In September, the Metropolitan Opera opened its season with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Based on the novel by Michael Chabon, with music by Mason Bates, production by Bartlett Sher and libretto by Gene Scheer. Weeks before the opening, Observer visited an early tech rehearsal to observe Bartlett Sher in his element.

“Noise! Make noise!” Sher hollered at the stage as the cast of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay rehearsed a complex party scene with a huge cast of characters. Unusually for a long tech rehearsal, the energy on stage buzzed between run-throughs. Performers bounced from foot to foot, stretched and practiced stage fighting and falls. They waited for the show’s impressive but temperamental new “irising” system—a curtaining technology that opens and closes around a square “eye”—to figure itself out.

Leaving his lunch uneaten at the director’s stand, Bartlett Sher was constantly in motion. He moved around the stage like a party host, wisecracking, laughing and answering questions. Chatting with Edward Nelson, who plays the opera’s Tracy Bacon, they practiced a balancing move, each showing a different way to hold his body.

A native Californian who speaks with a slight uptalk—his voice rising at the ends of sentences like an invitation—Sher’s conversational mode comes across as a desire to connect with whoever he’s talking to. Describing himself as an “interpretive artist,” Sher told Observer that he sees his talent as being “good at marshalling, pulling together many points of view.” His approach to direction is exploratory rather than single-minded. “I’m leading the exploration, I’m guiding us, I’m helping make choices that bring out the best in everybody’s work—rather than thinking of my vision being fulfilled.”

This penchant for weaving together diverse threads seems suited to bringing to the Met’s stage a story as soaringly epic as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Chabon’s novel follows two Jewish cousins—a Czech artist and magician, Joe Kavalier and a Brooklyn-born writer, Sam Clay. Joe escapes Nazi-occupied Prague and arrives in Brooklyn a refugee after being torn away from his beloved younger brother (transformed into a sister, Sarah, in the opera). Together the cousins create The Escapist, a comic book about a superhero who fights fascism through Houdini-esque escape tricks. The book is loosely based on the life of Jack Kirby, the creator of Captain America. It covers a wide range of political themes that remain pertinent to our own times, including fascism, homophobia and antisemitism.

The opera, he said, compresses Chabon’s story into the lives of its principal characters and their relationships, all set against the backdrop of World War II and the Holocaust. Incorporated into the work is the theme of art’s place during times of historical turmoil.

“Layered in with essentially Chabon’s own obsession with how much art can help you make sense of or change life,” Sher explained. “Joe Kavalier goes to comic books as a way of handling his pain and maybe transforming his pain. Whether that works or not is a fascinating question. Whether art can actually help you with these things or not becomes a major obsession of the book.”

The place of art in the political and the political in art has been woven throughout Sher’s career as a director. He’s often sought out politically charged material—from directing a dramatization of Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book Nickeled and Dimed, about the inability to survive on minimum-wage work in America, to politically sensitive revivals of South Pacific, The King and I and My Fair Lady, to Aaron Sorkin’s 2018 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird.

“I think theatre is a catalyst for change,” Sher said. “I don’t think you make theatre pieces to tell people how to change. We tell stories that express people’s ability to handle ambiguity, deal with problems, see conflicts and make decisions.”

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay approaches politics in a gently coaxing manner. Gene Scheer’s libretto tells a simple story about a handful of relationships in wartime New York and Europe. The epic breadth of Chabon’s novel is conveyed visually. Its density and richness are mirrored in the opera’s textured and complex set design. Layered screens iris in and out, with designs from 59 Studio projected onto them. Towering above the audience are images of midcentury New York in its gloomy noir glory. We see comic book superheroes gleaming in primary colors or animated as elegantly looping works in progress. Haunting the background like a nightmare are greyscale sketches of Nazi death camps, reminiscent of Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

As a director, Sher uses the entire stage—with all its dimensions and angles—in a cinematic approach to theatre. The vast cast of characters appears on stage with fair frequency, in large groups at parties, battles and crowd scenes. A superhero even flies on a wire. But it’s all conveyed with a subdued elegance, never demanding, always inviting. Sher’s contribution in Kavalier and Clay is conversational: the production’s emotional texture is pliable. He doesn’t tell you how to feel or think.

Sher’s ever-shifting, multi-perspectival approach feels ideal for our own overwhelming, anxious and information-dense moment. It dances away from ideological definition. “The themes of a kind of creeping fascism and the struggles against art, against the political mind, against who we’ve become, are really critical right now but also very elusive and very hard to figure out how to express themselves.”

On opening night at the Met, the political charge of our new normal seeped into the opera house. Peter Gelb and Senator Chuck Schumer made speeches on the importance of freedom of expression—the former to cheers, the latter to boos and heckles from frustrated constituents. Even in this historic environment, operating at a political remove now seems impossible.

“I try to believe that great stories come when you need them most,” Sher concluded. “And it feels to me like we’re lucky that Kavalier and Clay is coming around for us at this time.”

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Prototype, the festival of new opera-theater and music-theater from Beth Morrison Projects and Here, presented a dizzyingly diverse spectrum of performances in 2025. Overall, the festival came off like last year’s Mets’ playoff season, with wildly divergent highs and lows. It encompassed some of the most exciting theater this city has seen in the past twelve months, alongside shows representing some of the more moribund tendencies in the contemporary avant-garde. While no single quality stood out, a handful of themes emerged. Firstly, imitation: shows like Black Lodge that seemed divorced from the past but eager to harvest from it, in the spirit of A.I. Compared to The Black Rider, Tom Waits’ 1990 rock opera on the same subject, Black Lodge fell flat. Meanwhile, genuinely engaging, even brilliant works like Christopher Cerrone’s In a Grove and Sol Ruiz’s Positive Vibration Nation allow us, as the festival’s tagline entreats, to “see something new.”

This year’s festival kicked off with John Glover’s Eat the Document, a new opera based on Dana Spiotta’s 2006 novel about New Left activists from the 1970s and what’s framed as their “successors” in the 1990s: riot grrrls, hacktivists and subvertisers. The main stage at Here was designed in two parts: on one half vintage records, a Midwestern basement with 1970s-style Colonial Revival furniture; on the other, swank industrial bookcases like a sales display at Urban Outfitters.

The production paid close attention to precise period detail, down to the layered T-shirts and mesh long-sleeved blouses of the ‘90s characters. But Eat the Document musically took very little from the song stylings of either the ’60s or ‘90s. Aside from some brief folk harmonies and a jarringly out-of-context riot-girl rock aria, the show stuck close to contemporary musical theater. Some performers—particularly Danielle Buonaiuto as the young Mary—sang with gorgeous color and passion. There were several standout performances, such as Buonaiuoto and Amy Justman’s duet, Tim Russell’s bright and impassioned performance as the son of the erstwhile terrorist and Adrienne Danrich’s fulsome voice and versatile character embodiments. These performances uplifted a production that was unfortunately dominated by a libretto full of leaden, journalistic prose. While there was enough fire, talent and youthful energy to make for a splendid show,  the clunky language and mediocre score zapped the passion out of the subject matter.

Throughout, a tenuous connection is drawn between Weathermen-style 1970s militants and 90s activists. The program describes the opera, “Shifting between the protests in the 1970s and the consequences of those choices in the 1990s.” The tragic existence of ‘70s-era vanguardist militant groups like the Weathermen, who conducted bombings and ended up on the FBI terror list, seems like a ripe subject for opera. Unfortunately, the show creators approach radicalism as well-meaning tourists who aren’t interested in hearing ideas that might transform their worldviews. Truly, a missed opportunity.

Meanwhile, over in Brooklyn’s Bric Arts, was Black Lodge, “a live multimedia event” with singer Timur, his band, the Dime Museum and the Isaura String Quartet. The show’s main feature is a film inspired by the life and “complicated mythologies” of beat writer William S. Burroughs. Described on the festival website as “a Lynchian psychological escape room,” the film creates a dream space, referred to as a Bardo, for a Burroughs-styled character (Timur) to relive some of the seminal, violent events of his early life. The show was a live performance of the music from the film that was performed during the screening.

The film was more reminiscent of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle than anything in the worlds of Burroughs or David Lynch. While beautifully produced and with high production values, it turns away from creating the fug of nightmare and subterranean weirdness of either of its purported influences. It is surgically austere and challenging to watch, with the true-blooded avant-gardist’s disdain for capturing our emotions or giving sensory pleasure.

The opening night of Black Lodge began with an immersive theater presentation, Bardo, consisting of performance artists in multi-genre tableaux. The program describes Bardo as “a liminal space between life and death where lost souls linger, awaiting passage to the next realm.” Aspects of the immersive performance were connected with Black Lodge, and participants were asked to travel through a Bardo of their own before witnessing the Burroughs character’s trials and sufferings.

We wandered rooms where three zombie writers in Hell endured an eternity of writerly punishment (being literally forced to eat their words); a string ensemble played at a ghoulish ritual where wraiths writhed and zombie nurses blew bubbles; and a Beetlejuice-like demon and his BDSM slaves retrieved written dreams or regrets from participants and then read them aloud in a reverberating Disney villain voice. It was as if some Tim Burton-inspired art students decided to put on a haunted house in MoMA. The tableaux were good, but the experience was not immersive and required a different context. To be fair, the show had lost its original space at the Village East (a more atmospheric former Yiddish Theatre turned movie theater) and had to move to the more antiseptic Bric.

David T. Little’s music for Black Lodge, performed by Timur and the Dime Museum, was by far the highlight of the evening. Timur’s versatile split tenor, eerily oozing up and down octaves to the harsh accompaniment of his metal band, was memorable. Its ability to be so classically complex, with many textures and surprises, sounded like a confluence of Klaus Nomi, John Cage and Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

I returned to Here a few days after exiting the Bardo for Sol Ruiz’s Positive Vibration Nation. This “musical theater rock guaguanco opera” follows six characters from Miami in the year 3050 who journey in search of their roots. On their adventures, they discover the keys to unlock their “musical superhero power,” which allows them to take to the stars and explore the galaxy.

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Guaguancó is a kind of rumba, originating in Cuba, where the singer sings a narrative as dancers perform a couples’ dance symbolizing sexual competition. Ruiz combines the guaguancó sound with a panoply of Latin styles: cumbia, modern Spanish rap, reggae and undoubtedly other influences I couldn’t catch. The 1-hour LatinX space opera is fast, exciting and extremely funny. The space-age folk costumes, Afrofuturist design elements and glam intergalactic lighting all cohered with the spectacular music into a packed and joyful hour of thumpingly good opera. The audience whistled, cheered, tapped their feet and was even entreated to stand and dance. The multitalented performers dance, sing, play instruments and embody their space cowboy characters with delightful panache.

Like Gelsey Bell’s mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning], Positive Vibration Nation points in an exciting new direction for avant-garde opera. It points outward instead of inward and tells a new story in a genuinely new way that purposefully draws us in. In an age when so much cultural production has been ground down to mere mimicry, seeing something genuinely new is spiritually soothing. The zany comic book antics, immaculate vibes and ringingly good intergalactic song stylings present a truly original work. The show is also daringly vulnerable and willing to walk the edge of cringe to give us something joyful and generous. Positive Vibration Nation also shows just how brilliant a performance can be by virtue of strong artistry and a dynamic ensemble.

A few days later, across town in the East Village’s La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, I saw In a Grove, Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann’s opera inspired by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s 1922 short story of the same name. The original story deals with the violent stabbing of Takehiro, a samurai, with the events leading up to and following his death shown from multiple perspectives in a series of testimonies. The opera Europeanizes the characters and changes their context and professions but hews close to the emotional dynamics of the original story.

Cerrone’s score is full of slow, pulsing phrases, rhythmic tugs in and out of recitative and spare and dramatic instrumentation. The minimalist use of vocal manipulation, subtly complex reverb, looping and the like creates a sound that mimics the atmospheric smoke effects on stage. Director Mary Birnbaum places the performers on an empty runway, like the footbridge on a Kabuki stage, with the audience in straight lines on either side. The stage is empty, aside from a glass screen in the center that moves on and off stage at important transitions. The staging feels purposefully two-dimensional, like a long painting on a screen, and amplifies the drama of the excellently staged violence.

The costumes are 19th Century and military in design and made of light cloth like parachute silk. These simple, beautiful designs play an outsized role in this minimalist staging, standing in for much that is not shown. Singers Mikaela Bennett, John Brancy, Chuanyuan Liu, and Paul Appleby carried the show with trembling passion and immaculate skill. Like oppositional winds lapping a still lake, they rocked us from one end of this extended murder ballad to the other. You could not have asked for better performers.

The heady, throbbing, percussive score, shocking and tragic story and ingenious staging left me feeling (in the best way possible) like I, too, had just discovered a murdered man on a walk through a burning forest. In a Grove is a triumph and among the finest works at this year’s festival.

Throughout the ups and downs of this year’s Prototype Festival, reality came in and mirrored what was staged. Los Angeles burned, and David Lynch entered the Bardo while we took in the festival’s new works. Whatever else one can say about Prototype, it certainly reflects our current moment. Whether its end times vibes represent an end or the end of one world and the beginning of another has yet to be seen. Prototype takes a balanced approach to operatic apocalypse—the glass is half empty and half full. I’ll be returning to see what new music emerges from this chaotic Bardo next year.

