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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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      Pamela Z Manipulates Voices in a Virtual Tour of Times Square

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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 storyPamela Z Manipulates Voices in a Virtual Tour of Times Square“Times3” is the latest work by a veteran composer, vocalist, multimedia artist and “wild virtuoso.”“Times3,” a collaboration between Pamela Z (photographed here in San Francisco) and the theater artist Geoff Sobelle, is part of a pandemic edition of the Prototype festival of music theater.Credit…Andres Gonzalez for The New York TimesJan. 7, 2021The composer, vocalist and multimedia artist Pamela Z was supposed to have a good 2020. She started the year in Italy, as a recipient of the prestigious Rome Prize, working on a new performance piece that was to have its debut in June at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.The piece, “Simultaneous,” was to capitalize on the strengths Ms. Z, 64, has developed over a long and celebrated career. It would deploy her classically trained voice, her subtle (and sometimes humorous) layers of projected images and her skills as a live manipulator of media — especially her theatrical use of gesture controllers, wireless devices that let her physical movements affect sound.“I consider my instrument really to be the combination of my voice and the electronics,” she said in a phone interview from her home in San Francisco. “As a performer, I’m not just singing and then putting some effects on that. And I’m not just making electronic sounds. I’m actually simultaneously singing and speaking, and, in real time, sampling and processing and treating my voice to create these layers of sound that I consider to be a composition.”Ms. Z performing in San Francisco in 2015.Credit…Charles SmithWhen the pandemic hit, it cut her Rome residency short and indefinitely delayed her MoMA premiere. That was a blow not just for Ms. Z, but also for fans of experimental art in New York. While her music has lately been heard in the city as part of the Resonant Bodies Festival and the flutist Claire Chase’s ambitious “Density 2036” project, her more conceptual work as an installation artist and multimedia creator is not shown often enough here.The Prototype festival this month will offer something of a corrective, presenting “Times3,” a streaming soundscape collaboration between Ms. Z and the theater artist Geoff Sobelle. It comes as part of a pandemic overhaul to this annual festival of new opera and wide-ranging music theater; five of the six presentations in this year’s edition, which runs Friday to Jan. 16, will exist only online. (“Times3” is free; attendees need only register online beforehand, starting Jan. 9, to receive a link and password for the audio.)“Times3” gives listeners something of a crash course in Ms. Z’s ever-evolving practice. “I haven’t jettisoned anything, I’m just adding things,” she said. “At one time it would have been accurate to call myself a musician. Now it’s only a fragment of what my work encompasses.”Ms. Z was still finishing up the final version of “Times3,” alternately titled “Times x Times x Times,” in the days ahead of its premiere. The half-hour or so piece, a meditation on the past, present and future of Times Square, is built from interviews that Mr. Sobelle conducted with scholars and theorists who hold vivid perspectives on the neighborhood. The musical form it takes is Ms. Z’s responsibility.“I tend to work with everything from full sentences to short phrases to just individual words, even syllables and phonemes,” Ms. Z said, describing her editing process using the audio program Pro Tools. “And I’m just capturing all those little pieces and naming them so I can use them as building blocks, to structure the piece.”It’s a process familiar to Ms. Z, since some of her earlier work — including 2019’s “Louder Warmer Denser,” for Ms. Chase — has involved post-produced fragments of interviews. And the way Ms. Z layers her own voice, during live performances, has also prepared the composer for some of the challenges of “Times3.”You can hear that facility for editing in her other recent projects. A concert livestreamed from her home studio and presented by Mills College — featuring, in her description, “voice, real-time electronic processing, sampled sounds, wireless gesture controllers and interactive videos” — is technically startling and fluidly soulful; at one point, Ms. Z uses looping to build her own backup choir.[embedded content]The performance includes some pieces heard on her album “A Delay Is Better,” released on the Starkland label in 2004; that album also gives an effective overview of her work. A track like “Badagada” demonstrates her love of traditional operatic singing as well as of Minimalism and live electronic manipulation, while “Pop Titles ‘You’” works as a clever found-poem in sound. “Geekspeak,” which lets speakers other than Ms. Z attempt to define the essence of geekery, approaches interviewing and sound editing as forms of storytelling and art-making.Born in Buffalo, N.Y., and raised in Colorado, Ms. Z studied vocal music and education. Initially, she pursued more traditional voice-and-guitar singer-songwriter work — with “a bit of classical music bizarrely laced in,” she said in an email — before committing to a more experimental approach. In the 1980s, she moved to San Francisco, where she still lives, creating solo performances as well as fulfilling an increasing number of commissions — including chamber music, dance scores and dramatic pieces — from groups like the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the Kronos Quartet and Eighth Blackbird.Her “Times3” partner, Mr. Sobelle, worked with Jecca Barry, a director of the Prototype festival, on past productions. The festival’s organizers recommended that he and Ms. Z do a piece about Times Square. Mr. Sobelle was keen to partner with her; he said that he had been aware of her work “a little bit, from a friend who suggested that I take a look, at another moment, just to see a wild virtuoso.”And when Ms. Z watched the eight-millimeter short film that had opened Mr. Sobelle’s 2005 stage work “All Wear Bowlers” — “a beautiful, poetic piece that was styled after silent films,” she said — she was sold on the collaboration.After discussions with Prototype, the two artists decided not to make listeners venture to Times Square to access the audio. Instead, by using interviews with people familiar with the area, they decided to create what the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti might have called a Times Square of the mind.“There’s a landscape architect; there’s somebody who’s a theater stage manager, who’s stage-managed a lot of shows on Broadway,” Ms. Z said. “We interviewed some historians, people who knew about the Indigenous people who lived on that land. And we interviewed a person who has all kinds of theories about what would happen if there were no longer humans — and what changes would occur.”Mr. Sobelle conducted the interviews, then furnished Ms. Z with the raw sound files, as well as notes about ways the transcripts might be layered to produce dramatic resonance.In this way, “Times3” is closely related to the most current version of “Simultaneous,” broadcast last month by Deutschland Radio. In that 44-minute piece, the thematic focus is on the contemporary culture of multitasking, and Ms. Z’s jaundiced view of it.For source material, she interviewed and recorded her fellow Rome Prize recipients on the topic, preparing for the live performances at MoMA. Instead of waiting for those appearances to be rescheduled, she created a purely audio iteration for the German radio station.At the start of the radio version, fans of Ms. Z might find themselves impatient for her voice. But the narrative rhythm of her editing has humor, which makes the build toward her full bel canto-infused technique worth the wait. Her first noticeable vocal contributions come in scintillating, refracted shards around the 22nd minute. From there, her vocalizations grow more prominent. (Make sure to catch a lovely song in the second half.)“Times3” audiences can expect a similar structure. “You’ll hear my voice because I have some actual singing parts,” she said. “Also because Geoff insisted on interviewing me.”Mr. Sobelle said he was impressed with what Ms. Z was “able to cobble together out of strange pieces of material.” Though he was disinclined to offer audiences the equivalent of liner notes for “Times3,” or anything that would suggest an experimental work needs special explanation, he did say that “it’s not like a piece of journalism or like a historical document.”“Even though we’re speaking to academics and journalists and architects and city planners and people like that,” he added, “she’s looking for musicality. It’s very much an art piece.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story 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