Long-running minimal electronic group Xeno & Oaklander turned heads with 2019’s Hypnos, where they shed much of their usual monochromatic textures and left-field predilections for a pop-forward direction powered by polyphonic synthesizers. But the about-face proved successful, and the Brooklyn-based duo of Sean McBride and Liz Wendelbro continued down that Technicolor path on 2021’s Vi/deo, recorded in their Connecticut home studio in the first year of the pandemic. Its songs feel both inviting and distant, nostalgic and modern: “Infinite Sadness” juxtaposes Wendelbro’s half-whispered, wistful singing against bold, propulsive rhythms and foreboding melodies, while the uncanny, icy “Raingarden” could pass as the theme song for a long-lost 80s murder-mystery TV show.
Xeno & Oakland Credit: Liz Wendelbo
Xeno & Oaklander’s brand-new eighth album, Via Negativa (In the Doorway Light), may be titled and themed around “a study of what not to do,” but musically speaking, the duo get plenty right. On “Lost and There,” McBride and Wendelbro trade vocal lines over a backdrop of heightening suspense, and “Actor’s Foil” is built on a staunch rhythm that seems to mirror Wendelbro’s opening line (“You walk with intention / In the circle of my attention”). On “O Vermillion,” McBride’s deadpan delivery counters Wendelbro’s airy singing and spoken-word vocals, which together recall the romantic style of classic French pop. The record’s lush atmospheres and robust beats should feel even more gigantic live, so break out your dancing shoes.
Chicago indie-rock outfit Spun Out have always drawn inspiration from UK postpunk of all stripes—especially its tendency to create drama by adding a sudden ray of sunshine to a dark, austere atmosphere. Their best material rushes past your ears like the breeze off a northern beach. “Pale Green Sky,” from the new Dream Noise (Shuga), opens with sounds that remind me of crashing waves and ocean spray, but even if it didn’t, I would’ve imagined them. On Dream Noise, Spun Out lean into psychedelia to make their otherwise stark songs sound vital and expansive, like a garden going through its full spring bloom in a matter of minutes. Everyone in the band plays with the relaxed poise of a veteran musician, which we’ve got every reason to expect: keyboardist James Weir and guitarist-vocalist Michael Wells were in Ne-Hi, bassist Chris Sutter leads Meat Wave, synth player Sean Page records under his own name, and drummer Joshua Wells is also a producer and engineer who’s worked with Destroyer (he recorded and mixed Dream Noise too). Spun Out can ignite their songs with nimble shifts and huge structural transitions, and “High Life” is a perfect example, progressing from a pensive postpunk melody to a dreamy falsetto prechorus and then into an uplifting, anthemic chorus whose triumphant swagger takes over the outro.
Spun Out Tension Pets and Finesse open. Sat 11/23, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $15, 21+
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Leor Galil (he/him) started writing for the Chicago Reader in 2010. He joined the staff in 2012 and became a senior staff writer in 2020.
Galil mainly covers music, with a singular focus on Chicago artists, scenes, and phenomena.
He’s won a handful of journalism awards; he’s won two first-place awards from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (for music writing in 2020 and arts feature in 2022) and a Peter Lisagor award (for Best Arts Reporting and Criticism in 2022).
Galil lives in Chicago. He speaks English and can be contacted at [email protected].
Snotty Nose Rez Kids are a Vancouver-based hip-hop duo who use their music to explore their Indigenous identities, dismantle stereotypes and misconceptions, and shed light on the ongoing impacts of colonialism. Darren “Young D” Metz and Quinton “Yung Trybez” Nyce grew up down the street from each other in the Haisla Nation of British Columbia’s Kitamaat Village. After high school, when Metz pursued an audio engineering program, they began recording together for one of his class assignments. In 2016, they officially formed Snotty Nose Rez Kids, and the following year they self-released their self-titled debut and its follow-up, The Average Savage, which was short-listed for the 2018 Polaris Prize and nominated for Best Rap/Hip-Hop Album at the Indigenous Music Awards.
