Sellars, Peter

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    “The Nine Jewelled Deer,” a New Opera, Has Nothing to Do With Antlers

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    A bejeweled doe hides in the forest to protect itself. One day, the doe sees a drowning man who calls out for help. At great risk, the doe saves him. He promises not to reveal the animal’s whereabouts but — enticed by a bounty from the king — he betrays the doe, and a brutal fate is suggested.The story of “The Nine Jewelled Deer,” a new opera that premiered last Sunday at the cultural center Luma Arles, in a co-production with the Aix-en-Provence Festival, is inspired by an ancient Jataka tale of India, exploring the Buddha’s incarnations in both human and animal forms.It has had a decidedly modern rebirth. That story piqued the interest of half a dozen luminaries in the literary, visual and performing arts, including the author Lauren Groff, the painter Julie Mehretu and the director Peter Sellars, galvanizing them to join forces to produce a nonlinear, highly metaphorical adaptation. Their version explores acts of betrayal and exploitation — of the earth, and especially of women. In some cases, its creators said in interviews, it is based on their own experiences and the experiences of women they know.Sellars, known for his avant-garde and socially engaged opera and theater productions, is the sole man among the core creative team. At the heart of the production is Ganavya Doraiswamy, a New York-born musician and performer who blends improvisational jazz with Indian storytelling traditions. Sivan Eldar composed the score and serves as musical director.During the performance of “The Nine Jewelled Deer,” the singer, Ganavya Doraiswamy, onstage with bowls as part of a “kitchen orchestra,” like the one that her grandmother hosted.Theo Giacometti for The New York TimesThe sound engineering by Augustin Muller happens onstage, alongside musicians and vocalists.Theo Giacometti for The New York TimesGroff, the three-time National Book Award finalist and best-selling author, wrote the libretto with Doraiswamy and served as a kind of amanuensis, not just to the writing but to the people involved. Co-starring onstage with Doraiswamy is Aruna Sairam, a renowned ambassador of Indian vocal tradition, particularly South Indian Carnatic music, known for its devotional qualities. Mehretu, who had worked with Sellars on several operas as well — also based on ancient Buddhist stories, she said — contributed her characteristically abstract paintings that form the foundation of the production design.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Peter Sellars Is Still Living His Life Through Art

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      The director, one of the most influential in opera, is staging new productions in New York, France and Austria this summer.Peter Sellars watched the rehearsal and wept in the dark.It was a recent afternoon at Purchase College, north of New York City, and an ensemble was going over a soft yet cataclysmic passage in Matthew Aucoin’s “Music for New Bodies.”A group of singers was almost wailing the word “down,” over and over, as an instrumental undertow seemed to stretch time into a yawning void. The music made plain the terror in the text — Jorie Graham’s poetry of cancer treatments and climate change — and the cheeks of Sellars, the production’s director and one of the most revered figures in the performing arts, grew wet with tears.Among his collaborators, Sellars is cherished for this openness with his feelings. He wraps anyone and everyone in a bear hug. He releases sudden honks of laughter. He cries.“He allows himself to be impacted,” said the soprano Julia Bullock, “and releases his emotions very easily.”“Music for New Bodies” arrives at David Geffen Hall on Thursday as part of the American Modern Opera Company’s summer residency at Lincoln Center. Sellars’s production is in the pared-down, nearly ritualistic style for which he’s become known. With barely any set or props, the singers and instrumentalists are the focus, onstage together under moody lighting, in shifting formations that have the charged drama of Baroque paintings.“I made the staging, but staging is too fancy a word,” he said in an interview. “It’s just — you can see the music.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: John Adams’s ‘El Niño’ Arrives at the Met in Lush Glory

