{"id":261,"date":"2016-03-02T16:40:58","date_gmt":"2016-03-02T16:40:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/5\/?p=261"},"modified":"2022-05-29T08:38:27","modified_gmt":"2022-05-29T08:38:27","slug":"in-place-of-situations-gertrude-steins-libretto-liberato","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/5\/in-place-of-situations-gertrude-steins-libretto-liberato\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cIn Place of Situations\u201d: Gertrude Stein\u2019s Libretto Liberato"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Lissa Tyler Renaud<\/strong>[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"1222843370\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Four Saints in Three Acts: An Opera Installation<\/em>
SFMOMA in Association with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) Presents
An Ensemble Parall\u00e8le production; Featuring Kalup Linzy
Novellus Theater, YBCA
August 18 – 21, 2011<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The early avant-garde came to the fore this past summer in San Francisco and in its cohort cities across the bay, Oakland and Berkeley\u2014and Gertrude Stein in particular played a leading part in the goings-ons: One major exhibition focused on Stein as writer, dramatist, art collector and saloni\u00e8re (Contemporary Jewish Museum); another on the wider Stein family as adventurous patrons of the arts and early purchasers of works by unknowns, Picasso and Matisse (and C\u00e9zanne, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc.) (SFMOMA). From Paris came 100 masterworks by Picasso, who became Stein\u2019s close friend (de Young Museum); and from Texas, collages and Merzbau reconstruction by Stein contemporary Kurt Schwitters (Berkeley Art Museum). The Bay Area also saw myriad spin-off events from these shows, including performances and readings, panels and lectures. Even Woody Allen\u2019s new film, Midnight in Paris<\/em>, which features a Stein character and her artistic milieu, was in wide release throughout the area. So it was in this context that SFMOMA, Ensemble Parall\u00e8le and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts teamed up to produce the legendary opera with libretto by Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts<\/em>\u2014which has at least a dozen saints and four acts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I. A Heavenly Act<\/strong>
Music by Luciano Chessa; libretto constructed from Gertrude Stein\u2019s libretto<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Kalup
Kalup Linzy in A Heavenly Act, 2011, gospel section of the pre-show for Four Saints in Three Acts: An Opera Installation; an Ensemble Parall\u00e8le production presented by SFMOMA in association with YBCA; photo: Steve DiBartolomeo, Westside Studio Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To put us in a heavenly mood, the opera proper was preceded by an original, shorter curtain raiser, entitled A Heavenly Act<\/em>. This piece made a charming virtue of necessity: Some years after Stein\u2019s 1946 death, the composer of the Four Saints<\/em> music (and the collaboration\u2019s de facto impresario), Virgil Thomson, cut his score and Stein\u2019s libretto and re-arranged some of the scenes, with a comparatively slight nod to more conventional narrative. For this recent production, the collaborators shortened the text even further and, in the spirit of Tzara\u2019s Dadaist Poem<\/em> made with a newspaper and scissors, from the snippets they had cut, they created a text for saints in heaven to overhear spoken on earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The effect was a fitting tribute to the essence of the early avant-garde era as well as a hilarious, kitschy version of Heaven: Kalup Linzy\u2019s enormous projection screen upstage depicted our \u201cprojections\u201d of heaven: angels arranged self-consciously into \u201chosts,\u201d all in white with exaggeratedly fluffy wings, moving in stroboscopic slow motion as if inhabiting an atmosphere different from ours, dissolving into clouds and re-substantiating, now clapping or praying or looking transported, now looking in compassionate consternation down at the earth (stage), where they could hear a general hum as humans (chorus members), dressed in black like hybrids of nuns\/priests and grim reapers gathered purposefully into meaningless rows and simple formations\u2014now a word emerging and falling back into the larger texture of sound, now a phrase standing out or repeating or being swallowed up in creepy merry-go-round or circus music gone sour, or in a gospel solo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Projection<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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