EIGHT MILLION STORIES
The Mile-Long Opera, a biography of 7 o’clock, a choral work with music by David Lang and lyrics by Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine, premiered on the High Line last month. It’s a series of 26 linked songs staged along the length of the park, performed by 1,000 professional and amateur singers culled from city choirs. The work’s pedigree is highbrow; architecture office D S + R is credited as Creator and partner Elizabeth Diller as Co-Director, along with the accomplished choreographer Lynsey Peisinger.
Yet the Opera is direct and moving. Almost impossibly, it succeeds in capturing the battered and eccentric spirit of the city right now. Carson and Rankine wrote after interviewing locals about what 7:00 pm meant to them. It’s a time when most shed a public identity and fall back into themselves. Some of the words stun:
No we don’t talk but people get to know each other just by walking past each other all the time.
Parts of us erase.
Others are more lighthearted and, perhaps unintentionally, comic.
I think about coffee cups a lot.
Everyone getting their food delivered… no one cooks anymore.
The songs are staged very simply, with the bulk of the singers dressed in street clothes and lit visors, standing out like firelies against the dusk. Their voices, mostly unamplified, float just above the roar of traffic. The piece resets the architecture of the park. A tier of benches becomes a stepped stage. Metal floor grate becomes a precarious membrane through which singers wail to passersby, Marry me. One brushes up against the performers in order to move on. Some stare ahead blankly, and others, convincing actors, engage a visitor directly, holding her gaze until she steps out of range. The experience is embarrassingly intimate, exposing how fraught one-on-one exchange can be. It might be a sign of our times.
As one strolls north, towards Hudson Yards, individual singers and lyrics fade and one understands the opera as a constellation of small, brilliant, individual stories.
That the singers are deeply diverse in age, race, community and singing ability adds another layer of truth. In New York City we live deep in the sea of humanity. There are around us millions of others – entirely unknown – to speak to, learn from, and love. Yet to remain whole, and to remain sane, we move past them and return to the familiar.
Photograph by Thomas Schenk.