Soprano Angel Blue is fresh off a widely acclaimed run as Margarita Xirgu in Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar, in the opera’s first run at the Metropolitan Opera. On New Year’s Eve, she starred in the title role of Verdi’s Aida—the first new production of that opera at the Met in decades. Until this year, Blue was perhaps best known for performing the role of Clara in the renowned 2019 Met production of Porgy and Bess, the recording of which went on to win a Grammy. Blue’s gigantic voice is like a cathedral of sound, dense columns of notes soaring skyward, her rich and smoky mid and lower range planting her firmly in the earth. It is a voice that radiates warmth and tenderness while expressing a passion that hints at lines of power yet to be tapped. Blue is a magnetic performer who achieves that paradoxical opera singer’s ideal: polish and vulnerability, perfection and rawness.

The 40-year-old singer started voice lessons at the age of 6, initially coached by her father, Sylvester Blue—himself a pastor and highly accomplished gospel singer. Her family was interested in music, going back generations, with her West Virginia coal miner grandfather a lover of opera and singer in a barbershop quartet. “There hasn’t been a time in my life when singing wasn’t there… when it wasn’t a part of me,” Blue told Observer.

As a child, she went on the road with her family, playing bass guitar in the family gospel band: her brother on drums, her mother on piano and her father and sister singing. In addition to giving her some of her warmest memories of her family, this experience, she said, brought her an early taste of performing in an ensemble. “It informed me a lot about what it means to be a part of a group, part of a team, and that’s what opera is; we are part of a team. One person might be the lead but, ultimately, people are coming to see a team.”

Unusually for a lead soprano, she spoke beautifully of working in teams and ensembles and grounding herself in her fellow cast members’ performances. An ensemble, when it’s working, she described as having a special dynamic. “I think it comes from being theater kids, from being one of those kids when we’re all young, and we’re in our rooms in front of the mirror pretending to sing or dance… when we all have that energy, that excitement.”

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One such highly energized ensemble took to the stage for Ainadamar just this fall. “If I could sing that opera twice a year, I would,” Blue said. She found Deborah Calker’s highly energized directing style and the entire eighty minutes of choreographed music utterly thrilling. “I was so happy every rehearsal. I woke up in the mornings excited, thrilled, ready to go.”

An emotive and engaged performer, tall and constantly in motion on stage, it’s hard to take your eyes off her. Blue achieves that beautiful opera singer’s illusion of making an audience believe we can see her, her heart fully open, and her rawest emotions revealed. She is able to plumb rich veins of feeling as a performer, revealing an intimacy with text and music and a ferocious intentionality and rigor in her phrasing and vocal style. “Every word has to mean something to me,” Blue said. “If it doesn’t mean something to me, it’s like a blank moment for me on stage.”

Not every performance is like Ainadamar, however, and Blue has performed many of the same traditional roles, such as Mimi and Musetta, plenty of times since her career took off about fifteen years ago. When asked how she plugs back into a performance when she finds herself drifting, Blue replied that she works to engage harder with her fellow cast members. “I’ll look in their eyes to see what they’re feeling and try to really get that understanding from them of who they are, which helps to inform me of who I am in their world, and also in mine. That usually brings me back.”

Growing up singing in her father’s church and her family’s traveling gospel band, religion and spirituality have remained with her as an adult. “People can feel beat down by faith and religion, like they don’t measure up to this or that, but I was never raised like that,” Blue said. “I think that’s one of the reasons I have kept my faith.” Your average lead soprano in an opera must, by necessity, navigate a lot of torrential emotional weather. It would be difficult to divorce Blue’s skill at holding and channeling feeling from her spirituality, from what she describes as her nearness to God. This performed passion is crafted, to be sure, and honed by decades of training; however, Blue also has a special ability to push into an extra dimension of meaning. She is incandescent in some of her roles, as though touching the supernatural, breaking down mental walls for an audience as she draws them into the world of a story. To observe this intimation of contradictory possibilities live on stage is electrifying.

An opera career is a treacherous mountain to climb, and its challenges can often seem insurmountable. A nearness to God, Blue said, has also helped her navigate such a difficult industry. “The Bible says we all fall short of God’s glorious standard, and that’s true… we all make mistakes, but also there’s grace in making mistakes.” The concept of grace, she said, has aided her enormously in her music career. Given the centuries of operatic performance and the industry’s rigidly high standards, Blue said she’s “fallen short of that standard many, many times.” However, in singing, as in the growth of one’s soul, “there should be grace in trying again and coming back.”

Over a busy three-decade career, Anthony Roth Costanzo moved from singing in Broadway shows as a boy soprano—and backup vocals for Michael Jackson—to a successful career in one of the most challenging voice parts that exists in opera. Recently, the countertenor was appointed general director and president of Opera Philadelphia (effective June 1) and performed in Phil Kline and Jim Jarmusch’s The Lives and Dreams of Nikola Tesla as Summoned by the Honorable Spirits of the Grand Gotham Hotel as part of the Works & Progress Series at the Guggenheim. He’s performing as Orfeo in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, opening at the Metropolitan Opera on May 16. 

Outgoing and fast-talking, with a diary bursting with new projects, Costanzo is always on the go. Taking press interviews while commuting, the spritely 42-year-old doesn’t seem to have a stop button.

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Costanzo told Observer that performing on Broadway as a child gave him a “theatrical instinct for exhilaration.” Like the cheeky von Trapp children, Costanzo thrills audiences through exuberance and swiftness: a rarity among modern opera singers. I first came across Costanzo in the 2019 production of Akhnaten at the Met, his bright head voice filling the 3,800-seat theater, penetrating eardrums with ethereal violence that teased my mind out of thought. With his beaming falsetto tunneling the audience into a new dimension, I knew I had encountered a different kind of performer.

Countertenors, the highest male voice part, are exceptionally uncommon among opera singers. They can sing the same range as a mezzo-soprano; some even sing up into the soprano range. Countertenors are rare not only because of the natural rarity of the voice part, but also because the training is particularly challenging, and the trained singer then has a limited range of roles to choose from as a performer. A countertenor typically must sing roles initially intended for 17th- and 18th-century castrati (men who were castrated as boys so that their voices never broke) or in new music made in the last seventy-five years.

Where many countertenors train later in life, Costanzo was lucky to have had his voice discovered by a teacher at age thirteen, right after his voice had changed with adolescence. He described having to become conscious of how to use his voice as a countertenor after spending years as a boy soprano unconsciously using a combination of head and chest voice. “I had to work years, decades,” he said. “I’m still working on it, connecting those and learning the very delicate tightrope walk that is required for the countertenor register to be fully functional and also beautiful.”

A natural teacher with a mind for detail, Costanzo described singing in his register as being like “chiaroscuro.” This is a painting term describing the strong contrasts between light and dark characteristic of works of art in the Baroque period—the same era that coincidentally birthed the first European castrato. He told Observer he was taught to think of his body as a bow and arrow (a baroque metaphor if there ever was one), “you breathe in, you open the space like pulling back a bow, and then you send the sound and the words forward like an arrow.” He described his method of maintaining the solid core of his voice while leaping into a stratospheric descant as a careful balancing act between technique and expression: “Sometimes that’s by controlling the air in really complex and elegant ways, and sometimes it’s about the roundness of my mouth or the shape of my vowel, but ultimately it comes from a deep desire to sing and to communicate.”

Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, known as a reformist opera, is an uncharacteristically short 18th-century opera, its plot and scoring far more streamlined than was common at the time. This opera seems an ideal vehicle for a singer like Costanzo, who brings a radical style to early music. He likened its theatrical style to French New Wave cinema, where the most violent moment in a story can remain off-camera, its impact expressed through its absence. He described Orfeo as being more modern in its storytelling method and musical style, with uncommonly little ornamentation for an opera of its period. “Instead of having a castrato, for whom Orfeo was written, sing in decorative fioritura and fast notes,” Costanzo said, “Gluck writes a piece that is about pathos and emotional communication through lyricism.”

Having a voice that is a rarity among rarities is not always a boon. Costanzo, like all countertenors, is limited by his choices of traditional roles, so much of Costanzo’s time is spent creating spaces and projects for himself as a performer. One project especially dear to his heart is his collaboration with cabaret performer Justin Vivian Bond. Taken to see one of their shows fifteen years ago, Costanzo told Observer, “I was immediately struck within thirty seconds that this was not only one of the greatest performers I had ever seen on stage, but also someone who was entirely themselves.” In their pandemic-era collaboration, Only An Octave Apart, they duet and sing mashups—some intentionally and hilariously silly—of songs in their particular voice parts: Bond’s baritone, Costanzo’s leaping countertenor. Costanzo called it a “meditation on identity,” adding that, “in art, we’re not always playing other people but we’re sometimes reinforcing who we are, especially when we’re using our voice.”

A career like Costanzo’s might not have been possible a generation ago, and his story shows that sometimes the most radical thing you can do is use your voice. Director Peter Sellers told the New York Times in 2017 that Costanzo, like the famous 18th-century castrato, “exists to transform the art form.” These castrato were wildly popular in their era, sought after for their artistry and seen, paradoxically, as sex symbols. Recently, as grand opera houses discover that innovation and diversity bring in new audiences, real change is afoot and spaces for new and rare voices are opening up. Costanzo is a boon to new opera fans everywhere because he has seized this historical moment and appears capable of dragging opera into a new century.

By chance in 2019, SeokJong Baek met internationally acclaimed tenor Yonghoon Lee. Baek, who comes from a South Korean family with a great love for classical music, had recently graduated from the Manhattan School of Music where he had trained as an operatic baritone, but when Lee heard him sing, he told Baek there was something in his voice that made him think he could sing the upper register. He had, Lee said, “great potential.”

After that encounter, Baek was accepted as a baritone into a young artists program at The San Francisco Opera but was given the opportunity to sing as a tenor in the final student concert. And it awakened something in him.

He was still in San Francisco looking for someone to help him change his voice when the pandemic hit, but with social distancing, there wasn’t a teacher to be found. Still determined, Baek secured a practice room at the South Korean United Methodist Church. “I spent every day there,” Baek told Observer. “I practiced without even a day’s skipping, testing and observing my voice and how it would function on my body.”

It’s not a story of success, he cautioned, but rather one about failure. Alone in an empty church with Covid shutting down the world, things looked bleak for musicians everywhere. “It was a very tough and cruel time because I had no idea what I was doing at first,” he said. “I failed and I tried harder, and I failed again and tried different techniques.”

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Months went by before he saw any results, but he finally figured out how to retrain his voice, learning to approach the passaggio in new ways and achieve that elusive high C. Determination kept him going, and he practiced for a year and a half before he could sing some of the more difficult tenor arias without strain.

Looking back, Baek feels it was the very dead space at the height of the Covid closures that allowed him to focus like this: “Work had stopped during the pandemic and I felt this is the only thing that I need to do, and this is the only way that I can find something for my future.”

Baek spoke to Observer shortly after starring as Calaf in the opening night of Puccini’s Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera. Turandot ends relatively happily, with Calaf’s triumphant marriage and, in this particular production, his literal coronation. The 1987 Franco Zeffirelli Turandot, one of the Met’s beloved old war horses, is a gloriously decadent monstrosity of gilded pagodas, severed heads and courtly fan dances. Aesthetically, it borrows equally from traditional Chinese and Japanese painting, commedia dell’arte, Italian fascism, Hollywood musicals and seventies disco. Between the dancers, the singers and the acrobats, directing this production must be akin to marshaling an army.

Today, SeokJong Baek is more than up to the challenges of Calaf. His hard-won upper range is supported by a splendid lower core that developed during his fifteen years of training as a baritone. A rich voice with a soaring volume, he brings the quality of his lower register into the high notes. Combined with the passion of his performance, you couldn’t ask for a more winning Calaf.

It’s worth pointing out that Calaf is not just a tenor role, it is the tenor role—the performer must sing the soaring, show-off aria “Nessun dorma.” In the Zeffirelli production, the aria is sung on a stage awash in romantic moonlight. It is the Hamlet’s soliloquy of arias, a rite of passage for lyric tenors. Baek, fortunately, has the acting skills to match his impressive vocal range. He plants his flag on that stage and announces his worthiness with a passion that surely harkens back to those long, bleak hours of solitary pandemic practice.

“I think the character of Calaf is just in my blood,” Baek mused. In Turandot, Calaf must win the hand of the vengeful Princess Turandot by answering her three riddles. Failure means execution. Calaf successfully answers the riddles, but Turandot is not defeated and is still out for vengeance. Calaf says that if she can guess his name before morning he will go willingly to his execution. Turandot declares that none shall sleep in Peking because if the prince’s name is not discovered by morning, it will mean death for all. The emperor’s courtiers offer Calaf land and wealth to give up on Turandot and leave Peking. But he refuses. Only when his father’s slave girl is tortured and then commits suicide to protect him does he finally relent. He tells the princess his name. Turandot, transformed by the events of the drama, accepts his love.

Zeffirelli’s Calaf is given a coronation in gilded robes in the splendors of the sun emperor’s palace. Like Calaf, Baek’s story—his “story of failure”—concludes spectacularly. Rarely in the arts does hard work lead inexorably to career success, but with a packed 2024 season at the Met, London’s Royal Opera House and more, Baek’s breakthrough career as a leading tenor is off to a jaw-droppingly good start.

