(upbeat music)
(audience applauds)
- Hello, good evening.
Thank you for staying.
Is great pleasure to have the creator
of "Othello in the Seraglio" with us.
Mehmet Ali Sanlikol, who is a composer,
a great singer as we have
seen him, singing as Sumbul.
An ethnomusicologist,
as well as a full-time
faculty member at New Conservatory.
New England Conservatory?
- Yes, New England Conservatory.
- In Boston.
- In Boston.
- Welcome to USC, Mehmet Ali.
- Thank you so much.
It's wonderful to be here.
- So we are gonna have a
brief conversation together,
and then we are gonna turn the floor
to the audience members.
Wow, that's great.
What a vision of English,
Turkish, Italian music,
literature, cultural discourses,
and just like an amazing fusion.
So I would love to hear
how the project emerged.
Like, once the concept started,
as well as, I'm a Shakespeare professor,
so I would ask, what's the
connection to Shakespeare?
How did Shakespeare came to this work?
- So, before this idea came to me,
I need to give you a
little bit of background,
because there was a period in my life
when early European music ensembles
would hire me as a professional musician
to perform in their concerts.
And around then, I was
also producing concerts
with my own traditional
Turkish music ensemble, too.
And it's very interesting,
because in these two worlds
of traditional ethnic music concerts
and early European music concerts,
if you go to these events,
you'll see that typically
they're put under a theme, okay.
So they'll pick a theme
and then they'll assemble repertoire.
So this is important, I think,
because that's the model I kind of had
at the back of my mind.
I was seeing classical Turkish music
and early European music and how
they could be kind of merged together.
So that's one part of the puzzle. (laughs)
The other part of it is, as
just maybe a decade or so ago,
one night, as I was just watching TV,
I happened to come upon
Kenneth Branagh's "Othello"
with Laurence Fishburne and--
- Oliver Parker's.
- Right, and so as I was just watching it,
I don't know, maybe it was two
in the morning or something,
kind of thinking to myself,
wow, wouldn't it be great
if Othello was kind of
flipped upside down, and if
Cyprus was Ottoman Cyprus
and not Venetian Cyprus,
and if the attackers were
not Turks but Venetians.
And of course, shortly
after the time of "Othello,"
that's exactly what happened.
Turks took over Cyprus, and
the roles were reversed.
And as I was thinking that, suddenly,
I thought of a little
short story I had just read
about an Ottoman,
well-known Ottoman eunuch.
And it wasn't a fictional story.
It was actually based on an actual eunuch
that lived in 17th century, and somehow,
right then I had this
epiphany, like moment,
and I thought about, oh, I'm gonna take
Shakespeare's "Othello"
and turn him into a eunuch.
And so that's the other
part of the puzzle.
The last part of it is
I wanted to do an opera,
you know, the moment I knew that "Othello"
was gonna become a
eunuch, I knew that this,
was gonna, you know, this
could be a great opera.
But the problem then was, you know,
operas cost a lot of money.
And at first I thought maybe we could have
a small orchestra, but I was
still thinking orchestra.
And I was thinking from the get-go that
there would be some Turkish
instruments in it, too.
Still, though, I was picturing
a larger setting, a stage opera.
And of course, I started
talking to people.
Whoever I talked to, the
moment I said, you know,
I'm gonna reimagine Shakespeare's
"Othello" as a eunuch,
they were immediately, wow, great idea.
But as soon as we would do the budget,
you know, it wasn't that
difficult to hit $100,000
with props and large
ensembles, rehearsal time.
So I kind of shelved the idea for a while.
We kind of put it on hold.
I didn't wanna have it go to waste.
I didn't want it to be a
simple production, too.
And so it was, in fact,
the person who was playing
the Ottoman harp, who has
been my main collaborator
for a long time, was, he
actually first had this idea of,
how about if it all took place
inside of a coffee house,
and how about if we had a coffee,
a traditional coffee house storyteller
who brought the characters to life.
