A so-called 'lieder-opera', this show combines elements of both those forms ('lieder' being 'art songs', and 'opera' being, irreducibly, opera), mixing them in with spoken word interludes both pre-recorded and live, and a stream of visual images projected on to screens behind the performers - three singers, all dressed in white, representing different stages in the life of their subject, Emily Dickinson, and three musicians (piano, acoustic guitar, cello) - to produce an impressionistic-thematic account of Dickinson's life and work (the 'libretto' is a setting to music of her poems, including some of her most famous), organised thematically rather than strictly chronologically or biographically ("death", "home", "Susan", "nature", "Samuel", "immortality").
Described like that, it probably sounds a mess - but actually it was quite wonderful. Dickinson is my favourite poet, and this performance rung true - it reminded me of many of the reasons why I fell in love with her work in the first place...above all else, she felt things so intensely, and through her poetry we are at once brought into the presence of something true and larger than ourselves and reminded of its fundamental unknowability. There's a mystery at the heart of everything she wrote, and yet it speaks directly to us.
(w/ trang + Arthur)
* * *
There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself -
Finite infinity.