Snotty Nose Rez Kids signed to Sony in 2023, which afforded them more resources and studio time to stretch out and experiment on their fifth full-length (they’ve estimated they made more than 50 demos before paring down the record’s final tracks). Red Future embodies a spirit of Indigenous futurism, and its imaginative, beat-heavy songs, which feature guest spots from a who’s who of contemporary Indigenous artists, including Calgary rapper Drezus and Australian electro-soul duo Electric Fields, share visions of liberation, sovereignty, and self-determination. As Nyce raps on “Peaches” (which features a powerful verse from feminist rapper Princess Nokia), “Dis ain’t ’bout the money, the fame, or awards / We for the children like child support / I’m rez to the bone, straight from the source / I been on fire, I come with the torch.” Snotty Nose Rez Kids embrace the duality of maintaining centuries-old traditions in a modern world on the lighthearted “BBE” (an abbreviation for “big braid energy”), while the dark, gritty “Devil’s Club,” featuring Apsaalooke Nation singer-songwriter Rezcoast Grizz, plays off the name of a spike-covered shrub (used for ceremonial and medicinal purposes in many Indigenous communities) to create a metaphor for being dangerously self-contained. “We’ve always said, ‘Tell your story the way you want it to be told, and the universe will gravitate towards it,’” Metz said in a 2021 video interview for SOCANmusic. So far, they’ve been right on the mark.
Snotty Nose Rez Kids Travis Thompson opens. Fri 11/22, 7 PM, Cobra Lounge, 235 N. Ashland, $37.08, $30.90 in advance, all ages
In a 2015 interview on the AirGo Radio podcast, host Daniel Kisslinger called Jasmine Barber, who raps as J Bambii, “Chicago’s shining light.” That praise may sound grandiose at first pass, but the multihyphenate creative has earned it with her art and her years of building community by organizing parties, film screenings, fishing trips, tarot readings, and artist showcases on the south side and beyond.
Barber has been etching her name into the foundation of Chicago’s artistic scene since she was a teenager. She became enamored with spoken-word poetry as a freshman at Morgan Park High School after hearing Daniel Beaty’s poem “Knock Knock,” which explores the relationship between a Black boy and the father who abandoned him. “I remember being like, ‘This is what I’m supposed to do,’” she recalled in a 2023 interview with the Sun-Times. So she began writing and performing, honing her craft at West Town creative writing incubator Young Chicago Authors, where she won awards for her slam poetry.
Barber’s poetic beginnings are omnipresent in her music, especially in the fluid way she lays down vivid metaphors next to real-world experiences. On “Chaos,” the lead single from her forthcoming debut album, Black American Beauty, she describes feeling simultaneously fetishized and rejected by past lovers. “Niggas’ tongues got amnesia all of a sudden / Hiding all yo crystals when you leaving the coven / Tryna act like it ain’t me that you loving,” she raps.
Barber speaks with emotional potency; she’s not shy about confessing and confronting her feelings in interviews, social media posts, or in person. But in her music she doesn’t just tell you about the introspection, spirituality, and healingthat powers her creativity, she invites you to experience it with her—and that feels very fucking good.
When it comes to music, this year has been especially busy for Barber. Along with her work as J Bambii, she’s held a DJ residency at California Clipper under the name Psychic Pu$$y, and she’s continued to organize and host monthly south-side party the Fifi, which she launched in 2022. And in October, she released her second short film, Church Fan (following last year’s Chaos), which doubles as a music video for the album single of the same name.
At this Sleeping Village show, Barber will perform songs from Black American Beauty. She’ll have support from Ohio artists Pink Siifu (currently based in Atlanta) and Sista Salem, plus hometown artists Dialect Tre and Such N Such (who will open the night with a DJ set).