And I could see that.
I could somehow see that.
And so I thought, wait, you know,
maybe we can do the
very beginning of opera.
Let's just go all the way back to 1600s,
to Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo,"
where operas were not staged.
They were inside big rooms
and so we started thinking
very essentialist, you
know, forms of theater.
On the one hand, we had the
shadow play of the Ottomans,
also a very essentialist form,
on the other we had commedia
dell'arte, of course,
with the half masks, and the
masks were a great solution,
because then we took all four singers,
and we were able to have, you know,
you put the mask on, you become Sumbul.
Otherwise, you're just
a musician in the band,
and you do whatever you do.
So it's basically, all
of these ideas, you know,
allowed me to somehow create
this "Othello in the
Seraglio" coffee house opera.
- Yeah, that's great.
Like in a way it's really pushing
the boundaries we have
between east and west,
between Western music and Turkish music,
and between what's Europe,
what's Ottoman Empire.
So that fluidity you are bringing
to the table is so valuable.
And I think it's kind of
reflecting the cosmopolitan world
you are portraying, right,
it starts with multiple
languages, like Jews, Armenians,
Greeks, Turks, Christians,
in the same space,
and you are recognizing
this probably tolerance
or coexistence of differences
in the Ottoman Empire.
However, what I really
appreciated is you are not,
kind of, stepping away by
bringing in the slavery
to the table, the violence,
and the racial difference to the table.
So when we look at
"Othello," it's the story
of a black man in a white world.
And Venice, as a cosmopolitan
center, enables the marriage,
whereas that marriage destroys
when they are in Cyprus.
- That's right, yeah.
- So I would love to hear
more how did you envision
the Ottoman world by delicately
balancing the coexistence
of differences, but at the same time,
speaking to the violence of slavery.
- So, obviously that wasn't easy.
Let's see, you know, one
of the ideas here was,
of course, to try and
bring that Ottoman nuance
in such a way that, well,
the goal was two-fold.
So, on the one hand, I wanted
to bring a complicated picture
that would also perhaps
help American audiences
defeat the stereotyping, you
know, of the Middle East,
and Islam, and all of that, because,
especially on opera stage, you know,
the Middle East has been exoticized,
Orientalized for so long that, I mean,
the very title "Othello
in the Seraglio," that,
of course, is a direct nod
to Mozart and you know.
And it's intentional, you know.
On the one hand, I was
actually trying to defeat
that kind of stereotyping by providing
that cosmopolitan
picture with that nuance.
But on the other, I didn't wanna do it
in such a way and say,
oh look at this wonderful,
rich, great, you know.
I wanted to paint it as close as possible
with the tensions that were
present in that society.
All societies are subject
to tension, right?
I mean, you know, the United States
is a great example of it, actually.
You know, this is the country
that gave us jazz, and I mean,
the African American experience
hasn't necessarily been
the greatest one, and yet,
the profound result of jazz.
So you know, I like to
put the Ottoman experience
or the pictures that I'm painting
from that kind of a perspective.
- And looks like eunuch
became a really great
historical figure to convey that, right?
I mean, Othello is the Moor of Venice,
like, Moor, recognizing religious
as well as racial difference,
but our character Sumbul,
which means hyacinth, right,
the vulnerability of the flower.
And our character,
Sumbul, is not only black,
but also considered with deformed body,
so the gender ambiguity is there, as well.
And would you say more about that,
especially how that
problematizes his relationship
with quote, unquote,
Desdemona of the play.
- Of course, yeah, so first
of all let me tell you this.
I am not the kind of composer that likes
to meddle around with
the works of masters.
I'm actually very skeptical of, you know,
picking up a piece by Ravel
and re-orchestrating it.
I fear and I also do not
necessarily like to engage in
that kind of recompositional
rearranging kind of activity.
