An indie rocker aims to crank up the opera
Updated: 2011-10-09 07:58
By Julie Bloom(The New York Times)
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Karen O, lead singer of the New York indie rock band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and her collaborators aim to create a new kind of genre-blending performance.
The singer's "Stop the Virgens," an opera of sorts, is a kind of psychedelic myth about the evolution of a group of virgins. The show, at St. Ann's Warehouse in New York October 12 through October 22, has been almost seven years in the making. The director is the playwright Adam Rapp. For both artists, "Stop the Virgens," which mixes theater, music, dance, video and technology, is a chance to take the multidisciplinary experience to another level.
"Being on the road with the band for 10 years and playing every kind of venue that there is around the world, I really loved the idea of being able to plant yourself somewhere and really kind of crank up the live experience," Karen O said of her motivation for creating the work. She added, "This is an amplification of that kind of emotional engagement."
The show's presenters are the Creators Project, an initiative from Vice Media, and Intel, the technology company, which hopes to become a new model for arts patronage. Intel provides financial and technological resources; Vice acts as the creative director.
"We go and see lots of rock shows, and we've seen every movie," said Eddy Moretti, an executive producer and the executive creative director of Vice and the Creators Project. "We're pop culture people, and we're like, 'There's nothing that turns us on anymore.' Like all these amazing artists, why don't you book a theater and do a weird thing and invite me there."
"Stop the Virgens" will kick off a Creators Project festival in New York that will also feature bands like Florence and the Machine and ASAP Rocky, and multimedia works from David Bowie.
Karen O (her last name is Orzolek), 32, had harbored the vague concept for "Stop the Virgens" in her back pocket for years, not quite knowing what to do with it. About a year ago, she started working on a narrative with K K Barrett, the production designer and a former member of the punk band the Screamers. Mr. Barrett is the show's co-creator.
"I'm really outside my comfort zone with this," said Karen O, who is known for her undeniably female yelp. "But that's the most exciting part about it."
The lyrics to the opera, which is entirely sung, are abstract. The story is this: The virgin characters are dropped unformed into a world with Karen O as a kindly mother figure. Then, after a storm, she transforms into a dark dictator and casts them out. The virgins discover their sexuality and partake in a Dionysian party but wake up hung over and realize the error of their ways. They later ingest gumballs and are led to a grisly, inevitable deliverance.
"Stop the Virgens" seems really to be about Karen O's journey to maturity as an artist and a woman. A note to cast members reads: "It embodies the collision of darkness and innocence. We skin our knees on the way to wisdom."
The music, to be released as an album, was written in about three weeks, she said. It was inspired in part by different film genres: Italo-westerns, black exploitation films of the 1970s and David Lynch noir.
For Karen O, who was a writer of the songs for Spike Jonze's 2009 film "Where the Wild Things Are," the theater presented new challenges. She has had to contend with stage direction, choreography, multiple costume changes " and a giant lobster claw.
"When I had seen Karen perform, she has such a powerful way that she communicates with the audience, that felt very natural to me," Mr. Rapp said. "She knows how to cast a spell, which is such a theatrical thing."
As part of their research, she and Mr. Rapp, who has experience in experimental theater, went to see "Sleep No More," a wacky retelling of "Macbeth," from the British theater company Punchdrunk.
"Stop the Virgens" is a very female experiment. It will feature a chorus of roughly 30 virgin acolytes, seven virgins and two sentinels, all women. "Being on the road with rock, it's pretty much 90 percent guys," Karen O said.
Now that "Stop the Virgens" is set to open, Karen O is already wondering in what directions she will go next. "I feel like every five to seven years I really need to put myself in this position of discomfort and exploration, just to survive," she said. "Otherwise I feel like I'm falling asleep, like I'll go crazy if I don't do it."
The New York Times
(China Daily 10/09/2011 page12)