J Bambii Pink Siifu, Sista Salem, Dialect Tre, and Such N Such open. Sat 11/23, 8:30 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $22.66, 21+
In June 2023, the city gave landmark status to a stubby brick factory building at 206 S. Jefferson—in the late 1970s, it had housed the nightclub where Frankie Knuckles wove funk, disco, soul, and pop into the subcultural lifeline that became known as house music. Three months earlier, Preservation Chicago had named the Warehouse one of the city’s seven most endangered historical buildings, and seeing the city move quickly (relatively speaking) gave me some hope that it might do more to celebrate house music as a bona fide Chicago institution. After all, house became a global phenomenon thanks to generations of Chicagoans who are in many cases still producing, DJing, and dancing—and few get their flowers while they’re still alive. The 1987 Rhythm Controll single “My House” became a foundational text of the genre thanks to an impassioned (and widely sampled) dance-floor sermon by producer and vocalist Chuck Roberts, but when Roberts died this past June, the Sun-Times called him an “unknown house music legend.”
Marshall Jefferson and Byron Stingily Credit: Courtesy the artist
Earlier this year, storied house producer Vince Lawrence launched House Music 40, a nonprofit dedicated to celebrating the genre’s history (especially its Black origins) and giving financial support to local house artists struggling with health issues. The nonprofit’s name references the number of years that have passed since Lawrence and Chosen Few DJ Jesse Saunders made the first original house record, Saunders’s “On and On,” which helped establish the genre’s identity and accelerated its international takeover. This past January, Chicago house promoter Kirk Townsend (who as a teenager in the late 1970s helped turn Mendel High School into a crucial house hub) launched a GoFundMe to help Saunders recover from a severe stroke he suffered in November 2022. The musicians, promoters, and fans who built house aren’t waiting around for the city to provide for their community. House Music 40 is among the cosponsors of tonight’s unusual performance by Chicago house veterans Ten City, who’ve been active on and off since 1987. They’ll be backed by a 14-piece band, which ought to do a lot to flesh out the sophisticated ornamentation and glamorous flair on the band’s recordings—I’ve listened to Ten City’s 1989 hit “That’s the Way Love Is” often enough to wonder what it’d be like to see a live string section interact in real time with the velvety vocals of Byron Stingily. And as a setting for this grand display, Metro is perfect: Joe Shanahan has a long history with house and opened Metro and Smart Bar in 1982, drawing inspiration from his experiences at the Warehouse and Chicago’s first punk disco, La Mere Vipere. And while I still dream of the day when Ten City can command a stage at Soldier Field or the United Center, this might be an even better way to celebrate their contributions to house: surrounded by people who care about it in a space intimate enough to remind you that you’re as much a part of this culture as the people onstage.
Ten City This concert, billed as “Ten City and friends,” also includes White Knight, Curtis McClain, Harry Dennis, and the Good Girls. Fri 11/22, 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $50, $40 in advance, four tickets $100, table for two $150, 18+
Every few years, Chicago’s storied, genre-mashing metal outfit Immortal Bird migrates back into the studio to weave a prickly yet embracing sort of nest. Their new album, October’s Sin Querencia (20 Buck Spin), is their first full-length since 2019’s Thrive on Neglect, and its arrival suggests a band who like to take their time at their craft. The group have scaled down from a four-piece to a three-piece in the studio, and the assured feel of the new material shows that vocalist Rae Amitay, guitarist Nate Madden, and drummer Matt Korajczyk are collaborators who know each other’s minds.
They recorded the album with Pete Grossmann at Bricktop Recording, with all three members playing bass parts (and Amitay adding keyboard and synth). It opens with “Bioluminescent Toxins,” which plays like a multichapter story; it’s raw, dank, and aggressive, and it cracks open in the middle to let the light through with lilting, clean vocals before brutally slamming shut. Immortal Bird are a band with so many ideas they can blow through them promiscuously or turn on a dime, and on Sin Querencia there isn’t a dull or wasted moment. The pummeling, churning riff of “Propagandized” fades into the inexorable tsunami surge of “Ocean Endless,” which relentlessly shifts through startling tempo changes and abrupt twists and turns. The rhythm section really shines bright, and the starkly angular title track is bolstered by a nimble, rubbery bass line from Kayhan Vaziri (Coliseum, Yautja), Amitay’s bandmate in the duo Wretched Blessing. (Vaziri has also been providing additional thunder to Immortal Bird as their live bassist.)