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      The opera-oratorio, an alternate Nativity story, featured a flurry of Met debuts, including the director Lileana Blain-Cruz and the conductor Marin Alsop.On Tuesday night, the Metropolitan Opera continued to play a bit of catch-up with the American composer John Adams.As a Minimalist of striking imagination and moral probity, Adams has developed a distinct musical style and point of view that have earned him a firm place in the pantheon of American art music over the past 40 years or so. His operas, though, didn’t make it to the Met stage until 2008, when “Doctor Atomic” had its East Coast premiere. “Nixon in China” followed in 2011 and “The Death of Klinghoffer” in 2014, decades after they were written. These are Adams’s so-called CNN operas, with subject matter ripped from headlines and history books. But “El Niño,” a hybrid opera-oratorio from 2000 that had its Met premiere on Tuesday, is a different animal.Created with the librettist and director Peter Sellars, a frequent collaborator, “El Niño” is an alternative Nativity story, drawing its Spanish, Latin and English texts from the Apocrypha, 20th-century Mexican and South American poetry, a medieval mystery play and, of course, the New Testament. The gospels of James and Pseudo-Matthew, which didn’t make it into the codified Bible, provide some of the most characterful scenes, as when Joseph comes home to find Mary six months pregnant and exclaims irately, “Who did this evil thing in my house and defiled her?”The air of triumph as the curtain came down on Tuesday night owed as much to the piece as to the director Lileana Blain-Cruz’s vibrant and infectiously exultant production. It was almost as inspiring to see as it was to hear Adams’s marvelous work on the Met’s stage.It was an evening of firsts. The trailblazing conductor Marin Alsop made her long overdue Met debut to much applause. The singers Julia Bullock and Davóne Tines and most of the creative team also made their first appearances.Taking a cue from the piece’s Latin flavor, Blain-Cruz trades the Middle Eastern climate of standard biblical depictions for a lushly tropical realm. The set designer Adam Rigg’s storybook framework, with rolling hills and broad-leaved plants that look like cardboard cutouts, achieves grandeur without aloofness. Montana Levi Blanco’s moss-green costumes for the chorus amplify the sense of a thriving natural world, but shocks of hot pink and aquatic blue, particularly in Yi Zhao’s hallucinogenic lighting design for “Shake the Heavens,” recall the iridescent striations of a Mexican serape. The puppet designer James Ortiz’s contributions reach a captivating zenith in the “Christmas Star” finale of Part 1.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lileana Blain-Cruz Directs ‘El Niño’ For Her Met Opera Debut

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      When Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manger, asked the director Lileana Blain-Cruz what she wanted to stage, she didn’t need any time to think about her answer: “El Niño.”A couple of years ago, she had already been hired to direct Missy Mazzoli’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” an adaptation of the George Saunders novel that will premiere in the 2026-27 season, but Gelb was curious about what else she might be interested in.Long a fan of John Adams and his collaborations with the director-librettist Peter Sellars, Blain-Cruz particularly loved their 2000 oratorio “El Niño,” a blending of the Nativity story with ancient and modern texts, like poetry by Rosario Castellanos and Gabriela Mistral.“It makes you weep, and you don’t expect it,” Blain-Cruz said of the piece. “It shook me and stayed in my imagination for a while after I heard it, but I didn’t know when I would have a chance to make it happen onstage myself.”Gelb quickly said yes. Now, Blain-Cruz’s production of “El Niño” will premiere at the Met on Tuesday, bringing with it the return of the brilliant mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges and the long-awaited house debuts of Julia Bullock, Davóne Tines and the conductor Marin Alsop.Davóne Tines, center, makes his Met debut in “El Niño. Costumes are by Montana Levi Blanco. Lila Barth for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jorie Graham’s Poetry of the Earth and Humanity, Set to Music

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      The composer Matthew Aucoin, Graham’s former student, and the director Peter Sellars have adapted her poems into the operatic “Music for New Bodies.”Peter Sellars wanted to know more.He was in San Francisco a few years ago, attending a performance of “The No One’s Rose,” a fascinatingly idiosyncratic work of music theater that featured some of his favorite artists, from the American Modern Opera Company, and a score by the young composer Matthew Aucoin.One section of the piece stood out: “Deep Water Trawling,” a setting of a poem by Jorie Graham that felt both human and not, both natural and spiritual. Most important, it seemed to have brought out something new, and special, in Aucoin’s writing.After the show Sellars, who at 66 has long been a reigning opera director, asked Aucoin, “What was that?”They decided to take the inspiration of Graham’s poetry further, starting without any specific commission. Now, having taken shape as the evening-length “Music for New