So to touch Shakespeare is not really my,
it wasn't my immediate goal,
but it was the eunuch that enabled it,
because when I thought that,
or what I really thought
that the eunuch brought to the table
was in fact a genuine Ottoman
dimension to this drama,
that I can really transform,
or add to Shakespeare,
something that really
wasn't there dramatically.
So that's important.
That's what really convinced me,
and I'm a hard case to
convince in this case.
So I was convinced by the eunuch.
And of course, the paradox of the eunuch
from the very beginning
musically enabled certain things.
I was like, okay, I can,
there are lots of suppressed,
or there's suppressed childhood,
there's suppressed past.
How can I bring that back
to the table musically?
So I thought when he's
starting to lose control,
you know, those are the
moments when I'm gonna imply
this, you know, polyrhythmic
African grooves,
and yet they won't
really quite be African.
Suddenly you have those
musical moments where,
you know, these kinds of paradoxes,
the conundrum of the
eunuch, that is projected.
What else?
I don't know.
- No, I think that's great,
because especially thinking
how African presence in Ottoman history
has been so much ignored.
- Right, very much, yeah.
- And we have there's a
huge eunuch transportation
to Ottoman Empire, like in the
16th and early 17th century.
Any time you have a thousand
to 1200 black eunuchs
in Istanbul then to court.
And the transportation of those black boys
from sub-Sahara to North
Africa and undergoing
this violent surgery,
and then most of them will die eventually.
So it's just like horrifying story,
and the way you are kind of
like relating it to Othello,
who has been enslaved several times.
It's also that story of
slavery, of the Africans.
So that connection I
think is just brilliant.
- And also it was really
a good opportunity,
if you're an Ottomanist,
and to a certain degree,
I consider myself that.
So if you're an Ottomanist,
one of the most interesting
aspects of that society is,
you know, which I wanted to portray here,
you know, the four main characters.
Three out of the four
are either former slaves,
or the concubine actually
becomes a free woman
during the play, but the other two
seem to be former slaves, right?
And they're the most wealthiest,
and yet the fourth one,
Saadet, who is, you know,
as far as their class
positions are concerned,
she's the lowest, as
far as they're, and yet,
she is the only free woman by birth.
And to me, that's, you know,
that's the Ottoman society,
at least in its 17th century.
And so, wow, that's cosmopolitan,
a different kind of
cosmopolitan picture, unique.
So this is a great opportunity to portray
something like that, and that's...
- Complex.
- It's complex, yeah.
- And you mentioned, like, that you wanted
to go back to the start of
opera in the 16th century,
or early 17th century.
This is, at the same time,
where we have coffee houses.
Mid-16th centuries is when coffee houses
becomes very popular
in the Ottoman Empire,
and it becomes a place where
population would come together,
not only for entertainment or
like storytellers like this,
and smoke a nargile,
and dancing with boys,
and doing more things with boys,
and kind of enjoying that time.
But at that same time,
it's a place when people
come together, they become politicized,
and most of the time, coffee
houses has been banned.
Many people related it to
Bohemian lifestyle, whereas,
I think, in reality, it's
related to the political danger
of bringing people together.
- I mean, like, rock and
roll in this country,
or the Prohibition Era, these are always,
these things, when they come about,
they kind of shake and rattle
the already established,
you know, rules and regulations,
government, whatever.
And so the way to handle them is to
at first suppress, ban,
this stuff, but, you know.
- But you cannot prevent them, right?
- Chuck Berry and Little Richard
and Elvis Presley are, you know.
(laughs)
So are coffee houses.
- And they don't stay
where they are, right?
I mean coffee houses reaches England
in mid-17th century.
- Of course,
and it's very quick, too.
- First popped out in 1650s.
Then it becomes like, they got banned
this time as a Muslim habit.
You would get darker
skin if you drink coffee.
All these discourses.
But you are putting this
opera in a coffee house,
very appropriately again
combining East and West in a way.
