Opera Archeology, Opera Apocalypse

Chornobyldorf: An Archeological Opera in Seven Novellas by Roman Grygoriv and Ilia Razumeiko. PROTOTYPE Festival, at La MaMa ETC, New York City, January 14 and 21, 2024.Landscapes, in the words of Simon Schama, are constructed from a "rich deposit of myths, memories, and obsessions."1 Archaeology involves not only unearthing historical artefacts but also reconstructing a landscape that is both material and ephemeral, made up not only of objects but of emotions. Myths, memories, and obsessions may also be an apt description of opera, a form whose beginnings were also somewhat archaeological. The genre arose, in part, from Early Modern attempts to recreate ancient Greek performance. Such reconstructions necessarily evolved and reflected their own political realities, refracted through myth and music. We reconstruct these realities and our own when we stage historical works.Like myth and memory, landscapes are vulnerable to loss and destruction through war, natural and man-made disaster, and colonial structures of violence and erasure. This loss and the accompanying rage of survivors and descendants are at the center of Roman Grygoriv and Ilia Razumeiko's post-apocalyptic "archeological opera" Chornobyldorf, which made its U.S. premiere as part of this winter's PROTOTYPE Festival, in a production at La MaMa. Ukraine is their archaeological site and space to envision various futures.For many the name "Chernobyl" is synonymous with disaster. The 1986 nuclear accident is the worst of its kind in human history, killing dozens and displacing thousands from Pripyat and the surrounding area. Chornobyldorf then prompts a recontextualization; encountering the Ukrainian spelling "Chornobyl" involves recognizing that disaster as part of the history of Ukraine's colonialization and forced Russification: centuries of violent political and cultural suppression that have been unearthed again and again, erasing music, folklore, and language. The suffix -dorf reminds us that the cities of Chornobyl and Pripyat were not just nuclear sites but towns with histories that reach back into the pre-nuclear past.Grygoriv and Razumeiko's synopsis describes a post-apocalyptic world that is also post- "capitalism, opera, and philosophy," where survivors attempt to reconstruct civilization through a series of "archaeological performance-rituals." It eschews narrative for what it calls "novellas," movements that layer atop one another, accumulating and jettisoning meaning as the opera progresses. In one novella, two folk singers clothed in ritual garb that includes wide collars made of electronic wires chant as a nude priestess, her arms and mouth hung with cymbals, spins wildly between them. In another, Orpheus screams at an absent Eurydice over wailing electric guitar feedback, calling her nothing but an absence, the "residual sparkling in neurons." When she appears, her body naked in the red light, he stumbles after her as if pulled by an unseen force. Another novella stages an operatic performance in an abandoned theatre, robotic operatic technique giving way to a creaking, throaty groan, while dancers and singers frantically spin like tops "in search of tonality."Time and history behave strangely in Grygoriv and Razumeiko's world, as does reality. The opera opened with a recorded segment: a bald male head, features stretched and distorted by the lens, intoned, "Hello, this is Yuri. This is a message especially for you. It is the end of a letter I have not written, but I will write." Even imaging a post-apocalyptic society attempting to reconstruct our current present involves an incursion to the strange grammar of the future-perfect tense: we imagine a future that reflects on a past that is yet to happen.The movement through the novellas are neither directional nor chronological. For Grygoriv and Razumeiko, reconstructing history involves error and encounter. Meaning arrives through misinterpretation. They cite "universal symbols and signs which are again misinterpreted" in their introductory note, rituals that "dissolve into the white noise of nature." Chornobyldorf's treatment of myth bears this out. Orpheus and Eurydice, whose narrative we re-perform in each telling, appear but are inverted. Orpheus shouts, not sings. He follows Eurydice, and she never looks back. One central scene involves the dream of a young woman who envisions her marriage, only to wake alone, while ghoulishly humorous funeral rites appear. These misinterpretations culminate not in closure, but in a delirious rave, where singers, dancers and instrumentalists writhe and thrash around a revolving, bloody head of Lenin.Chornobyldorf moves seamlessly between live performance and filmed segments—its creators refer to the opera as "real virtuality." Actors we see on the screen suddenly appear before us in person, seeming to walk between film and stage. This not only serves to blur the lines between the embodied and the recorded but also to insert Chornobyldorf into Ukraine's landscape. One filmed segment takes place inside the abandoned church of St. Michael, within the Exclusion Zone; others traverse desolate landscapes of empty steppes, the desiccated tree-trunks of the Red Forest in Polesia, the