A Thought

Written in 2017 - a micro-opera for 4 sopranos, 1 actor, and piano trio.

Credits to the Video Above

Directed by Carolyn Fagerholm
Conducted by Alexander Popovici

Mind: Alissa Plenzler
Heart: Hayley Hoss
Eyes: Rachel Thornsberry
Hands: Alexandra Hegedus
Anima: Adelle Blauser

With Brandi Main, violin; Gramm Drennen, cello; Steven Naylor, Piano

Filmed and Edited by Nick Zoulek

Written for the 2018 BGSU MicroOperas Coordinated by Hillary LaBonte 

Special Thanks to Jennifer Cresswell, Kevin Bylsma, Jake Heggie, and Dr. Marilyn Shrude for their help in the development of this project.

A Thought was written out of a patchwork of efforts that revolved around the theme of consciousness. The more and more I think about the act of reading, writing, speaking, or thinking, the more is becomes clear to me that because you often don’t actually think about these actions, they become passive. Your mind is away, and the mechanics of the brain takes over. The more you dig, the more it seems that you might not be in complete control. Thoughts creep into your mind; we lie to ourselves about what we want and what we do. When meeting strangers, or when approaching a potential love interest, the amount of uncontrollable thoughts, emotions, fears and anticipations, becomes uncountable. Here, in A Thought, I wanted to show that moment from the inside and expand it to such a length that a moment becomes a scene, and a minute becomes an act, and the mind and body become the players.

When I started writing the piece, I was artist-in-residence at Arts Letter and Numbers; while I was there, I was really interested in how the mind works and how intrusive thoughts can be beyond our control but heavily influence the decisions we make. Part of my interest in this was exploring how nonsense words can be impactful and meaningful when sorted out into different combinations. This became doubly exciting when I was watching Stockhausen lectures and thinking about ways of either arbitrarily or meaningfully sorting material to make a piece. When I tried doing this with words, I took phonemes and syllables and resorted them through matrices and other formal techniques for structural design so that the phonemes of the voice were deeply integrated into the structure of the pitch content.  

That's all well and good, and that was very fun to explore and I had a great time generating a lot of material. However, when it came to sit down with Jennifer Cresswell, and Jake Heggie to workshop the piece, I had essentially finished the whole thing and all of the structure and all of this logical arrangement of material worked quite well for what I was trying to do and say, but the thing made no dang sense from a dramatic standpoint. After all I had assembled phonemes and syllables making all of the text essentially nonsense. Jake was extremely kind about this and that's a lot of interesting things to say but the thing that stuck with me the most was the idea that opera needs to be grounded in something.

I’m a huge fan of film, especially abstract movies and slow, art house cinema. I’m always down to get weird, and explore wild things, but I think the films, the operas, and the abstractions that I’m drawn to all benefit from having a single nugget of reality to latch on to. An example I’ve heard before is David Lynch’s “Eraser Head” (1977): it’s a movie about a guy who isn’t ready to be a dad. That is an emotional core, and then from there we can explore all kinds of abstractions and really go off the rails (I think the same is true of “Inland Empire” (2006) perhaps even to a greater degree). So after speaking to Jake about this and after very recently starting what would become a very long term relationship, I turn this into a love story. My abstractions are still there, my structural interests are still there, but by replacing just the text giving it this sort of grounded idea, I think the piece works much better as an opera or as a single scene.

I wrote my own text, which I often do, and to this day I'm not sure how much of this is cringy, cute, or if it's good at all, but I think it works.

The last thing I want to say about this piece is that I'm not sure this piece would have worked so well without my director Carolyn Fagerholm. She really got what I was trying to do and found a way to convey it on the stage in a way that made sense, that added to the drama, and in a way that really brought this to life and off the page. This was probably the first time I really understood how much that matters to my work and how most of my pieces, no matter how interesting the structure, don't exist on the page but exist in the air and on the stage

Synopsis (SPOILERS):
A girl sees another the woman of her dreams across the way. She eagerly wants to introduce herself to her, but struggles with her own self-doubt, past failures, and a day-dreaming anxiety about an unknown, but yearning future together. Eventually, she takes the plunge saying ‘hello’.