“I’m just an ordinary man; sometimes I’m shy, and in general I’m very introverted,” Baek said.  But like Calaf, once presented with a challenge, he can’t let it go. His story of gritting his teeth and returning over and over to the practice room to retrain his voice has a happy ending, making it a rare tale in an industry where the pandemic, instead of advancing careers, forced artists to find other work. And training the voice to sing in higher registers is one of the hardest transitions a performer can make. Would that the industry supported young artists better and helped fund and otherwise support the long periods of training that would allow for such unusual leftward turns. If that was the case, voices as held and curated as Baek’s would be the norm and not be the exception to the rule.

Chornobyldorf: Archeological Opera In Seven Novels is a post-apocalyptic opera in which the last surviving humans on Earth recreate our lost civilization through ritual performance. In post-industrial ruins, performers recreate and misinterpret symbols and stories from human civilization, gradually erasing all meaning until all is dissolved “into the white noise of nature.”

The performance includes film footage taken by the show’s co-creators, Illia Razumeiko and Roman Grygoriv, of the site of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and incorporates Ukrainian folk singing, classical music, dance and avant-garde theatrics. Though initially conceived of in 2020 and set hundreds of years in the future, Razumeiko and Grygoriv felt the footage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was like scenes from the opera. Razumeiko told the PA news agency in Kyiv that it was now the opera’s diplomatic mission to show that Ukraine, its language, culture, and history—distinct from Russia’s—still exists.

Nonetheless, Chornobyldorf is hard to quantify, as it hails from an inexplicable school of avant-garde that we don’t see much anymore in New York City. Visually, it is a lush, jewel-toned, fleshy feast of sharp angles and schizophrenic strobe effects, and the political context provided by the co-composers doesn’t do much to help us understand the work. On opening night in New York, Ukraine’s ambassador to the UN was in the audience, and I wondered what he thought of the nude dancers writhing in strobe lights reflected on the disco ball shaped like Lenin’s head. Did he leave feeling as deranged and teased out of thought as I did?

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That’s not a put-down. I approve of any opera where the orchestra stands up, takes off their clothes and joins in a post-Soviet rave. Being handed earplugs by the usher instead of a program was also a welcome novelty. Why not amplify opera? Why not write an opera where the last surviving inhabitants of Earth look like they live in the Mad Max universe but party at the House of Yes?

The performers draping themselves in Ukrainian flags at the curtain call directly after the wildest and most naked opera that I have ever seen was so emotionally discordant that I truly did feel transported to the end of humanity. I am squeamish of all forms of nationalism, but then I don’t live in a country under siege, and, understandably, artists want to connect to their nation at this time. The opera’s sandwich of symbols may be uniquely weird, but it’s also unforgettable: the nude performer, clothed only in gold glitter, sweating beside the red and black flag of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

Again, Chornobyldorf defies analysis. The production’s “Seven Novels” are almost totally inscrutable and therefore infinitely interpretable. Some scenes made me wonder if they were metaphors for the political conflagration of the Euromaidan protests in 2013. But mostly I was so baffled that I resisted narrativizing, yet I was eventually charmed by the old-school modernist alienation. It made me nostalgic for a time when shows that go as hard conceptually as Chornobyldorf were everywhere in lower Manhattan. I was touched by Razumeiko and Grygoriv’s total disinterest in connecting with me and my little human feelings—I didn’t think composers cared enough anymore to want to ensure our alienation.

The performers themselves were excellent, even extraordinary. In particular, the folk vocalists and female presenting dancers gave magical performances. The traditional choral singing was very well done, with the amplification mimicking the overtones created by Slavic women’s folk choruses. And the dancers, who spent almost the entire show naked, at least from the waist up, showed an impressive command of expression, with their beautifully synchronistic, robotic movements in a twitchy sci-fi ballet that stole the show. One dancer still stands out in my mind, progressing downstage carrying gold cymbals as a throat singer made the walls of La MaMa rumble with chthonic groans.

Chornobyldorf isn’t an ‘easy’ opera, but the performers are so committed to the bit—throwing themselves like a joyful circus troupe into a manic stew of wildness—that I was won over by their sheer forcefulness and vim.

Illia Razumeiko and Roman Grygoriv’s company, Opera Aperta, is named for a term coined by Umberto Eco in 1962 meaning “open work.” The postmodern concept refers to there being multiple meanings in each work of art, shaped by the backgrounds of the audience rather than the single meaning defined by the artist. In 2024, this is a relatively old-fashioned idea when applied to theater, even given my above enthusiasm.

Let’s conclude, therefore, with Chornobyldorf’s musical richness rather than its high-concept staging. The opera has many elements that will excite the modern music enthusiast: microtonal instruments, invented instruments, body electronics, an algorithmic piano called a Rhea-player and Ukrainian polyphonic singing. The sound experience, like a combined opera and noise show, unlike its well-worn avant-garde theatrics, was exciting and new. What The Wooster Group was doing forty years ago has been transformed into a sound journey: an aural adventure that will burn itself into your memory with searing permanence.

Adrift: A Medieval Wayward Folly | 65mins. No intermission. | 59E59 Theaters | 59 East 59th Street | 212-753-5959

Adrift: A Medieval Wayward Folly is performed in a starkly empty black box theater at 59E59. A spare set piece, a ship’s mast, inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s Ship of Fools, is perched in one corner. The set piece, like the performance itself, is handmade and vigorously detailed. It looks like a close up or a cut out from the 15th century painting. As one can surmise from the play’s title, the performance takes much of its inspiration from the art and music of the Middle Ages. The enthusiastically crafted scenarios, all performer created, with costumes, puppets, and set designed by the Happenstance ensemble, are partly homages to specific artworks from the late medieval and early Renaissance period. Specifically, they were inspired by works by Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, as well as illuminated alchemical and medical texts from the same period. With music, dance, puppets, miming, and physical comedy, and using minimal language, the performers recreate symbols and scenarios from these late medieval masterworks. 

The ensemble presents a vast array of performance skills: clowning, miming, sleight of hand, puppeteering, dancing, singing (in Latin and French), and medieval instrumentation (hurdy-gurdy, recorder, and hand harp, to name only a few.) Audiences anticipating a Monty Python-like lampooning of the Middle Ages will be disappointed. While its playfulness and its series of comedic interlocking sketches are reminiscent of a Cambridge Footlights show, its multiskilled ensemble, both as performers and craftspeople, raise the bar and transform a sketch comedy act into something far stranger and more beautiful.

The performance begins with a puppet world besieged by storms and tornadoes and ultimately engulfed in flames. After this puppet apocalypse, the ensemble gather on a “ship of fools” that is adrift and doomed, with no sailors or destination. With only a barrel hoop for a ship, the performers are all keen mimes, mimicking the rolling waves on the wind tossed ship; all while in character as hapless medieval peasants. In the next scenario, ensemble members Sabrina Mandell and Alex Vernon, dressed as anthropomorphic hay creatures—their attire reminiscent of ancient mumming costumes—ascend barrels and answer questions gathered from the audience. The most visually arresting scene in the entire performance, it is impressive as tableau vivant alone. Mandell and Vernon’s synchronicity as they perform as one being, moving like antique clockwork dolls, an infectious mania in their expressions, is a special work of performance art in itself. While Adrift often treats its source material with breathless worship, this scene takes stylistic cues from Bosch and Bruegel and then dives somewhere completely new and different. 

Similarly, another standout performance is Sarah Olmstead Thomas as the furred and horned demon: a venal and playful critter straight out of Bosch’s Hell. Like Mandell and Vernon as the hay prophets, Olmstead Thomas embodies her fiendish character. She bestrides the stage, humping legs and rubbing her ass on the floor like a dog in heat, spitting and speaking a devilish glossolalia. A dynamic physical comedian, Olmstead Thomas takes up space; her demon breaks out of the medieval painting and engages the audience in three dimensions. 

Also noteworthy is the puppeteering throughout the show: Olmstead Thomas’s shadow puppet work, Vernon’s marionette puppeteering, and Mandell’s painted puppets mimicking windblown trees in the opening scene. Skillfully performed and stylistically integrated, this eclectic pastiche of medieval symbols are a splendid homage to the source materials. Similarly, the prolific instrumentation and cinematic use of sound immerse the audience in Bosch’s crowded, two-dimensional spaces.

As inspiration for clowning and puppeteering it doesn’t get much better than medieval art. With such a wealth of material to draw from, I was a little disappointed by the absence of pacing or narrative structure in Adrift. We drift dreamily from scene to scene, the adorable scenarios hanging together loosely, like animated short films. I longed for a narrative throughline that would allow me to become emotionally invested in the work. With an entire show chock full of medieval iconography, heavy with meaning, the performance itself turns away from meaning and permanence. However beautifully crafted the costumes and puppets, the scenarios seem just too fragmented and child-like for adults to latch onto with our grownup and complex emotional bodies.

 Co-directors Sabrina Mandell and Mark Jaster state in the program that they became interested in medieval artworks because they showed how “magic and mystery were woven into everyday life, when people still felt they were not so separate from the natural world.” Their lovingly handcrafted performance does a good job of displaying how nature’s cycles, the changing of the seasons, the cycles of growth, life, and death, were of a piece to the medieval peasant. Where the divine was unfathomable and yet always close at hand. Mandell and Jaster connect this theme to our own time, stating, “In our current moment in history, humanity is facing a reckoning with nature. The dire global climate crisis has us seeking ways to adapt and manage. Perhaps if we listen closely to the mystery, we can discover how.” 

Like medieval art, the Adrift speaks through surfaces and affect. Compared to a medieval peasant, however, a modern audience is iconographically blind. An illiterate 15th century peasant read symbols the way that Happenstance’s audience reads text. The arcane symbols in Bosch’s paintings would have been rich in meaning to his contemporaries. Removed from their context, brought forward as absurdist puppets, that richness doesn’t translate over. Without much in the way of storyline, the directors’ lofty themes have little to latch onto. Some kind of narrative spine to go along with the carefully presented miming, music, and puppeteering, might have brought out some of that richness of meaning.

If the dizzyingly complex paintings of Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder could speak, they would speak volumes. A play, however, unlike a 15th century triptych, can speak. While Happenstance’s medieval scenarios are charming and beautifully crafted, I came away wishing they had grappled more dynamically with the content from the late medieval paintings that inspired them. However appealing and whimsical, their literal, surface approach to these often allegorical masterworks too often turns away from their rich and terrifying substance. 

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A chorus of performers in vivid blues and greens undulate across the stage of the Delacorte. There are droves of them, and they are amateurs, from young children to people in their eighties. They are a warm and vivacious cross-section of humanity giving life to the play, vivid and teeming as a coral reef. I was deeply moved watching the chorus traverse the play, seeing their sweet unconstrained expressions, their individuality and their collaborative helpfulness as they aided each other in navigating the choreography. They were clearly having the time of their lives, and their enthusiasm was infectious.

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The production does a superb job of presenting a truly diverse chorus, with amateur performers, each with a different look and skill, tearing up the stage. It was thrilling to watch them watch each other, help each other, and dive headlong into the singing and dancing with the total absorption we achieve dancing late at night, alone in the kitchen. Community theater is a beautiful thing, and we don’t have anywhere near enough of it in uber-professionalized New York City.

The chorus (“Spirits” in the original play, “Spirit Ancestors” in the Public Theatre’s musical production) dash on and off stage, more like the fairies in Midsummer Night’s Dream than Ariel’s pedantic spirits in the original text. They swarm like phosphorescent fish around Miranda and Ferdinand, whose adolescent love story the play adaptors have made the heart of the production.

Sixteen-year-old Naomi Pierre, in the role of Miranda, steals the show from the significantly more experienced professionals in many of the other principal roles. Her simple, precise and elegant performance is collaborative and engaging. The casting of Pierre was a stroke of brilliance, and she approached the role with a curiosity and generosity that was lacking in some of the professional actors. Pierre reported to The New York Times that with her school responsibilities, she still has not had time to actually read The Tempest, yet she so immersed herself in the character that in performance, she became the naïve, witty and wise Miranda personified.

Dancing and physicality were brought forward in the production. In the manner of contemporary Broadway musicals, the genre varied from scene to scene. During the masque scene, Oyu Oro, an Afro-Cuban experimental dance ensemble, took the stage with bomba drummers and dancers in traditional folk costumes. While the music and dancing were lovely, this addition, like so many other aspects of the production, came out of nowhere. Various abstract themes (love, forgiveness, togetherness) were hammered home in extremely on-the-nose song lyrics, (“I’ll finally be free of the tempest in me,” sings Prospero), but despite all the attempts at populism, the play was a little confusing. I imagine it would be more so for those unfamiliar with the original text—it was plaplexing in a contemporary manner, in the way of mainstream blockbusters where one must be immersed in, say, decades of Marvel superhero lore to follow the plot twists. The production wasn’t all that interested in our ability to understand in the most basic way what was happening on stage.

Prospero, performed by Renée Elise Goldsberry of Hamilton fame, with her booming mezzo-soprano, perhaps best embodies this contextless production. Goldsberry, radiant with health, flies about the stage singing and dancing, wins a great victory over her enemies and has her dukedom returned to her. She does not pretend to be the elderly Prospero, and yet delivers the lines: “Bear with my weakness. My old brain is troubled. Be not disturbed with my infirmity.” Prospero, while elderly, sometimes puts on an infirmity to trick those who had usurped his position; however, this very Disney production of The Tempest lacks that kind of subtlety, as does Goldsberry’s delivery. She also states, in a final scene, after all ruses are given up, “retire me to my Milan, where every third thought shall be my grave.” (A line so odd and unbelievable in this production that it evoked titters from the audience.)  Like the random bits of constructed scenery that went unused and unremarked upon on stage, the randomness of the textual and artistic choices made me wonder if the show adaptors cared if the audience understood what was happening and why. The focus instead was on the blending of the community ensemble with the professional actors, a showcase for participation as art in and of itself.

