This gallery opera was created specifically for Watermill Center in response to Robert Wilson’s vast collection of non-Western art objects. We encountered the sculptures and artifacts as living performers and developed our vocal language and movement from that encounter.
As these objects are in many ways veiled under colonial regimes of knowledge and violence they remained opaque to us, and we to them. The work is built around this opacity and the strange bedfellows of early ethnographic writing and surrealism that were part of the long journey of these objects to Watermill Center.
The opera was designed as an exhibition, and the audience was free to come and go, wandering freely through the gallery. Here is a short excerpt:
composed and directed by Joe Diebes
performed by Christina Campanella, Joe Diebes, John Rose, and Saori Tsukada