The stakes are high and harrowing, but 'Ruinous Gods' is primed to beguile, too.
The topic may be tough, but the creators of Spoleto's new opera aim to conjure fantasy and heart.
Ahead of the May 24 world premiere of Ruinous Gods, I slip into the College of Charleston Sottile Theatre to talk with its composer, Layale Chaker, and librettist Lisa Schlesinger. The two collaborated on the work, which is co-produced and co-commissioned by Spoleto Festival USA, Opera Wuppertal and Nederlandse Reisopera, with direction and dramaturgy by Omar Abi Azar and Maya Zbib.
At the Sottile, I am guided through the backstage hallways, past Spoleto Festival USA general director Mena Mark Hanna who is intently parsing some detail of the production, presumably with a team member. I pass a human-size plastic geodesic-esque orb, a hint of what is to come when Ruinous Gods makes its world premiere.
Chaker and Schlesinger greet me, each radiating serene smiles. We huddle in theater seats and a folding chair. Around us, choristers and other cast and crew members converge for a rehearsal. In the background, lulling, lovely music washes over the space.
Calming composure or not, it’s hardly a peaceful premise, Ruinous Gods. The opera mines the fallout of forced migration, homing on the impact it has on child refugees. Schlesinger explains a phenomenon I did not know. On several occasions, the displacement of these children has resulted in resignation syndrome— a non-responsive, coma-like sleep triggered by trauma. For weeks, months, and sometimes years, they quit our conscious world altogether.
My mind turns to that backstage bubble with its geometries and sheen—hardly the makeshift, roughhewn refugee camp I had envisioned for the set. Instead, the production folds fantasy into its story, both in its telling, through music and myth, and its showing, through vibrant colors and objects that speak to its dreamlike state. The librettist also assures me that while the subject matter is serious, there is ample uplift, too, in the form of this fantasy and humor, too.
A project in flight
The genesis of Ruinous Gods dates back to 2014, when Schlesinger was working on a project about the refugee crisis. As the crisis intensified in 2015, she determined that it was the big issue of this lifetime, and that she would put her artistic lens on it.
Thus began The Iphigenia Project, a series of collaborations based on the mythological character, which involved multi-disciplinary collaborations, including site specific performance, a text/film essay, readings and presentations, among them a short film.
The project featured music composed by Kinan Azmeh and a performance by Chaker, who is married to Azmeh.
In researching Iphigenia, Schlesinger came across an article in The New Yorker by Rachel Aviv about resignation syndrome occurring in Sweden. Displaced children who had relocated there were initially thriving, until they discovered their fate was far from vouchsafed.
“Once they realized they weren’t granted asylum they fell asleep,” she tells me. “I thought at that time…there were children all over the world probably, or in history, that had that diagnosis but we just never had a name for it or never paid attention to it.”
She immediately saw its dramatic potential. “This has to go on stage.”
Ruinous Gods draws from the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone to explore the psychological toll endured by children in the throes of forced migration, casting an eye on how governments and societies treat migrant families. As one mother strives to revive a 12-year-old daughter locked in deep sleep, we follow the child’s journey through a fantastical underworld.
Becoming operatic
The work quickly bended operatic. First Schlesinger concluded that the work should have music. “There’s something too ethereal and too mysterious about this to just face it in realism. I felt like it needed the heightened experience of music.”
Chaker, who is a composer and violinist, immediately came to mind, determining the she would be the perfect person to compose the music. “She would understand that mystery and that ethereal quality and also the care for children. She has such a deep empathy.”
It was Chaker who identified that the work, as a modern recreation of myth, should be an opera, a new venture for the composer.
“It had never even occurred to me that I would have the desire to write for opera,” Chaker says. “But the subject…was living in a dimension that was so otherworldly that the music has…to be the backbone of the story.”
As she speaks, the entrancing music wafting through the Sottile begins to make more sense. Evocative piano notes surround Chaker as she gently shares her thoughts. Chaker’s composition frequently blends Arabic maqam and Western classical music traditions with diverse Middle Eastern influences, jazz and improvisation.
The moment of escape, she offers, is better lived and experienced than told or explained. That way, we slip into the underworld with the children seeking refuge from reality.
“It’s an experience that is going to be immersive, and we’re going to partake in that travel to the underworld,” she says of the audience experience. “We are witnesses, in many ways, as the chorus is a witness to it.” She adds that depictions of birds will join the performers as well. I begin to see more clearly the childlike leanings of this new opera, the tender mercies in unimaginably tough times. The circumstances are so unimaginably tough they prompt a child to do what any parent knows is against his or her nature—to go to sleep.
After our interview, I am welcomed to linger for a few minutes to get a glimpse of that afternoon’s rehearsal. The Spoleto Festival USA Chorus find their place onstage near a massive craggy rock, surrounding mezzo soprano Taylor-Alexis Dupont who portrays the character Hannah. I am immediately drawn by the poignancy of this lone woman in the wild, and keen to learn her story.
It was a story that resonated with Spoleto’s general director, too. Hanna had first connected with Chaker in his previous role at Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin, and was then drawn to the timeliness of its topic.
And while it’s timely, the composer notes that it is also timeless.
“The relevance of this subject has always been relevant and it will always be relevant, because forced migration is something that as humanity we endure… especially in the Global South, where we will continue to endure in the years to come,” Chaker offered. As she says, the music around her happens to intensify, its soft, mesmerizing strains becoming increasingly urgent.
With its new work and artists newly venturing into other art forms, Ruinous Gods is just the stuff of Spoleto Festival USA.
“We just feel blessed that we had somebody to trust us in this point in time and to trust the importance of what we’re trying to say to to take that vision to stage,” Chaker observes. “We feel that everyone is working on this from a place of heart and conviction.”
I’ll be in the audience for its premiere tonight, May 24, set to delve into this hypnotic new world to bear witness myself. Stay tuned for my review, which will run here and in Charleston City Paper.
For information and tickets, visit spoletousa.org.