by Robert Faires
Opera
smells of age. That isn’t meant as a slap at the venerable form of musical drama; it’s merely
a comment on the way opera is enveloped almost exclusively in the past. The
operatic works produced most frequently today are the products of the 18th and
19th centuries. Their subjects are often historical in nature, figures of
history or ancient myth, and we typically present them in period dress. Even
modern attempts at opera, such as Ghosts of Versailles and Nixon in
China, tend to look backward in time, even if it’s only a few decades. By
and large, opera rarely stares into the future.
But it is doing so now.
The Black Blood, which opens December 29 at Planet Theatre, is a new
opera which turns its gaze firmly, resolutely, toward tomorrow. It attempts to
bring the form into the era of technology, this age in which machines are an
integral part of human existence, and even to project it into an era in which
metal and flesh are fused. Composer Chad Salvata and his electronic music group
Ethos call the piece a cybernetic opera.
According to Salvata and Bonnie Cullum, who is directing the VORTEX Repertory
Company production, The Black Blood is unquestionably an opera. In form,
the work fits squarely into the operatic tradition. The work is a musical drama
with no spoken dialogue; everything is sung. In content, The Black Blood echoes the great tragic operas of old. Its story concerns brothers, opposites
in nature, in a battle for control of a world; a king who is corrupted and his
son who challenges his evil father only to become like him. The consequences of
these actions are rape and murder. The issues raised by them are centuries old:
the legacy of the past, the sins of the father being visited on the son, the
abuse of power.
But The Black Blood offers this old wine in a very new wineskin, one
that gleams and resounds with a metallic clang. To begin with, the cybernetic
opera’s sound is, according to Cullum, “ultra-modern and contemporary.” The
basis for Ethos’ score is techno-trance music, the driving repetitive
electronic music that evolved from the rave style. Still propelled by an
insistent beat but slower and more spacey in its rhythms, techno-trance is “New
Age music with a beat,” says Salvata. “And an edge,” adds Cullum. Salvata has
adapted the style to suit the needs of a musical drama. He has abandoned the
sustained intensity of pure techno-trance for a variety of moods and tempos.
Cullum fills out the picture: “Some of the songs are very hard-edged and
industrial. Others are softer, more melodic.”
As these descriptions suggest, the quality of the sound differs substantially
from that found in a traditional opera. Gone are the natural strings, reeds,
percussion, and brass of the unamplified orchestra. The instruments used by
Ethos are all electronic. The material is composed on computers and
synthesizers; its beat is kept by electronic percussion. What’s more, the sound
of the performers is altered, too. “We hear embellished voices,” explains
Salvata. The actors perform with headset microphones and their singing is
processed electronically before it is heard by the audience. There are two
kinds of processing, according to the composer, a lyrical sound closer to the
sound of a natural human voice, and a style called “voicescape,” which is more
improvisational and alters the character of the voice more radically. The
upshot is that at no point during the performance is a human voice heard in its
natural state.
While the all-electronic sound may seem little more than a state-of-the-art
gimmick, it is in fact at the heart of Salvata’s concept of the cybernetic
opera: a synthesis of the human and the machine. The composer/creator is intent
upon having the mesh of flesh and metal integrated into every aspect of the
production, even in the way the characters move. In the VORTEX production, all
the performers will be walking, turning, gesturing, in a very stylized manner,
a cybernetic style. “The movement and the energy is very mechanical and yet
it’s very human,” says Cullum. “It has a very dynamic edge; it departs from
ordinary movement in much the same way that Butoh departs from dance.”
The form of “cybernetic” movement originated in Salvata’s individual
performance art, where he refined it to an elaborate degree. “Chad had been
developing this style for years,” notes Cullum, but that was primarily for his
own use. With the production of The Black Blood, Salvata was having to
teach it to a cast of actors. “So Chad and I worked together on the
choreography,” says Cullum. “It’s really teamed choreography. We figured out
these are possible head movements, these are possible arm gestures. Then we
taught it to the cast. At first, it looked very robotic. But then, once people
assimilated the movement, the individual actor’s human movements were brought
in. So, each person’s `cybernetic’ movement is different and it’s as much human
as it is mechanical.”
Further exploring the human/machine dichotomy in the visual realm are designer
T’Cie Mancuso’s outfits for the performers. “The costumes are particularly
spectacular,” says Cullum. “They’re made of a lot of metal — tubes and pipes,
products of the 20th century — but with the softer lines of skin showing
through in many places. There’s a lot of skin showing,” she laughs. “But none
of the looks are naturalistic. They’re all otherworldly. We have some elements
that look very futuristic, like something out of Star Trek, and others
which look very fantastical, like something out of Tolkein.”
This fusion of Middle Earth and the edge of the galaxy, of the futuristic and
the fantastic, the human and the mechanical, has been a long time in the
making. Salvata sowed the first seeds of the piece in his performance art in
Houston years ago. His work on this particular script dates back some five
years. When he moved to Austin in the early Nineties, Salvata approached Cullum
about developing the work, thinking VORTEX a natural venue for the piece.
Coincidentally, Salvata’s name had been passed to Cullum by the head of the
Houston arts organization Diverseworks. She invited Salvata to perform excerpts
from The Black Blood at VORTEX’s fifth birthday party, then had him
present more of it last December at a special preview and fundraiser. The past
year has been spent focusing on the development of a full production. And now
that’s come.
But when The Black Blood closes January 6, don’t expect that to be
the last you hear of cybernetic opera. Salvata envisions the piece as the first
part in a trilogy, The X and Y Trilogy. The second and third parts of it,
Panoptikon and Triskelion, respectively, explore the
repercussions of the tragedies in The Black Blood and investigate
further the dangers of a lack of balance in our existence. “The later works,”
says the composer, “examine prison as a metaphor for contemporary life and the
decentralization of life in this country, but dealt with in a fairy tale
setting.”
As seems natural, Salvata has his eye on the future. But the future doesn’t
come easy, as he and Cullum have learned from the current project. In creating
this future form of opera, says Cullum, “We were all at Square Zero. But we
were fortunate to have a bright, talented group of performers willing to
experiment. Because it is so unusual, in the work’s sound, in its movement, a
classically trained singer or a classically trained actor might go, `What is
this?’ But these performers didn’t. They went ahead.
“The challenges for me as an artist have been great. And the way has been full
of risks. But I’ve never seen anything like this. It has such a dynamic and
original quality. It experiments with form and content. It’s a new frontier and
I think that’s terribly exciting.” n
The Black Blood will be performed Dec 29-Jan 6 at Planet Theatre.
This article appears in December 22 • 1995 and December 22 • 1995 (Cover).