REN_playbill.indd 1 6/4/14 2:44 PM Contents ANCIENT EVENINGS.........................2 MAP..........................................................4 REN..........................................................7 THE SON ALSO Rises.....................8 Neville Wakefield LIBRETTO...........................................16 NOTES ON THE MUSIC....................21 Zach Baron PROFILES............................................24 CAST AND CREW..............................26 WHO’S WHO IN THE CAST.........28 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION......31 “...Ren, one’s Secret Name, who left at once, even as a falling star might drop through the sky. That is as it must be, I concluded. For the Ren did not belong to the man, but came out of the Celestial Waters to enter an infant in the hour of his birth and might not stir again until it was time to go back. While the Secret Name must have some effect on one’s character, it was certainly the most remote of our seven lights.” Norman Mailer Ancient Evenings The use of any recording device, either audio or video, and the taking of photographs, either with or without flash, is strictly prohibited. Please turn cellular phones off, as it interferes with audio recording equipment and telecommunications. Thank you. REN_playbill.indd 2-1 6/4/14 2:44 PM Ancient Evenings Ancient Evenings EN is the first act of “Ancient Evenings,” a collaborative project by Matthew expanses of salt beds beneath Michigan. KHU is the only act that will feature all RBarney and Jonathan Bepler that is inspired by American author Norman three automobiles. BA, the final live act, will take place in New York City as the Mailer’s 1983 novel Ancient Evenings, set in ancient Egypt. A nontraditional opera, automobile is further transformed into the 2001 Ford Crown Victoria. the “Ancient Evenings” project is structured in seven parts, corresponding to the seven stages of the soul’s departure from the body as it passes from death to Set amid the American landscape, “Ancient Evenings” uses the language of rebirth according to Egyptian mythology: the ren representing the departure of modern industrial processing and recycling to tell the story of its automobile one’s secret name; the sekhem of one’s power; the khu of one’s light; the ba of one’s protagonist, alongside the character agents deployed from Cremaster 3 (the Entered spirit; the ka of one’s double; the khabit of one’s shadow; and finally the sekhu, Apprentice and Entered Novitiate) and the Egyptian pantheon (Osiris, Isis, Set, one’s remains. Among other elements, the opera entails three live acts, each to be Nephthys, Horus, Anubis and Khepera). The mythologies inherent to the previous performed only once and in a different site-specific location across the American life of the 1967 Chrysler Imperial and to Mailer’s Egyptian-themed novel are met landscape. REN begins the saga of regeneration, formally staging the loss of the at each site with a set of local mythologies, symbolisms, and indigenous musical protagonist’s secret name through a ritualized loss of identity and propelling the traditions as diverse as American, Mayan, and Celtic. transitional journey from death toward new life. While each performance employs local talent, the characters inherent to Cremaster 3 and Mailer’s Ancient Evenings continue to evolve and reappear, pervading the transformation of the automobile protagonist as it endures the seven soul states toward the journey of its three embodiments. Sculpture is generated with each transformation and as the narrative is materialized. Each act is further characterized by musical instruments that are constructed according to the logic of the narrative, so that the story unfolds sculpturally, theatrically and musically with an evolution of new forms in a moving arena where personal, local and cultural mythologies are interwoven. While Mailer’s novel chronicles the soul’s progression through death and rebirth as told through the story of a man who is reincarnated three times, Barney and Bepler’s story replaces the body of a man with the body of an automobile. Three generations of American automobile design act as vehicles that carry the narrative impulse: a 1967 Chrysler Crown Imperial (known for its crashworthiness) is transmogrified into a 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am (known as the last high- performance engine of the original muscle car generation) and finally as a 2001 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor (known for its tireless service in the U.S. Government fleet). Primarily excerpted from Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, the libretto also includes The story begins in south Los Angeles with REN and the 1967 Chrysler Crown historical rites from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and The Pyramid Texts, along with Imperial from Cremaster 3, as it undergoes its first death and is prepared for rebirth texts from American authors Walt Whitman, William S. Burroughs and Ernest as the 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. The second performance KHU is set in Hemingway, offering a confluence of meditations on the timeless concerns of Detroit, bringing the Chrysler back to its birthplace, a city built upon the vast mortality and regeneration. 