Bodies,” their project is premiering in concert on Saturday in Houston, presented by Dacamera and the music school at Rice University, where it will be performed.The director Peter Sellers, center. “This is not just standard operating procedure,” he said. “The piece has this depth and this inner tranquillity, and warmth and intensity.”Meridith Kohut for The New York TimesIn five movements sprawling across 70 minutes, “New Bodies” sets poems by Graham about the earth and humanity that are told in shifting voices and registers, channeling natural forces and at times evoking the mind under anesthesia. Although its expansiveness and form recall Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde,” it is neither a song cycle nor a symphony. It is perhaps closest to opera, though mostly, it is what it is.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Pathbreaking Singer Arrives at the Met, With Pearls and Tattoos

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      Dav­óne Tines, who stars in the oratorio “El Niño,” is challenging traditions in classical music and using art to confront social problems.The bass-baritone Dav­óne Tines, wearing Dr. Martens boots, a sleeveless black shirt and six vintage pearl rings, stood on a rehearsal stage at the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan the other day and began to sing.“My soul’s above the sea and whistling a dream,” he sang, a passage from the Nativity oratorio “El Niño” by John Adams, in which Tines makes his Met debut this month. “Tell the shepherds the wind is saddling its horse.”Tines, 37, known for his raw intensity and thundering voice, has quickly become one of classical music’s brightest stars. He has won acclaim for performances of Bach, Handel and Stravinsky, and he has helped champion new music, originating roles in operas like Adams’s “Girls of the Golden West” and Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.”Tines has also used his art to confront social problems, including racism and police brutality. In 2018, he was a creator of and starred in “The Black Clown,” a searing rumination on Black history and identity inspired by a Langston Hughes poem. In 2020, he released a music video after the police killing of Breonna Taylor, calling for empathy and action.During a rehearsal break at the Met, he described his art as cathartic, saying his aim was to “pick apart the complicated, contentious existence that is knit into the American landscape.”“It’s a blessing to be a performing artist because you get an explicit place to put your feelings,” he said. “It’s the blessing of having a channel.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Kaija Saariaho’s ‘Adriana Mater,’ After Her Death

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      The conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the director Peter Sellars, two Saariaho collaborators, brought “Adriana Mater” to the San Francisco Symphony.The composer Kaija Saariaho, who died earlier this month at 70, spent much of her career expecting not to write an opera. She saw it as a dusty art form, she once said, and couldn’t picture translating her sound world of slow, subtle harmonic changes into melodies and arias.A pair of directors changed her mind. In the early 1990s she saw Patrice Chéreau’s staging of “Wozzeck” in Paris and Peter Sellars’s production of “Saint François d’Assise” at the Salzburg Festival — experiences that, she later said, “opened my mind to what can be done by telling a story with music.”Saariaho’s first opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” an ethereal allegory of medieval love, premiered at Salzburg in 2000 and quickly became her most famous work. Even so, she didn’t plan to compose another.But some nudges, and a commission from the Paris Opera, led to “Adriana Mater” in 2006. Less than a week after Saariaho’s death, that sophomore outing was revived at the San Francisco Symphony — by the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and Sellars, two of her longtime collaborators, who first brought the work to life.The long-planned event was a ready-made memorial for news so fresh it had to be acknowledged with a program insert. On that succinct sheet of paper, Salonen touchingly remarked, “This is the first time I’ll conduct the music without my friend.” And Sellars described the performance as “the best way we know to remember her, call her back and let her go again.”