Calling
Opening Sept.12 at La Mama, 74A East 4th St. (at Broadway); (212) 475-7710, $25.
During a particularly difficult passage of music, eight-year-old Madison Papas, a student at P.S. 89 in lower Manhattan, stopped the rehearsal to ask a question: "This part...because it sounds scary...is it supposed to be a bad dream?"
The director explained, in a very straightforward, New York manner, that this is where the parents come to pick the kids up from school after the planes have hit the towers.
Satisfied with the answer, in that half-interested, half-bored way natural to children, the young performer turned back to her music and began to sing, "What are we waiting for? Why are teachers crying? What's going on?"Madison is too young to remember the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Yet, even for those of us who do, it is tempting to look back at what happened as a horrible fiction of our subconscious. But writer-director Wickham Boyle and composer Doug Geers are not content to let the terror and disbelief keep hold over our memories of that day. Instead, they have created Calling: An Opera of Forgiveness, which will receive its first fully staged production this month in an attempt to reconcile those anxieties.
Calling, however, is not meant to tell the story of the attacks themselves. “This isn't ‘9/11: The Opera,’” Geers is quick to point out. “We're not cashing in on tragedy here. It's a story about people living through this experience.”
The production—with the exception of the promotional postcard—contains no images of the towers, no explosions or flames, no fire-engine sirens.
Instead, Calling recounts one family's firsthand experience of the attacks and the following period of recovery.
For the libretto, Boyle, a veteran of experimental theater and formerly Executive Director of La MaMa Experimental Theatre group, took her book, A Mother's Essays from Ground Zero, and distilled it into spare, poem-like vignettes. Boyle lived near the Twin Towers, and her children were attending school the morning of 9/11, so her perspective is one of utmost intimacy and urgency; but it’s one that also seeks peaceful understanding, beginning with the witness of those harrowing attacks and ending with a moment of reflection and release during a yoga class.
Boyle’s push toward reconciliation strikes a chord that may be familiar to many New Yorkers. Often, the rest of America's angst and retaliatory attitude regarding 9/11 is at stark odds with our own impulse toward resolve.
And the calls by some to constantly tear at the wound of 9/11 as a way of fueling nationalist sentiment often fall numb on those of us who seek resolution.
Even Rudy Giuliani, our mayor at the time of the attacks, has managed to alienate many New Yorkers by making Ground Zero a platform for political campaign, including a recent speech at the Republican National Convention where he was literally backed by an enormous projection of lower Manhattan, a view of the city that still looks unfamiliar with the towers missing from the skyline. In contrast, Calling, which draws upon the intimate, non-political experience of 9/11, may be a salve for those of us weary of static election-year jingoism.
“It's about forgiveness,” Boyle says. “There can be no forward motion without this.”
To this purpose, Boyle asked Geers to create music that “moves from dissonance to harmony.”Geers’ score is an accomplished patchwork of modernism, post-minimalist modality and live-produced computer mixing, including a noteworthy addition of the “Wii-mote”—the hand-held, wireless video game joystick—six of which are used to "paint" sound, much like a Theremin. As the devices swirl through the air, a computer discharges gurgles, shrieks and occasional scales, which mix eerily into the orchestral milieu.
Conductor Hiroya Miura will direct an ensemble of six instrumentalists, four vocal soloists and a nine-person chorus, including three students ranging in age from eight to 12, all of whom go to school in lower Manhattan.
Choreographer Edisa Weeks has been enlisted to add movement.
Calling seems to have sparked somewhat of a community effort. According to Boyle, many of the collaborators and performers are donating their time, if not at least receiving a fraction of the fee they would normally expect.
One of the soloists, Gretchen Garvin, who also works at Design Within Reach, joined the cast after her company held a fundraising event for the production.
“The process doesn’t have to mimic the art, but it’s nice when that happens,” says Boyle.
Indeed, the way New Yorkers came together as a community—that bittersweet way in which catastrophe can catalyze strangers to work together to accomplish good—is certainly no less of a hallmark of that day than the horror of the attacks themselves.If we only nourish our memories of the terror, there is probably little hope of ever healing.
Or, as Boyle puts it, “‘Never Forget’ means you can never forgive.”