This blending of professionals and amateurs was not entirely successful, but not for the reasons you might expect. The amateurs presented more subtlety and greater kindness to the audience than many of the professional actors. The non-professionals had tremendous heart and lacked the flippancy of the professionals, whose skill and polish could come off as knife-edged and disciplining in comparison. The comic nature of the production emphasized this hardness of performance. The scene between Caliban (Theo Stockman), Stephano (Joel Perez), and Trinculo (Anthony J. Garcia, understudy filling in for Sabrina Cadeño) is meant as comic relief in the original play, a moment of lightness. However, in this production, each actor asks that we take their hijinks with extreme seriousness. They make demands instead of invitations and, for myself, the scene inspired as much anxiety as it did laughter.

The Public Theatre describes the show as follows: “As Prospero grows closer to getting the justice she desires, she witnesses her daughter fall in love, listens to the wisdom of spirit ancestors and discovers that sometimes forgiveness is the only way to break cycles and right the course for the next generation.” Every generation, every era, is going to remake Shakespeare for its own purposes. This gender-blind and colorblind musical production, with its Pixar-like sound, is very much of our own time—a socially just, values-first spectacle that is chock full of lore and world-building but limited to the resources of a specific franchise. Granted, Shakespeare has a lot more artistic bandwidth than Guardians of the Galaxy, but even Shakespeare will have a narrowness of scope if only pursued for abstracted themes and hokey punchlines.

The production engages live handcrafted special effects and zany audience interactions to recreate the frisky dynamics of the 18th-century singspiel, or German light opera. With its blank canvas stage and DIY effects, the production might seem like a no-budget avant-garde staging that’s been writ large at the Met. Birds are represented by pieces of paper. Papageno clinks out a melody with celery sticks on liquor bottles. This is on the same stage where earlier this month a live horse was employed in Aida.

Brownlee’s performance as the stricken, lovelorn prince is impressively windswept. He flickers balletically in virginal white across the stage, he dives into the orchestra pit. He endures trials, blockades, manipulation and assault. Arguably the least insane character in the frenzied fable, Tamino is like the audience’s avatar, guiding us through Mozart’s chaotic picaresque. Papageno’s straight man, the Queen of the Night’s naïve hero, Pamina’s tormented lover and Sarastro’s somber protégé: Tamino is the life raft we cling to in the opera’s tumultuous waters. Die Zauberflöte is like a snapshot of 18th-century male insecurities in the face of female power, and Brownlee is a faithful conduit for the tender and demented stew of emotion engendered in that space.

“Tamino was the very first role I ever sang in opera,” Brownlee told Observer. He had sung Tamino before he had ever even seen an opera. “Simon McBurney challenged me. He talked about Tamino being someone who was arrogant, full of himself, and had to learn to be humble.” Tamino, a child of privilege tossed into the deep end of an epic adventure, earns the temple of the sun when he conquers the feminine chaos of night and all of nature’s elements.

Mainly known as a bel canto tenor, Brownlee is working somewhat outside of his strengths in Die Zauberflöte. Without a conduit for his dazzling top notes, he leans powerfully into acting and movement in his performance as Tamino, guiding the audience admirably through one of opera’s most anarchic plotlines.

“I like to be challenged,” Brownlee said. “Anytime I go to a role my whole thing is to be an empty palette that the stage director and music director can make something with, along with my knowledge now.” With twenty-five years in the business, Brownlee brings an enormous amount of experience to his roles. “I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of this craft,” he said. “But I need to have an out-of-body experience in the sense that I don’t just rest on what I know. I like someone to untap some potential in me.”

Tamino is like an empty vessel as he guides the audience through the struggle between light and darkness in Die Zauberflöte. It is in a similar role as a conduit and guide that Brownlee approaches his new album, Rising, released on June 2 by Warner Classics for Black History Month. Conceived in 2020, during the coronavirus lockdown, he sees the album as a way to create a space for young composers in classical music. His voice plows the furrow down which he leads new audiences to diverse new music.

“We all endured the George Floyd situation,” Brownlee said. “I remember being in that space and talking to my colleagues, people asking me questions about Black artists, Black composers, people having space and an opportunity to operate in what their gifts were.”

Knowing that he would be performing a program at Carnegie Hall this year, he took that as an opportunity to bring young Black composers into some of the most privileged spaces in classical music. In Rising, composers Jeremiah Evans, Carlos Simon, Damian Sneed, Shawn E. Okpebholo and Joel Thompson are paired with authors from the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes. These composers are side by side on the album with Margaret Bonds and Robert Owens, 20th-century Black composers who have passed away and who knew and composed for some of the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance.

By combining contemporary with historic composers, Brownlee told Observer that he hoped to contribute to the canon of songs and to increase what is out there that comes from Black composers. He also looks to change the perceptions of works by Black composers and to broaden their adaptability.

“A lot of people think that music written by Black composers is only for Black singers. I don’t agree,” Brownlee said. He hopes that the album presents the music in such a way that the songs seem like they can be sung by anyone.

Brownlee’s voice guides us through a varied assortment of musical styles in Rising. The songs sound like they exist in the same canon if not the same style. This variety was deliberate on Brownlee’s part. He compares the variety of styles to the multiplicity of Black experiences.

“The beautiful thing about this is that the program is so diverse. That’s what I love about it because obviously we, as Black people, are not a monolith. We have so many different influences. So many of these composers are influenced by gospel, some by Strauss, some by jazz, some by pop… there isn’t any throughline other than the fact that I said I didn’t want this album to be just about our struggles, but our triumphs, our joys, our inspiration.”

This same diversity Brownlee sees as intrinsic to the Harlem Renaissance itself—also by no means a monolith. He compared contemporary composer Damian Sneed’s The Gift of Song on Rising to Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story and notes its Latin influence. Much like the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, the composers on Rising were influenced by New York City’s staggering diversity. Rather than give the composers on the album thematic or stylistic restraints, Brownlee said that he gave them a sense of where his voice sits and then mostly let them do as they liked.

A passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion in classical music, Brownlee’s interest in expanding Black voices in his field has led him to speak widely on racial justice and diversity initiatives. Rising, as well as his 2018 album Cycles of My Being, both encounter the Black experience in America: the struggles, inspirations and joys of African Americans.

As Simon McBurney’s Die Zauberflöte draws new audiences to Mozart by employing ancient staging techniques and effects, Brownlee leans into his classical training and the legacy of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance to draw a new audience to contemporary black composers. These new composers, he told Observer, “stand on the shoulders of composers who came before them but they all have something to say.”

In David Graeber’s slim posthumous book, Pirate Enlightenment: Or the Real Libertalia, the anthropologist argues that 18th-century pirate society inspired and influenced European Enlightenment thinking. Specifically, he describes how the pirate “kingdoms” of 18th-century Madagascar brought together the proto-democratic self-government of pirate ships with the uniquely inclusive cultural melting pot of the people of Madagascar (the Malagasy). The historical narratives and folktales about these pirate “kings” made their way to Europe in the time of Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu, and maintained a purchase on the minds of writers like Daniel Defoe. As a result, pirate philosophy became mixed up in the profusion of ideas that would come to shape European thought for centuries. 

This book continues the project Graeber began, alongside archeologist David Wengerow, in The Dawn of Everything (2021), to “decolonize the Enlightenment,” proving the global and pluralistic non-Western origins of Western thought. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengerow write of the indigenous diplomat Kondiaronk, who debated the punitive nature of European law with early French Canadian colonials. These debates were noted down in a book that became a widespread bestseller across Europe in the early 18th century. In Pirate Enlightenment, Graeber turns his attention to another source of early 18th-century pluralistic thought in his research on the mock pirate “kings” of Madagascar. 

While doing his graduate field study in Madagascar in the early nineties, Graeber came across an unusual ethnic group, the zana-malata, that could trace its origins to 17th- and 18th-century pirates who had married Malagasy women and lived in vibrant trading towns along the island’s eastern coast. These Malagasy women sought economic independence through marriage to their (frequently absent) foreign pirate husbands. In these mutually beneficial marriages, women gained financial liberty while transforming their pirate husband’s plundered jewels and silks into comfortable domestic lives. As much wealth as the pirates could steal, that wealth could not be translated into a higher status back in their home countries. Madagascar’s pirate port towns were another story. 

Graeber describes the pirate “kings” themselves as leaders in name only: able to display the great wealth of a king due to their stolen booty, even while lacking the connections or legitimacy to enforce their authority in daily life. Graeber maintains that these men were also likely influenced by the self-government maintained aboard pirate ships, where the crew elected their captains, where work and booty were shared around, and where a captain only had the right to command others during pitched battle. One such pirate king, Ratsimilaho of the Betsimisaraka Confederation, was an elected king whose kingdom was maintained for 50 years of peace and prosperity in a largely decentralized kingdom at a time when Madagascar was racked with internal strife. Most impressively, the kingdom kept the European slave traders away, even while slavers were actively kidnapping and transporting native Malagasy elsewhere. 

This story dovetails with similar research in The Dawn of Everything, which details the broad spectrum of styles of self-government common globally until the modern era. In the distant past, humans were agile and flexible in collectively choosing how we should live. Unchanging top-down hierarchies are a relatively modern invention. We once chose differently, Graeber inveighs, and we must do so again. 

Graeber’s work may best be seen not merely as scholarship or as entertaining popular nonfiction, but also as part of an overarching political project that connects with the author’s political organizing at Occupy Wall Street or as part of the debt cancellation movement. Rare are contemporary scholars who would both write a definitive study on the history of debt and organize a movement to rid a generation of student debt. Academics rarely cross that line from scholar to organizer and Graeber claimed that he did so at his peril. He described himself as exiled from American academia following his dismissal from Yale, which he credited to his political advocacy. 

Nestling into his theories is easier done once Graeber’s political intentions are understood. He was the child of working class Jewish intellectuals. His mother was a member of the Ladies Garment Workers Union and performed a lead role in the long running pro-union Broadway musical, Pins and Needles. His father was a communist who fought against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. A lifelong anarchist, Graeber’s political perspective infuses all his work and he rarely tries to hide his distinctly radical analysis. 

Graeber states in the preface to Pirate Enlightenment: “If nothing else, what I’d like this little experiment in historical writing to bring home is that existing history is not just deeply flawed and Eurocentric, it’s also unnecessarily tedious and boring.” Where many moralizing scholars will insist upon the diversification of the canon, few entice us towards multiculturalism through joy. He makes the inclusion of figures like Kandiaronk and Madagascar’s Ratsimilaho into the canon of Enlightenment thinkers into a diverting romp. According to Graeber, engaging with history from a radical point of view is not merely more honest and enlightening, it’s also more fun. 

“Let us tell, then, a story about magic, lies, sea battles, purloined princesses, slave revolts, manhunts, make-believe kingdoms and fraudulent ambassadors, spies, jewel thieves, poisoners, devil worship, and sexual obsession that lies at the origins of modern freedom.” So begins Pirate Enlightenment. Like a political novel it asks more questions than it answers and it gives heft and architecture to unknown or unknowable worlds. The study of Madagascar’s pirate kings must by necessity be an imaginative act, given how little is known of the period, how much information has been lost, and how hard it is to divide fact from fiction in the narratives shared in the 17th and 18th centuries. Graeber does not exaggerate what he knows but he does draw enough threads together to put forward a few theories. He makes a valiant attempt at describing the different actors in 18th century Madagascar—Malagasy women merchants, mpanjaka (Malagasy princes,) Islamic Gnostics, Jewish ritual cattle slaughterers, colonists, pirates, sorceresses, and slave trading con men—and builds a convincing scholarly parallel to contemporary pirate legends. He writes discursively and conversationally, combining hard research with literary analysis, conjecture, personal anecdotes, and jokes. Using mainly contemporary sources, he brings a shadowy historical backwater to life and sketches out what may well have been a real pirate utopia. 

Readers of Graeber learn to leap into his jeweled nests of ideas without any expectation of emerging with certainty about any of them. He is a little like the James Cameron of anthropologists: engaging in occasionally crude or unfinished techniques in a self-conscious attempt to shatter paradigms and build a new world. His works are flawed not because he chose scholarly shortcuts or began on false premises, but because he is trying to do something incredibly difficult, if not impossible, and something very definitely new. 

 Graeber died at 59, with his career in full swing. Reading his work now is to be reminded of his passing and of the books he wasn’t given the time to write. His final book is a reminder of his bravery, bombast, and brilliance, and his ability to create vast, imagined worlds from sparse resources—not unlike the pirate kings his last work commemorates. 

Gelsey Bell’s new experimental opera, “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning],” directed by Tara Ahmadinejad, tells the story of the extinction of the human race and the billion years of rewilding and species evolution that follow. Performed in a small 100-seat theater at HERE through January 22nd as part of the Prototype Festival, “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning]” is sung by five singers, Bell included, who perform a capella or play instruments on stage.

These instruments include the Celtic harp, handfuls of marbles swirled in a glass bowl, basic synthesizers, and a daxophone (a kind of stringless cello that makes eerily human sounds through the friction created by a bow on wood). The performance is a clever patchwork of genres: improv and opera, choral folk singing and musical theater, spoken word and electronic noise music. Using whimsical light design reminiscent of early arcade video games, the five singer instrumentalists—each with a highly individualistic performance style and tonal quality—blend their voices throughout a ninety-minute sound story that takes us to the literal end of the earth.