“Adriana Mater” is starkly different from “L’Amour”: contemporary in its subject matter and more explicitly dramatic. But then, all of Saariaho’s operas are distinct, even if they add up to stars in the same constellation.The composer who was reluctant to write for theater would go on to create the richly nuanced monodrama “Émilie,” premiered by the soprano Karita Mattila in 2010; the Noh-inspired “Only the Sound Remains,” staged in 2016; and “Innocence,” first unveiled at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2021, a work powerfully wise in its ideas and execution, a smoothly cohesive collage of styles that now seems like something of a career capstone, if not her masterpiece.History will decide what music of Saariaho’s will survive. It’s hard, however, to imagine the operas fading from the repertoire. They represent the art form at its best: elevated expression that, through storytelling, constantly revisits themes that are timeless and universal. For all their complexity, they are about how we love, how we hurt, how we die. Beyond any surface-level drama, like a school shooting in “Innocence” or war in “Adriana Mater,” these works are utterly relevant — not only in how they pertain to our moment, but also in how they capture the root of that word, as the author Garth Greenwell has observed of the French “relever,” to raise back up.The San Francisco Symphony’s production was staged by Peter Sellars and conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, both of whom were involved with the opera’s premiere in 2006.Brittany Hosea-SmallThat much was clear during the San Francisco Symphony’s performances of “Adriana Mater,” which concluded on Sunday at Davies Symphony Hall and were recorded for later release. Amin Maalouf, the librettist for all of Saariaho’s operas until “Innocence,” has said that the work recalls conflict in the Balkans at the end of the 20th century. But its themes resonate independent of that reference point. It is fundamentally about the uncertainty of motherhood, and about compassion in the face of brutality — about seeking, as one character says, salvation over vengeance.“Adriana Mater” is an opera of difficult questions and emotions but straightforward plot. Adriana (the mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron, a mighty presence in a small frame) rebuffs Tsargo, a drunk young man, with a mixture of disgust and pity. But later, Tsargo — sung by the baritone Christopher Purves with Alberich-like bite — returns during wartime to rape her, empowered by circumstance and an assault rifle. Adriana becomes pregnant, and despite warnings from her sister, Refka (the alluringly lyrical soprano Axelle Fanyo), chooses to have the baby. “It isn’t his child,” Adriana says. “It’s mine.”But she does worry: Will the child be more like Tsargo or like her? Cain or Abel? Act II, set 17 years later, puts that uncertainty to the test when her son, Yonas (an agile, heldentenor-like Nicholas Phan) learns his father’s identity and sets out to kill him. But when he sees Tsargo, blind and broken, he cannot bring himself to do it. Yonas feels ashamed for not carrying out the murder, but his mother is relieved. He is truly her son.Saariaho’s music is rarely representational. Adriana’s offstage rape is punctuated with violent chords, and drilling percussion evokes the assault of war, but otherwise the writing favors atmosphere and abstraction. In a way that prefigures the grand tapestry of “Innocence,” she attaches specific sounds to each character: turbulent harmony for Adriana, long melodic lines for Refka, darkly shadowed low strings for Tsargo, frantic lightness for Yonas. Too often in contemporary music, conductors seem merely to be keeping time; but all this was handled deftly by Salonen, who looked as animated and assured as if he were conducting Beethoven.Sellars’s concert-hall staging was minimal, as was his original production at the Paris Opera. Here, the action unfolded on platforms of various heights that kept the singers, looking contemporary, if not specifically of any one place, in Camille Assaf’s costumes, almost always isolated. At the start, Adriana and Tsargo’s little stages, under James F. Ingalls’s lighting, were colored yellow and blue, as if to suggest that the story took place in Ukraine.But any comparison to the current war didn’t linger. The colors changed constantly, mercurial and expressive, as the action unfolded. Neither Sellars nor the opera, after all, needed an updated story to make it more recognizable. That’s already in the score, in the way Saariaho’s delicately consoling music stares down the worst of the world and says: The only way forward is grace.‘Adriana Mater’Performed on Sunday at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. More

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      Review: In ‘Monochromatic Light,’ Artists Saturate and Vacate Space

