The Politics of Quiet

I made this piece with Meredith Monk in the late 90s. It was a smallish opera made distinctly for her ensemble.

It was a kind of mourning for things gone; objects that still exist but that have lost their purpose. During the piece the objects were ceremoniously dipped into a vat of molten bee’s wax then placed along the DS edge of the stage like an offering for the audience. You can see a few here. 

I wish I could remember more of the specific items. There were definitely some old hand tools. There was a manual typewriter. (At this time personal computers were not yet ubiquitous so although a manual typewriter would be obsolete an electric one would probably still be in use).

I was production manager and stage manager. Tony Giovanetti did the lighting, David Meschter the sound and Carol Anne Pelletier did the costumes. There was a wonderful ensemble of musician/singers. Here are Theo Bleckmann, Alison Easter, Katie Geissinger and Dina Emerson.

We rehearsed in Lucinda Child’s loft on Broadway between Houston and Canal. The building was on the west side of Broadway and you could see the Paul Taylor’s studios across the street. Each of the four floors of the building was a very large column-less space and was inhabited by a different artist. In addition to Lucinda David Gordon had a floor. There was at least one more well known downtown performance artist on another floor but I can’t remember who. Lucinda was out of town so we rented her studio to create this piece.

There wasn’t a set designer for the piece. It took place on an open stage with a cyclorama and a lot of props. Some of the props came from Meredith’s home but I ended up sourcing most of them. What that meant was that Meredith would say “Will, can you get one of those things? You know, like they used to use, to like, thresh wheat? And I would have to figure out what she was talking about and then find one.

This was before internet shopping had taken off. I had a computer and had spent time on dial-up bulletin boards and AOL but I didn’t go onto the open internet via a web browser until 1996, the year of this production. Suffice it to say I wasn’t just going to research and order these things for delivery in a matter of moments. But we had something almost as good; Canal Street.

At the time Canal street was like an emporium where you really could find anything. From Broadway to the east was China town where you could find every kind of knick knack and general merchandise item that was beginning to be produced in China. To the west was the real gold. There were small shops that sold every kind of industrial item one could imagine. The great thing about is was that most of them sold new and used items: all mixed on the same shelves. Many of the shops were not organized in any recognizable fashion. But after a few visits you would start to catalog things in your own mind and kind of get to know where things were in any given shop.

Countless times I would have some kind of theater ghetto engineering challenge and just head to Canal Street, not knowing what I was looking for. But I’d go with the confidence that somewhere on those blocks lay my solution. All I had to do was to wander the aisles of the shops free associating what I saw with my problem. Eventually I’d be holding two objects before my face that never were meant to be together; rotating them slowly till my answer clicked into place.