Yesterday evening I visited the ODC Theater to see the first of the two performances of Danny Clay’s one-hour chamber opera “Echoes.” (Performances were given yesterday at both 6 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.) This was the second-day offering of the T.L.E.S.tival, the two-day festival presented by The Living Earth Show (TLES), the highly imaginative and creative duo of guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson. Given the impact of COVID-19 on event cancellations, I felt that last night’s offering was a bold move; but, given the scale of the performing space, I also felt that risk could be minimized through basic common sense.
The fact is that I had strong feelings about seeing “Echoes,” since I had attended the world premiere performance when it was presented by San Francisco Performances in October of 2017. “Echoes” was no conventional chamber opera. Clay’s music served to provide context for spoken-word performance, in contrast to more conventional “operatic” vocalizations. The libretto was based on text sources provided by Youth Speaks, an organization that encourages pre-college students to get actively involved in writing and performing poetry through programs held during the school day, in after-school hours, and on weekends.
It was curated by Tassiana Willis, an Emerging Arts Fellow at Youth Speaks, whose texts were combined with those of four other poet-performers, Gabriel Cortez, A. M. Smiley, Aimee Suzara, and Michael Wayne Turner III. The libretto also included texts by Tongo Eisen-Martin and Enrique Garcia Naranjo. Willis was assisted in curation by Sean San José, who directed the staging of the opera and gave the libretto its final edit.
There was one other contributor to the libretto. Turner’s performance included a compelling delivery of “The Young Dead Soldiers” by the late American poet Archibald MacLeish. This poem had been inscribed on a fountain that had recently been completed in 2017 for the War Memorial park space between the War Memorial Opera House and the Veterans Building. The premiere performance of “Echoes” took place in Herbst Theatre in the Veterans Building. The recitation of MacLeish’s text underscored the immediacy of the sense of place established by the entire War Memorial complex.
The best way to describe Clay’s score is to say that it established a context for the spoken-word performances that provided “Echoes” with its spinal cord. Andrews and Meyerson were joined by the members of the Kronos Quartet, violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt, and cellist Sunny Yang. One could almost say that Kronos provided the Youth Speaks poets with a continuo for their solo performances, since the score consisted almost entirely of mournful chord progressions. At the premiere performance, my impression of TLES was that they were adding “punctuation marks” to that continuo. However, what seemed to matter most was how Clay provided parts that took in the duo’s full dynamic range, from head-banging hard rock at one end to the subtle murmurs of the slight brush of a snare drum head or the bowing of a vibraphone.
Unless I am mistaken, there was more staging (provided by San José) at the premiere performance. Last night the vocal performers (including San José) sat before microphones. Thus, the overall sense was more one of chamber music than one of opera. The fact is, however, that there was more than a fair share of “action” in the texts being delivered. For the most part the words served as a guided tour of the diverse extent of San Francisco, given a rhetorical presentation that had far more impact on my attention than any of my efforts to read Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas.
When I first encountered “Echoes” I was struck by the extent to which the Youth Speaks texts amounted to a geography of disenfranchisement. Some two and one-half years have elapsed; and the rhetoric of disenfranchisement is as cautionary and intense now as it was when the libretto had been compiled. Indeed, the comings and goings of the new “digital oligarchy” have probably made conditions in 2020 worse than they were in 2017. It is all very well and good to provide platforms and amplifiers through which youth can speak; but the nature of the performing arts culture in this city suggests that those who ought to listen to youth are those who deliberately choose not to do so, preferring the comforts of their acquired status.
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