Review of Opera Cabal’s ‘USW’ [‘And So Forth’]
For the One Who Thinks Differently
By James Sandrolini, March 7, 2010
Witnessing the contemporary avant-garde breathe new life into moribund revolutionary politics hardly represents just another night on the town. Especially in Chicago, the literal birthplace of anarchist Americana with the Haymarket Square riot of 1886. For those attending this Saturday night’s [2/20/10] highly conceptual theater piece USW in the city's ancient Fine Arts Building, this “opera” presented an aural and visual orgy of the senses. More sensorial than temporal, this highly challenging and at times jarring production, vaguely inspired by the incendiary times and trials of determined Marxist revolutionaries in pre-Nazi era Germany, is something not to be taken lightly. It is, in the eyes of one reviewer, “a multi-media, theatrical and abstract representation of the chaotic life and politics of Sparticist league founder Rosa Luxemburg.”
The program, appropriately held on the tenth floor of the historic, century-old Fine Arts Building, had the aura of a large, underground New York art-house production. One had the feeling he/she was somehow privileged to have been ‘invited’ to such a rarified art-house event. A young, well-tempered crowd, draped in Bauhaus black and white, was at capacity levels for the voluminous, ancient room. Little in this timeless environment would have been terribly out of place during the pre-Weimar period, the electric and increasingly precarious time-period Opera Cabal had re-created for ‘USW’ [literally ‘And So Forth’ from the German ‘Und So Weiter’].
“Those who do not move do not notice their chains.” Thus spake Polish-German hell-raiser, Rosa Luxemburg. And like Ms. Luxemburg, USW is fully engaged in movement. This ambitious, often baroque production begins with an edgy, frenetic trio of instrumentalists [bassoon, violin & cello] plucking, clicking and hissing out intensely cut, staccato’d notes and verbal emissions to the rapt, if slightly intimidated audience. Avant-garde scat singing, if you like. The effect was jagged, energizing and arresting. Though, clearly not for everyone (a number of disengaged audience members faded gently into shallow bouts of slumber around me). The overall effect of this vaguely musical offering suggested, perhaps demanded, motion, if highly physical and chaotic. On display here was construction and movement of language, by whatever means necessary.
According to USW composer Lewis Nielson, who admits to no great affinity for traditional opera, this experimental 2007 piece offers text that “consists of repeating consonants and vowels, fragments of indeterminate language, and utterances – both fragmented and in complete form – in German, Spanish and English.” The opening piece, entitled ‘WHAT ABOUT YOU?’, offers tense, curt musical phrasing paired with dense lingual meaning providing, “a social message unmistakable in any language or form of communication.” While such assertions lend themselves to considerable debate, there can be no doubt that all of this musical-lingual movement is meant to represent some degree of profound social meaning, however opaque.
And were a soundtrack to the cataclysmic revolutionary period of early 20th Century to be offered up to the masses, no doubt it would sound less like the majestic rapture of John Philip Sousa, John Williams or even Sergei Prokofiev … and much more like what we experience with Nielson’s highly challenging score to USW. In the night’s second movement, conductor Nicholas DeMaison’s ‘Black Wheels (Three Sides Square)’ introduces “an awkward mediation on constriction” whereby clarinets and cello add to the building musical clime of the opening trio. It would hardly hurt listeners to have procured a PhD in musicology from Berkeley prior to attending tonight’s musical performance. Barring such credentials, one likely experiences this music more than comprehends or truly appreciates the highly intricate mathematics of it. Then again, sensual experience is what Opera Cabal is really all about. And on that note, they do not disappoint.
The mise-en-scene to all of this physical play and mental anguish is a large film-screen portraying myriad stark imagery, sometimes germane, often non-sequitur to what is playing out before us: a mother cat giving birth to a litter, titillating though muted vintage pornography, hallucinogenic technicolor lights, people standing around in a room deliberating. Most arresting among the visuals was a superimposed phalanx of draftsman compasses, perhaps a dozen in all, lined up in perfect uniform order, side-by-side, primed for the strum und drang of angry dissent soon to appear. Precision calibration as a tool to maintain the social order at all costs. Sporadically, writ large before us, Luxemburg’s defiantly humanist text, takes form … only to quickly dissipate under the visual static of an approaching political and cultural maelstrom. Rosa’s declarative text, “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently,” is traced over and over upon itself, until the determined prose appears no more than bold, incoherent scribblings on a cluttered slate. Once this occurs, the distorted static submerges the text and abandons it – and perhaps Luxemburg – into history’s dustbin. Whether or not one derives hope and promise from this dark, sometimes violent production is ultimately a matter of subjective interpretation. But then, what isn’t?
Finally - amidst a stabbing musical score, visceral imagery, and a frenzy of physical torment, submission and clenched defiance, we hear the recorded language of actor Rosa interspersed throughout the final operatic rise and fall. She declares to the world, “We leave tonight – we leave for war – we are young and optimistic and leave to engage in the thing that will define our lives.” Yet, via less sanguine performances and a daunting, tortured musical score, we are hardly left optimistic at what is yet to come. For Germany. For Freedom. And ultimately, in the context of Opera Cabal, for Rosa.
On January 15, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg was arrested and shortly thereafter executed by German paramilitary Freikorps, an SS prototype. Her lifeless body was tossed into Berlin’s Landwehr Canal and drifted into revolutionary marty
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