S T R A N G E R L O V E an opera in 3 acts Music by Dylan Mattingly Libretto by Thomas Bartscherer Lead Production Team (in-progress): Martin Butler, Ruben Van Leer, Leigh Sachwitz, Nicole Beutler Concept by Thomas Bartscherer & Dylan Mattingly Contact: [email protected] | +1 510 333 2543 For more information, visit: www.stranger.love *** What is Stranger Love? Stranger Love is a 6-hour-long multimedia opera, scored for 28 musicians, 8 singers, and 6 dancers. An immersive experience, Stranger Love is a grand celebration of being alive. Inspired by Plato’s account of love in the Symposium, Stranger Love gradually broadens in scope and frame over the course of its three acts from the personal to the archetypical to the expansion of the universe. The experience of Stranger Love evokes the visceral thrill of a gospel revival, the ethereal calm of watching snow fall, the wonder of staring into the night sky. Stranger Love is committed to an experience of the impossible. It is is deliberately countercultural in both scale and its commitment to joy; its music dances faster than we believe possible and offers stretches of unimaginable serenity. The fragmentation of contemporary life into ever-shorter temporal intervals has turned hectic distraction into a default mode of daily experience. Stranger Love offers an opportunity to dwell within a different temporality, in which attention is both dilated and focused. *** The structure of Stranger Love Structurally inspired by Plato’s Symposium, Stranger Love is divided into three acts, each one presenting a wider perspective than the last. The first act presents love in a human and personal frame, as in Alcibiades’ speech. The second act follows Aristophanes in depicting an archetypal account of human love. The final act is inspired by the vision of divine love—a love supreme—that Socrates attributes to the priestess Diotima. *** In detail: The first act tells a story of two lovers whose encounter unfolds to the rhythm of the seasons. In springtime, they meet; in summer, their love flourishes; autumn and winter, they face threats from without and within; a second spring brings resignation and the chance for renewal. The visual design creates a series of tableaux, illuminating individual moments of the characters’ lives within the context of the broader seasonal cycle. * In the second act, the singers move into the instrumental ensemble, and the action shifts to three pairs of dancers who move inexorably slowly throughout the entire space towards each other, at last meeting in three different outcomes: a kiss, a collision, a passing. Music and design present a second vision of the passage of seasons. * In the third act, the entire space is dark except for a constellation of lights scattered throughout like stars. These lights move away from the center of the space at differing speeds, creating the illusion of depth and the feeling that the audience is traveling into the negative space. The music is a revelation of pure joy, the velocity of universal expansion. Stranger Love ends in ecstasy and pitch black. * Visualizations of Stranger Love — created by Martin Butler Over the course of Act One, the visual design moves through one rotation of the seasons. Act I, Spring Act I, Summer Act I, Winter Act Two sees the action shift to three pairs of dancers, who move slowly towards each other through the whole space to meet onstage. The design presents another cycle of seasons, and as the frame moves out from the personal to the archetypical, a sight of the universal is visible: Act Three finds the audience on the other side of the door. Lights are scattered throughout like stars, and move slowly away from the center of the space. The audience travels into the negative space, the door recedes, and the opera ends in pitch black with music of velocity and joy. ACT 3 In addition to the eight singers and six dancers, Stranger Love calls for a chamber orchestra of 28 musicians. The music was written for Contemporaneous, a New York-based ensemble and a 501(c)3 co-commissioning organization for the project. * * * Creative Team: Called “visionary magic” by Prufrock’s Dilemma, composer Dylan Mattingly’s work is fundamentally ecstatic, committed to the extremes of human emotion, drawing from influences such as Olivier Messiaen, Joni Mitchell, and the microtonal folk singing of Polynesian choirs and the Bayaka of Central Africa. Mattingly is the founding executive and co-artistic director of Contemporaneous. Among the ensembles and performers who have commissioned Mattingly are the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, the Berkeley Symphony, the Del Sol String Quartet, John Adams, Marin Alsop, Contemporaneous, Sarah Cahill, and many others. Mattingly, whose work has been described as “gorgeous” and “beautifully crafted” by the San Francisco Chronicle, was the Musical America “New Artist of the Month” for February 2013. In 2016, he was awarded the prestigious Charles Ives Scholarship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mattingly