SEE ALSO: True Events Become History and History Becomes Art in the Met’s ‘Ainadamar’

Creating sounds and theatrical experiences that have never existed before is a prerequisite for new music; however, what is winsome and refreshing about this work is its approachability. Bell and her collaborators seem to want to win over audiences with charm, humor, and good storytelling. The need to discipline audiences with difficult atonal sound or incoherent narrative, so prevalent in so much experimental music, is absent.

“mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning]” is novelistic, linear, and fast-paced. It contains thrills and surprises. The audience laughs out loud. Storytelling, as a dramaturgical device and aesthetic framework, is at the heart of the piece. The work begins with a haunting choral sound, suggestive of Native American songscapes, as the singers gather around a collection of bowls and mark the end of our species, the act that commences the opera.

Gelsey Bell told the Observer that she was inspired by Alan Weisman’s 2008 book The World Without Us in composing the opera. This book details what would happen to the earth’s flora and fauna if humanity suddenly disappeared. Weisman looks at what the planet’s rewilding would look like as it gradually heals from millennia of human intervention.

Bell said her opera is a “celebration of a cleansing that the planet is capable of.” In Bell’s opera, Weisman’s tale is told in all its rich scientific detail—a melodic, anti-capitalist TED Talk. Much of the story is rendered in song, with important transitions spoken.  I found myself frustrated at times when the songs lacked crisp phrasing, rendering key factual components of the story inaudible. I had to remind myself that I was watching an opera of hard science fiction. As in the long, didactic novels of Kim Stanley Robinson, pleasure is to be found by letting the scientific information wash over you. There will be no quiz to follow. Fortunately, the opera’s abundant charm sands away at these moments of friction, and the audience is mainly held and nurtured in the dream space of the story.

Vast timescales structure the opera, starting in decades, moving to millennia and then millions and then billions of years. The time cycles are signified by increasing numbers of marbles poured into a bowl. Bell, alongside singer instrumentalists Aviva Jaye, Paul Pinto, Ashley Pérez Flanagan, and Justin Hicks, tell this eons-long story like zany primary school science teachers hell-bent on entertaining their classroom.

“The piece is very much an imagining of a possible future,” Bell said she spoke at length about the desire to express these vast time periods so that the audience develops an emotional relationship with the concept of a million or a billion years.

“There’s a political mentality of nothing can change; we’re stuck in this catastrophic climate crisis, we’re stuck in what our relationship to other animals is, and there’s nothing we can do to really move that,” Bell said. She hopes that her work can open imaginations to other ways people can be in relation to time, nature, and other beings.

The creation of a meditative space for thinking about geological timescales seems like ripe territory for new music. Having established the logic of this dream space in the first portion of the opera, following hundreds of thousands of years of rewilding, nuclear meltdowns, and decomposing missile heads, the opera switches gears and moves from hard science to fantasy. After the Anthropocene has been and gone and the earth has had time to heal itself from the catastrophe of the human race (the remains of human civilization are repeatedly referred to as a rash upon the surface of the planet), we come to a new golden era. As human poisons are leached out of the soil and oceans, new species evolve. Most notably, the octopus, which comes to replace Homo sapiens as the dominant sentient lifeform.

Not until the performers transformed into singing space-traveling super-intelligent octopi was I fully won over to “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning].” The ability to contain that much whimsy and seriousness in a single ninety-minute work is conceptually impressive and shows a willingness to wild out on the show’s material. The super-intelligent octopi travel the solar system and colonize Mars (sorry, Elon). They make first contact with aliens and transform our corner of the galaxy into a tourist destination for the viewing of solar eclipses.

This winsome act of strangeness is helpful in conceptualizing the opera’s vast planetary timescale. Bell and her collaborators arrive at their uncanny conclusion like aerialists smiling through gravity-defying feats. The opera ends with a triumphant flourish. With its Pac-Man-like light design, we view the planet’s last solar eclipse a billion years from now, just before the moon pulls away from the Earth—an event witnessed by aliens from across the galaxy. 

Species time has been on a lot of people’s minds since the pandemic brought the human race’s fragility and transience to the fore. “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning]” avoids hinting at eco pessimism or ecofascism through its deft manner of communicating its values. The performers are, after all, speaking to a human audience in 2023 that has no intention of lying down and dying to make room for the super-intelligent octopus. The expanses of time narrativized in the opera create an imaginative space for thinking about our relative place in the universe and our inseverable relationship with nature. Bell and her collaborators make clear that the earth will go on without us. How we learn to save our species from itself may well begin with such truly humbling perspectives on our planetary relevance.

It takes a special kind of cynic to stand beside the Revson Fountain in Lincoln Center, gaze up at the Chagall murals inside the opera house, and not feel the tiniest bit thrilled. The beloved limestone Lincoln Center campus, now six decades old, warmed and smoothed by the patina of age and use, is a bright spot in a part of the city that can feel aesthetically and spiritually bereft. The eye relaxes when it lands on this island of bone white elegance in an ocean of corporate monoliths.

Lincoln Center’s newest addition, the refurbished home of the New York Philharmonic, David Geffen Hall—named after a 100-million-dollar gift from the billionaire and entertainment industry magnate—will have its grand opening on October 8. On the day the hall opens they will perform in an immersive multimedia performance of Etienne Charles’ San Juan Hill, which tells a story through music, and original first person accounts, of the neighborhood that was destroyed to build Lincoln Center. The renovations are nearly complete, and the Philharmonic is now rehearsing in its new home while the paint is drying, and the balcony handrails are still wrapped in plastic. 

The hall was stripped and reshaped and now bears little resemblance to the old Avery Fisher Hall, visually or acoustically. As the home of the New York Philharmonic, sound was prioritized in the redesign of the new hall to an almost fanatical degree. This was an understandable precaution given the hall’s use as well as its history. When the hall first opened in 1962 as Philharmonic Hall, the acoustics were notoriously awful. Musicians couldn’t hear each other on stage. The New York Times called the sound “antiseptic” and “weak in the bass, with little color and presence.” The original acoustic consultant, Dr. Leo L. Beranek was fired, and the hall saw a major renovation and in 1976 reopened as Avery Fisher Hall. The renovations improved acoustics, but audiences still strained to hear at the back of the hall, and music from the bass instruments got lost in the vastness of the space.

The most noticeable acoustical elements in the architecture of the new hall are the vertical and horizontal lines along the sidewalls. Paul Scarbrough is the principal acoustician at Akustiks, which was selected in 2012 as acoustical consultants for the hall’s redesign. He told the Observer that this grid of lines, “introduce diffusion or scattering of the sound on some of the wall surfaces.” These lines vary in depth from two to fourteen inches and allow sound to be evenly articulated around the hall.

The grid is meant to have the same scattering effect that in a traditional European concert hall is created by dense ornamentation. According to Scarbrough, the architects and acousticians looked at the pilasters, moldings, and sculptures in concert halls like the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the Musikverein in Vienna and studied how much of the wall surfaces were flat and how much were layered to guide the different levels of articulation in the grid. In this way they are creating similar diffusions of sound at similar frequency ranges to a traditional hall.

Gary McCluskie is the principal architect at Diamond Schmitt Architects, which in 2015 won an international competition to redesign the hall. He told the Observer that they took inspiration from sound waves in the design of the articulated grid. “In the way that architecture is sometimes thought of as frozen music we were literally thinking of ways in which both the material in the wood and the shaping of that architecture could have a musical character,” McCluskie told the Observer.

From the warm brown beech wood walls to the brass and bronze railings along the balconies, the architects drew their inspiration from musical instruments. “The concert hall itself is a big musical instrument,” McCluskie told the Observer. “It is the way in which all the different sounds of the orchestra are blended together.”

This idea that the Philharmonic and its audience is nestled inside the body of a huge violin is lovely, and yet the space is more conceptually interesting than visually arresting. The grid along the sidewalls struck me less like soundwaves and more like a giant Excel spreadsheet. Which isn’t to say that it’s not beautiful, in its way. We belong to a culture that knows how to create beautiful spreadsheets. Likewise, the twisted ribbons of wood over the digital organ loft are impressively grand, and yet reminiscent of paper that’s gone through an office shredder. These elements lead me to wonder if the architects were inspired more by the objects in their offices, or by conference rooms and convention centers, than by musical instruments and concert halls.

The beech wood walls create a loungey mid century aura, in keeping with the historic aesthetics of the Lincoln Center campus. Yet, the paneling is also reminiscent of many elementary school auditoriums, last renovated in the ‘60s or ‘70s. At the Metropolitan Opera, whimsical anachronisms are lovingly preserved in their glorious opera meets disco decor. However, the rather masculine minimalism of Geffen Hall doesn’t match up. This is in part due to the disconnect between the architecture and the furnishings.

The minimalism of the hall is contrasted with the décor of the upholstered seats and redesigned lobby. The floral motif of the seating was created by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and mimics the rose murals in the sumptuous new lobby. They are meant to suggest petals falling from the ceiling, with splashes of red, pink, and purple petals in patterns that vary from seat to seat. It’s a playful design in an architectural space that’s deadly serious. The combination of floral decadence and architectural sparseness looks like a clownish error. I viewed the space during a rehearsal without an audience or theatrical lighting so perhaps this effect will be transformed or mitigated during performance. However, from what I saw, compensating for the room’s minimal three-dimensional ornament with a profusion of petals gives an overstuffed and garish look to the furnishings. Where separately elegant, in combination they are discomfiting, probably unintentionally so.

That being said, David Geffen Hall will most likely be a great space for listening to classical music. 500 seats smaller than Avery Fisher Hall, it is an intimate, focused, and meditative space. There is no proscenium, and the orchestra is brought deeper into the audience, the eyes of audience members drawn to the stage by the curved balcony tiers and the grid along the sidewalls.   

The seats are democratic, with the stage decently visible even from the back of the third tier. The most delightful aspect of the hall might be the choral balcony, which will be open to audience members when a choir isn’t in use, allowing the orchestra to be viewed in the round. Audiences will be able to see orchestral performances with the conductor facing them. They will be closer to the timpani and woodwinds and the sound of the orchestra will present differently in these very special seats.

Like its predecessor, Avery Fisher/Philharmonic Hall, David Geffen Hall is meant to last for a generation. It is meant to accommodate the transforming orchestral music world for a century to come. Given its geographical placement, it may well be the last big renovation the Lincoln Center campus sees. The bone white island could easily be underwater when next in need of major refurbishment. David Geffen Hall’s spare yet intimate swan song to Lincoln Center’s golden era is charming, thoughtful, and a little sad. Third go around, after sixty years of trying, they’ve hopefully gotten the acoustics right and created an excellent space for playing and listening to music. I hope for the sake of the future of classical music globally that they will be able to fill this hall with audiences of all ages for a generation to come.

Back in the late 2000s, Rod Townsend had an excellent column in Gawker called “Past, Over” in which he was called on the phone by a New Yorker from the past: someone residing on just the other side of Giuliani-era gentrification. The past called to yell at the present and tell them just how lame their New York was compared to the New York of yesteryear. The past bragged of that halcyon era when ‘some’ non-Trust-funded people under 30 lived in Manhattan, a subway token cost $1.25, and avant garde New York City theatre was actually a thing. They boasted of going to Danceteria, The Roxy, and Tunnel; seeing Wigstock in Tompkins Square Park; and clashing with a vast cross section of humanity in one wild, sweaty New York City night after another. 

The past is very much over and yet here and there are pockets of the New York that was: a New York that was somehow wilder yet gentler, more humane and yet more dangerous. Actor Michael Cavadias first moved to New York in the early nineties, during the city’s pre-9/11 glory days. As a young actor, he was a member of the Blacklips Performance Cult, an avant garde drag theatre troupe that performed plays each Monday night at The Pyramid Club. It was here that he debuted his cult famous fictional alter ego, Claywoman: a 500-million-year-old alien from the Mirillion Galaxy. 

Claywoman’s face is craggy and cracked and she looks like a cross between the Junk Lady from Labyrinth and The Bird Woman from Mary Poppins. Claywoman appears on planet Earth in a show at Pangea in the East Village a few times a year to give one of the oddest, funniest, and most joyful cabaret performances that I have ever seen. She will be making her next appearance at Pangea Sunday September 11th at 7PM. 

“I was sitting in my room and the name Claywoman popped into my head and I started laughing,” Cavadias told the Observer. “Initially she was very different, she was young, she was only 100 million years old.”

From 1992 to 1995, Blacklips Performance Cult took over the stage at The Pyramid Club on Avenue A on Monday nights. They put on plays that they rehearsed just once before performing. The Pyramid Club, a still existent and iconic drag bar, helped pioneer the careers of RuPaul and Lady Bunny in this same period.  As part of Blacklips, Cavadias worked with Anohni, a performer and musician who became the first trans person to be nominated for an Academy Award in 2016. Anohni wrote a play for Blacklips, The Birth of Anne Frank in which the titular character is birthed from the head of a drag queen in a weird retelling of the Virgin birth. It was into this context that Claywoman was born in Cavadias’s Blacklips play, Clayworld, set in the Mirillion Galaxy.  

In 2000, Cavadias appeared in his breakout role as the gender nonconforming Miss Sloviak in the film Wonder Boys. Thereafter, he started to receive more regular acting work. Avant drag Claywoman disappeared for a time, but emerged again in the late 2000s as the audience interactive improvised cabaret act that he continues to do to this day.

