Hopscotch-Takes-Opera-Into-The- Streets.Html
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
CLIP BOOK PREVIEWS/ FEATURES October 31, 2015 Also ran online: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/arts/music/hopscotch-takes-opera-into-the- streets.html September 13, 2015 Also ran online: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-fall-arts-hopscotch-opera-la- 20150913-story.html October 8, 2015 Also ran online: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-hopscotch-opera-industry-20151008-story.html November 21, 2015 Also ran online: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-hopscotch-hawthorne- 20151121-column.html December 13, 2015 Also ran online: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-best-classical-music-2015- 20151213-column.html November 16, 2015 Opera on Location A high-tech work of Wagnerian scale is being staged across Los Angeles. BY ALEX ROSS Parts of “Hopscotch” are staged inside a fleet of limousines. Other scenes take place on rooftops and in city parks. CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY ANGIE SMITH FOR THE NEW YORKER Jonah Levy, a thirty-year-old trumpet player based in Los Angeles, has lately developed a curious weekend routine. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, he puts on a white shirt, a black tie, black pants, and a motorcycle jacket, and heads to the ETO Doors warehouse, in downtown L.A. He takes an elevator to the sixth floor and walks up a flight of stairs to the roof, where a disused water tower rises an additional fifty feet. Levy straps his trumpet case to his back and climbs the tower’s spindly, rusty ladder. He wears a safety harness, attaching clamps to the rungs, and uses weight-lifting gloves to avoid cutting his palms. At the top, he warms up on his piccolo trumpet, applies sunscreen, and takes in views that extend from the skyscrapers of downtown to the San Gabriel Mountains. Just after 11 A.M., he receives a message on a walkie-talkie. “The audience is approaching the elevator,” a voice says. A minute or so later, figures appear on the roof of the Toy Factory Lofts, about a thousand feet away. Levy launches into a four-minute solo: an extended trill, rat-a-tat patterns, eerie bent notes, mournful flourishes in the key of B-flat minor. On the distant side of the lofts, a trombonist answers him. Then Levy sits down in a folding chair and waits a few minutes, until the walkie-talkie crackles again. He performs this solo twenty-four times each day. Levy is one of a hundred and twenty-six musicians, dancers, and actors participating in “Hopscotch,” a “mobile opera” that is running in L.A. until November 22nd. It is the creation of a company called the Industry, which has drawn notice for presenting experimental opera in unconventional spaces. “Hopscotch” is its most ambitious production, and one of the more complicated operatic enterprises to have been attempted since Richard Wagner staged “The Ring of the Nibelung,” over four days, in 1876. Audience members ride about in a fleet of limousines, witnessing scenes that take place both inside the vehicles and at designated sites. Three simultaneous routes crisscross eastern and downtown L.A. Six principal composers, six librettists, and a production team of nearly a hundred have collaborated on the project, which has a budget of about a million dollars. It is a combination of road trip, architecture tour, contemporary-music festival, and waking dream. The title “Hopscotch” is borrowed from Julio Cortázar’s 1963 magic-realist novel, which invites the reader to navigate the text in nonlinear fashion. The opera’s itineraries also jump around in time, and, because of a system of staggered departure points, each group of limo passengers experiences the work in a different way. Fortunately, the story is simple enough so that you can easily follow what’s happening at any given point. It is a modern fable, with overtones of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice—and with the genders reversed. Lucha, an artist and puppeteer, marries a motorcycle-riding scientist named Jameson, who loses himself in esoteric research and disappears. Lucha hallucinates an encounter with him in the underworld. Unlike Orpheus, she overcomes her grief and finds happiness with Orlando, a fellow-puppeteer. In the Toy Factory Lofts scene, called “Farewell from the Rooftops,” Lucha achieves resolution. Jonah Levy is a fading image of the missing husband, his sombre costume identical to one worn by performers portraying Jameson elsewhere. “Rooftops,” which has music by Ellen Reid and a text by Mandy Kahn, lasts about ten minutes. Upon arriving at the Toy Factory Lofts, you are greeted by Marja Kay, the singer playing Lucha in the scene, and by a violist. “I set you free, Jameson,” Kay sings, though restless viola