And the storyteller is an
entertainer, Meddah, tradition.
I will come back to that later.
But he is very political as well,
in like, only God makes humans,
but only humans make slaves.
And it's just like, you know,
this grandiose statesman.
- Sufi philosophical
statement there, yeah.
- Yeah, and can you tell us
more about the Meddah tradition,
like, why did you need
storyteller to convey the stuff
in the middle of--
- Yeah, so, um,
maybe this gets me a little
bit into the practical ideas
that were behind the making of this.
So, we wanted this to be, or
let me put it to you this way.
Once we had the idea of
a coffee house opera,
then we also thought that we
want this to be so practical
that we can basically put all the props
in the back of our car
and just go to a venue
and be able to set it up and
perform within two hours,
which is, with opera, you
know, you can't do that.
With Bertolt Brecht, you may be able to.
So, that was another one I
wanted to mention, I forgot.
So you see, so we said, okay,
how can we be really practical
and be able to achieve all of these goals,
and so, we thought, okay,
storyteller is a good solution,
in a way, because coming in
and out with English like that,
we thought this is a good way
of being able to, in fact,
have a nice drive and be able to lift
some of the weight off of people reading.
And sometimes that's,
of course, necessary,
but in this case, it was actually
one of those practical solutions.
Another issue that is
related, not so much directly
to the Meddah, but just
the whole production,
was so I had a month to compose.
Okay, no one can compose a
two-hour long opera in a month.
So knowing that that was the time frame,
and I had time in front of it,
but I was teaching, and so,
you know, I knew that I couldn't sit down
and compose until that month-long,
basically Christmas
break, that's when it was.
But I had time up until then
to be able to do other things.
So I thought, early opera, well,
lots of early Baroque operas
were put together that way.
We called them opera
pasticcios, they're pastiche,
so lots of Handel operas, Vivaldi operas,
are pasticcios, meaning they borrow stuff.
That's why it says conceived
and composed in my credit,
because knowing I had only
month, I created this structure
when I said I'm gonna
borrow some material.
Luckily, the Turkish tradition
places so much emphasis
on improvisation that
it's kind of sacrilegious
to leave it out, so I thought,
okay, I must have some
improvisation, that's good.
All I have to do is
contextualize that, that's fine.
And then I thought, the
role of the narrator
coming in and out, and then of
course, newly composed music.
So what I did in front
was to look for what
I was gonna borrow and create
the best possible structure
and then fit these different elements,
including the storyteller,
and where he comes in
and out, and all of that.
- And looks like masks
did a huge benefit for you
to reduce it, but at the same time,
you had a short amount
of time, and I would like
to talk about casting,
and a part of "Othello"
production history is a huge debate,
whereas Othello has been in black face
or you cast a black Othello, right?
And the production you have
seen, Laurence Fishburne,
is probably the first
high-budget Hollywood example
where we have
- Example, yeah.
- a real black Othello
that put Laurence Olivier
or Anthony Hopkins black
face Othellos into shame.
You have yourself as black
eunuch with a black mask.
So can you tell us a little bit if you had
any hard time to make this decision,
or is it related to other casting issue,
because it's an opera, and has different--
- Absolutely, so basically,
in that case, obviously this came up,
but the musical goal
was very clear, right?
I mean, anyone who
watches this understands
that the two worlds, two musical worlds
that are really coming together here are
classical-slash-Ottoman folk
Turkish music tradition,
and early European music tradition.
And so those are the two
worlds that are merging.
And, the role of the eunuch,
or the style was clearly
gonna be high Turkish, high
Ottoman Turkish, so basically,
once that was clear to me,
you know, it was also clear
that there's so no such black person
that can sing in that style.
I mean, there really isn't.
In Turkey, maybe there was 200 years ago,
but so knowing that that's not the case,
so there were two options.
Either I was gonna cast myself
or someone who's capable
of singing that style
with a black mask or let go of the style,
appropriate the musical style, but,
I decided not to appropriate
the musical style.
