Noises Off
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Maybe the administrators were spooked by the show’s catalog essay, written by Christoph Cox. It describes Burns’s piece as humorous but also “alarming,” drawing from the verbal “ejaculations” of the fashion photographer, transforming “dictatorial commands” into “a disembodied sonic superego” that “barks orders at passers-by.” It also mentions Michelangelo Antonioni’s hard-partying 1966 freak-out film Blowup as an inspiration. What respectable academic weenie wouldn’t be nervous?
The voice belongs to Burns; the setup is his means of exploring a paradox. He says people are at their most private when they’re out in public. “Walking down the street, they have blinders on; they don’t want to talk to anybody and don’t want to be spoken to. When they’re home, it’s kind of a flip–they’re open to the world, willing to let all sorts of information pour into their lives.” Posing Phrases is a disruption of public privacy, however mild. In the shadow of 9/11, Burns says, that might look like a problem to the college administration. Without the terrorist attacks, “I think the work would have been installed and no one would have said anything.” As it is, “there’s something about putting a disembodied voice on the street–maybe they felt it would create some kind of discomfort at a point where all people really wanted was to feel more comfortable with being out.”
“Two years ago, no one would have dreamt it,” says Chicago Opera Theater general director Brian Dickie of the news that COT will take last season’s production of Orfeo to the prestigious Brooklyn Academy of Music for four performances as part of BAM’s Monteverdi festival next spring. It’s no coincidence that two years ago was when Dickie arrived at COT and began to remake it, renouncing its mission of doing operas in English and quashing any delusions about competing with the Lyric. Under Dickie the company has specialized in works too small in scale for the Civic Opera House, and he’s changed the dates of the season to minimize Lyric overlap. He’s also imported talent–like Orfeo’s British conductor Jane Glover and New York director Diane Paulus–while recruiting the cream of the local crop (directors Mary Zimmerman and Michael Halberstam, for example, and members of the Newberry Consort). And maybe the BAM invitation shouldn’t be a big surprise: it’ll be COT’s first time, but not Dickie’s. He took the Canadian Opera Company there in ’93, when he was its general director. “When it became clear to me during rehearsal of Orfeo that we had something special on our hands, I called Joe [Melillo, BAM’s executive producer],” he says. Melillo came, saw, and was immediately smitten. COT has received $40,000 for the New York production from a single donor (the One World Foundation); Dickie says that’s about 10 percent of what it’ll cost. BAM will come up with the rest.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Bruce Powell.