patterns indicate lingering tension. (Nineteen women embody Lucha in the course of the opera, each wearing a yellow dress.) By the time you reach the roof, two French-horn players and a violinist have joined the group. Outside, you experience a thrilling expansion of visual and acoustic space: the ensemble mingles with the ambient rumble of traffic and helicopters. Kay points to the ETO Doors building, and Levy enters the fray, his music suggesting fanfares being pulled apart and blown away by the wind. Kay points in the opposite direction, cueing the trombone. Eventually, she bids farewell to the Jameson figures and descends the elevator in a buoyant mood. “I feel my powers now,” she sings. “This city is orchestral—I lift its baton.” The phrase is an apt motto for “Hopscotch.” Scenes unfold on the steps of City Hall, in Chinatown Central Plaza, in Evergreen Cemetery, and at the Bradbury Building, the Gilded Age structure whose darkly opulent iron-and-marble atrium appears in “Blade Runner” and many other films. The topography ranges from the verdant summit of Elysian Park to the bleak concrete channel of the Los Angeles River. The limo scenes are quieter, more intimate. You might be joined by a pensive, flute-playing Lucha or by guitarists who evoke the character’s Mexican background. At one decisive moment, though, the exterior world rushes in. You find yourself riding with the actor-playwright Peter Howard, who is portraying a real-estate developer. While musing on gentrification, he lowers a window and addresses a black-clad motorcyclist who is riding alongside the limo. “Hey, your tail-light is out!” he yells. “It’s dangerous!” The motorcyclist yells back, his voice carried to the limo’s speakers through a wireless mike: “You know what’s really dangerous? Distracting a motorcyclist when he’s on the road.” The biker, performed virtuosically by Stephen Beitler, is another Jameson figure; he and the developer argue as you clutch the armrests. This is the rare opera that asks you to sign a legal waiver before the show begins. The mastermind of this spectacle is the opera director Yuval Sharon, a thirty-six-year-old Chicago native, who moved to L.A. in 2010 and founded the Industry that year. He realizes that his current project, which took more than two years to pull together, could be seen as a daft undertaking. He told me, “An opera with a nonsequential plot that depends on cars arriving on time in L.A.? We’ve created a monster, but it’s alive.” He closed his eyes and gave an antic laugh. Trim and curly-haired, and dressed habitually in jeans, a T-shirt, and a vintage Le Tigre track jacket, Sharon looks like a hip counsellor at a summer arts camp—albeit one who reveres Wagner and names Brecht’s “The Life of Galileo” as his favorite play. (He plans to stage it on the beach in Santa Monica, beside a bonfire.) Tirelessly upbeat, he has a knack for charming his way through bureaucratic tangles. “Hopscotch” entailed conversations with the Department of Transportation, California Parks and Recreation, and the Army Corps of Engineers, not to mention the Toy Factory Lofts Homeowners Association. He persuaded city officials to have potholes paved over so that musicians would have a smoother ride. He has also had, so far, a fair amount of luck. Road closures and tieups have been minimal. El Niño, which is likely to bring drenching rains to L.A., has yet to arrive in earnest. No film crews have commandeered the Bradbury Building. And, the day before I attended a rehearsal, in mid-October, the Dodgers had lost to the Mets in the National League playoffs. “I’ve never followed sports so closely in all my life!” Sharon said, laughing again. “My dad took me to games when I was young—I didn’t get it.” If the Dodgers had reached the World Series, they would have played at home on Halloween, the day that “Hopscotch” opened, and the opera’s routes would have been mired in traffic. We were at the Los Angeles River site, a former Union Pacific staging ground called the Bowtie Parcel, now an art park. The performers were rehearsing “Hades,” the scene in which Lucha imagines Jameson in the underworld. “This is going to be the River Styx,” Sharon told me, looking down at the gray-green stream, which flowed past scattered rocks and masses of vegetation. More than twenty people milled about, among them the venerable experimental composer David Rosenboom, who is the dean of the school of music at the California Institute of the Arts. For “Hades,” he had composed a punchy, angular, R. & B.-inflected score, using an ensemble of three trumpeters and three percussionists. “Make it more rhythmically precise— more James Brown,” he said to the musicians. Sharon and his team had found a ready-made seating area: a folly-like enclosure at the top of the embankment, constructed from rusted steel frames.