Goddess of grunge Courtney Love seems to be exploring her high brow side as of late. The Hole singer is slated to star in the experimental opera "Kansas City Choir Boy" during New York's Prototype festival this coming January. The piece is directed by Kevin Newbury.
The show's composer Todd Almond will star alongside Love in what's described as a "theatricalized concept album about love altered by unexpected fate." The opera takes the form of a mystery told through flashbacks, following two lovers in a small, Midwestern town who are forced apart when one goes missing. The show draws inspiration from ancient mythology, the internet age and the 24-hour news cycle.
Although rocker Love isn't exactly the typical opera star, it was her rebellious energy which drew Almond to her in the first place. "I’ve always been fascinated with her," Almond said to The New York Times. "I love her voice, and I think she’s a great actress. And I thought she would find the character interesting."
Love seemed equally enthusiastic about the theatrical opportunity, telling The Times "I love the concept, and I’m loving the music... I wanted to do something challenging." What do you think, readers? Does Love have the singing chops to pull off opera or are these isolated vocals a dark foreshadowing of what's to come?
Let us know your thoughts on Love as opera star in the comments and, in the meantime, check out her stint as a visual artist.
Courtney Love's Art
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"The essence of what I do straddles so many different things," she said in an interview with MusicWorks. "It sounds pretentious to have such a long title, but I want to develop ideas that can't be expressed by just singing." She continued: "Even though I work consistently with a lot of modern, digital gear, and I get a lot of inspiration from the strange things that happen when I get new "toys", I'm really mainly interested in the magic, the thing that happens when the strange, lyrical, poetic, or frightening ideas from some artist's head come out and make themselves manifest regardless of whether the work is electronic, acoustic, or electro-acoustic."
"I don't consider myself a proper composer," he explained in an interview with the Huffington Post, "but I wrote this aria about a frightening 'shroom trip I had a few years ago when I was possessed by demons and thought about cutting out my voice box. That is one of the center pieces for this larger piece. It sort of expands this idea of a trance, or a trip. A lot of my work is like a memory theater, in that there is an autobiographical element, an exploration of memory. The 'shroom trip was like an explosion of memory, it is very fractal in form. From there it goes into other formats -- this voice teacher character appears and she is trapped in a silent film. We are trying to have a dialogue but we are existing in different art forms."
Lucid Possession: Bean's Blog from Toni Dove on Vimeo.
"The performer is haunting the movie," Dove explained in an interview with the Huffington Post. "I am interested in models of subjectivity. How many people are in there? Are we one voice? Are we a chorus? Is there a ghost inside you?"
"I stumbled backwards into opera, really, and have learned almost entirely by doing," Mr. Little explained in a statement. "...By following my instincts. These projects excited me to explore the vast potentials of opera in the 21st century, into questions of form, language, narrative, and so on. I am looking forward to working with and within these three terrific companies to explore all that opera can be."
A New York Times review of the piece in 1990 wrote: "Mr. Moran has a dark side that makes David Lynch look like Pollyanna."
Art21 described her previous performance in PS1's exhibition "WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution.":
"Snapper’s performance involved her total submersion in a black tank filled with water. Outside on a chilly day on the steps of PS1, she was visible through a large window in the tank that framed her like a picture, as she floated ethereally in a kind of anti-space, dressed in fishnets, furs, a blonde wig and bright red lipstick. Snapper sang underwater for almost an hour, gurgling and shrieking in dissheveled but glamorous distress, into a microphone suspended in the water. She managed to fuse intense discpline, self-inflicted trauma and the desire to communicate through the even the most compromised means, evoking a palpable power and rawness."
"I started to interview opera buffs," Oleson explained of her exhibition to ArtForum, "because I love people who hold such a vast and fascinating knowledge on this subject and I’m interested in how it is driven by a personal set of concerns. You can’t buy the knowledge of opera or of dance; you actually have to invest in it. That’s something that’s fascinating to me: There’s the accumulating information but then there’s also a bodily love that’s not about the information—it’s more of a passion. What drives people to love ideas?"
"Despite the lack of traditional trappings," wrote a New York Post review, "this new work by downtown troupe Two-Headed Calf does exactly what opera is supposed to do, brilliantly melding music and text to deliver an emotional wallop."
M. Lamar-Negro Antichrist from M. Lamar on Vimeo.
An Untitled Opera Based on the Story of Milli Vanilli | David Levine | April 1, 2011 from The Watermill Center on Vimeo.
"The musicians get fed their parts just in time and it’s never the same piece twice,” Levine told DNA Info. "They play it as they receive it which leaves it prone to all kinds of glitchy repetition."
"Space and architecture certainly affects the way I present my performance," the artist told Inside Thirteen. "Music has the dynamic ability to create both inner and outer space for a listener — and I believe that taking a venue space into account, in its presentation and delivery, only augments the dynamism of delivery, to be more experiential, than presentational beyond just the proscenium of a stage."
"Experimental opera doesn't mean no narrative," he told LA Weekly. "It just means a different kind of narrative, a different way of telling a story based on how we view stories today, how we listen to stories and how we perceive stories. And the form has to change based on that, on us as a contemporary audience."
His original opera, "Borges and the Other," features adapted stories by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges performed by two tenors and a seven-piece band. In the opera Borges, in a dream state, encounters himself at a different age in life.
"I believe in fun, freedom, and feeling good," Harris says in her artist statement. "I hope my work can inspire reconciliation of the past by generating a whole heap of new sense memories, that we may enjoy a balanced present day."