Pale Courage
Music by Dr. Kyong Mee Choi
Libretto by Bianca Lee
Chicago Center for the Performing Arts, March 2022 (world premiere)
Full Recording
Pale Courage went through a few different incarnations as we prepared to mount it. The project began as a fully-staged production, then morphed into a semi-staged concert, and finally rested as a fully-staged production masquerading as a concert. Due to the ever-evolving nature of the production, I ended up having to re-imagine and re-block the show multiple times. Would the piece end up being on-book or off-book? Would the singers be costumed or not? Would the orchestra be onstage or in the pit? The preparation was exhausting, but I believe we ended up with a strong world premier for Dr. Choi's music.
The world we ended up inhabiting was one shaped by my previous concert direction, and one that will serve to inform my future projects. We firmly embraced the roles of the singers exhuming and examining this story as themselves - as singers playing roles. This intentional and forthright storytelling method made sure the audience never forgot they were at a concert. The orchestra was onstage, the singers were all wearing costumes that could easily be considered concert attire, and most of the props and scenic elements were nakedly objects one would find at a concert. By obliterating the notion of immersing ourselves in the early 20th century when this piece takes place, we leveraged the magic of found-object storytelling. The singers acknowledged and connected with each other when deactivated in their chairs upstage, they made props appear and disappear for each other when needed, and always took a beat to get into character in front of the audience before entering a scene. We watched storytellers tell a story as an audience, and by pulling back the curtain a bit, were privy to seeing a little of that behind-the-scenes magic onstage. This piece continued my trend of using the supertitle projections as more than just translations, with some imagery being presented, and one scene's projections being controlled by a singer. No convention was to be overlooked at face value - everything is a possible tool for storytelling.
One important piece of technology we encountered here was the positioning of our conductor, Mary Chun. By placing her with the orchestra, it placed her upstage of our primary playing space - with some ingenuity led by Bocca Lupo Porductions, we ended up with a two-way director cam system. This allowed the conductor to see what was happening downstage of her, and the singers had two large displays hung on the balconies to keep their eyes on Mary. Turns out that the fewer digital components you can have in such a setup, the better for lag reduction - analog-to-digital conversions add precious milliseconds to the video feed, which can make it harder for the singers and conductor to stay in time. After a few reherasals, the singers were comfortable with the setup and it was considered a success.
The reason that this piece went through so many shifts and changes was due to an important subject - racial representation in opera. During the course of preproduction, I had to give myself a crash course on opera's somewhat frought history. I had no idea that the last time the Met in New York used skin-darkening makeup for a caucasian performer to sing a role meant for a person of color was 2015. During one recent calendar year, two separate productions in London's West End were cancelled due to all the roles being characters of Asian desent, but being portrayed exculisvely by caucasians. A lot of the reckoning that's gone on in the theatre world, including moving from colorblind to color-conscious casting, has been slower to occur in opera. We had to dive into discussions of gatekeeping, making opportunities to share the work of composers of color, how artists need to make intentional decisions about what roles they take or turn down. Through multiple meetings with the cast (comprised of graduate students) and staff, eventually branching out to include other community members, we settled on this method of telling the story. I'm elated that the students had a chance to think about their feelings on this subject in an educational environment instead of while weighing the merits of a gig that they may rely on financially. Young operatic artists today will be responsible for shaping the culture of the opera scene in the decades to come, and that includes what stories get told, and what types of people will be cast in specific roles. I look forward to seeing the scene they nurture.