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      Tyshawn Sorey’s music, initially written with Mark Rothko’s abstractions in mind, comes to the Park Avenue Armory with art by Julie Mehretu.If you write a musical composition in homage to Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” and if you premiere it in the actual Rothko Chapel in Houston, you’d seem to be anchoring its meaning and context in rather firm ground. But the American composer and percussionist Tyshawn Sorey is a more restive and conjectural artist than that; and his “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the chapel earlier this year, has come to New York rewritten, reorganized and reinvigorated.This latest, and now staged, version of “Monochromatic Light” premiered at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday, and it retains the spare and ritualistic tenor of Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” with long rests between its inquiring viola phrases and soft rumbles of the timpani. Here in New York, though, Sorey’s music is heard in the company not of Rothko but of another American painter: the contemporary artist Julie Mehretu, whose dense and digitally conversant abstractions flow and swarm where Rothko’s brooded. The production, by the avant-garde journeyman Peter Sellars, has been souped up for the Armory’s cavernous drill hall and augmented with young dancers. The running time has ballooned, too, from under an hour to a good 90 minutes.In scaling up, Sorey may have sacrificed the ecclesiastical concentration that both he and Feldman before him had found in Houston. The night has its longueurs. But this rethought and more antagonistic “Monochromatic Light” strikes a new richness in New York, and it affirms how abstraction can give form to suffering and freedom in ways more straightforward expression so often cannot.At the Armory, “Monochromatic Light” is staged in the round. Sorey, at center, conducts an ensemble of just three musicians, playing viola, keyboards and percussion: nearly the same instrumentation as Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel.” Singers from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street sit at a distance, and behind the audience is an octagonal gangway, with one massive reproduction of a Mehretu painting hanging above each side. Three of the eight abstractions were seen in her 2020 exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery; one appeared this year at David Zwirner in a group show devoted to Toni Morrison; and four are new, incorporating dense layers of halftone dots, sprayed clouds of bright yellow or green and seething black squiggles.The staging echoes Philip Johnson’s octagonal nave of the Houston chapel, but from the opening moments of gently struck tubular bells, it’s clear that Rothko’s dark reticence is being left behind. For Mehretu’s works here are not paintings but blowups on translucent screens, lit from front and back by colored spots. (The lighting designer, James F. Ingalls, a longtime Sellars collaborator, synchronizes the color adjustments across all eight paintings so that, at a given moment in the score, their backgrounds will all glow purple or aquamarine and their tremulous blacks will emerge or recede.)Deidra “Dayntee” Braz, one of the eight dancers who performed in the Brooklyn-born style known as flex.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesUp on the gangway are eight dancers, one per painting, who bend and writhe throughout in a Brooklyn-born style of dancing known as flex. The performers are athletic, the men among them perform shirtless, but choreographed by Reggie Gray (also known as Regg Roc) they appear vulnerable, fragile, under threat; they contort their arms as if they’re fractured or disjointed and draw in their stomachs as if taking a punch.The score is rangy and spatial, the tempo largo to larghissimo. (There’s no beat as such; Sorey marked time with strokes of his baton lasting a second or longer.) Its opening minutes are especially minimal. Against a long and attenuated trill of the viola, Mehretu’s backgrounds become a lurid green or mysterious blue and the black lines of the paintings start to look more querulous. The dancers moonwalk and roll their necks; their motions are smooth and spasmodic by turns, and several of them present bulging eyes and pained expressions that recall the existential intensity of butoh.The dancers’ broken movements, and Mehretu’s colliding layers and shaking lines, bring out an anxiety in Sorey’s score that probably did not come through in front of Rothko’s hushed paintings in Houston. There’s an angst and frailty in the scattered notes Kim Kashkashian brings from her viola, while the percussionist Steven Schick bows between the bars of a marimba to produce a spooky, theremin-like keening. The silky ah-ah-ah choral lines, a Feldman quotation that I imagine worked better amid the Rothkos, feel out of place against Mehretu’s unsettled paintings, though there is sharper accompaniment from Davóne Tines, the solo bass-baritone, walking through the audience and later circumnavigating the gangway. As he wrenches forth fragments from the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” the words octaves apart and isolated by long silences, the evening takes on the tone of a funeral march.The solo bass-baritone Davóne Tines singing in front of an enlarged reproduction of a painting by Julie Mehretu, with the flex dancer Jeremy “Opt” Perez lying on the gangway below.