Opera That's Hardly an Opera at All

Seemingly not even barely: “Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Boléro” was plainly a dance, conceived and choreographed by South African artist Gregory Maqoma. Its primary medium was bodies in space; it was performed at the Joyce, a dance theater.

And yet the human voice — the vehicle through which opera creates drama — permeated it. Chant, whisper, Xhosa-language clicking consonants: From its first moments, when a man stumbling across the stage wailed over the insistent march rhythm that runs through Ravel’s “Boléro,” crisply rattled out on a snare drum, “Cion” was, for me, as much a vocal event as a choreographic one.

Ravel’s strategy in his 1928 classic was to increase intensity, bit by tiny bit, through relentless repetition, an excruciatingly steady crescendo. Maqoma, the founder of Vuyani Dance Theater, realized that the piece is, in this way, like a ritual, a religious litany.

So with his collaborators — the music direction and arrangements were by Nhlanhla Mahlangu — he broke up and reconjured the Ravel, offering a kind of distant echo of molecules of “Boléro.” These fragments passed, by way of four singers, through other textures and sounds, including the mellow, melancholy a cappella style of Isicathamiya, familiar from Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

On a stage dotted with spindly crosses, a wall looking like craggy rock looming in the back, nine dancers created images of collective prayer that kept dissolving into violence. Celebrations continually became killings; mourning went on, in all its sadness and ecstasy. A vocabulary derived from traditional African dance was seamlessly married to contemporary street genres like krump and flex; anxious, seizurelike movements broke into sinuous floating.

Most moving was a sequence in which the dancers together formed a shape that suggested a boat surging through stormy waters, an evocation of forced migrations past and present. The piece ended with a graveyard dance, Ravel’s unflagging rhythm accelerating into ferocity: The effect — as of the whole hourlong piece — both somber and exhilarating, even hopeful. This was an impact achieved by voices as much as by bodies: opera, then, in the most fundamental sense.

“Cion” was hardly out of place amid the more characteristic presentations of this Prototype, which closed Sunday and was produced by Beth Morrison Projects and the arts organization HERE. The festival’s work tends shortish in length, intimate in size, and darkish, ambiguous and poetic in mood. This describes Maqoma’s work as much as Danielle Birrittella and Zoe Aja Moore’s “Magdalene,” performed at HERE’s home in SoHo.

“Magdalene,” a song cycle delegated among 14 female composers, draws its text from poetry by Marie Howe that explores women’s lives, obliquely, through the virgin-whore archetype of Mary Magdalene. There was a nice tension between cohesion — everyone was composing for string quartet and harp, conducted by Mila Henry — and variety, with some numbers spare, some lush, some poppily alert, some sincerely mild.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)

I feared, in the first minutes, a tone of turgid solemnity. (“Who had me before I knew I was an I?”) But “Magdalene” grew on me. This was partly because of its inherent diversity of expression, and partly because of its eventual openness to humor, most winningly in a sly setting of “Their Bodies,” an enumeration of the physical and emotional qualities of different penises.

But mostly it was because of Birrittella, who gave an exposed, intelligent and earnest performance in what was essentially a one-woman show. (Her character, M., had a silent dancer double, the unflinching Ariana Daub, who joined her in moodily traipsing in and around a large, shallow pool at the front of the stage.)

Birrittella was asked to make an eerily elderly twang at one point, and to rise to grandeur near the end, in a long final monologue with music by Emma O’Halloran. She was persuasive and powerful throughout.

Persuasive and powerful, too, was Jennifer Zetlan as the tormented psychoanalytic patient at the center of “Ellen West”; Zetlan was focused through rangy, angry vocal lines and sweetly plangent in nostalgic reflection. The piece, presented at the Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center, is a setting of Frank Bidart’s long poem about a mid-20th-century case study of a woman suffering from body dysmorphia and gender dysphoria.

The text is an enigmatic and poignant expression of a self that feels itself unreal. But while Ricky Ian Gordon’s elegantly impassioned score drew dusky lyricism from the Aeolus Quartet, conducted here by Lidiya Yankovskaya, and though the baritone Nathan Gunn was a comfortably paternal presence as the therapist, the work strained to form this material into more than a monodrama. (Emma Griffin’s production also needlessly included two dancers, dressed as hospital orderlies, making twitchy movements on the sidelines.) You got the sense that Zetlan would have been more than capable of holding her own.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)

On a larger scale — by far the largest of this festival — “Rev. 23” was a madcap explosion of lovable ludicrousness for a large orchestra and a substantial cast. Performed at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, it was a sustained exercise in a comic energy unusual for, and therefore welcome from, Prototype.

The title refers to an as-yet-unwritten next chapter of the biblical Book of Revelation, and the plot, such as it is, involves an effort by the forces of the underworld to balance out the prevailing goodness of the universe with badness, by bringing culture and politics — the messy substance of human life — up to Adam and Eve on Earth. Sun Tzu, author of “The Art of War,” acts as strategist for Hades and Lucifer; heaven is a re-education camp overseen by the Archangel Michael, wielding a sparkly yardstick.

But while Cerise Lim Jacobs’ libretto seemed to want to echo the zany yet cutting anti-authoritarian satire of Ligeti’s 1978 classic “Le Grand Macabre,” her story was difficult to decipher even by the standards of absurdism, and even given the bright, clear production by James Darrah, its prevailing color electric green.

The daffy libretto, however, inspired Julian Wachner, best known as the director of music and the arts at Trinity Wall Street, to create an explosively, virtuosically eclectic score, with the pummeling perpetual motion of John Adams, the burbling angularity and dark comedy of Stephen Sondheim, the arpeggios of Philip Glass, and the coloratura of Handel — all thrown into a blender with some amphetamines.

There were self-contained arias here, including one that ended neatly enough to garner applause — a rarity in Prototype-style contemporary opera — as well as moments of disarming pastoral prettiness. Wachner handled this 50-car pileup of styles with confidence and apparently inexhaustible verve; the singers and the orchestra, NOVUS NY, conducted by Daniela Candillari, shared both those qualities. However mystifying it all was, I enjoyed it.

Also confident, in a very different register, was Garrett Fisher’s score for “Blood Moon,” at the Baruch Performing Arts Center. Fisher ingeniously transfigured the sound world of classical Japanese Noh drama, with a harmonium making a gently coppery wheeze and the willowy viola da gamba trading off with its more powerful descendant, the cello. Modern metal flutes coexisted with the antique sound of a bamboo flute; traditional taiko drums crashed as punctuation on the action.

The bass Wei Wu had a robust voice and presence. But the spirit tale related in Ellen McLaughlin’s libretto didn’t feel distinctive enough to fill the substantial running time. For me, the far more compelling ghost story of the festival was “Cion,” as inspiring a haunting as I can recall.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .