The Week Over-Heard #3
Thrill of The Hunt
The first time I tried seeing The Hunt of the Unicorn at the Met Cloisters, the tapestries were closed for cleaning. The closest I got was in the giftshop.
Posters, post-its, and mousepads decorated with the famous Unicorn in Captivity. Its horsey face with strangely human eyes and a white beard.
Kate Soper’s The Hunt — which premiered at Columbia’s Miller Theater on Thursday, Oct. 12 — was just as anachronistic as a museum mousepad. But much more entertaining.
Set in the “speculative” medieval future, the opera — with texts by Hildegard von Bingen, Christina Rossetti, and H.D. — is written for three sopranos, who accompany themselves on ukulele and violin. This is it as far as instrumentation goes, aside from some electronic drones.
These three virgins, we learn, have been selected by the king as “unicorn bait.” Brett Umlauf, as the ditsy Fleur, twirls her sleeves as Hirona Amamiya, as Rue, fiddles away the time. But Christiana Cole — as the straight-faced Briar, in glasses and a dowdy veil — stole the show.
The humor is Monty Python-esque raunch. At one point Cole is practically spanking their instrument, which hangs from a strap. But there are gorgeous moments, too, such as Cole’s messa da voce in their Scene Two solo.
The audience was instructed to switch phones to airplane mode before the concert. That’s because the virgins offer livestream “updates,” which are met with the King’s gloved thumbs-up. Sickly sweet, they sing: “We thank his Highness for his patronage, and thank the court for tuning in.”
In a key scene — spoiler alert — Cole, who is nonbinary, rips off their wig, revealing a bleached pixie, and makes out with Fleur. In retrospect, I should have seen it coming: “I was a librarian,” says Briar earlier in the opera. “It’s not exactly a sexy profession.” “Yes, it is,” says the flustered Fleur.
In another, the virgins eat a sugar cube (intended for the unicorn) laced with belladonna. The following “high scene” is full of trilling, barking, and clucking. They strip their medieval smocks to reveal athleisure underneath: sneakers, leggings, and sports bras.
O Anderson
When we were gifted last-minute tickets to Laurie Anderson’s Let X=X — at BAM on Tuesday, Oct. 17 — we couldn’t pass on the opportunity. (Though I was sad to miss M Lamar’s set at Sundown Bar in Ridgewood.)
Anderson was at BAM’s first “Next Wave Festival” forty years ago. “I fell into the pit,” she said, in a story that seemed to go nowhere, “and suddenly it was all black.”
Part of the joy of hearing Anderson is surveying the crowd of “old people in leather jackets,” as my partner calls them. Overheard behind us: “Joe just texted me that Philip Glass sat right in front of him.”
Later, Anderson listed her heroes, including Glass. This was followed by a dad joke: “Sometimes I ask, what would John Cage do? And the answer is...” Crickets. Followed by chuckles.
Though the program had no set list, Anderson played mostly arrangements of songs from her 1982 album Big Science, accompanied by the jazz band “Sex Mob.”
Now, the members of “Sex Mob” aren’t exactly sex bombs. But I enjoyed the Larry David look-alike guitarist’s stanky faces throughout.
“This is your captain,” chanted Anderson in “From the Air.” With the words, “Cover your eyes,” some people actually did. The titular song “Let X=X” was melodic and mellow.
At halftime, she treated the audience to a 10-second-long Yoko Ono scream: “Think about the war in Ukraine, genocides, hostages in Gaza,” she said.
At first, I was surprised to hear “O Superman,” as this “Massenet-inspired pop hit” — as the Times’s Seth Colter Walls calls it — is so over-played, probably to Anderson’s chagrin. But the lyrics couldn’t have been timelier.
“Here come the planes,” sang Anderson. “When justice is gone, there’s always force.” Her age-cracked voice made it even more poignant.
This wasn’t Anderson’s only ambiguous political commentary. In “Only an Expert,” she added the words “and bombing hospitals.”
She also riffed on “Twinkle Twinkle’s” apocalyptic second verse: “When the blazing sun is gone, nothing now to shine upon, how I wonder where you are.”
As in The Hunt, technology formed a theme in Let X=X. One song was accompanied by 3D renderings of a snow-covered mountain. With captchas projected onscreen, Anderson commented on the irony of attesting you are not a robot to a robot.
During another, a quote: “If you think technology will solve your problems, then you don’t understand technology, and you don’t understand your problems.” Anderson also cited her latest obsession with AI, comparing it to angels.
Indeed, “Walk the Dog,” with Anderson’s Alvin and the Chipmunks-like vocoder, feels almost AI generated. “I went to the movies,” she shrieks, “and I saw a dog thirty feet high. And this dog was made entirely of light.”
In an encore, Anderson had the entire audience do Tai Chi in honor of Lou Reed. The sight — three levels of people following Anderson’s command — was surreal.
Tabula Rasa
Anderson’s performance formed the backdrop of how I listened to The Rasa Project at National Sawdust on Sunday, Oct. 22.
Forgoing a traditional seat, I plopped down on one of the black floor cushions. These were surrounded by giant, charred scrolls of paper, on one of which a dancer — Andrea Villarreal Lozano — was sleeping.
The program notes tell a vague backstory: Our protagonist, “Andrea,” finds herself in a “post-apocalyptic” barren wasteland, where she is guided by an “artificially intelligent voice.”
The performance, inspired by AI and John Cage’s indeterminacy, is a “response to the climate crisis,” evocative of Fluxus happenings. (And things were certainly happening!)
“Have you ever thought of exploring a virtual environment?” says the AI voice. To a backdrop of lava lamp-like projections, the dancer plants a seed in a box of dirt (a Cagean metaphor?), willing it to grow.
It soon becomes clear that, through the dancer’s headset, she “sees” things we cannot.
Pianist Landon Wilson, cocking his bleached mushroom cut, plays the first of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano.
These sounds — futuristic yet fully acoustic — compliment scuffling toes and ripping paper. These, in turn, contrast Lozano’s fluid, organic movements.
Next, cellist Clara Cho played the New York premiere of inti figgis-vizueta’s INBHIR (many waters). To rising double stops, which evoked a plane taking off, and Fratres-like arpeggios, the dancer got within my touching distance.
Nacho Ojeda rose from audience for the next of Cage’s sonatas. His thoughtful playing soon grew faster and faster, like a bossa nova.
Around this point, my foot fell asleep. This was just in time for Cage’s 4’33” which, despite some of that “moment of silence” awkwardness, moved me to my core. Lozano’s twitching slowly turning to stillness.
“Why take action now if you won’t witness it in your lifetime?” says the voice, interrupted by pianist Arthur Siyun Li’s exciting, energetic playing.
The focal point, however, was violist Teagan Faran’s declarative rendition — walking barefoot, eyes closed — of Reena Esmail’s Varsha, based on an Indian raag. The final Cage sonatas, played by Wong Foo Jeng, sounded like a waterfall of music boxes.
The performance’s ending offered little closure. Placing her headset on the piano, Lozano lies down where she started, paper a bit worse for wear. The scene is dimly illuminated by the red EXIT signs.
Coda
One evening, procrastinating on this review, I type into ChatGPT: “Can you write a song about unicorns in the avant-garde style of Laurie Anderson?”
“Oh, the unicorns in the binary streams. In the zeros and ones, they dance and gleam,” it responds. “In the tapestry of the digital night, unicorns of code take flight.”
It’s absolutely terrible.
