying that hot dog is his favorite meat.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More