NATURE FETISH is a 5-episode opera.

Each episode translates a theory on the “nature of nature” into a process-based, sometimes participatory, sometimes theatricalized framework of notated and aleatoric music, text, actions, and images.

The frameworks for the five episodes, or “fetishes,” were developed through five public workshops.

The five episodes are best performed in order, functioning as an opera. However, they can also be performed separately, as demi-operas, or as part of an evening of other performances.

The five episodes are:
1.) Laws and Logic of Nature. Keyboard, electronics, snare, small gong, bowed banjo, vox. (Approx. 20 min.) Performance and audience theorize collectively that “nature is a computer” by breaking down into binary expressions of tones at a funeral, the corpse rises from the dead, an aria posits that human consciousness is a virus (or cyst) in the beautiful computer of nature.
2.) The Emergence of Nature Keyboard, electronics, clarinet, flute, guitar, vox. (Approx. 20 min) A debate between theories that nature is ecological, material, agricultural, Platonic, and/or sustainable, embodied by emergent characters. The audience receives small objects to construct a score as musical environment.
3.) The Wild. Keyboard, electronics, clarinet, flute, guitar, turntable, vox. (Approx. 15 min) This episode is performed for spectators. The performers play characters who feel an urge to “return to nature” and seek theories about how to act this. Nature is played out as a fetishized narrative about humans, characters “devolving” back through speech and consciousness.
4.) Consciousness. Keyboard, electronics, clarinet, flute, guitar, vox. (Approx. 20 min) Nature is theorized as an ongoing catastrophe, chaos itself. Performers are controlled by words/symbols/notes (anything) written on paddles and held up by the audience in a circle. Any emotional difficulties we have with this are focused by a shamaness into a conscious mantra, which helps us fetishize/actualize our fears and desires for meaning. This piece can also function as a conclusion to the opera.
5.) Nature Fetish. Keyboard, electronics, clarinet, flute, guitar, vox, many other instruments. Approx. (20 min) Individual artists, composers, musicians, and dancers, some who appeared in the other episodes, and others invited/curated in to create a ‘theory of nature,’ perform simultaneously in the space. Artists vary depending on date, venue, and other contexts. This episode is only performed when appropriate.

The new opera with music by Brian McCorkle and libretto by Esther Neff will feature Jessica Bathurst, Arla Berman, Cory Bracken, Katie Johnston, Natasha Missick, Michael Newton, Ellen O'Meara, and Dave Ruder.

 

For more information and updates check back here or our NATURE FETISH blog:

 

NATURE FETISH: Documentation of Stage 1 from Panoply Lab on Vimeo.

 

The project will be developed in three stages at:

University Settlement
184 Eldridge St
New York, NY 10002

1.) public workshops/group performance research
2.) rehearsals/production (with workshops of episodes Thursday, Friday, and Saturday January 26, 27, and 28, 2012 7:30PM)
3.) interactive public workshop performances (Thursday April 26th – Saturday April 28th, 2012)

You’re invited to stage one: a series of five free public workshops lead by PPL composer Brian McCorkle and director/librettist Esther Neff. The project seeks to provide a platform for the expression and description of “every day deep thought” and its relationship with action and human agency. All participants in the workshops are considered philosophers, scientists, and generative artists with full authority to publicly explore the fundamental questions, “what do we think nature is? How do our conceptions construct nature, and how does nature construct our conceptions?”

October 19: Law and Logic of Nature
October 26: The Wild
November 2: Animalia
November 10: Nature and Consciousness
December 7: The Evolution of Nature

Each workshop runs from 7PM-9PM. Admission is free.

These five workshops will:
1.) Generate the underlying musical rhythms and themes for each of the opera’s episodes using amateur choir-building methods, live sampling and looping, and pitch improvisation exercises
2.) Sketch spatial diagrams through movement exercises and improvisation with props and in public parks and other “natural” environments
3.) Gather ideas, phrases, statements, and personal opinions through group discussion and theater improvisation games.

Inside overarching questions about “the nature of nature” in their impossibly grand philosophical sense, are five more direct conceptual clusters, which structure the individual workshops and determine which exercises and games we will use. The first workshop will focus on any Laws and Logic of Nature, the second on ideas of wildness, or The Wild, the third will be titled Animalia, the fourth Nature and Consciousness, and the fifth will focus on historic and scientific ideas of nature, entitled Evolution of Nature. Associations with these titles will give us a starting point and allow the workshops to move concretely towards the second stage of the project.

Come to one or come to them all! If you are interested in being part of the project as a whole, the best way to get involved is to attend one of these workshops or e-mail panoplylab@gmail.com (also, feel free to e-mail if you have any questions)