You see, it's cultural
appropriation one way or the other,
but I think at least this way, I mean,
it's an opera first and foremost,
and the musical goals are clear.
It actually wasn't a big debate.
When the decision, it took this much,
a conversation to settle on that decision,
for better or worse.
I don't know if everyone is
gonna be comfortable with that,
but we were, because
at the end of the day,
it's the musical genre.
- And your vocal range, kinda like,
it was able to sing like a castrati.
A castrati is a sainted opera singer,
goes back to 16th, 17th century.
They are also called
eunuch, and you are also,
I feel like hinting a combination
of operatic figure and
historical figure, right?
- Yeah, I thought, what
is the best way to,
or best, I don't know if it's best,
but what would be an
interesting dramatic way
for the eunuch to sound like.
So I thought, I didn't wanna sing
in falsetto voice throughout.
Instead, I wanted to kind of
have this cracking, you know,
I wanted to kind of hint at
some voice that may crack, okay?
You know, like, aaa,
aaa, you know, kind of.
And so that's why, you know,
when I sing, I keep switching between
the high falsetto and the chest voice.
But of course, it's, on
the very few moments,
it is kind of done in a
more out of control fashion
to indicate he is losing control,
but most of the time,
it's actually designed
in such a way that it's smooth, et cetera,
just to go along with the style.
- And you bring so many different styles
of singing and songs together.
Can you tell us a little
more about the songs?
I think most of them
are from 17th century?
- So like I said, you know,
let's just say one-third
of the opera is borrowed material.
Those do come from 16th, 17th century,
either Venetian or Italian
or Istanbul material.
So that's one third.
One third is improvised material.
And then one third is
newly composed material.
So for example, especially
when you have duets,
you know, between the
soprano and the eunuch,
so you have a Turkish
style against an earlier,
there's no such music that,
so that had to be composed.
The quartets, there's no
quartet you're gonna have
two voices in Turkish
style, two voices in,
so you know, these were
clearly the composed material.
But then, of course,
everything I had to arrange
and adapt to the setting, too.
In other words, even though,
even if I borrowed stuff,
they were all, I had to arrange them,
adapt them, et cetera.
So I mean, (laughs)...
- And some spice of Shakespeare.
- Yeah, exactly, there are
lines that I had to find,
'cause that's the other thing about this.
You know, from a very
operatic perspective,
there is no librettist here.
It's a bunch of compiled texts that,
you know, some of them comes from,
some of them I even borrowed from
out of Rossini's "Othello"'s libretto,
just, you know, couple of lines,
because the willow song, maybe,
the Italian of that may
originate from Rossini's.
I don't rem, yes, I think so.
I think that, the willow song,
the Italian setting of it,
I think originates from Rossini's opera.
And I looked at 'em all, and I was like,
hmmm, this one flows better
from that text to, you know.
- And some of the songs, I
realized are from Ali Ufki,
who himself was a captured
slave who became a musician.
Can you tell us more about Ali Ufki,
and why his music was
important for this production?
- Sure, so if you're borrowing music,
and if it's 17th century
in the Ottoman tradition,
the man that you're gonna
end up with is this Polish,
initially Polish Protestant by the name
of Alberto Wojciech
Bobowski, who was captured
by the Tartars and sold to the Ottomans.
He was not a very young boy.
He was older and that's why, apparently,
he was more valuable, because
he spoke multiple languages,
and so the Ottomans realized that
this was actually a person of value.
They immediately got him up to the palace,
and he became court musician,
eventually looks like he
even became the director
of the ensemble, and then he also was
court translator and so on.
He adopted the name Ali
Ufki, and of course,
was converted to Islam.
But he's one of those
few cases where, in fact,
Ali Ufki remained in Istanbul
for the rest of his life
and seemed to actually
blend in really well.
