KINGDOMS
Original Score: Christoffer Schunk / Direction: Kestrel Leah / Choreography: Lauren Frias / Costume design: Kate Fry / Lighting design: Zach Moore / Scenic design: Nina Caussa / Vocalists: Marcus Rubio, Christoffer Schunk, Max Wanderman, Danny Wood, Coleman Zurkowski / Cast: Chelsea Duvall, Lauren Frias, Nora King, Sadie Kuwano, AJ Schemadovits-Nor, Sarah Shoemaker, Gyasi Silas, Joseph Thomas, Renell White
A performance collaboration between composer Christoffer Schunk, choreographer Lauren Frias, and director Kestrel Leah, joining multiple disciplines in the manner of a “hyperopera” (the term introduced by composer Anne LeBaron to describe a work that is highly inter-disciplinary and collaborative). Performed live at CalArts’ New Works Festival in 2013, the project was conceived as a film collaging dance with other live-action and animated visual sequences as imagined by director Leah, to be accompanied by the live performance of Schunk’s vocal score Kingdoms.
Schunk’s score, based on TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men, follows the five movements of The Hollow Men but substitutes Eliot’s words with his own syllabic translation of the poem, which is distorted, repeated, and voiced with extreme vocal textures. Schunk amalgamates several genres of music into a combination of structured singing and paralinguistic vocalization, combining extended techniques from the Western classical world and vocal techniques from non-Western folk music.
Wielding the Brechtian aesthetic inherent in Schunk’s music, the work approaches the trauma of battle through parody, playing with themes of translation and interpretation, and the transfer of realities between subject, performer and audience.