2 3 REN_playbill.indd 2-3 6/4/14 2:45 PM Site Map Site Map Snares Bass Drums SHOW ROOM FRONT FRONT Mellophones SALES LOT Tubas RECEPTION PARTS AND SERVICE BACK SALES LOT Baritones Cymbals Trumpets 4 5 REN_playbill.indd 4-5 6/4/14 2:45 PM Los Angeles, California 12624 Rosecrans Avenue, Santa Fe Springs SUNDAY MAY 18, 2008 (one time only) Act 1 of Ancient Evenings Directed by MATTHEW BARNEY AND JONATHAN BEPLER Written by Music by MATTHEW BARNEY JONATHAN BEPLER Produced by MATTHEW BARNEY with JERRY GILES, LUIS ALVAREZ Y ALVAREZ, LILA DOWNS, AIMEE MULLINS AND MOUSE Presented in Association with Producer REGEN PROJECTS MIKE BELLON Director of Photography Production Design PETER STRIETMANN MATTHEW D. RYLE Stage Manager Production Coordination TONY GERBER LUIS ALVAREZ Y ALVAREZ, NICOLE GANAS Special Effects and Makeup GABE BARTALOS Associate Producer LA ATLANTIC WEST EFFECTS STARR SUTHERLAND REN_playbill.indd 6-7 6/4/14 2:45 PM The Son Also Rises from one world to another. Cars, like myths, are traded in the rake of this particular light; a light that reaches from the sky and illuminates our desires. Neville Wakefield And just as the presence of steel made Detroit the foundry of the auto industry, so the cast of this light made Los Angeles its showroom, where fetish is written ituated at the edge of history, Los Angeles may be the Promised Land into every clear-coated surface. The car in Southern California is the true Sthat never was. Manifest Destiny would surely have led Brigham Young manifestation of lifestyle; a smog-tested religion whose creed of social and and the Latter Day Saints to the fecund land of the Los Angeles basin were physical mobility has also spawned its most baroque expressions: automobiles it not for his stated ambition to find, “…a place on this earth that nobody that have been stretched, chopped, shaved and fed through a culture of th else wants.” On July 24 , 1847, upon entering the most forbidding of continuous customization. South Central’s own handcrafted resurrections can lands, Young exclaimed, “This is the place!” There, amidst the inhospitable be found alongside the car lots and showrooms of the new. These, after all, surroundings of the Great Salt Lake, he and his followers believed they would are cars that have been actually revived from the past. Body and bones may find refuge from the persecution they had recently fled. The belief system that be classic American dreamboat, but the pressure of liquids now transforms rooted in that barren soil was one that would become threaded through the them into scrapers, newly articulated to allow one corner to kiss the ground spiritual landscape of the American West. It passed through Norman Mailer’s as the other reaches for the sky. It is here, more than anywhere, that industrial The Executioner’s Song and on through Matthew Barney’s own hymn to the regeneration has become an art form of its own. errant soul. This passage, based on Gary Gilmore’s own confrontations with mortality, became stations in a cross that led the narrative of Cremaster from the flat horizons of Provo to the spires of New York. Where Salt Lake was shunned for its harsh conditions, barren soil and innate hostility, Los Angeles has been embraced as the City of Angels, a place where dreams alone could hold mortality at bay. It is here that the first act of Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler’s “Ancient Evenings” comes to pass. Drawn from Mailer’s original text, the central character is no longer the man Menenhetet I, but a 1967 Chrysler Imperial, the embodiment perhaps, of a certain kind of man, as well as the industry and era that brought him into being. A year of multiple births, 1967 bore witness not just to the arrival of the artist himself, but also to the apogee of the Imperial marque, a car so solidly Van Nuys Boulevard, Los Angeles built as to have been banned from demolition derbies across the land. Reflecting this, the Imperial of Barney’s own past comes adorned with This particular car – a car that would not die – is recognizable as a giant scarab. Typically placed over the heart of the mummified deceased, the survivor of Cremaster 3. Wounded by the impact of others, its body bears an amulet now crowns the V8 of an industrial past. Behind it, a great ball of testament to the violence of auto-infliction. The lobby of Walter Chrysler’s dung has become the septic nutrient for another engine. This four-cylinder temple to the Pentastar was the first site that this illustrious model withheld the energy beats the announcement of its larval energy against the confines of choreography of its planned demise.