eighth blackbird confronts composer Amy Beth Kirsten’s commedia dell’arte demons
eighth blackbird: Heart and Breath, MCA Chicago. September 12, 2014. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.
Chicago’s multi-grammy-award-winning new music sextet eighth blackbird stretched the boundaries of musical performance practice once again in their presentation of composer Amy Beth Kirsten’s commedia dell’arte dreamscape Colombine’s Paradise Theatre. The centerpiece of a concert titled “Heart and Breath” at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on September 12, 2014, the ‘birds performance was both heart-arresting and breathtaking.
For this project, nearly two years in the making, Kirsten borrowed from the classic 16th and 17th century Italian art form and adapted Isabella Andreini poetry from 1601. Mining both her early work as a singer and songwriter and her more recent focus on contemporary composition, she has crafted music that commands a visceral commitment from the ‘birds beyond simply playing their instruments with every virtuosic technique in their substantial reservoir. This work requires them to fearlessly extend their musicality into singing, mannered speaking (even breathing), acting, and precisely choreographed movement about the stage, often in costumes and masks. In choosing the characters for her commedia, Kirsten professed a life-long fascination with the iconic love triangle of Colombine, Harlequin, and Pierrot. They captured her fancy and haunted her dreams as a child, as if Jungian archetypes of good and evil, darkness and light. Colombine is Kirsten’s childhood dream-world doppelgänger, with Pierrot drawing her towards Apollonian enlightenment, while Harlequin tempts her towards Dionysian darkness and carnality.
Michael Maccaferri, Tim Munro, and Yvonne Lam of eighth blackbird in Heart and Breath, MCA Chicago. September 12, 2014. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.
From the opening section, captioned “death sweet breath,” we know the players are inhabiting that porous border region between awake and dreaming. Structures at the edges of the stage are draped in diaphanous sheets of cloth in Harlequin’s signature pattern. The lights come up to find Colombine (pianist Lisa Kaplan) collapsed and asleep in a heap on the floor. Spectral figures lurk about the edges of the scene. Colombine awakes to her dream with a start, and repeatedly sighs a loud “Oh!” followed by deep audible breaths. Harbinger (cellist Nicholas Photinos) enters and plays a cello solo, setting the scene. The three-bodied Harlequin (flutist Tim Munro, violinist/violist Yvonne Lam, and clarinetist Michael Maccaferri) enters, ritually donning their costumes and masks to play their parts in the dream, and join in the musical thread begun by Harbinger. Munro take the Harlequin lead playing an idyll of seduction on his flute while simultaneously singing “...I alone can know my Colombine again. Let me eat her Reason: let me swallow every light that blinds her...” Meanwhile, at the edge of Colombine’s consciousness, Pierrot (percussionist Matthew Duvall) has entered and pulled one of the set drapes to reveal a cornucopia of instruments, representing the vast wealth of knowledge he can impart. Colombine intently listens to Pierrot’s rhythmic playing, trying to resist Harlequin's charms.
In the second section, Pierrot hangs the moon for Colombine, in the form of a glowing bass drum, to brighten her dark dreamscape. But she resists his influence, and sings “my charming murderer,” remembering Harlequin: “...a delirium more handsome than ever turns his gaze on me...” The highlight of the third section is a frantic piano duet featuring Harlequin (with Yvonne Lam in that guise) as a puppet master to Colombine, forcing her to revel in a carnal keyboard fantasy. The fourth section features an exhausted Pierrot crawling across the stage, drumming the floor and other implements being carried along for him.
Tim Munro as Harlequin and Matt Duvall as Pierrot vie for the attention of Lisa Kaplan's Colombine. Photo credit: eighth blackbird
In the finale, captioned “she comes undone,” the characters ritually doff their costumes for the final time, dropping them at their feet as if their characters have now vanished. Next, they pull down the all the set draping, leaving a bare unadorned stage. All but Colombine and Harbinger exit, and they play a final piano and cello duet. The artifice and Colombine’s dream are over. She returns to the waking world knowing that her dreamworld companions are sure to return.
The sense of a waking/dreamland netherworld is sustained throughout the work by the repeated use of a sleeping Colombine to start new scenes and the ritual donning and doffing of costumes and masks. In the final analysis, it is impossible to separate the elements of music, performance, stagecraft, and artifice; Colombine’s Paradise Theatre is all of a piece. And that is what makes it such an enthralling experience. None of Kirsten’s creation or the ‘birds performance would be possible without the brilliant stage direction and choreography of Mark DeChiazza, sound design and production by Ryan Ingebritsen, lighting design by Mary Ellen Stebbins, and costume design by Sylvianne Shurman.
“Heart and Breath” began with a mashup of old and new music massaged into a convincing four-movement prelude that set the stage musically for Colombine’s Paradise Theatre and prefigured some its thematic material. This prelude consisted of Duo for Heart and Breath (2012) by Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire), Lamento della ninfa (1638) by Claudio Monteverdi (arranged by Munro), Moro, lasso, al mio duolo (1611) by Carlo Gesualdo (also arranged by Munro), and Babys (2009) by Bon Iver (arranged by Kaplan).
“Heart and Breath” was first performed in the fall of 2103 at University of Richmond and at the Atlas theater in Washington, D.C. New Yorkers get their first chance to see and hear this production on Thursday, September 18, 2014, at Miller Theater, Columbia University.