Immortal Bird Credit: Vanessa Valadez
“Sin querencia” essentially means to be without a place where one feels safe, and this album evokes the dread of a world where fascism appears to be creeping at every corner. But perhaps paradoxically, its heavy, dark music is compelling and inviting enough to become a querencia in itself, where outside pressures match the pressures within, evoking a sense of catharsis that brings relief.On Facebook, Immortal Bird have warned that this Reggies release party will be their last local show for quite a while—now that Sin Querencia is out, they plan to play a few gigs here and there and with any luck embark on some major tours next year. This stacked bill also includes Indianapolis death-doom outfit Mother of Graves, Lake County hardcore band Payasa, and Chicago blackened thrash unit Apophy.
Immortal Bird Mother of Graves, Payasa, and Apophy open. Sat 11/23, 8 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $25, $20 in advance, 17+
Shakespeare’s brooding Danish prince has never been far away from stages around the world. But in Chicago, we’ve seen some innovative reimaginings of Hamlet in 2024. Eddie Izzard’s one-person interpretation played at Chicago Shakespeare in April, Red Theater offered a stripped-down take on the text in May, and the New York Circus Project’s physical interpretation hit the Studebaker in August.
Now, internationally renowned French Canadian director Robert Lepage comes to town with The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark, a piece he created in collaboration with choreographer Guillaume Côté, who performs the title role. The show, which premiered at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre in early April, makes its U.S. debut at the Harris Theater on November 23 and 24.
The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark Sat 11/23 7:30 PM, Sun 11/24 1 and 6:30 PM; Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph, 312-334-7777, harristheaterchicago.org, $58-$168
Lepage, whose lengthy résumé stretches back over 40 years in theater, film, opera, and circus—and whose use of new technologies in performance has long been a hallmark of his work—tells me in a phone conversation a few weeks ago he has directed the play several times in the past and even played Hamlet at one point.
“I think I know and have a command of the piece. But then at one point, you go, ‘OK, I’ve staged it enough. I think I pretty much know what the whole thing’s about.’ And you kind of get bored and move on to other stuff. But I started working with Côté, who’s the star dancer of the National Ballet of Canada. We got to do a project a few years ago, based on the biography of a film animator from the 40s and 50s—a Canadian guy called Norman McLaren.” (McLaren, who was born in Scotland and emigrated to Canada, was particularly influential for his advancements in synchronizing animation with music.)
That 2018 piece, Frame by Frame, premiered at the National Ballet of Canada in 2018 and won widespread acclaim, particularly for the visual framework provided by Lepage’s vision. Afterward, notes Lepage, Côté told him, “I’m gonna turn 40 soon, and I think I’m gonna be past my prime to do Hamlet.”
Shakespeare as the inspiration for dance is not new, of course: the Shakespeare and Dance Project lists 16 versions of Hamlet alone stretching back to 1788. But for Lepage, the challenge of telling Shakespeare’s story without text was irresistible. He also notes the project began life during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, which meant there was a lot of time to work with Côté and dancers from Côté Danse, the company Côté formed in 2021 to explore forms outside ballet.
Robert Lepage (L) and Guillaume Côté in rehearsal for The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of DenmarkCredit: François Latulippe
Lepage describes the makeup of artists in those initial workshops as “old chums from the classical world but also a lot of contemporary dancers and a few street dancers, and there’s even a guy that was krumping.” In thinking about the class dynamics in the original play, where, as Lepage notes, “[Shakespeare] doesn’t make the king and queen speak in the same language as the gravedigger or the clowns,” it became apparent removing the words would allow the story to explore those dynamics through what Lepage calls “the hierarchy of dance.”
“It’s a braid of the classical, the contemporary, and the street dance. By developing that, it created all these amazing situations and characters” that gave the dancers a lot to work with dramatically. With a laugh, Lepage notes when they did a workshop at a small theater in Montreal, “I had some people congratulating me on how I had found some great actors who knew how to dance.
