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Nixon in China: A Postmodernist Exercise
| Article
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14090 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1988 |
736 Words |
| Author
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Kenneth LaFave
Ken LaFave is music editor of the Kansas City Star. |
The world premiere of Nixon in China last October in Houston was the focus of extraordinary press attention and public interest. More than fifty critics were there from around the nation; the event even made CBS's Sunday Morning. And not without good reason. For once, a new opera was inaugurating a new hall, Houston's Wortham Theater Center. The Houston Grand Opera had joined with the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Kennedy Center in commissioning a new piece from the combined talents of composer John Adams, director Peter Sellars, and British poet Alice Goodman. What they got was a true product of today's pedigreed talent, a Postmodern exercise in flat actualities, an old news story refracted through an indifferent lens and set to the pulsing monody of a suspended-animation score.
It was not precisely an opera. Where opera relates drama primarily through the medium of classical singing--its literary and staging aspects being fundamentally secondary--Nixon in China balanced visual, textual, and musical elements to present a meditation of sorts on recent history: the 1972 visit of President Nixon to China that began the current thaw in Sino-American relations.
The opera was Sellars' brainchild, and his studied static staging dominates the work. The spare movement and plain, sometimes frozen, gestures conspired to make the slow progress of this nondrama "real" in the sense that television is real. What viewers took away with them was not the memory of this aria or that ensemble, but the curiously quasi-documentary sense that what they had watched was merely a reworked television news program with sonic accompaniment. This was not the first musico-dramatic work to deal with recent characters and events--Anthony Davis' X lyricized
... (1997 of 4673 Characters)
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