also received both the Ezra Laderman Prize and the Philip Francis Nelson Prize from the Yale School of Music in 2016 Mattingly holds an M.M. in Music Composition from The Yale School of Music, where he studied with David Lang, Martin Bresnick, and Christopher Theofanidis, and is mentored as well in Berkeley by composer John Adams. www.dylanmattingly.com Thomas Bartscherer works on literature and philosophy in the ancient Greek and modern German traditions, focusing on tragic drama, aesthetics, and performance. He has collaborated with Contemporaneous on two previous projects, writing Long After Hesiod for the performance of Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet No. 3: Gaia and narration for Dylan Mattingly’s The Bakkhai. Bartscherer also writes on technology, new media, and contemporary art, and has published translations from German and French. He is co-editor of Erotikon: Essays on Eros Ancient and Modern and Switching Codes, both from the University of Chicago Press. He is a research associate on the Équipe Nietzsche at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (Paris) and has held research fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure, the University of Heidelberg, and the LMU in Munich. Bartscherer teaches in the humanities at Bard College and previously taught at the University of Chicago. He holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. https:// thomasbartscherer.wordpress.com/ Martin Butler is an interdisciplinary artist and stage director living in Berlin, Germany. He was trained in Drama at Manchester University, and then later Choreography and Performance at the SNDO, in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. His work has always bridged and combined various disciplines, dance, theatre, music, film, performance, new media, and fashion, and through this interdisciplinary approach his work explores the new dramatic that the combination of different genres facilitate. His new media and installation work has been shown in the Palais de Tokyo, Istanbul Modern, Beijing Design Week, European Media Arts Festival in Osnabrück, Fundación Telefonica in Lima, Photokino, Köln, Øsknehallen, Copenhagen, San Pau Modernista, Barcelona, Istanbul Design Biennale, Amsterdam Museum, Pixxelpoint Festival in Slovenia, Olympus Photographry Playground, Centre Pompidou Paris, Kasteel Keukenhof, the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, Marres, Maastricht, Salon Amsterdam, and Mediamatic, amongst many others. In 2014 he worked as dramaturgist for the international award winning opera/ dance film “Symmetry” by director Ruben van Leer in collaboration with the European Nuclear Research Centre (CERN), CTM Pictures and NTR Podium. He worked as a stage director and scenographer for the international project “Perseus & Andromeda”, together with the Italian ensemble L’Aura Rilucente, which introduced children to the world of the classics and baroque music, combining performance, shadow play and opera. In 2016 he developed and directed the successful new opera “GIANNI” based upon the life of Gianni Versace with German musical ensemble Brandt, Brauer and Frick for the Deutsche Opera, Berlin. In 2017 he worked as artistic advisor on Nicole Beutler’s new work Triple Moon at the Amsterdamse Schouwburg and as dramaturgist for Kate Moore’s and Ruben van Leer’s “Sacred Environment” for the Holland Festival. martinbutlers.com It is 1993 and Scottish native Leigh Sachwitz moves to Berlin. She has just received her architectural diploma from the Glasgow School of Art and arrives at this post wall city where, at that exciting time, anything seems possible. She sees Berlin as it is, a gigantic playground, and ventures to the many temporary spaces and improvised art events in the eastern part. It is the experimental 1990’s in Berlin and while she works in an architect office by day, she helps create makeshift clubs, bars, art spaces for the night using all sorts of materials, light and projections. Later she would add sound and video. Her visuals, sights and sounds are ephemeral and bang on trend, mixing media and technologies, yet they create visceral experiences for the visitors, the artists and party people of the night. Leigh leaves the architectural office to focus solely on these immediate creations and transforms the transient spaces all over this constantly evolving city over the next several years. For example, at WMF, a legendary club housed in ever changing, unique locations for more than a decade, she evolves from experimenting with simple slide installations to live mixing elaborate and encompassing club visuals. With the curation of the Jugend Musik Festspiele at Volksbühne Berlin her directorial skills were pushed to another level. It is 1998 and Leigh decides to turn her vision into an official business – flora&faunavisions (FFV) is born and evolves into a slowly growing team of diverse professionals in charge of management, finance, design and more.