“It’s a very different approach for a lot of the dancers. They’re used to conveying traits of character or action in a dance fashion. But I took a lot of time reading passages and lines [from the play], which a lot of choreographers don’t do. I really said [to Côté], ‘If you want me to do this with you, you do the choreography, I’ll intervene into it and try to feed all of the complex ideas.”
Lepage observes, “The thing that’s interesting is that Hamlet’s profound paradox is action versus nonaction, right? Because he complains all the time, ‘Why is it I have all the motivation to take action, but I don’t take action?’ Suddenly with dance, there are very interesting ways of conveying that and incarnating that paradox.”
I ask Lepage whether he thinks there’s any particular significance to the uptick in new interpretations of Hamlet, such as Izzard’s show. “I won’t have any kind of intelligent answer to give you, but I think it’s probably a sign of something,” he says. “Certainly with what’s going on in the U.S. right now with Trump and the resurgence of extreme-right dictators. The political thing is very embedded in a lot of the Shakespeare dramas, and you would find clues of that in Hamlet for sure.”
The piece has been evolving through subsequent performances, including one at a Shakespeare festival in Romania. But the essence of the original story remains.
“That’s what’s so great about Shakespeare plays. You remove the words, and you’re not necessarily depriving the story of a lot of stuff,” says Lepage. “Everything’s already in there—the skeleton of it. There’s a lot of action, there’s a lot of muscle, there’s a lot of passion going on.”
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The atmosphere was ebullient at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s 47th season Fall Series at Steppenwolf, featuring the return of beloved works by Kyle Abraham, Lar Lubovitch, and HSDC resident artist Aszure Barton, as well as the hotly anticipated company premiere of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon’s Sweet Gwen Suite.
Sweet Gwen Suite—originally created as three separate pieces (“Mexican Shuffle,” “Cool Hand Luke,” and “Mexican Breakfast”) for a Bob Hope television special in 1968 and The Ed Sullivan Show in 1969—was adapted and reconstructed with additional choreography by Linda Haberman as a single performance commissioned by the Verdon Fosse Legacy for the New York City Center Fall for Dance Festival in 2021 (with New York City Ballet soloist Georgina Pazcoguin in Verdon’s role). HSDC is the first company to collaborate with the Verdon Fosse Legacy to present Fosse’s work.
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Fall Series Through 11/24: Thu-Sat 7 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, hubbardstreetdance.com; sold out, but $30 standby tickets sold one hour before performance (admission not guaranteed; refunds given if seats not available)
The curtain opens on the company in serene array, clothed in white costumes reminiscent of martial arts gis for Barton’s return to patience (2015, HSDC premiere 2023). In a strong echo of George Balanchine’s Serenade, with ceremonial simplicity they open their feet as one to first position and take a long lean to the side, as if they are not receiving but embodying the beam of light that tiptoes in from stage right. To the sound of solo piano (Caroline Shaw’s Gustave Le Gray, a contemplative response to and adaptation of Chopin’s Mazurka in a minor, Op 17, no. 4), the work proceeds from the group to a series of duets and back with softness and exquisite technique made visible primarily by absence: absence of any excess, whether that be vibration to the body or semblance of performance. Instead, one experiences balance, stillness, gravity, shared space—a beautiful sense of quiet, breath, and harmony.
Aaron Choate in Show Pony by Kyle AbrahamCredit: Michelle Reid
Its very opposite trots in next, in the form of Abraham’s blockbuster, no-holds-barred, shiny-unitarded, emphatically virtuosic, riotously individualistic solo Show Pony (2018, HSDC premiere 2023), danced with unstoppable charisma by Shota Miyoshi on opening night (Choate alternates in the piece). To percussion composed by JLin, Miyoshi appeared as a spark, almost radiating the special gleaming down on him on the darkened stage. As the light (designed by Dan Scully) opens and closes the area for performance, the dancer appears sometimes to stand on the ground and sometimes to hover in space, profoundly conscious of being watched, a star in all its senses.