Marganec Quarry, the cooling towers inside an empty nuclear plant. Rusted pipes crisscross the vivid blue sky and forlorn equipment reflects in still water.The opera emerges out of both real and fictional contexts; two fictional institutions, the Archaeological Museum of Chornobyldorf and the Institute of Chornobyldorf Culture. This digital museum includes exhibits of "items without interpretation," often props from the show, as if the performance itself had taken place hundreds of years earlier. The museum is only one part of Chornobyldorf labyrinthine digital landscape; there is also a map that allows viewers to click through the various locations featured in the filmed segments.2 Riffing on Umberto Eco's concept of "opera aperta," Grygoriv and Razumeiko offer their own "open work" that extends beyond the theater into digital spaces, able to be re-encountered in various ways.Chornobyldorf refracts its premise through a hoard of musical styles, including Ukrainian folk songs, Western classical opera, and extended techniques on instruments from a vast geographical expanse. First among these styles are the polyphonic folk songs of Ukraine, some of which were recovered from villages in the Polesia region at the center of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. Snippets of musical references—the operas of Monteverdi and Handel, Mozart's Requiem, Bach's counterpoint—emerge as if dredged up from a lakebed, recognizable but permanently altered by decay, and sink back into Grygoriv and Razumeiko's mesmerizing and chaotic musical textures. Scored primarily for a bandura, dulcimer cello, brass, and percussion ensemble (assembled by Yevhen Bal), Chornobyldorf also brings together electric and acoustic guitar, morin khuur, duduk, and zurna along with plenty of electronics, including one algorithmic piano called the "Rhea-player" created by electronic instrument builder Winfried Ritsch of the Künstuniversität Graz. The bandura is an especially poignant choice. The instrument, traditionally used by blind Ukrainian bards called kobzar, has been subject to violent suppression under both Russian Imperial and Soviet control, part of wider-spread cultural suppression including sanctions that limited the use of the Ukrainian language.3 The vocal palette is similarly varied; it spans throat, folk, and classical singing; spoken words both live and recorded; screaming; chattering; guttural clicks; and groans. The sound world they create is one of dissolving boundaries between musical genres, as well as across live and recorded sound, singing, speech, and noise. Chornobyldorf suggests that one of the advantages of misinterpreting history is that it allows for an omnivorous approach, creating juxtapositions that would otherwise be jarring, and offering a sonic world that can feel at once familiar and utterly unexpected.In an article on ecomusicology, Alexander Rehding identifies two strains in ecological thought arising in the 1990s: apocalypse and nostalgia.4 While apocalypse seems the noisier of the two, it is nostalgia that Rehding identifies as music's double-edged weapon in responding to the climate crisis. Memory, in his words, is "one area in which music is known to excel." But for Chornobyldorf, nostalgia only functions when those alive can make sense of their pasts.When Rehding was writing in 2011, musical responses to the climate crisis were just beginning to appear on the operatic stage. In 2024, such representations are accumulating rapidly as composers, many of whom have grown up in an age of climate awareness, respond to our current world. In 2019, Rugile Barzdziukaite, Vaiva Grainyte, and Lina Lapelyte's award-winning Sun Gelsey Bell's Morning/Mourning (2023) explored how the earth would transform if all human life suddenly disappeared. Daniel Schlosberg's The Extinctionist, an adaptation of Amanda Quaid's play which finds dark comedy in the impending climate doom, will premiere with Heartbeat Opera in April 2024.Chornobyldorf distinguishes itself from the above examples because in its vision of a post-apocalyptic future, it necessarily recognizes a post-apocalyptic present. To do this, it returns always to the landscape of Ukraine and of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. One need only look at images of the rusting Ferris wheel in Pripyat or read the estimates positing two thousand years may pass before Chornobyl's radiation levels return to safe levels to know that an apocalypse has already happened. One only need to look at current images of bombed hospitals in Mariupol to know that another kind of apocalypse is taking place. The final novella, which saw the whole company—Grygoriv and Razumeiko included—dancing with fury and abandon, felt like a moment of short-lived triumph in the face of past and present destruction. At the same time, it also said something about opera, a form which offers ways of encountering future-pasts and past-futures through repeated performance. We are always performing opera against history. All interpretations may indeed be misinterpretations; there are no universal myths that are not subject to decay and corrosion. Chornobyldorf mourns these losses, as well as all the others that are now embedded in Ukraine's landscape.