Opening Sept.12 at La Mama, 74A East 4th St. (at Broadway); (212) 475-7710, $25.
During a particularly difficult passage of music, eight-year-old Madison Papas, a student at P.S. 89 in lower Manhattan, stopped the rehearsal to ask a question: "This part...because it sounds scary...is it supposed to be a bad dream?"
The director explained, in a very straightforward, New York manner, that this is where the parents come to pick the kids up from school after the planes have hit the towers.
Satisfied with the answer, in that half-interested, half-bored way natural to children, the young performer turned back to her music and began to sing, "What are we waiting for? Why are teachers crying? What's going on?"Madison is too young to remember the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Yet, even for those of us who do, it is tempting to look back at what happened as a horrible fiction of our subconscious. But writer-director Wickham Boyle and composer Doug Geers are not content to let the terror and disbelief keep hold over our memories of that day. Instead, they have created Calling: An Opera of Forgiveness, which will receive its first fully staged production this month in an attempt to reconcile those anxieties.
Calling, however, is not meant to tell the story of the attacks themselves. “This isn't ‘9/11: The Opera,’” Geers is quick to point out. “We're not cashing in on tragedy here. It's a story about people living through this experience.”
The production—with the exception of the promotional postcard—contains no images of the towers, no explosions or flames, no fire-engine sirens.
Instead, Calling recounts one family's firsthand experience of the attacks and the following period of recovery.
For the libretto, Boyle, a veteran of experimental theater and formerly Executive Director of La MaMa Experimental Theatre group, took her book, A Mother's Essays from Ground Zero, and distilled it into spare, poem-like vignettes. Boyle lived near the Twin Towers, and her children were attending school the morning of 9/11, so her perspective is one of utmost intimacy and urgency; but it’s one that also seeks peaceful understanding, beginning with the witness of those harrowing attacks and ending with a moment of reflection and release during a yoga class.
Boyle’s push toward reconciliation strikes a chord that may be familiar to many New Yorkers. Often, the rest of America's angst and retaliatory attitude regarding 9/11 is at stark odds with our own impulse toward resolve.
And the calls by some to constantly tear at the wound of 9/11 as a way of fueling nationalist sentiment often fall numb on those of us who seek resolution.
Even Rudy Giuliani, our mayor at the time of the attacks, has managed to alienate many New Yorkers by making Ground Zero a platform for political campaign, including a recent speech at the Republican National Convention where he was literally backed by an enormous projection of lower Manhattan, a view of the city that still looks unfamiliar with the towers missing from the skyline. In contrast, Calling, which draws upon the intimate, non-political experience of 9/11, may be a salve for those of us weary of static election-year jingoism.
“It's about forgiveness,” Boyle says. “There can be no forward motion without this.”
To this purpose, Boyle asked Geers to create music that “moves from dissonance to harmony.”Geers’ score is an accomplished patchwork of modernism, post-minimalist modality and live-produced computer mixing, including a noteworthy addition of the “Wii-mote”—the hand-held, wireless video game joystick—six of which are used to "paint" sound, much like a Theremin. As the devices swirl through the air, a computer discharges gurgles, shrieks and occasional scales, which mix eerily into the orchestral milieu.
Conductor Hiroya Miura will direct an ensemble of six instrumentalists, four vocal soloists and a nine-person chorus, including three students ranging in age from eight to 12, all of whom go to school in lower Manhattan.
Choreographer Edisa Weeks has been enlisted to add movement.
Calling seems to have sparked somewhat of a community effort. According to Boyle, many of the collaborators and performers are donating their time, if not at least receiving a fraction of the fee they would normally expect.
One of the soloists, Gretchen Garvin, who also works at Design Within Reach, joined the cast after her company held a fundraising event for the production.
“The process doesn’t have to mimic the art, but it’s nice when that happens,” says Boyle.
Indeed, the way New Yorkers came together as a community—that bittersweet way in which catastrophe can catalyze strangers to work together to accomplish good—is certainly no less of a hallmark of that day than the horror of the attacks themselves.If we only nourish our memories of the terror, there is probably little hope of ever healing.
Or, as Boyle puts it, “‘Never Forget’ means you can never forgive.”
