“Black Lodge” may or may not be a lot of things.
It calls itself an opera and was a finalist for a Grammy this year in the opera category, since there is no Gothic opera category yet. It’s noisy. It’s scary. It’s incomprehensible. He does his best to misbehave, transgressing between the real and the imagined, between dangerously raw and overcooked emotions, shattering the boundaries between what we call classical music and what we don’t. Like many great operas, it was written to convey a great singer, in this case the tenor and then a certain Timur Bekbosunov, who is generally called simply Timur.
You could also call it a song cycle that uses piercing rock and, for respite, a welcoming string quartet. There is a film that accompanies a production that has little to do with opera. The opera has to do with its composer, David T. Little, and his relationship with three of his art idols, past and present: the filmmaker David Lynch, the late French poet and theorist Antonin Artaud, and the writer and Beat artist William S. Burroughs. The non-narrative libretto is by one of our few remaining Beat poets and a treasure from that era, Anne Waldman.
What else? Presented by the UCLA Center for the Art of Performance and Beth Morrison Projects for a single performance Saturday at the United Theater on Broadway, it was marketed as a Halloween event. The Gothic Theater opened 90 minutes early, its lobby transformed into a pre-show “Bardo,” a macabre performance installation by Sandra Powers.
Some audience members showed up in costume, but none could compete with the wonderfully eerie mix of butoh dancing, shadow theater, ghosts of all kinds, nurses looking like they came straight out of horror films and tormented models or others. There was music, shouting, televisions and more everywhere you went up and down.
This interpretation of the Buddhist concept of bardo – the state between death and rebirth, often used colloquially to simply imply the transition from one state to a significant other – was full of wonder. But he treated the transition as a screaming horror, not for the faint of heart. I found shelter in the same old place, while waiting for some sort of opera outside, at a nearby taco truck.
As an opera, “Black Lodge” is a disaster. As a song cycle, it’s an eye-opening marvel. As a performance for Timur, it further expands the promise of transformation that Julia Bullock and Davóne Tines demonstrated in their recent staged recitals.
Like Bullock with “Harawi” and Tines with “Robeson,” Timur has long been obsessed with his project. He sang the project’s first two songs at a Green Umbrella Philharmonic performance in Los Angeles in 2016. concert. The full piece, consisting of 16 songs, was created during the pandemic. It was during the COVID shutdowns that director Michael Joseph McQuilken made a film with Timur in a white suit as the Man and Jennifer Harrison Newman as the Woman frolicking in various states of agony and ecstasy in the artists’ houses.
On stage, to the right of the screen, Timur sang live, in a white suit. He was joined by his band, Timur and the Dime Museum (keyboard, guitars and drums, with the instrumentalists also providing additional vocals) and the superb Isaura String Quartet. But all the attention was on the fascinating Timur, who shed light on the ghostly or grotesque essence of Artaud, Burroughs, Lynch and, of course, Little.
Little’s idea for this cycle was to examine how his own story might intersect with that of Artaud, who brilliantly attempted to return theater to a state of psychic ritual and ultimately became psychotic; Burroughs, who brilliantly tried to cut the world into various pieces stuck together and who, in a stupid accident, shot his wife; and Lynch, who we know has a brilliant surrealist side (he was not involved in the project). The composer grew up, he writes in the liner notes for the recording of “Black Lodge,” seeing “the dark side of things,” and here he journeys through that in search of and often discovery of beauty.
The production apparently makes no distinction between the three parts: “The Realms of Hungry Ghosts and Hell”, “The Animal, Human and Demigod Realms”, and “The Realm of the Shamans”. Each of the songs explains a place and time of an incident or idea in the lives of the protagonists. For a moment, we consider what it might mean to replace the soundtrack of a film set in Petrograd in 1917 with something else. Next we look for a figure cut in Cambridge in 1939.
Van Gogh’s severed ear also haunts this work, which begins in pain and remains in pain until it frames Artaud’s last sought-after sleep in Ivry-sur-Seine, France, in 1948. The last lines of Waldman’s libretto are: “All I want is out of here.”
Little, who is one of the most famous American opera composers, has long blended rock, minimalism and a kind of narrative neo-romanticism into a dramatically captivating but simple opera. He amplifies the horror of grim subjects in operas such as “Soldier Songs” and “Dog Days,” full of war and anger. He was looking for a surreal twist on the life of John F. Kennedy which has not been sufficiently explored.
But he never had a librettist like Waldman. His text is a true surreal fantasy with little to cling to except evocative imagery, which invites an incomparable tenor to enter a vast range of psychic states across a vast range of musical styles and a vast range of vocal techniques. There was no song that wasn’t an extraordinary musical event. But you didn’t always know that.
The rock band was playing at volumes that could make your knees shake, your skin vibrate, and your brain shut off. It wasn’t necessarily unpleasant, but it dulled the senses like a narcotic. Moments of gentle calm did indeed serve the shock effect of the next sonic attack, but that too became old news.
For nuance and description, there’s always the first-rate recording (which absurdly qualifies as a movie soundtrack and is more than worthy of a Grammy, regardless of category). But Timur’s live performance added another level of otherworldly exhilaration that neither the film nor the deafening amplification can improve upon.
Little, Waldman, and Timur have entered an operatic bardo (if that’s necessary), where every emotion is exposed and then erased, seemingly preparing us for the unknown. We don’t know where we will go. We recognize, however, something new and important, and we must trust it, and not tear it to smithereens, leaving us more shaken than agitated.