While Claywoman hails from the avant drag scene of the early nineties, Cavadias doesn’t see her as a drag act, exactly. He prefers not to define her. “In my mind it fits whoever’s viewing it and how they’re interpreting it—that’s who it is,” Cavadias told the Observer.

Cavadias, who studied theatre at Tisch with Ruth Maleczech and Andre Gregory, as Claywoman incorporates aspects of drag with experimental theatre and dance. The audience is merely asked to accept that they are experiencing an evening with a 500-million-year-old alien. Interpretation is otherwise left up to them. 

At the start of the show, we only know that Claywoman has entered the theatre from the slow thunk of her cane on the floor and the nervous giggles of the audience. “Make room for Claywoman,” the venue staff announce, as the audience clears the narrow aisles of Pangea for the extraterrestrial visitor. Hunched over and wearing her Rastafarian intergalactic sorceress costume, the galaxy’s oldest woman thuds to her stage at a snail’s pace. Bells tinkle from her matted gray locks as she creaks towards the spotlight. Pausing and sighing and catching her breath, she takes several minutes to make her way through the audience.

Rob Roth, the director of the 2008/2009 Claywoman show, brought in Butoh dancer Vangeline to teach this slowest of all dance forms to Cavadias. Butoh is a form of avant garde dance from Japan that came about in the 1950s as part of a counter cultural movement responding to the massacres at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is defined by its slowness. “In terms of moving really slowly and inhabiting the body of someone hundreds of millions of years old, that really took it to the next level,” Cavadias told the Observer. He also incorporates long pauses into his Claywoman act, and rich, unbothered silences fall on the audience throughout the performance.  

Claywoman’s voice is a little Mid-Atlantic (or perhaps Mid-Intergalactic) and she sounds a bit like Julia Child, if Julia Child were from the Mirillion Galaxy. Her shows include a guest interview and an audience question and answer section, and begin with a monologue in which she takes you into her ancient and storied past. We explore her universe of harmonizing dinosaurs, rival intergalactic cabaret stars, and hundreds of millions of years of ex lovers and arch nemeses.

Perhaps the most intensely funny part of a Claywoman show is the guided meditation. In one show in 2019, Claywoman entreated the audience to shut their eyes and join her in a collective dissociation exercise. We were told to imagine ourselves riding through an empty void on the back of a spoon. The act of shutting your eyes during a cabaret performance and being made to laugh so hard that tears run down your face is singularly bizarre.

“A normal meditation is supposed to relax you, but Claywoman’s meditation is not very relaxing,” Cavadias told the Observer. The pleasure for him is watching the audience take the ride and land wherever they land.

 Claywoman is extremely funny and worth seeing for comedy alone, but it is her warmth that has made the character so long-lasting. 

“Lately, what’s coming up for me is this universalism,” Cavadias told the Observer. “It’s the perspective of an extraterrestrial looking at earth and seeing it just as one place that she visits and one place that she loves a lot and seeing all the beings on it as one thing…Even though to us humans are so different, to her she looks at it and sees they live these very short lives, they share a lot of the same pain, the same joys.”

Claywoman would probably be a very bad therapist, and yet seeing Cavadias’s show, and in particular the weird distancing impact of the performance, feels deeply humanizing and therapeutic.

Claywoman performs only a few times a year in small venues, and the audience of her shows can be a who’s who of New York City performers. It is definitely a ‘scene,’ if such a thing can be said to exist in New York in 2022. Here you might rub shoulders with a Broadway star, a local politician, or a Sex and the City castmember.  This clash of bodies in one tiny cabaret venue I take as hailing from the culture of The Pyramid Club, and a long gone era when New York nightlife could have a leveling influence. In addition to the performance itself, going to the show and being in the audience offers one a glimpse of that old New York, where a night on the town could bring you to a whole different planet.

The New Yorker’s Hilton Als questions definitions of folk and outsider art in an exhibition of works by Antiguan artist and polymath, Frank Walter

There is something about landscape painting that lends itself to colonial kitsch. So tied are our systems of control to land ownership that even the most rugged representations of nature are sewn through with a rentier mentality. In Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, the male perspective dominates the misty mountain scene. 19th century landscape artists were plumbing the wilderness and planting their flags in the harshest terrains: environs soon to be strip mined, bulldozed, or transformed into commercial tourist destinations. So much for the Romantic sublime… 

In the vast majority of western landscape paintings, the viewer looks at nature as an object to be consumed. Yet, there is another kind of landscape that has traveled alongside this dominant strain. One in which you look at nature but nature also looks at you. 

In 2017, Hilton Als, theater critic for The New Yorker, visited the West Indian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and first saw works by the Antiguan artist, Frank Walter. The exhibition was in a basement. It was hot and the only worker in the gallery was Barbara Paca, an art historian who discovered Walter in Antigua, and authored the only existing book on the artist. Als found Walter’s work immediately arresting.

“He wasn’t imposing the human form on the landscape,” Als told Observer. “He was trying to find a way to not only show us what he had seen, but also, he was very interested in how does the human, how does the vision or visionary equal the landscape?”

Als, whose family comes from Barbados, was immediately struck by Walter’s multiplicity of vision. “I left the exhibition spiritually taken as much as I was visually,” he told Observer. At the exhibition’s opening, Als spoke on the lack of sentimentality and softness in Walter’s landscapes. Walter, he said, wants nature to be a part of us. 

After the Biennale, Als met up with the English dealer from David Zwirner gallery and told him and everyone he knew about what he had seen in the West Indian Pavilion. This experience led to the Frank Walter exhibit currently on display at David Zwirner’s uptown gallery in New York, curated by Als.  

The selections of Walter’s work chosen for this exhibit are mainly landscapes, often with huge, overwhelming skies and muted colors. Forest and rock formations are pressed claustrophobically against the foreground, obscuring watery horizons from view. In one work, untitled but known as View of Sea Through Trees, ominous foliage leans across an inlet streaming in from the sea. The water’s surface froths with movement. In another work, also untitled by the artist, known as Craggy Mountains with Meandering White Path, spindly green and gold trees are poised between black cliffs. The white path snaking around the trees is like a trailway of light, leading to the dawn sky that lifts up the horizon. Both landscapes are viewed from the point of view of a walker about to see something spectacular. But that Caribbean picture postcard view is covered over and dominated by parallel natural forms. Nature, the works declare, doesn’t care that you want to see the unobstructed panorama.  It has other work to do.

Walter’s landscapes are looming, weird, and off-kilter. They are nature viewed from the point of view of a bird or an insect or of a person who has lost their way. Walter, who received no acclaim for his work when alive, and who died in 2009, is typically shown among outsider artists when he is exhibited. Walter was solitary and lived in his own world. Like outsider artist Henry Darger—the hospital janitor whose 15,000-page novel, The Story of the Vivian Girls, is filled with astonishing watercolors of children being tortured and saved in an epic fantasy—Walter also struggled with mental health and was institutionalized. He experienced hallucinations throughout his life. Walter’s own literary work, an autobiography, runs to 8,000 (hand-typed) pages.

However, unlike Darger, Walter was highly educated and had some success in a professional career. He was the first Black man to work as a manager in the Antiguan Sugar Syndicate. He lived and traveled extensively in Europe. He cultivated farmland and ran for political office. Where Darger was an orphan, Walter had a loving family. 

Als rejects the pigeonholing of Walter as an outsider or folk artist. “I wanted people to take his work as a painter to be the work of a painter, and not this odd figure who was living in isolation,” Als told Observer. He edited the exhibit at Zwirner to just be about Walter’s painting and visual life. He pushed aside the autobiographical and foregrounded Walter’s hand as an artist.

Als’ desire to have the art world see Walter as a great artist by stepping around his background and struggles with mental health is understandable. Walter being as tremendous an artist as he was, being as educated and cultivated as he was, and being a Black man from Antigua, raises questions about outsider art and why there is an inside and an outside to begin with.

One of the most striking works currently on display at Zwirner is Right Side of the Milky Way (artist’s own title)—a surreal horseshoe shaped cosmic landscape depicting the Milky Way bursting out of the sun. Painted on a gnawed slab of wood, its contours are reminiscent of ancient Anglo-Saxon metalwork. Having this work on display at Zwirner’s swank uptown gallery is gratifying, and at the same time a little bit sad. In the harsh glare of the gallery lights, on the blindingly white walls, Walter’s small, brilliant works are literally hard to see.  

That one must strip an artist like Walter of his autobiography to have him taken seriously by the art world is heartbreaking. This notion also strikes me as coming from the standards of a different era. It bears the imprint of Formalism at midcentury: when art was encouraged to abstract itself from context, to remove itself from world affairs and political movements. That is clearly not Als’ intention here. Yet, I couldn’t help but think while walking the gallery, how much more impactful these works would be if shown alongside the fullness of who Walter was. Walter as a landscape artist refused to show nature naked on an examination table. Not for him the clean panoramic beachscape. Nature instead was a thing of many conflicting and contradictory patterns. Perhaps in exhibits to come, curators can mirror this richness in the way his work is displayed.

“The Temptation to Exist,” Alfredo Jaar’s new show at Galerie Lelong,  consists of two spaces—the first a dark room with a large neon sign that states the following phrase by the Roman stoic philosopher, Seneca: “What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.” This light installation takes up an entire wall of the gallery. In a separate room is a group installation consisting of 95 works by 72 artists, many of the artworks related to activism or political struggle. They are stacked one on top of the other, or strewn across the floor, in what Jaar calls in the press release for the show, “a space of resistance, a space of hope.”  

The deadpan language from Seneca set the tone for the entire show. His statement (which I find hard to read without laughing), much like the rest of the work on display, is removed from its original context. It is stripped of humor or emotional tone and presented on the gallery wall like leftover condiment on a white dinner plate. During my visit, a class of children (extremely well-behaved and perhaps from a smart local private school) came in two by two and sat down beneath the Seneca sign. I wondered how their art teacher would impress upon them how the whole of life calls for tears. I wondered if they would be taken into the room with the group installation and if their teacher would speak to them about Valie Export’s 1969 photograph, Action Pants: Genital Panic. This is a dramatic photo of a woman cocking an uzi, her hair wild, and her crotch girded in a skin-like loincloth. Fortunately for the childrens’ chaperones, the installation room is so emotionally detached, this excellent photo could probably be taken in without any corruption of childhood innocence. This removed quality is good for the children perhaps, but much less interesting for the casual adult viewer. 

There are many extraordinary works in “The Temptation to Exist,” but put together they are denuded of feeling. Even Art Workers’ Coalition’s “Q. And babies? A. And Babies”—a horrifying lithograph depicting a roadside massacre of several families, with the title words inscribed on top and bottom like the head and tagline of an advertisement—turns away from and refuses its own triggering content. 

In the group installation, dated video art by Yoko Ono, Jaar’s ink on vellum drawings of Antonio Gramsci, and Diamond Stingily’s Entryways, 2016 (literally a door with a baseball bat leaning against it) are side by side with photos from protests and picket lines and vivid photo portraits by Shirin Neshat, Zanele Muholi, and Seydou Keita, among other artists. While the intention was perhaps to connect liberatory struggles all over the world, the overall effect is that of redundancy and defeatism. United in their inability to materially impact reality, the installation stands for itself alone, and yet borrows legitimacy from the many serious struggles represented on its walls. 

This exhibit is in contrast to Jaar’s wonderful video installation at this year’s Whitney Biennial. 06.01.2020 18.39 (2022) is everything that “The Temptation to Exist” isn’t. It is an immersive look at the BLM protests in DC in the summer of 2020, from the point of view of a protester. The viewer is forcibly dragged into the march and can feel police helicopters overhead from the heavy-duty wind turbines blowing. The collection at Lelong, on the other hand, takes a distant look at all forms of protest or political turmoil. 

That we are culturally and artistically fragmented is undoubtedly true and has been true since many of the exhibited artists in “The Temptation to Exist” were young radicals and practicing activists. Why contemporary artists choose to contribute to that fragmentation instead of forging new bonds of connection is probably caused by the needs of the market. A story could be told through a number of the photographs in “The Temptation to Exist.” Gino De Dominicis’ Tentativo di Volo, depicting a figure leaping off a mountain, their arms cast wide as in a crucifixion, probably tells a fascinating story. As does Valie Export’s From the Underdog File, depicting a woman walking a man on a leash across a city street, and Kara Walker’s gorgeous Just Be Done With It, showing a black figure wrestling a white one off a cliff. However, too many works in the exhibition lean into the old-fashioned idea that the end-all be-all of radical art is offending the sentiments of the square. “The Temptation to Exist” buries such stories in maximalist clutter and hides where it could reveal. 

“The Temptation to Exist” is not a good exhibit, but it will probably be a successful one. Good and bad art are mixed in so no object stands out and much is reduced to the level of a jumble sale. Nevertheless, the exhibit will make a lot of money for a lot of talented artists of color. The installation cashes in on the Biennial’s politics and what some believe (or want to believe) is a trend towards left radicalism in art.

Part of the problem is that “The Temptation to Exist” is stuck in a different time, namely the 20th century. A bit past its sell-by date, this roomful of apocalyptic ephemera is trying very hard to be relevant. Yet, Letizia Battaglia’s sexy photos of Pasolini and Jaar’s iconic Gramscis could have graced dorm room walls 30 or 40 years ago. The absurd neon Seneca quote, combined with the closet of curiosities, is reminiscent of an article in Apartment Therapy. 

