American Voices: Robert Ashley and New Opera

Dust, Celestial Excursions, and Made Out of Concrete, composed and directed by Robert Ashley, La MaMa E.T.C., January 15–25, 2009.

The recent operas of Robert Ashley—Dust (1998), Celestial Excursions (2003) and Made Out of Concrete (2007/09)—received new productions in January in New York City, rotating on a ten-night program at La MaMa E.T.C. entitled Robert Ashley Three Operas. Ashley, along with the seasoned ensemble of singers and the crack tech team he has worked with—for about two decades, in most cases—turned the theatre’s Annex into a concentrated lab for these wry, austere, and decidedly beautiful works. Each piece had been retooled since its premiere: Dust, with a full new staging; Celestial Excursions, with condensed stagecraft and the addition of four instrumental preludes in the third act; and by a thorough shuffling of vocal parts in Made Out of Concrete, the implementation of a less predictable sequence of musical movements and a new aria for singer Joan La Barbara. As a retrospective of a decade’s work, it was an exceptional opportunity to experience Ashley’s musical structures and thematic aims. And given that he’s seventy-eight, it proved a rarified forum for an experimental master’s views on the tactics of memory and the emotional realm of old age.

As nineteenth-century operatic forms such as bel canto mirrored their culture, Ashley’s operas reflect ours with their speed, incision, and the directness he sheathes in off-handed generosity. Since television came to dominate audience expectations, advanced stage works from Beckett’s late monodramas to the monologues of Spalding Gray and Anna Deavere Smith have contended with a new manner of passive attention. Ashley sees TV as the ideal medium for his work—quick cuts and channel surfing seem built into the fabric of his texts—but his telltale vocal style and spare, sumptuous music are most powerful in live performance.

The works at La MaMa shared a deft drive, and this was matched by the exacting vigor of Ashley’s team. The composer directed the three operas, with stage design and lighting by David Moodey. Joan La Barbara and singers Jacqueline Humbert, Thomas Buckner, and Sam Ashley recreated their roles; they have

Celestial Excursions, La MaMa E.T.C. Photo: Hiro Ito. Courtesy Performing Artservices.

Joan Jonas in Celestial Excursions, The Kitchen, 2003. Photo: Mimi Johnson. Courtesy Performing Artservices.

been originating Ashley’s characters since the composer embarked on his opera tetralogy Now Eleanor’s Idea in the late 1980s. Tom Hamilton has handled live mixing and sound processing since 1990. “Blue” Gene Tyranny played synthesizer in Dust, and improvised the keyboard accompaniment as performance artist Joan Jonas reprised her role as the Silent Character in Celestial Excursions. Tyranny has been involved with Ashley since the 1960s; it has been in such circumstances of intensive community and collaboration that the composer’s oeuvre has evolved over the past fifty years.

The La MaMa productions opened with Dust. Six park benches were clustered on staggered risers strewn with styrene bins and wire milk crates, before a looming backdrop of skyscraper silhouettes that would be utilized in each of the operas. For its premiere in Yokohama in 1998, Dust had an imposing visual design by Yukihiro Yoshihara that featured banks of video monitors. The new stage design by Moodey was produced last year for the Arteforum Festival in Ferrara, Italy, and situated the opera in the urban park described by Ashley during his opening song. The mise-en-scène would prove a comfortable fit for most of the piece, as five homeless characters sounded off from their benches in solos and in ensemble sections that at times seemed an impenetrable weave of muted voices. The psycho-linguistics of ranting has been a cornerstone in the composer’s method, and for Dust he constructed an exemplary playground.

The ensemble entered, dressed with rumpled ease—Ashley in a light jacket and brown slacks, La Barbara in a wildly creased...