He's a unique character for sure,
and he left behind a
manuscript of notation,
in staff notation, so
it's European notation,
of Ottoman Turkish music.
So for example, the one
sequence where I borrowed
a couple of folk songs from that period
was the wedding sequence.
Those are pieces that
I took out and arranged
and assembled to create
that 17th century Istanbulite wedding.
- And did your singers have any difficulty
to get singing the 17th Ottoman Turkish?
- Yeah, here and there.
I may have had to correct
a couple of accentuations
or whatever, just, 'cause
sometimes they don't recognize
the words, obviously, so you know.
But overall, you know,
these particular musicians
are adventurous like myself, and so,
at least I exposed them earlier
to Ali Ufki's works you know.
They were more or less familiar, yeah.
- And do you have any future
plans building on this project?
- At the moment with
"Othello in the Seraglio,"
I mean, we premiered the
live production in 2015,
and so we did about 20, 21
performances in four years.
And we filmed it in its fourth year.
And we premiered it last
year, the film that is,
and so now we're screening
it here and there
around the country,
thanks to you, out here.
So right now, you know,
the film is certainly
probably achieving a life of its own.
It's available, streamable
on Amazon Prime,
and a number of other platforms, too,
which, you know, there
are so many of them,
maybe even on Hulu, I don't remember that.
But it is definitely on Amazon Prime.
And so, I mean, I think
that's a good enough place
for me for this production.
- Yeah, that's wonderful,
and I really hope
you would mess with
Shakespeare more and more.
- I will.
- But I think at this point,
it's time to open floor
to the audience and see if
they have any questions.
- Thank you, I just
wanted to say our class,
with Professor Arvas, has
seen so many productions
of "Othello" already,
and for me, personally,
this was the most emotional
one that I've seen so far.
I think that says a lot,
because there's so much
that singers can do,
especially opera singers.
They're so focused on getting those
loud and high notes, or whatnot.
And also just seeing them four together
allowed us to see the human side of them,
as opposed to people trying
to play a certain character.
So besides the music, what can you tell us
about the wardrobe that they wore?
I saw that it was very culturally defined.
And what can you tell us about the choice
of color for all four characters?
- Oh, you mean the shawls
and those colors, okay.
You know, purple with Sumbul,
high stature, elegancy,
you know, that was kind of obvious.
Red, with you know,
Mustafa, Iago, you know,
I think that's obvious, too, right?
Especially the red underneath
the eyes on the mask
kind of symbolizing some
degree of violent intent.
And then, that's a good
question, because green
for the Muslim Turk.
- Simple Turk.
- Exactly, you know, the color of Islam,
green, so there's that.
And then blue, I don't know, I mean.
For Europe, for some
reason, we picked that.
There, maybe it's because at that point,
you know, we had green, we had red,
we had purple, and I thought maybe.
So that may have been more aesthetic.
- A desire to freedom.
- There's always room for that.
- First of all, thanks so much
for this magnificent piece
of music, and thanks so much to Mehmet
for bringing it to us here.
I'm very interested in the
structure of the piece,
because somehow, it's actually
very Baroque in a way,
because the members of the orchestra
are also singers, are also characters,
and the orchestra plays
like an audience to them.
So it's almost like all the
potential points of view
of a theater experience are actually
encapsulated in the ensemble itself.
So what I would like to
know a little more about is
how does it feel for you,
as a performer, to be,
in so many ways, you
know, you're the composer,
you're performing, you are
playing, at some parts,
you're an audience, so you are traversing
all the potential ways
in which this can happen.
And I wonder how is that managed
or negotiated through you
when you have the experience
of being part of it.
- Yeah, it was difficult.
It's, first of all, I had
to wear a number of hats,
and that was clear from the beginning.
And so when we, we did work
with a stage director, you know,
before the film director, and so,
and the stage director was
very much aware of this, too.
And we decided that there's
no reason to meddle with it.
It is what it is.