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesSorey’s interpolation of a spiritual into “Monochromatic Light,” as well as the dancers’ channeling of Jamaican vernacular movements and the violent news imagery that Mehretu abstracts into her churning backgrounds, all imbue this threnody with the particularities of Black grief. But it resists resolution throughout. This is a work of Blackness (or blackness) in abstraction — one that defies the supposed blankness of nonobjective painting or art music on the one hand, and current market demands for social advocacy on the other. Blackness in abstraction, as the curator Adrienne Edwards has written, is a more capacious and immanent model of artistic creation than many of our institutions can handle. It requires a dual engagement with form and identity, which, in Edwards’s words, “shifts analysis away from the Black artist as subject and instead emphasizes blackness as material, method and mode.” It can draw as much from Rothko, whose murals in Houston are black with purplish-blue undertones, as from Du Bois or Eastman or O’Grady. It pushes past biography or storytelling, and enters the realms of the psychic, the global, the cosmic.What I most admired about Mehretu’s midcareer retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year was how she used magnitude to defy the diminishment and simplifications that even our “diversified” cultural institutions still assign to artists outside the dominant representation. Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light,” for all its spareness, does the same. Where Mehretu saturates space, Sorey vacates it, yet both painter and composer offer vital examples of how to create at full scale when the times impel others to reduce their ambition. This is how you speak to some and to all at once; this is how you mourn and stay free.Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)Through Oct. 8 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

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      A Work of Mourning Comes to New York, With No Rothkos in Sight

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      Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” written for the Rothko Chapel in Houston, becomes longer and grander for the Park Avenue Armory.Few pieces of music are as tied to the place where they premiered as Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife).”Commissioned to honor the 50th anniversary of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Sorey’s work was first heard in February in that intimate room, surrounded by Mark Rothko’s brooding late canvases. But the site specificity goes deeper: “Monochromatic Light” closely echoes the instrumentation and the mournful, glacial style of Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” written for the space soon after it opened in the early 1970s.Sorey’s work wouldn’t seem fit for any other setting. But along with the chapel and the Houston arts organization DaCamera, the Park Avenue Armory commissioned the work, and from Tuesday through Oct. 8, “Monochromatic Light” will be presented there — with no Rothkos in sight.“We decided we wouldn’t try to recreate the experience of the Rothko Chapel,” Sorey said in an interview. “You can’t do that anywhere. You can’t redo that situation.”The Armory’s vast drill hall dwarfs the chapel, where “Monochromatic Light” was given a straightforward, concert-style presentation. The New York production, staged by the veteran director Peter Sellars, has grown to match.An octagonal playing space, nodding to the shape of the chapel in Houston, has been constructed within the drill hall. The audience — about 600, versus 150 at the premiere — is seated in the round and surrounded by eight paintings by another abstractionist, Julie Mehretu, blown up to billboard-size dimensions. A dancer is stationed in front of each painting, sinuously twisting and bending in the Brooklyn-born street dance style called flex.An octagonal performance space that nods to the Rothko Chapel in Houston has been constructed inside the Armory’s drill hall.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesSorey has added to the piece itself, bringing its length to almost 90 minutes, from 50 minutes in Houston, particularly broadening the music for the pianist Sarah Rothenberg. She also plays celesta (the only keyboard instrument in the Feldman) and is joined in the center of the space by the violist Kim Kashkashian, the percussionist Steven Schick, and Sorey, as conductor.Sorey said he knew earlier this year that “Monochromatic Light” hadn’t yet reached its final form, but simply didn’t have enough time before the premiere to write more. And the rehearsal process in New York, particularly the addition of the dancers, had inspired him.