Even before news of his death broke on Thursday, the spirit of the director David Lynch hovered over the Prototype Festival. For 12 years, this annual showcase of experimental opera and music theater has hewed to a Lynchian aesthetic, with works that mine emotional extremes and blur the boundaries of reality.
But this year’s festival, which ran through Sunday at spaces in Manhattan and Brooklyn, included an overt tribute to Lynch, complete with the severed ear and crawling ants that in “Blue Velvet” drew the gaze through a suburban lawn into a hidden mystery. Here, they appeared in David T. Little’s gothic rock opera film “Black Lodge” as part of the hallucinations of a tortured soul.
Not every show at this year’s festival was as darkly surreal as “Black Lodge.” Stylistically, the works included references to hip-hop, the Beach Boys, Urdu ghazals and psychedelic Cuban blues. But what makes Prototype such a generative force in opera is the focus on the human voice in all its beauty and its weirdness.
Black Lodge
Billed as a gothic industrial rock opera, “Black Lodge” was written for the singular voice of Timur Bekbosunov along with his glam-rock band the Dime Museum. The work takes the form of a song cycle tracing the nightmarish voyage of a psychotic mind trapped in a liminal state between life and death. The libretto is by the poet Anne Waldman, who channels the writer William S. Burroughs in addition to Lynch and others.
In 2022, “Black Lodge” was released as a hallucinatory film directed by Michael Joseph McQuilken, starring Timur, who is subjected to exquisitely artistic forms of torture involving potter’s clay and knitting needles. At BRIC in Brooklyn, the film was shown in a live-to-screen version with costumed musicians onstage. The presence of those musicians barely made a dramatic impact — McQuilken’s film is too effective on its own — but their live performance brought out the music’s rib-rattling ferocity. Timur’s voice is a marvel of expressive inflections, from golden falsetto and wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing velvet to anguished shrieks and ghoulish inhalations.
In a Grove
The highlight of the festival was Christopher Cerrone’s “In a Grove,” a haunting psychological thriller with a libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann, at La MaMa. (This production had its premiere in Pittsburgh in 2022.) The opera is based on a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa that describes the deadly encounter between a brigand and a married couple from multiple perspectives, including that of the murdered husband speaking through a medium. Each retelling deepens the mystery of how the man died and what happened between the woman and the stranger.
The opera transports the action to a forest in 19th-century America devastated by wildfires. The first sounds are an electronic haze that swirls like an auditory representation of the dry ice shrouding the set designer Mimi Lien’s narrow catwalk intersected by a movable pane of glass. The music (performed by the Metropolis Ensemble) grows out of this white noise. Over the course of the opera, as characters deliver their testimonies, the tensely tonal music behaves like a single mass that billows and drifts, ponders and pounces, but never falls silent.
Stylized yet sensual, the vocal lines glide along the surface of this instrumental texture. The vocal writing has an old-fashioned elegance that is artfully distorted at crucial moments by electronic processing. Sometimes it’s just a little tremor or pitch bending that reveals the intervention of machines. But when the baritone John Brancy, darkly erotic in the role of the outlaw, gives his testimony, his low notes ring out with a nightmarish buzz.
The outstanding cast also included the blooming lyricism of the tenor Paul Appleby, the luxuriously cool soprano of Mikaela Bennett and the iridescent countertenor of Chuanyuan Liu as a monk and medium. The score is eerily detached from the singers: Though individual instruments might double a line or even an isolated note sung by one of the characters, the music doesn’t reveal whether it believes — whether we are to believe — anyone.
Eat the Document
The only world premiere this year was “Eat the Document,” by the composer John Glover and the librettist Kelley Rourke. It is based on the 2006 novel by Dana Spiotta about two anti-Vietnam War activists, Bobby and Mary, who go underground after one of their explosive devices kills an unintended target.
Like the novel, the opera jumps back and forth between the 1970s and late ’90s, when new protest movements — against capitalism, climate change, meat — bubble up around Bobby and Mary, eventually forcing them out of hiding. Spiotta’s book is suffused with tense irony that skewers the narcissism of student politics even as it raises difficult moral questions. In the opera, that tension gives way to a cheery eclecticism of opinions and musical styles that never quite coalesces into a point of view.
In the novel, the Beach Boys take on the pivotal role of revealing middle-aged Mary’s identity to her record-maven teenage son. Glover’s score — for rock band, piano and acoustic strings — evokes pop idioms while politely sidestepping direct quotation. The cast, often performing multiple roles across generations, seemed at ease moving in and out of pop and classically trained sound production, with notable performances by the tenor Michael Kuhn and the bass-baritone Paul Chwe MinChul An. But because these forays into pop vocals require close amplification, instances of more operatic singing sounded awkwardly compressed by the sound technology.
The story unfolds in fast-paced scenes within a single set, an anarchist bookstore (designed by Peiyi Wong). Glover’s music runs at a pragmatic clip from one set number to the next. These are typically songs with a catchy chorus, into which various characters then interject lines revealing information or private thoughts. But because these set numbers are so often written as pastiche, the connective tissue of the score, the music that should be most authentically Glover, fades into the background.
Positive Vibration Nation
A more clarion call to activism was Sol Ruiz’s “Positive Vibration Nation,” a “rock guaguancó opera” presented in the more intimate Dorothy B. Williams theater at HERE. This staged song cycle loosely tells the story of a time-traveling citizen from a future Miami with a winning mix of Caribbean rhythms and exuberant steampunk costumes.
Sung mostly in Spanish with projected translations, the songs explore intergenerational trauma and healing, arming Ruiz’s character with the ancestral moxie to take on climate change, colonialism and technological overreach, among other ills. What holds it together is her voice: robust and throaty, it splinters into anguish, anger or ecstasy in a flash.
Night Reign
Later in the week, HERE hosted the Pakistani American vocalist and composer Arooj Aftab, who presented her Grammy-nominated album “Night Reign” along with selections from earlier recordings in a cabaret setting. Aftab is also a gifted and, it seems, reluctant comedian, who keeps her audience at arm’s length with acerbic humor and disarming self-consciousness.
While most of her songs are in Urdu, Aftab offered neither summaries nor subtitles. It was her way of warding off being exoticized, she said, and besides, she added, all she ever wanted was to be treated like Billie Eilish. That left non-Urdu speakers to focus on the sheer heady sound of the music with its blend of South Asian classical singing and jazz, shimmering with the unexpected combo of bass, drums and harp.
Telekinetik
Another memorable stylistic mash-up came in the form of “Telekinetik,” a 10-minute hip-hop opera video produced by Catapult Opera. In it, the bass-baritone and composer Khary Laurent trains his gaze on the split consciousness of a Black man torn between bloody vigilantism and self-discipline. The mix of classically trained singing and rap, some of it backlit with choral textures, works wonderfully in this context of a sleep sequence in which the borders between dream and conscious inner dialogue are blurred, a place where David Lynch would have felt right at home.