I conceived it, and so there are moments
when, it's not so much
conducting, but cues,
ritardandos, meaning when
the music has to slow down,
someone has to give certain.
And so we worked them in.
I would raise my hand, some
of these things worked in,
but also at the same time, you know,
at other productions, I
conduct ensembles, right.
So that's also part of
who I am as a musician.
I move my hands, so it
wasn't that difficult.
I didn't have to force anything
with these different identities, you know.
They were all there.
So the director, I think,
kind of realized that,
and he decided also not to
really engage with these things.
I think there were maybe a moment or two
when he gave me some pointers,
but most other times,
the decision was to kind
of let it be and just,
he let me be in my natural state,
and I would just do a few things.
I worked them into the
role as much as I could.
The experience of it, (laughs)
I guess I can say as I was
watching it even today,
you know, is a similar situation.
It's hard, that's harder to talk about.
I try not to think about it.
(audience laughs)
I think that, yeah, because
at the end of the day,
I have to keep on top of
a lot of different issues,
certain cues to the band members,
I gotta remember to put
this instrument down,
pick that up, go there, and so,
if I, you know, indulge myself
in the experience too much,
then I'm gonna lose it anyway. (laughs)
So I just kind of, you know,
let go and just take it on
and try to survive through the two hours.
(laughs) It seems to work.
- Thank you very much.
A quick comment and a question.
The comment is back to the wardrobe issue,
and I just wanted to
share my impression when,
at the end of the marriage scene,
her handmaid veils her
fully with her blue.
That was very, that struck me very much
as a Virgin Mary look with the blue.
- [Mehmet] Oh, I see, okay.
- Intentional or not, I don't know.
But the other, the question I had was
was it a practical matter
that you hope will eventually,
over time, go away, to hold the scores,
or do you feel that it's a part of,
an essential part of the work?
- We worked it into, and we thought that
it was a way to complement also, again,
the differentiation, just like the masks.
We wanted to create this relationship
between the storyteller
and the characters,
and the fact that they were
coming in and out of the band,
we had to find ways to
make that relationship
more meaningful just on stage.
One method was masks.
The other was the rug,
everyone stepping on top of
the rug and coming in and out.
And also the scores.
And so there are many
times when we're not even
looking at it, but with, try to highlight
as much as possible, the
hand, so in other words,
when they're handed to us,
they're actually quite visibly filmed,
and that's part of this
establishment that it's really
the storyteller who is bringing
these characters to life,
and then he directs them.
He gives us, you know, so
we're kind of like puppets.
And at one point there was
this idea of maybe, you know,
pushing the image of the, you know,
being a little bit more puppet-like,
but then we didn't quite buy that.
I don't know why, and we kind of let go.
So there was a, I don't
know if you're familiar
with Stravinsky's "Petrushka," you know,
so there was a kind of
moment when we were thinking
about that kind of an idea,
but then we decided to be more
natural with our movements,
but really make it visible
that we would take the scores.
And every single time a
character is handed the score
the first time, there's
this moment of discovery,
et cetera, a little bit.
So kind of like that.
It's, you know, a lot of
things in this is unique,
a lot of decisions, and, for example,
in our many experiences of
performing the live production,
we have come across, you
know, if the audience members
were really devoted fans of stage opera,
the scores, you know, ended up throwing
a couple of them off.
They didn't quite get it.
Or maybe we didn't quite get it, I don't,
I mean, I'm not gonna take a side on this,
because I understand, you know.
But at the same time,
that's why we kept on saying
from the very, from the get-go,
it's a coffee house opera.
It really is not an opera.
It's this, you know.
And it is, I mean, who will
ever assemble 11 musicians
and a storyteller and try to put
something like this together?
And this is really the
way to make it way work.
It cannot be a real opera.
It cannot be something that
is entirely not an opera.
It is what it is.
It's a unique way of
blending all of these things.
(orchestral music)