“At the Houston performances, while I was very satisfied, I felt I needed more of this experience,” he said. “In terms of having more material and developing off what we did at the chapel, now I’m at a place where it’s like, we’ve left the chapel. I’m dealing with everything the chapel stood for, but also things we’re dealing with now.”His additions had arrived in the musicians’ email inboxes just a few hours before a rehearsal on Sept. 14, on an upper floor of the Armory. The stress level in the room was high. But the meditative music, with its spacious if unsettling quiet, gradually brought down the blood pressure.With mock-ups of the Mehretu paintings on the walls, a few dancers stood in for what would eventually be the full complement of eight, while four singers — one for each voice part — represented the choir of Trinity Wall Street. The choreographer, Reggie Gray, a flex innovator also known as Regg Roc, sat to the side watching, and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines slowly walked around the space, intoning the score’s vocalizations, which can evoke fragments of the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.”Tyshawn Sorey, center right, conducting his work, which he has expanded to 90 minutes for the Armory production.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesSellars occasionally called out cues to the dancers, representing shifts in mood that would be reflected in the staging by dramatic changes in the lighting on the paintings. “The heart of the world opens,” he cried at one point; at another, “walking on the razor-blade bridge on the day of judgment.”Gray, in a joint interview with Sorey, Sellars and Mehretu, said of the dancers’ movements: “It’ll be different every single night. It’s how do the emotions go through their bodies at that time.”When he was discussing the formation of a creative team with the Armory, Sorey said, he wanted to reunite with Sellars, after working with him on several iterations of “Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine,” an evening-length recomposition of Josephine Baker songs, starting in 2016. Sellars, in turn, suggested Mehretu (with whom he had staged Kaija Saariaho’s opera “Only the Sound Remains” in 2016) and Gray (with whom he created “Flexn” at the Armory in 2015).At first, Mehretu didn’t know how closely to hew to the works in the Houston chapel. “I thought a lot about making black paintings,” she said. What she ended up producing was far more active and jittery than the Rothkos, with the swooping calligraphic gestures and kaleidoscopic, colorful flecks she is known for.“I contacted Peter as I was working and said, ‘These are not monochromatic,’” Mehretu recalled with a laugh.Among the performers are members of the choir of Trinity Wall Street, left, rehearsing here with the production’s director, Peter Sellars.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesBut, Sellars said, “a lot of the staging is monochromatic light. Seeing these paintings under these single lighting temperatures or colors, they get new identities under monochromatic light.”The underpaintings — invisible in the final works — are blurred images, mostly taken from the news, including coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol and the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va. Those ghosts of history and trauma, personal and societal, are a veiled presence, like “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” in Sorey’s score.“It’s constantly playing back as the piece is going, but you only hear it now and again,” Sorey said. “You have this musical information that is in a lot of ways inspired by that spiritual, but you only really hear it from time to time. It’s there, and it’s not there.”In Sellars’s telling, the past is invoked in this way in “Monochromatic Light” in order to heal and press toward the future. “Coming out of the two years we’re coming out of, it’s important to move forward,” he said, “The past is ongoing, but we have to move this whole thing forward.”Unlike in Houston, where audience members faced in the same direction toward the performers, the Armory’s in-the-round presentation also has political reverberations. “It’s about a society looking at itself,” Sellars said. “There is no way out; we’re all in this together. None of us is experiencing the exact same thing, but we’re with each other.”Sorey’s music, he added, “is experiential. It’s lived in; it’s an experience.”The question is how audiences will respond to an experience so long, spare, rigorous and ritualistic. “It is about endurance,” Sellars said. “How long a minute can be. Not ‘Oh, let’s change the subject.’ We’re going to stay here until we really find something. It’s a space of concentrated investing.”And the music gives the sense that it could keep on quietly expanding forever. Sorey, however, said that he thought it had reached its final form: “This feels like what it is.”Then, with a grin, he added: “I’ve got another hour to add. Easily, right?” More