Ovation Fellows are current students or recent alumni from Los Angeles area universities. Fellows are paired with a Mentor, currently serving as an Ovation Award voter, and see productions and meet artists around Greater Los Angeles throughout the year. Their articles, posted on LAStageBlog, are intended to be their personal responses to their experiences, and not as critical reviews or representing the views of LA Stage Alliance.
Marta Portillo is an Ovation Fellow from Los Angeles City College.
When I learned I’d be watching a contemporary opera, I was intrigued. My opera experience is very limited. I have been lucky enough to watch La Boehme at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and Tosca at Le Grand Theatre in Bordeaux, France. In both instances, I dressed up; I went to the venue which was specifically built to house the voices of the performers and sat in my seat while I listened to Puccini’s masterpieces and watched the spectacular drama unfold on stage.
Opera is anything but small in scale so how do you go about creating a new contemporary opera that is anything but traditional? Well what you don’t do is go small and Overtone Industries’ Songs and Dances from Imaginary Lands certainly does not. What they do is flip the opera on its head by taking it out of a traditional venue and placing it in an old car dealership in Culver City. Inside the vacant building the company takes on the subject of identity loss while analyzing the pivotal events in the lives of two people. The piece that took seven years to develop is visually stunning.
There are about 17 sets, 21 librettists and 11 composers. This is truly a massive undertaking, not to mention the fact the audience moves around either by carrying their chairs from scene to scene or driven by a train that weaves its way through the cavernous building with such precision I was left to wonder: how do you even begin to conceive of something like this? What are the logistics? What was it like for the performers, the rehearsal process, how does something like this come together?
I had the opportunity to talk to ensemble member Matthew McCray who provided some insight into his experience with the production. Matthew joined the cast a few months prior to its opening. Some people have been with the production for seven years. For him the process was a little different. He was stepping into something that had already been created and he had to find the balance between making it his own and not disrupting the creative process and artistic vision that had already been set.
What I found interesting was that he was given his part and that was it. He was placed inside the giant jigsaw puzzle that is Songs and Dances. He played his part in the same way we all do when we are on stage, with the exception he was not aware of the entire story at the beginning of the process. But isn’t that how life works? We don’t get the script in advance. We form a part of someone’s life and may never know their entire story yet we may affect it in ways we will never see.
