“Eat The Document” was my debut of working on an opera. The wonderful and brilliant director, Kristin Marting, let me onto the team and taught me exactly what she needed her assistant (me) to do. Clear lines, great communication and transparency made for a work environment where I quickly learned completely new skills – skills that all looked like the world I’m from (theatre), but tasted like something completely different (opera).
“Eat The Document” was an “Alternative opera”, and coming from a world of pretty alternative theatre, a lot felt familiar to me. A bunch of the methods and the inisticts I’m trained in following as (assistant) director turned out to play a big part in making the experience as wonderful as it was; to me it seems that working with 8 opera performers managing costume changes, measure countings, acting, singing, hitting marks and living through war traumas through the heightened emotions of the opera genre was similar to, say, 7 south african performers building a western movie set while shooting a movie and playing both white europeans while telling a story about apartheid and the human heart of darkness. Organised chaos, high stakes, attention to detail, a caring and talented team that knows the importance of the story they’re telling – I felt all at home in the strange new world I inhabited during the rehearsal of ETD.
A BEAUTIFULLY CURIOUS WORLD WHERE…
…the assistant director have never lived in new york before or worked with opera before or read the book it’s based on yet, and so it’s nice for her to know what prototype festival is (embarrassing) and what some basic opera terms mean (embarrassing) even though this is clearly not a basic opera (is there such thing, i guess i mean it’s not”classical”) and what the story is about (why is it so embarrassing to have once not known what you know how? actually dumb)
… a libretto is a script
(this one brilliantly written by librettist Kelley Rourke)
… some words are in italian
(“TUTTI” is not a name, it means “everybody”, but “ENSEMBLE” also means “everybody”, so that was one of the questions)
…you can’t just make last minute changes or new endings day before the opening, because a score was composed many months ago and some of it actually pre-covid
(this one beautifully composed by John Glover)
… rehearsal schedules are very detailed, rarely chronological and actually kept, because you can’t just rehearse something else because the other performers aren’t there because there’s literally nothing to do for those performers if they weren’t already scheduled in because it’s all music and the music director can’t be two places at once
… costume changes aren’t to be fucked around with, because you can’t just stall the score, so it’s helpful to know how many measures you have to change into a completely different character off stage, because that might be 15 seconds
… notes are referred to by measure numbers and not page numbers
… blocking is by surgical precision and there’s no time or space to write full names or unnecessary words
… where words are poor; where a moment when a single word, within the music, channeled through an insanely brilliant performer, creates a moment so emotional it gave me goosebumps over and over. “Exasperated move” become nothing but words of reference from director to performer. Useful but ridiculously short of meaning.
I don’t know if any of this is different from how other people usually work – I’ve been told this was not a usual opera. I’ve come to know that the composer is groundbreaking in mixing genres. I learned that the director, being from the world of theatre and not opera, has a completely and more theatre-based approach to rehearsals (which may be why I felt such at home). I think maybe the fact that the librettist was able to change a few lines during the rehearsals was very unusual, helpful and “flexible”.
This opera was not devised, I don’t think. It was developed. So much had happened before the rehearsals started, years of research and set design models, of composing and writing and talking with the author of the book. But so much also happened once rehearsals started. I’ve never paid this much attention to blocking, to the importance of a look, of a gesture, of routes through the stage and physical relationships between the characters. I think I’ve learned that there’s still so much space for creativity and ideas and impulses and care and love for the story even though the essence of the material had already been developed. This might be why I love a good script as well. Maybe I should really write more. And spend the time giving it life instead of altering it. At least that’s one way to do it. Worth a try. Stay tuned.
