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Woodstock Times - Featured Arts | 8/20/2009 |
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World premiere!
See Palestrina channeled via Nathaniel Hawthorne through the auspices of the Rocky Horror Show this weekend in rustic Mount Tremper |
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| | Mount Tremper Arts founders Matthew Pokoik and Aynsley Vandenbroecke.
[ Dion Ogust ] | |
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by Geddy Sveikauskas
Up the gravel driveway past the Mount Tremper Arts sign on Old Route 28 to the small parking lot with only one car in it, a battered green Volvo station wagon. The place looks dusty and deserted. Up at the studio is a glass door, behind which six people are sitting in a circle on the floor. What are they doing?
Open the door. The six are singing together, a cappella, carrying multiple melodic voices at the same time, pitch against pitch, entering and enlarging and diminishing, listening very carefully to each other as they create harmonies together, enjoying immensely the counterpoint they are creating.
Holy cow. It's Palestrina, vocal music written half a century or so before Henry Hudson sailed up the same river into which the Esopus Creek outside flows. This Palestrina stuff is not easy to sing well. These people must be very good at what they do. I feel prickles up and down my spine. I'm as honored as I am surprised to be in this bright, large, sunlight space listening to pure vocal sound resonating off the rafters.
I've stumbled into a world premiere. Since the first performance is scheduled for this Friday at Mount Tremper Arts, in fact, I am experiencing my own world premiere. What have I done to deserve this? Is this my reward for verbal self-indulgence?
This weekend the Brooklyn-based Collective Opera Company will perform a new opera called Scarlet Fever, loosely based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's 19th century novel The Scarlet Letter. The work has been commissioned by Mount Tremper Arts. Tickets are $12 in advance and $15 at the door. Performances are at 8 p.m. both evenings. Better seating is more likely to be available Friday night than Saturday.
Scarlet Fever, the blurb tells us, "... is a new opera that mines America's long-held obsession with unorthodox pregnancy. Classical voices and tabloid storylines collide in this absurdist riff on maternal identity and the glaring influence of the media over our collective response to transgressive motherhood."
In the only other scene I saw, Ryan Tracy, guiding light of this interdisciplinary ensemble of creative artists, dances briefly with two supporting muses. Held up by them, he groans as though in childbirth. The muses gently let him go, and then gather him again. He groans again. A pause. Another female dancer flies across the room, slides past under the transfixed Tracy. It is Pearl, Hester Prynne's daughter of an unknown father, that moment born.
Theatrical moments worthy of the Rocky Horror Show pervade the Collective Opera Company performance. Expectations in regard to form do not apply here.
Ryan Tracy has directed over 30 performances of the Collective Opera Company during the past four years, mostly in New York City. In a brief interview, Tracy described how fortunate he and his colleagues were to have concentrated working time in the country setting of Mount Tremper Arts.
One would not immediately think of what Tracy does as "opera." Opera, as he sees it, does not have to be long, big, sung all the way through, set to an orchestral score, performed on a stage, or live.
"A new idea that interests me, and that, I believe, has manifested itself in this new work, is getting opera to feel more like theater," he wrote in a recent blog. "Opera, it seems, has developed over the last hundred years into a theatrical form that feels distinctly unlike the theater or plays. I'd like to experiment with getting opera to have that immediacy and urgency one feels in non-musical theater (and even in some works of 'musical theater'). Why does going to opera have to feel esoteric and alien?"
Mount Tremper Arts' second season ends next weekend with two performances by dancer Kimberly Bartosik, whose work one perceptive critic, Elizabeth Bachner, has described as "careful and intentional." Bartosik is working on a piece called "The Materiality of Impermanence," which is said to investigate "the traces and residues which bodies leave on each other, and the ways bodies take up space inside each other."
Mount Tremper Arts co-founders photographer Mathew Pokoik and dancer Aynsley Vandenbroecke have lavished two years' worth of unending care and stubbornness on their brainchild. They express a deep kinship between themselves and the Woodstock arts tradition. Pokoik in particular feels that there's got to be the potential for a more substantial Woodstock audience for Mount Tremper Arts. How come the proportion of Mount Tremper Arts' audience from Woodstock has been disappointing?
I can't answer that. Perhaps you can.++
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