Photo by Mark Frohna
Poorly versed in contemporary opera, I asked a young opera singer friend how I might describe Missy Mazzoli’s 2012 chamber opera Song from the Uproar whose opening night, in a coproduction by Milwaukee Opera Theatre and Wild Space Dance Company, we’d attended at the Broadway Theatre Center last weekend. “Highly spiritual,” was her perfect suggestion. “Extremely difficult,” she agreed, would also be apt. Mazzoli actually instructs the singers not to try to memorize certain rhythmically mad passages but to carry those parts of the score onstage.
Since reading tattered manuscripts is a central action in the opera, this fits. The non-narrative libretto by Royce Vavrek is distilled from surviving fragments of Isabelle Eberhardt’s journals written when, after the death of her family in Geneva in the 19th century, she lived as a journalist in North Africa, often disguised as a man. She converted to Islam, reported on war and loved an Algerian soldier who ultimately abandoned her. At age 27, she died in a desert flood that destroyed her home village and most of her work. The opera gets under her skin as she experiences despair, resolve, discovery, transformation and transcendence—processes mirrored by the singers and dancers who serve as barefoot explorers feeling their way through scraps of evidence to embody this exemplary life.
Conductor Viswa Subbaraman wore headphones in order to sync a pre-recorded soundtrack of human voices, nature sounds and electronic effects with the impassioned live performances of pianist Ruben Piirainen, clarinetist Jon Lovas, flutist Angela Krainz, double bass player Tim Koehler and electric guitarist Fred Pike. The ravishing live singing arrived in extraordinary bursts. I can’t express enough admiration for the gorgeous sound and strong acting of mezzo-soprano Colleen Brooks. Singers Sarah Richardson, Danielle Aldach, Allison Hull, Joseph Riggenbach and Pablo Siqueiros were brilliant as an amplifying chorus in this exploration of the meaning of divinity for which Brooks served as lightning rod. In the end, Brooks gave her journal to the flood and opened herself to the adventure of death.
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Dancers Dan Schuchart, Yeng Vang-Strath, Mauriah Kraker and Kelly Radermacher Butts possess the gravitas to stand motionless and gaze at the infinite. There was little conventional dancing; rather, task-oriented, emblematic movements reminiscent of the European dance theater of Pina Bausch. This was altogether an enormous achievement by Subbaraman, MOT director Jill Anna Ponasik, Wild Space director Debra Loewen and lighting designer Jason Fassl.