Black and brown artists getting attention, making money, showing their work in a prestigious gallery is all to the good, of course. The next step might be allowing some of these artists the space and resources to tell a complete story, instead of just a fragment. How much better an exhibit it would have been had Jaar given the many great artists on display the ability to show the throughlines that connect their liberatory struggles. 

Opera and science fiction are more alike than you might imagine. They both deal with people in extreme situations: people caught at the end of their tether in forbidden affairs, on deserted planets, on the brink of bloody revenge, or hurtling through space in failing starships. They both put regular people into dire circumstances and allow wild and weird sagas to unfold. They can both tell sublime truths through absurd stories. Some operas, like Fresh Squeezed Opera’s new Self Defined Circuits, which opened last week at HERE Arts Center, take the best of both artforms. The production is so well done it makes one wonder why sci-fi operas aren’t more common. You would think that after nearly a century of space operas in literature and film, the genre would have taken off in grand operas. And yet, like so many styles which transformed the way that billions of people experience reality, science fiction unfortunately passed opera by. 

Admittedly, there is something uncanny about watching a science fiction opera. Jillian Flexner and Orlando Segarra’s work is, on the face of it, a weird story to tell through opera. It tells the tale of a sex robot who discovers what it means to be a woman while trapped in a world created by her programmer. Her sung journey of self-discovery ultimately leads her to escape her creator and set out on her own to find out who she really is. My friend who joined me at the opera told me that its premise reminded him of an anime. The set up is simple, absurd, and extremely genuine with no distanced irony about it. 

Self Defined Circuits opens in a basement laboratory: a sparsely furnished room with a few computer screens, tools, and an array of unused artificial human parts. The word “Electricity” is projected onto a wall. The character, Cora, is a “Siri” device, performed off stage by Cara Search and Elyse Kakacek, who appear on screen on stage as two women with their faces painted to look pixelated. They sing the word “Electricity” in high-pitched robot voices reminiscent of the drone of a swarm of locusts. In the first moments of the opera my heart sank. I thought I was in for a night of corny avant garde theater. I needn’t have worried. While the setup of the opera sounds like a disaster, like an overambitious undergraduate thesis project gone wrong, the performance itself is so artfully done, so sensitive and authentic, not only did I enjoy myself, I started to question some of my prejudices about experimental theater itself. Self Defined Circuits is able to take that undergraduate thesis project premise, and through mature skill allow the passion and sweetness of the creators to come to the fore. 

The show is performed in a tiny black box theater, with a minimal set and barely enough room on stage for the entire cast. The orchestra is smooshed together in a hallway, with the musicians almost on top of one another. Despite the conditions, they were able to make a highly professional and, at times, even sublime sound. The show combines electronics with orchestration, with synthesizer sounds integrated with live orchestral music. There are strobe lights and projections and the live characters on stage duet with the artificial “Cora”on the screen. The effect is genuinely unsettling. Search and Kakacek’s voices, however, so pointed and gorgeous and crisp, lifted me out of my technology-induced discomfort. The layering of the two modes, the classical and the experimental, carry the audience through artistically difficult moments, elegantly guiding us around sharp corners so that boredom or apathy are avoided. 

The duets between the Coras and the fembot, Gal, performed by Sara Lin Yoder, are exquisite. It is some of the best music of the show. Yoder has a lovely voice with an incredible, show off soprano range, and a bright, Disney princess quality that complements this particular character well. She stomps awkwardly around the stage on her new robot legs, wearing a white ‘70s era showgirl minidress that seems like a part of her skin. Gal’s programmer, Pete, tells her that her sexualization is who she is. She was built to pleasure him and she has no other purpose in life than to be his companion.

Pete, performed by baritone Shane Brown, acts the role of mediocre white man splendidly: shuffling on stage in sweatpants and manipulating Gal through a combined whininess and authoritarianism. He opines that he lost all his friends in his obsession in making the fembot—an AI that he built to look like his favorite movie star. Now, Gal is all he has. He locks her in his laboratory at night, where she learns through the Coras about the world, about herself, and about womanhood.

The show climaxes when Gal agrees, after extensive coercion, to sleep with Pete. Afterwards, her conscience splits: her body remains artificial, but her mind becomes human. She begins to rethink her identity. This scene, in particular, displays the show’s impressive ability to create big cinematic effects with minimal orchestration and a strobe light. It would be interesting to see what the creators could do with the same cast but a much bigger budget. Opera, being opera, always wants to break out of its mold and go large, diva that it is.

Self-Defined Circuits was inspired by the composer’s life, by her experience of an abusive relationship in her early years. Flexner writes in the show notes that while in this relationship she was forming ideas about gender and identity. “The most invasive and damaging thing he ever did was to define these for me,” Flexner says. “For a very long time, I lived trapped within his definitions of who I was and what I meant to the world. I wanted this opera to reflect this abuse: that defining a person is just as damaging as any other type of harm.” The fembot Gal, armored with an embryonic new identity, and newly clothed in a curtain and a belt made from a computer cable, takes her fate into her own hands in the final act of the opera. 

Like Gal, Self-Defined Circuits breaks a lot of boundaries. This welcome and much-needed new opera can count itself among the contemporary works that are attempting to save classical music from itself. As an opera that elegantly integrates experimental and classical forms, it seeks a new identity for the genre itself. 

On April 28, International Friends of Festival Verdi (IFFV) gathered at the Metropolitan Club for a fundraiser. Festival Verdi is a festival of operas which takes place in Parma, Italy in the fall. Verdi, it appears, has a lot of wealthy friends, and tables at the gala started at 12K. The black-tie event was attended by a packed cohort of opera aficionados and devotees of Italian food and culture. In attendance was Massimo Bottura, chef restaurateur of Osteria Francescana: Modena’s three Michelin Star restaurant, ranked among the top restaurants in the world. A five-course meal of Chef Massimo’s cuisine was served to the gala attendees, and dessert was accompanied by two arias by grand opera diva Eleonora Buratto, currently performing as Cio Cio San in “Madame Butterfly” at the Metropolitan Opera. Following the performance was a silent auction, with Brook Hazelton, former president of Christie’s, acting as auctioneer. Attendees bid thousands on dinners, wine tastings, and Italian race car experiences, alongside ornamental décor inspired by Verdi operas.

James E. Miller, Managing Partner of Miller Shah LLP, is founder of the International Friends of Festival Verdi. Addressing the gala, he joked that he had to found a charity and fly Chef Massimo to the US in order to eat his cooking, since the Modena restaurant is booked solid and reservations are impossible. The gala attendees appeared to be largely drawn from the employees at Miller Shah. Young firm associates, in tuxes and no doubt new and pinching patent leather shoes, hobnobbed with Italian cultural diplomats. Where the visual arts, for all their financialization, still give off a whiff of downtown—of boho students and group shows in converted Brooklyn warehouses—classical music, as ever, is a conservative uptown affair. Besides employees and friends of the firm, those in attendance who were indeed true friends of Verdi belong to a contingent of Upper Manhattanites who live and die above 59th Street. Without their support the classical arts would surely crumble.

The Metropolitan Club, founded in 1891 by J.P. Morgan, holds court inconspicuously on the corner of East 60th Street and 5th Ave. Tourists waiting in line for knishes by Central Park can gaze up into its windows across the street, into gilded rooms with coffered ceilings, and catch the glinting highlights of the impossible wealth within. By the entrance, only chicly dressed socialites, emerging from black cars and disappearing under the awning, give onlookers an inkling of what goes on inside. Gilded age Upper East Side spaces lean towards the desperation of their original social climbing owners. Their conspicuous displays of art objects filched from Renaissance palaces tend to be vulgar compared to their European counterparts. Not so the Metropolitan Club. The club is comfortable in its class position and doesn’t have anything left to prove. The gold ballroom in which Verdi’s friends dined on Michelin Starred lasagnas and schmoozed the Mayor of Parma was comfortably exclusive. Here was wealth enshrined for posterity and preserved for all one’s very lucky descendants.

We dined off “The Crunchy Part of the Lasagna,” Chef Massimo’s deconstructed lasagna made famous from his episode of Chef’s Table. Chef Massimo himself, in chef’s whites and New Balance sneakers, addressed the gala eloquently and at length about his elaborate menu. In his lasagna, a sheet of crunchy lasagna pasta stood upright in a meat ragu. The “crunchy part” was hand painted to look like the Italian flag. The night’s main course, “Beautiful, Psychedelic, Spin Painted Veal, Charcoal Grilled With Glorious Colors As a Painting,” was a tribute to Damien Hirst’s spin-painted canvases, and was so astonishing to look at it produced a flurry of picture taking from the diners. The meat was only brushed in vegetable charcoal and then slow cooked at a low temperature to retain “essential proteins.” While the event space and the music being fundraised for was traditional, our dinner was decidedly avant garde. Long descriptions were needed to understand what we were eating. However, as in any catered dinner for a big crowd, haute cuisine struggled.

One room over, Chef Massimo, in a perfectionist’s frenzy, directed the traffic of waiters carrying trays of deconstructed lasagna and painted veal, checking each plate as it went out. I had the sense throughout dinner that there was a meta cuisine being served that I’d have needed a certificate in molecular gastronomy to appreciate. The quiet hum of happy eaters one associates with a very good meal was absent at the gala. Yet everyone seemed to enjoy their dinners, even if they were mostly enjoying only looking at their meals. The tasting part seemed secondary.

Eleonora Buratto, having dined well on Damien Hirst veal, took the stage after dinner. I have never been so close to such incredible vocal skill. She sings with a dark chest voice that is all warmth and heart and extraordinary brilliance. In two transporting arias, she spirited her audience away to another mental plane. It was pure serotonin injected via the ears. We sat in such close proximity to this sound that my skin prickled. Here, in this gold ballroom, after an entertaining but very strange dinner, was something special and precious. It gave credence to great wealth’s great claim that preserving true artistry is its province, its service to humanity. A lie, but a convincing one when one is well fed and three feet away from a genius vocalist.

Where grand opera in New York is a massive affair at the Metropolitan Opera, houses in Europe, including the Teatro Regio di Parma, can be considerably more intimate. Anna Maria Meo, Director of the Teatro Regio di Parma, spoke to me for Observer at dinner of the intimacy of the opera venues for Festival Verdi. Here you can experience exquisite singing performed so close to you that the hairs stand up on your arms. This old world of classical music, which gets preserved by charities like the IFFV, despite its exclusivity, relies upon very basic human needs: for pleasure, for beauty, for spiritual sustenance. Wealth is not always given over to the pursuit of beauty, leading me to believe that some of these friends of Verdi understand what is good in life. This love of artistic substance, which is rare enough, seems well worth preserving alongside the operas of Verdi.

For the first time in twenty years, Actors’ Equity is unionizing a national tour. They have filed with the National Labor Relations Board after conducting a card campaign among actors and stage managers working the nonunion touring production of Waitress. They are currently awaiting a response from their employer, the touring production company NETworks. 

NETworks did not respond when reached out to for comment for this article.

According to Equity’s Mobilization Director, Stefanie Frey, the main impetus to unionize the tour was the fact that there are two Waitress tours currently running: one union, the other nonunion. In the nonunion tour, actors and stage managers are making a third as much as the workers on the union tour. Their daily expense allowance on the tour is so low that they are digging into their own savings to pay for food and transportation. One performer is working a day job. Others are going into debt to pay their bills. 

Despite the vast gulf between what the workers on the union show are being paid and what the workers on the nonunion show are being paid, the shows themselves are essentially the same. The actors are equally talented and union actors are trained from performance videos from the nonunion show. The shows share props and set pieces. Sometimes they even share performers. Actors who started on the nonunion tour have been moved to the union tour, and even transferred to the Broadway show. According to Frey, the non-Equity show is used as a talent pool: performers are trained and rehearsed on this show while being paid extremely low wages. These exploited workers, having been trained on the non-Equity tour, can then be moved to other productions. This saves time and money on casting and training for the other shows. 

This pool of poorly paid but highly trained talent from the nonunion show also helped the Broadway production of Waitress stay open during the Omicron surge.  When performers were testing positive in droves and needed to be sent home, touring performers stepped into their roles and kept the lights on for Broadway.

All these factors raised a lot of red flags for Equity, which has changed its organizing philosophy in the last six years and made a turn towards increased member engagement. Frey told Observer they have “recentered on the worker and how we can help the worker take the power back in their workplaces.”

Equity is organizing this tour in a far friendlier labor climate than anybody’s seen in over a generation. President Biden’s National Labor Relations Board has helped along the tremendous organizing efforts at Starbucks and Amazon, and inspired workers across the nation to organize their workplaces. Frey told Observer that the cast and organizing leaders on the nonunion tour of Waitress were inspired to unionize because of unionizing workers in other industries.

“I think all of us are really empowering each other through our various workplaces even across industries,” Frey told Observer. “We hope that we can inspire someone else that might be thinking about organizing their workplace.”

Showing solidarity for unionizing workers everywhere is both heartwarming and highly strategic: however different these industries may be, when it comes to the anti-union tactics of their employers, these workers are all in the same boat. NETworks, the nonunion touring company, has employed the anti-union law firm, Littler Mendelson in combating their workers’ NLRB filing. This is the same firm used by Starbucks in their union busting campaigns nationally.

