Long Beach Opera vs. The Rock

ARTS WATCH - The ever adventurous Long Beach Opera has once again taken a bold, but carefully crafted, yet still insanely wild swing at the ball, and this time knocked it over the fence. Since this is the very same weekend that the 340 ton rock finally found its way through our streets to the L.A. County Museum of Art, it's hard not to compare these efforts at creation and to make some editorial (or perhaps philosophical) judgments as to their relative worth. Here's a hint: I think the Lacma rock loses.

Let's start with the opera, because there is only one more performance, to be held next Saturday March 17.

In the years before and just after the first world war, a French émigré by the name of Guillaume Apollinaire invented a dramatic form which he named surrealism. His play The Breasts of Tiresias was first performed in 1917. The composer Francis Poulenc, perhaps best known for his opera Dialogues of the Carmelites, took Apollinaire's play and turned it into a comedic opera. Unlike some of Poulenc's other operatic music, this score is playful and jazzy. There is a hint of big band, an opening that is reminiscent of I Pagliacci, and an ending that reminded me a little of grand opera crossed with the American musical theater.

To today's audience, The Breasts of Tiresias plays something like an off-Broadway musical with a lot of lush orchestral playing, tuneful singing, and a plot line that is odd. It's so odd that we moderns would likely dust off that overly worn term "surrealist" to describe it. But it actually is surrealist, and in the original sense of the term.

Surrealism deals in dream imagery and thoughts unimpeded by our normal critical rationality. We think of Salvadore Dali's paintings of melting watches or the works of Yves Tanguy, or any of a whole room full of amazing paintings you can find at the Art Institute of Chicago. For a feel of what surrealist painting looks like, click on this link and then click on the picture.[link] By coincidence, the painting I have picked is titled The Rock, but my choice is not an attempt at cleverness. It's simply the fact that this has been one of my all-time favorite paintings since I saw it up close more than three decades ago. But at the same time, I think it's fair to invite comparison between Peter Blume's remarkable painting and the Lacma Rock, and to invite judgment as to which is superior art and which is not.

To continue, imagine thinking in surrealistic terms including the kind of imagery we see in surrealist paintings. Then turn those thoughts into a play, and then turn the play into a short opera. Poulenc did the final part in 1944, leading to the 2012 production in Long Beach.

The theme of Tiresias is frankly feminist. The plot line comes across as a little weird at first. A woman (Therese is her name) decides she is fed up with her wifely duties of bearing children and feeding her husband. She therefore decides to become a man. This is accomplished by the symbolic (for us) shedding of her breasts, which is accomplished on-stage by the production of balloons which leave her costume. She goes off to engage in politics and then be a General in some foreign war.

Her husband, meanwhile, converts to wearing a dress and bearing children.

All of this is accompanied by singing and dancing, a comedic duel (reminiscent of Mark Twain's famous satiric short piece The French Duel), and a lot of enjoyable music from the orchestra.

The Therese part is played by Ani Maldjian, a local who received a rave write-up in the LA Times the same day as the opening performance.  She is joined by Suzan Hanson, an LBO stalwart with an impressive resume, and  Robin Buck as the husband who surrealistically takes over a previously female task by bearing 40,049 children (all in one day). I warned you that the plotline is a little weird. It's supposed to be.

The LBO production adds one other ultra-short opera, The Tears of a Knife, to lead off the entire show. This one is equally surrealist but takes a different tone. Composed by Bohuslav Martinu, Tears uses the same cast as Tiresias, but in a more somber way. A young woman (played by Maldjian) falls in love with a man who is already dead. He committed suicide by hanging himself. She somehow manages to marry him. A neighbor who may or may not be Satan involves himself. As I said earlier, the surrealist movement out of which these pieces emerged involved stories that sound crazy, but when you experience the performances, you realize that they get to our inner fears and our attempts to deal with them.

In summary, the LBO production includes two short operas shoehorned into less than 2 hours of performing time. The first (Tears of a Knife) comes across as deep and a little dry, and the second, longer piece is what the person sitting in front of me referred to as "adorable." They are also more than just entertainment, as they involve questions about the reality of being human. In other words, they are, in the real sense, art.

In discussions with LBO, I was informed that the cost for this production including two performances runs in the region of $120,000.

And then we have The Rock. Not the Peter Blume painting, but the Lacma project. It involved a contraption described by the news media as "the size of a football field" transporting a boulder through the streets of Los Angeles County, and before that some other county. Perhaps calling it the Lacma Rock is not quite fair, because the artist who created the project is giving it the title Levitated Mass. I think it's fair to conclude that the Mass is Levitated only in the sense that it's going to be set down on top of a walled walkway through which Lacma patrons will stroll, eventually passing beneath the rock. In other words, it's only levitated in the sense that it's not levitated. Maybe it should be retitled Perched Mass or Squating Rock. We can't even call it Hanging Rock, because that's already been taken. Hey, bring your lunch and you can Picnic at Levitated Mass.

Perhaps this is being too harsh. It's just a rock, and maybe when we get to see it up close it will bring epiphany. After all, the artist only found the right rock after a couple of decades or so of looking. Maybe it's the right rock. Maybe it has chiseled features that will inspire deep insights.

I don't know. It all seems like a lot of trouble to bring the mountain side to the mid-Wilshire neighborhood. There's lots of rocks and boulders and cliffs not far from here, and many of us hike to them, walk around them, and clamber over them. I'm reminded of an observation I made a few years ago while visiting Yosemite. There are wonders to experience if only you are willing to walk a quarter of a mile past the end of the paved road, yet most of Yosemite's tourists don't do so. There are rocky masses around Sentinel Dome that dwarf not only the Levitated Mass but all of Lacma itself. If you are willing to walk a little further still, you will experience amazing things, and you will be experiencing a beautiful reality that does not involve a man-made tunnel.

And this brings up what the news media have been having so much fun with -- the price for the rock project. It's ten million dollars. Obviously a lot of that went into transportation and the building of the unlevitated pedestrian walkway upon which the rock will rest. Still, it's ten million dollars. Perhaps it is better communicated in capital letters: IT'S TEN MILLION DOLLARS!

A Lacma spokesperson assured the public in patronizing tones that the money all came from private donations. We are entitled to question the priorities of our donor classes when Long Beach Opera goes begging but Levitated Mass's dance card is full.

I think we are about to enter an era in which excess and waste in municipal spending will be rendered in a new unit which I will call the rock. In this accounting, one rock is equal to ten million dollars. We now have a unit by which we can compare useful and productive spending on culture (or government, for that matter) with the excessive, the frivolous, and the downright hoggish.

The whole LBO production of Tiresias was barely one centirock: that is to say, one one-hundredth of the ten big ones that make up one full rock unit. Just to offer one bit of embarrassing comparison, the annual salary of Lacma's director is slightly more than one million dollars a year, now rendered as one decirock. As local news media have pointed out, paying the director of Lacma over a million dollars a year to preside over Levitated Mass and the destruction of a celebrated film program is a bit much. Had Lacma's director been willing to forego even 7 millirocks (that's $70,000 per year), Lacma could have preserved Ian Birnie's renowned film program. And that film program was, by any lights, valuable art.

(Robert Gelfand is the 2012 Chair of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Coalition. He occasionally writes about cultural issues for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected])



CityWatch

Vol 10 Issue 21

Pub. March 13, 2012