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago dancers Elliot Hammans (L) and Alexandria Best in Prelude to a Kiss by Lar LubovitchCredit: Michelle Reid
Lubovitch’s Prelude to a Kiss (2005, HSDC 2023) begins with one dancer (Alexandria Best) hanging like a boa from the neck of the other (Elliot Hammans), arching across him to hold her own foot in a translated Natarajasana. The duet that proceeds is suggestively gymnastic yet danced with cool distance, often with no eye contact. The kiss, when it comes, holds the purported heat of all that preceded it—though in fact and in act, everything has already happened.
Linda Haberman of the Verdon Fosse Legacy in rehearsal with company members of Hubbard Street Dance ChicagoCredit: Michelle Reid
It’s all about the hips, hands, and hats in Sweet Gwen Suite, which begins with an architectural arrangement of three dancers (Cyrie Topete, Dominick Brown, and Aaron Choate) that kicks into action with a bump of the pelvis. The three pleather-clad vaquero types, glistening with rhinestone embellishments (costume design by Bobby Pearce), are too cool for school, grinding out their cigarettes with an infectious swivel of the hips that evolves into a twist, a ride, a twerk, and more. No gesture goes unnoticed, however small—every clap, snap, nod, and look is its own event, calculated to seduce, deliciously. At the opening, attended by Fosse and Verdon’s daughter Nicole, a knockout performance, especially by fiery Topete, made the work a pure pleasure and brought the audience to its feet. If this is just the beginning of HSDC’s partnership with the Verdon Fosse Legacy, Chicago is already salivating for the next.
Fosse’s presence bleeds through to Barton’s BUSK (2009), originally created for Aszure Barton & Artists and now a signature work for HSDC, as a lone man (Hammans) sleeping on a stoop shapeshifts into an entertainer with the simple addition of a hat and a hand wave. A band of supplicants, sacred and profane, appears at times rambunctious, at times meditative—vulnerable as they cluster into a heap on the floor and prostrate themselves with a hand outstretched to receive.
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in BUSK by Aszure BartonCredit: Michelle Reid
Mesmerizing solos by Andrew Murdock and Miyoshi express longing for flight through supple torsos initiating wingbeats that stiffen into outstretched arms, a motif like the repeated vision of Icarus falling from the sky. At the end, they all jump again and again into the air with arms extending to the sky, hovering an instant, and then falling back down, feet slapping against the obdurate ground. The yearning and melancholy of this great work of human life reads strongly in Steppenwolf’s intimate house.
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The program for Blue, now onstage at Lyric Opera, includes a note from librettist and director Tazewell Thompson about a pivotal moment in the development of the piece, which he wrote with prolific Broadway and film composer Jeanine Tesori.
Commissioned in 2015 by Glimmerglass Festival artistic director Francesca Zambello, who wanted an opera “about race in America, about where we are now as a people dealing with race,” Blue is the tightly constructed story of a three-person Black family in contemporary Harlem—a nuclear family so representative they are named only by their familial title: mother, father, and son.
Blue Through 12/1: Wed 11/20 7 PM, Fri 11/22 7 PM, Tue 11/26 7 PM, Sun 12/1 2 PM; ASL interpretation and sound shirt Wed 11/20, audio description and touch tour Sun 12/1; Lyric Opera, 20 N. Wacker, 312-827-5600, lyricopera.org, $49-$319; in English with projected English titles
The first act introduces the parents as a young couple deeply in love and awaiting the birth of their son. The mother runs her own restaurant, and in Thompson’s original concept, he tells us, the father is a struggling saxophone player. Their son, who quickly advances from treasured infant to rebellious teen, is dead by the opening of the second act—shot (in an incident the audience does not see) by police at a protest demonstration. As the creative team continued to meet to develop the opera, Tazewell writes, it was Tesori who wondered if, instead of playing the saxophone, the father could be a cop.
Tazewell notes that he initially rejected that idea. Incensed by continuing reports of police shootings of unarmed Black youths and men, and by his own experiences as a Black man, he did not want to make his protagonist a policeman until, “despite myself,” he saw the devastatingly effective possibilities.