It is Equity’s hope that organizing this tour of Waitress will inspire other nonunion tours to unionize. “I’m hopeful that more and more people in our industry will take their power back and realize that just because there’s a lot of workforce available in our industry doesn’t mean that you need to get exploited,” Frey told Observer.

Performers need exposure at the beginning of their careers. They also need to pay their bills. The relatively high salaries and extended runs of Equity tours are a lifeline for actors, and younger performers in particular. In an industry where precarity is the norm, where bouncing back and forth between acting gigs and retail and service jobs is routine, an Equity tour can be your ticket to a degree of career stability. The growth of nonunion tours in the 21st century has eaten away at a chunk of the income for actors and stage managers. Nonunion tours are doubly unjust because tickets to these shows are now nearly as much as tickets to Broadway shows, even while the touring company is spending a third to half as much on the production because they pay their performers and stage managers so little.  

According to Gotham Gazette, these productions can remain nonunion while maintaining close relationships with union shows by subcontracting and exploiting legal loopholes. So long as the producer isn’t the producer on the Equity paperwork then a show can run nonunion. Broadway producers are members of the Broadway League and therefore unable to make non-Equity contracts. However, this barrier doesn’t prevent them from forming business relationships with nonunion touring companies. Actors’ Equity member and labor organizer Dana Steer told Observer that many such producers have non-union producing partners through whom they license their show to one of the big touring companies, like NETworks. 

Through such loopholes nonunion tours have increased exponentially in the last twenty years. It is because of these loopholes that the union and nonunion productions of Waitress share not just performers but also managers. According to Frey, the producer of the nonunion show is also the general manager of the Equity tour. Organizing this card campaign has allowed Equity a path towards rooting out such shadowy subcontracting among national touring companies. 

“The work we do is the same work our friends in the Equity tour do,” said members of the non-Equity tour in a statement issued by Actors’ Equity, “so we are asking our employers why we can’t be treated with the same respect.” These performers attempted to go through management directly to improve their wages and working conditions, but to no avail. They have now turned to Equity in a moment of increased labor activity, to aid them on the road to unionization and just treatment from their employer.

Hair and makeup stylists at the Atlanta Opera are trying to form a union with IATSE Local 798. As part of the very first opera company in the nation to reopen during the pandemic, in the fall of 2020, these hair stylists were front-facing workers who—given the nature of their work—were not able to socially distance. The performers they were styling couldn’t wear full PPE while having their makeup done. Despite the dangerous work they were doing in a very uncertain period, working before vaccines were widely available, they were not given health benefits. They also didn’t receive pension benefits or overtime pay. They were considered independent contractors—even while working side-by-side with unionized employees who received all the benefits and pay that they lacked.

Angela Johnson, the hair stylists’ representative at IATSE Local 798, told Observer that the motivation to form their union began when they discovered just how many of their coworkers in other departments were unionized and had the pay and benefits that they lacked. For entire seasons they worked beside stagehands, wardrobe workers, and musicians who were unionized. Their coworkers were fully protected with health benefits during this highly dangerous time. The stylists, all of whom are Black, and a majority of whom are women, loved their jobs. They loved working in a creative field alongside performers. Some, such as department head Brie Hall, had been working at the opera for years and were responsible for designing looks for performers. They felt like a part of the team, working for an organization that they thought of as being diverse and progressive. 

“I definitely am a theater girl,” Brie Hall told Observer. “It was always fun. It was definitely joyous working there and being creative and making sure when you do something, you’ve got to nail it because the audience is watching.”

Coming back from lockdown, Hall noticed that her coworkers in wardrobe were getting paid time and a half for working weekend shows. The hair stylists weren’t. Meanwhile, they feared for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, working on performers’ maskless faces, without health benefits, during a global pandemic. The Atlanta Opera went to great lengths to ensure the safety of their workplace, with mandatory distancing guidelines for all workers. The unprotected stylists felt glaringly left out of consideration. 

Sakeitha King, another stylist at the Atlanta Opera, told Observer, “When we go out to work and we put our craft and things that we love at the forefront, we would like to be compensated a living wage.”

When the stylists asked the Atlanta Opera for voluntary recognition of their union, they didn’t respond. After several more attempts at communication, before the close of the spring show, they filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). They were granted an NLRB hearing and the regional directors found in their favor and ordered an election. The Atlanta Opera appealed the case, and the regional directors found in the workers favor a second time. The hair stylists finally voted over the summer, but the opera appealed again, this time to the NLRB in Washington DC. The opera’s claim is that the stylists were independent contractors and not employees and therefore ineligible to unionize. In appealing, the opera was able to get the stylists’ votes impounded while the NLRB considers the case. It has remained in review. 

Through the Atlanta Opera case, the NLRB asked for briefs from the public in December to address whether they should reconsider their standard for determining independent contractor status. 

Their case has gained national attention because of the leftward turn of President Biden’s NLRB. It is now theorized that the board might want to broaden the definition of employee, making it harder to misclassify workers, like these hair stylists, as independent contractors. The board is currently revisiting the Trump-era standard for employee classification and they have invited the public to submit amicus briefs on reclassification. IATSE 798, however, maintains that even under the Trump-era rules, the stylists are indeed employees and not independent contractors.

“We proved our case under the current rules,” Angela Johnson told Observer. “While it’s wonderful to help everybody, the bottom line is under the current rules that are in place, the Trump era rules, we’ve proved our case, and the regional board and the regional director found in the workers favor.” 

For Hall, the opera companies’ insistence on their continued misclassification as independent contractors felt discriminatory, especially given that everyone else who worked backstage were employees. Gig work in their field has specific connotations: it’s a day of work, like a wedding. An entire season of work isn’t a gig, it’s a job. 

“They work the same way in our industry as anybody else,” Johnson told Observer. “They’re told when to come to work. They’re told when the show goes up. They’re told when to start doing hair and makeup. They’re employees.”

Given their exclusion from the rights and pay of the many unionized employees they were working with, it’s no wonder these workers, a union made up of mainly Black women, felt personally persecuted. 

“I don’t understand why we don’t even deserve a conversation to negotiate,” Hall told Observer. “We were stonewalled. We never got to be heard at all. Me along with my other coworkers would really like to know why.”

As the NLRB considers the case, the Atlanta Opera has not rehired these stylists under even their former conditions. They offered reduced wages and working conditions. Some stylists might even have gone back to work at the opera, but the opera house requested their return far too close to the beginning of the season, when the stylists had already been committed elsewhere. The opera company, according to Johnson at IATSE, is now hiring stylists who live out of state, no doubt because out-of-state workers are unlikely to want to form a union. The Atlanta Opera did not respond when reached out to for comment for this article. 

As the case is reviewed, other performance industry unions have issued letters of support for these hair stylists. Actors’ Equity cites how frequently their members of color experience hair and makeup discrimmination at work, and how this is due to the scarcity of Black technicians in the industry. “Hiring Black workers but refusing to treat them equitably only exacerbates this crisis,” they wrote in their release last month. AGMA, the union representing opera singers, also issued a statement, condemning the Atlanta Opera’s retaliatory behavior and applauding the stylists for not backing down. As these workers await a ruling from the NLRB which has the potential to be a historic win for workers’ rights nationally, the union continues to organize. On April 30, IATSE Local 798 will be holding a rally in Atlanta in support. In the meantime, they are encouraging people to call the Atlanta Opera and demand union recognition. 

There are certain qualities and experiences you expect going into a Whitney Biennial. You expect to read long passages of puzzling descriptions on wall plaques and to think (hard) while trying to connect the puzzling wall plaques to even more puzzling art objects. You expect to wince in confusion, or to grimace at bad taste, or bad art, or at whimsy gone terribly wrong. You expect to leave queasy with art overload, wondering just how many pieces have been brought into the world as pranks on the aesthetically uninitiated. However, you do not expect big emotions. You do not expect your heart to thunder and your breath to catch. You certainly don’t expect to be emotionally unmoored by the Whitney Biennial.

Mea Culpa. Color me surprised and among the newly converted. Unusually for a Whitney Biennial, works of fretful, quasi-intellectual whimsy and adolescent radicalism make up only a minority of works. The very best pieces even manage to tell something like the truth.  

SEE ALSO: Curator Meg Onli On How This Year’s Whitney Biennial Came Together

The black, funereal chambers on the uppermost 6th story of the exhibition draw one into a honeycomb of tomb-like galleries. Sound and texture are featured from the opening room, where Raven Chacon’s Silent Choir glides one towards the gossamer curtain sectioning off Daniel Joseph Martinez’s Three Critiques: photographic self-portraits depicting the artist as four distinctive post-human monsters. The shuffling of feet along the carpeted dark corridors, accompanied by the crackle from the video and sound installations, creates a happy ASMR effect. The viewer is tended to and nurtured. In WangShui’s Hyaline Seed (Isle of Vitr∴ous) we are even invited to lie down on couches and gaze up at an LED sculpture, created by an AI that folds light into comforting psychedelic jellyfish blobs on the ceiling. We are wrapped and cradled and comforted. So happily entombed was I in this robot crib, I returned to it at the end of my visit and only a security guard calling closing time could peel me away.

The star of the Biennial was, perhaps more than any one artist, the high-definition video camera. Biennial standouts were high-definition videos by Adam Pendleton in “Ruby Nell Sales,” Trinh T. Minh-ha in “What About China,” Coco Fusco, in “Your Eyes Will be an Empty Word,” Danielle Dean in “Long Low Line,” the Moved by Motion collective in “EXTRACTS,” and Jacky Connolly in “Descent into Hell.”

Perhaps the finest of these is Fusco’s work, which pans up and down Hart Island, New York’s public cemetery, worked by prisoners until 2021. The video dazzles with the unreal, high-definition blues and greens of the Long Island Sound, all while the poet Pamela Sneed narrates the story of the bodies, people dead from the coronavirus, taken to this potter’s field. The video is viewed in the dark gallery space, with its simple yet impactful curation. Across a hall, in its own dark chamber, is Pendleton’s extraordinary black and white high-definition video portrait of the civil rights activist, Ruby Nell Sales. His achingly gorgeous close-ups of Sales’ face and hands imbue this already luminous person with a kind of divinity. It depicts Sales telling stories and giving what sound like improvised sermons: heartbreaking benedictions that set the grief-stricken tone of the exhibition.

It feels appropriate for the art world to be in mourning at present, and it is a relief that the Whitney’s curators understand that. It is also a relief that politics and activism are foregrounded. A fiery radicalism runs through many of the Biennial’s best works. Alfredo Jaar’s video installation, 06.01.2020 18.39 depicts a Washington DC protest the week that Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. It shows the march from the point of view of a marcher, and a wind installation captures the effect of police helicopters flying low overhead. Jaar, a Chilean artist, lived through the devastation that neoliberalism wrought on his native country during the Pinochet regime. In his description of his work for the Biennial, he said of witnessing the George Floyd protests, “I watched with horror the arrival of the helicopters. That is when I realized that I was witnessing fascism. Fascism had arrived in the USA.” Wandering into this installation, Jaar’s work forcibly flung me back to the long nights during the New York City curfew summer of 2020, with their explosions, sirens, and police helicopters. He took me back to those giant #defund protests, with the heavily armored cops with military-grade weapons closing in on all sides. He did all that with a black-and-white film and some heavy-duty fans. Like Picasso’s bicycle seat “Bull’s Head” it’s so simple it almost feels like cheating. I was momentarily shattered and had to go lie down underneath WangShui’s LED installation.

If the 6th floor is tasteful and finely curated, the 5th has all the subtlety of an elementary school science fair. A shame given the many fine works of art scattered across one of the museum’s annoyingly huge airplane hangar galleries. Here the viewer is inundated by an apparently random collection of objects and installations. Andrew Roberts’ Cargo: A certain doom, a severed zombie arm with the Amazon arrow swish tattooed across it, and La Horda—a video installation of four animated gig worker zombies, displayed like avatars in a video game’s “choose your player” page—were poorly served by being stuck into the middle of the floor amidst so much confusion. This consumeristic, ADHD quality is so commonplace in museum group shows, it’s almost unremarkable. Yet the upper floor proves that the curators can operate with a sublime set of aesthetics. Where the 6th floor nurtures the senses, the 5th oversaturates them. With so many video installations placed at angles to the static art, distractions abound. Woody de Othello’s deft and witty The Will to Make Things Happen—in which surrealistic creatures and ordinary household objects are cast as ceramics inspired by pre-colonial pottery—is hidden amidst the clutter. Like too many objects on this floor, despite its placement in a bathtub of light, it’s hard to see.

Curation is about making choices. It’s about deciding who gets enclosed in a 6th-floor mausoleum and who competes for attention on the sun-washed 5th floor. Like so many Hollywood films, the end result is, no doubt, a combination of competing influences. And as in a heavily financialized studio film product, the Biennial’s narrative trails off after a strong start.

In its description of the Biennial, the museum boasts of how its artists question institutions and structures. The newly unionized Whitney employees, proudly wearing their union buttons while working the floors during the Biennial, could almost be a part of the exhibit itself.  They certainly heightened some of the contradictions inherent in the exhibition when they held a leafleting protest during the Biennial’s opening night gala: protesting the Whitney’s refusal to negotiate with them over wages. The museum, housing so many politically radical works, albeit in a space that often looks and feels like a WeWork, is engaged in old-time union busting. Hopefully, before the next Biennial, the museum’s labor policies will have caught up with its purported politics. Perhaps with its foregrounding of political truths in its exhibitions, the museum administration will eventually see its way to negotiating a fair contract with its own employees.