‘STAR CHOIR’s Message Is Lost in a Bottle of Space Dust (The NoPro Review)
LA’s The Industry makes unenterprising missteps with its new opera
side by side we stay alive
side by side but far apart
These lyrics from STAR CHOIR resonated with me. And by resonated, I mean I was disturbed.
First, some context: STAR CHOIR is an opera by The Industry, an innovative, Los Angeles-based collective dedicated to contemporary perspectives and experimental works. Site-specific experiences have been set in parks, river beds, train stations, and limos.
The Industry describes the opera as “a meditation on the challenges and pleasures of mutual coexistence.” Audiences observe space colonists as they flee Earth in search of a new planetary home. Inspired by science fiction, in particular the author Octavia E. Butler, this galactic tale traces a familiar arc: the human crew invades a novel planet and chaos ensues. The colony is destroyed and the surviving crew is absorbed into the landscape as a mycelial-like network of telepathic organisms.
The production was hosted at the Mount Wilson Observatory, an inherent balance of science and design, and an ideal cosmic venue. In 2022, the Mount Wilson Institute launched a series of arts programming beginning with Within Sound: The Acoustic Sculptures of Michael Brewster, which showcased the observatory’s otherworldly acoustics.
Previous Industry projects have centered around colonialism, immigration, social justice, and the lived experience of those impacted by systemic violence and racism (the breathtaking HIVE RISE is one such project). STAR CHOIR’s astronomic story of colonialism and its total destructiveness was a natural progression for the company. The experience seemed perfectly primed thematically and spatially.
And then it lost its way.
The observatory’s dome is a massive structure, like a spacecraft in its own right. A small cast of eight struggled to maintain presence across the dome’s diameter. With the 100-inch telescope rising from the center, visibility of the walkway was limited. Even with singers in view, there were blocking missteps: one singer repeatedly stood directly in front of the monitor, obscuring the supertitles. This could potentially be attributed to rehearsal constraints within the observatory, but The Industry’s identity is, in large part, defined by performances in challenging and unconventional locations.
The sci-fi canon in novels and film has long probed STAR CHOIR’s general premise and although the opera was billed as a “reimagining [of] humanity as a porous category that must transform to survive,” the story failed to soar. By Act Three, the story felt so porous that it lacked clear and compelling definition. In spite of the superb orchestra and gorgeous music, the libretto and staging failed to deliver. In the end, the climax was delivered by the venue’s extraordinary capabilities, not the show itself.
However, none of that was the most significant lapse. The experience was ultimately eclipsed by a fundamental error — a giant, unspoken black hole and a dissonance so surreal that it overshadowed the singers’ lucent voices.
That error was Covid — or more precisely, its complete omission.
An almost entirely maskless audience sat in shared air and took in a production teeming with epidemiologist language. The libretto is a composition of viruses, symptoms, and infection (one chapter title employs the double entendre of “transmission”). Within the show’s plot is an invasive duality: the planet is allergic to humans and, in defense, infects them. Within the show’s staging was a cognitive disconnect: an audience watching a fictional narrative full of warnings without adhering to those same warnings in a current, parallel, and very real situation. Using wastewater data as a guide, there was a statistically strong probability that someone at STAR CHOIR was infected with Covid, perhaps without knowing it, and actively shedding the virus amongst the crowd.
Aside from personal preference and artistic license, our modern global pandemic (and its role as a mass-disabling event), is now so deeply interwoven into the cultural, scientific, and historical fabric of humanity it cannot be ignored when an in-person production’s metaphorical concept includes a life-altering virus and its fatal aftermath as a critical focal point.
In the program, it’s noted that The Industry “develop[ed] the work over several years,” but it’s unclear if that timeline began pre-pandemic. The crux is that it doesn’t matter. Had the production incorporated Covid, had it leveraged the reality we’re all still living in — even if many long to reject it — it could have elevated the messaging beyond sci-fi’s standard tropes; its visceral tangibility could have served as a communal acknowledgment of what’s actually, authentically at stake when we engage in these theoretical and existential conversations.
Instead, the experience felt hollow and unintentionally satirical.
To be clear (and without getting too prescriptive), the remedy is not for the opera to explicitly integrate Covid into the libretto or other aspects of the performance. However, safety protocol for the crew and audience could have been an in-world element that protected everyone present while emphasizing the transformative impact of the past four years. We didn’t need to travel millions of light years into the universe for humanity to encounter a worldwide pathogenic threat. So why immerse ourselves in art that ignores both the immediate practical risks and the broader philosophical questions of a problem that is already here?
It makes sense that the easier option, the one with seemingly less friction, was to avoid any talk or action around Covid — except that The Industry is exactly the kind of intrepid company to go against popular (and in this case ableist) opinion rather than take an apathetic route. (Covid precautions would also align with the company’s stated values of access and inclusion.) The Industry’s past work is a testament to its willingness to push forward inconvenient conversations about uncomfortable truths. And the truth is that Covid changed our world.
side by side we stay alive
side by side but far apart
At STAR CHOIR we were indeed side by side, but The Industry missed an opportunity to be a true star, to stand out far apart from the mainstream and chart a different course.
STAR CHOIR by Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade ran Sept. 30th — Oct. 1 at Mount Wilson Observatory.
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[Original publication: No Proscenium, 10/12/23]