The father, movingly portrayed at Lyric by bass Kenneth Kellogg (who also sang this role in the Glimmerglass premiere in 2019), is caught in a vise. He has provided for his family as a police officer, “keeping the city safe.” But as his beloved teenage son sees it, he’s “pathetic”—a Black man in a “blue clown suit—keeping it safe for the white man.”
The son (Ryan Opera Center tenor Travon D. Walker) is determined to keep protesting in the streets; his father only wants him to stay safe. They argue over it and come to blows. When the son is killed, the father’s sorrow and anger, complicated by his own implication as part of the system, is gut-wrenching.
There are some light moments in the first act—sparkling trios and quartets when the young parents share news of the pregnancy, and then of their son’s birth with their separate groups of friends. But even here, the foreshadowing is grim. “Thou shalt not bring Black boys into this world,” the girlfriends warn.
Zoie Reams as the mother in Blue at Lyric Opera Credit: Kyle Flubacker
Mother, exquisitely sung by mezzo-soprano Zoie Reams, is a vital force in the first act; by the second, she has completely withdrawn, mummified by her grief. A preacher, the Reverend (Norman Garrett), attempts to bring Father to a place of “change and forgiveness.” They share a memorable bass duet, and there’s a funeral scene with a powerful vocal ensemble, but, to the creators’ credit, there’s no easy reconciliation here.
Thompson, drawing on his skills as playwright and director, has written a libretto that manages to be both tightly wound and poetic, and Tesori’s vocal score serves his words well, even lyrically, while her orchestral writing, beginning with the opera’s menacing opening rumble, gives voice to every emotional nuance.
Sets and lighting, in a perfect marriage by Donald Eastman and Robert Wierzel, respectively, are starkly effective; guest conductor Joseph Young leads the fine Lyric Opera Orchestra.
In an ambiguous epilogue, the little family is reunited at a table prepared by the mother. It’s a scene that might transpire only in her head.
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Editor’s note: Coco Picard spoke with artist vanessa german about her new solo exhibition, “At the end of this reality there is a bridge—the bridge is inside of you but not inside of your body. Take this bridge to get to the next _______, all of your friends are there; death is not real and we are all dj’s.,” on view at the Logan Center Gallery. Edited text from the comic is transcribed here to ease readability.
During her Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry fellowship, Pittsburgh/Asheville-based artist vanessa german led an experimental seminar at the University of Chicago. With a curriculum designed around the concept of “paraacademia,” german’s course prioritizes esoteric knowledge (magic, the occult, fairy tales, etc.) traditionally overlooked by higher education. Born from those discussions, artworks in her resulting solo exhibit record and reflect the “entangled energetic signature of the class,” and are conceived to transport viewers into a similar space of vulnerability, curiosity, and courage. This for german is the technological capacity of art, a capacity engineered by the artist whom she views as a “complete technology of beingness.” In the following interview, german discusses some of these processes. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
vanessa german: “I think about most of the small clay objects as artifacts that have kernels of power inside of them, because those forms come through awareness, like what it is to be aware of being aware. So how does one interact with an artifact that is a technological device of that power of awareness? The objects hold and share the energetic imprint of that frequency with anyone in proximity.
“What is it to sit together? To bring a place of focus and awareness into a sitting? . . . We would envision other cultures sitting around fire or a body of water and being in oneness with the source energy of those places. . . . It really is far outside the limiting presence of what has been defined as the fertile field of knowledge and wisdom-gaining.
“I think consciousness as the complete animation of source energy. I find that when ChatGPT came out and people starting posing a whole bunch of questions to AI and really engaging in a kind of flirty back-and-forth with this technology—one of things I kept thinking was, ‘I just want to ask you that question.’ I’m curious if we spoke to each other with the same level of wild, outlandish, nonviolent, nonhostile curiosity, what stories would we find?”
“At the end of this reality there is a bridge—the bridge is inside of you but not inside of your body. Take this bridge to get to the next _______, all of your friends are there; death is not real and we are all dj’s.” Through 12/15: Tue-Sun 9 AM–9 PM, Logan Center Gallery, 915 E. 60th Street, loganexhibitions.uchicago.edu/exhibitions/vanessa-german
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