“Black Lodge” is maybe a lot of things or maybe not.
It calls itself an opera and was a finalist for a Grammy this year in the opera category, since there isn’t a goth opera category yet. It’s loud. It’s spooky. It’s incomprehensible. It does its best to misbehave, transgressing between the real and the imaginary, between emotions dangerously raw and overcooked, breaking boundaries between what we call classical music and what we don’t. Like many a great opera, it was written as a vehicle for a great singer, in this case tenor-and-then-some Timur Bekbosunov, who usually goes by just Timur.
It could also be called a song cycle that employs ear-piercing rock and, for respite, a welcoming string quartet. It’s got a film to go along with the staging that doesn’t have much to do with the opera. The opera has to do with its composer, David T. Little, and his relationship to three of his art idols, past and present: filmmaker David Lynch, the late French poet and theorist Antonin Artaud and Beat writer and artist William S. Burroughs. The non-narrative libretto is by one of our few remaining Beat poets and a treasure of that era, Anne Waldman.
What else? As presented by the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA and Beth Morrison Projects for a single performance Saturday at the United Theater on Broadway, it was marketed as a Halloween event. The gothic theater opened 90 minutes early, its lobby turned into a pre-show “Bardo,” a ghoulish performance installation by Sandra Powers.
Some members in the audience showed up in costume but none could compete with the wondrously weird mélange of butoh dance, shadow puppetry, ghosts of various varieties, nurses seeming straight out of horror films along with models, tormented and otherwise. There was music, shouting, TVs and lots more everywhere you turned upstairs and down.
This take on the Buddhist concept of bardo — the state between death and rebirth, often colloquially used to imply simply transition from one state to a significant other — was full of wonder. But it treated transition as a screeching horror, not for the faint of heart. I found refuge in the same old same old, awaiting the opera of sorts back outside at a nearby taco truck.
As an opera, “Black Lodge” is a mess. As a song cycle, it’s a revelatory marvel. As a performance piece for Timur, it further enlarges the transformational promise that Julia Bullock and Davóne Tines demonstrated in their recent staged recitals.
Like Bullock with “Harawi” and Tines with “Robeson,” Timur has been long obsessing over his project. He sang two early songs from the project at a 2016 Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella concert. The full piece, which is composed of 16 songs, came together during the pandemic. It was during COVID closures that director Michael Joseph McQuilken made a film with a white-suited Timur as the Man and Jennifer Harrison Newman as the Woman cavorting in various states of agony and ecstasy in the homes of the performers.
Onstage to the right of the screen, a live, white-suited Timur sang. He was joined by his group, Timur and the Dime Museum (keyboard, guitars and drums, with the instrumentalists also supplying additional vocals), and the fine Isaura String Quartet. But all attention belonged to the riveting Timur, who illuminated the ghostly or grotesquely essence of Artaud, Burroughs, Lynch and, of course, Little.
Little’s idea for the cycle was to look at how his own story might intersect with Artaud, who brilliantly attempted to return theater to a state of psychic ritual and who eventually became psychotic; Burroughs, who brilliantly attempted to cut up the world into various stuck-together pieces and who, in an idiotic accident, shot and killed his wife; and Lynch, who we well know has a brilliant surreal streak (he did not participate in the project). The composer grew up, he writes in the booklet notes to the recording of “Black Lodge,” seeing the “the dark side of things,” and here travels through that in search of, and often discovering, beauty.
The production does not seemingly distinguish among the three parts: “The Hungry Ghost and Hell Realms,” “The Animal, Human and Demigod Realms” and “The Realm of the Shamans.” Each of the songs explicates a place and time of an incident or an idea in the lives of the protagonists. One moment we are considering what it might mean to replace the soundtrack of a film set in Petrograd in 1917 with something else. The next, we look for a severed digit at Cambridge in 1939.
Van Gogh’s severed ear also haunts this work, which begins in pain and stays in pain until it frames Artaud’s sought-for final sleep in Ivry-sur-Seine, France, in 1948. The last lines of Waldman’s libretto are, “All I want is out of here.”
Little, who is one of the most successful out-there American opera composers, has long mixed rock and minimalism and a kind of narrative neo-Romanticism into dramatically gripping but straightforward opera. He amplifies the horror of grim subjects in such operas as “Soldier Songs” and “Dog Days,” full of war and anger. He sought a surreal spin on the life of John F. Kennedy that didn’t delve deeply enough.
But he’s never had a librettist like Waldman. Her text is an actual surreal fantasy with little to hang onto other than evocative images, which invites an incomparable tenor to enter into a vast range of psychic states through a vast range of music styles through a vast range of vocal techniques. There was no song that wasn’t an extraordinary music event. But you didn’t always know that.
The rock band played at volumes that could make your knees shake, set your skin vibrating and turn your brain off. This was not necessarily unpleasant, but it dulled the senses like a narcotic. Moments of sweet quiet effectively served for the shock effect of the next sonic onslaught, but that too became old news.
For nuance and description, there is always the first-rate recording (which absurdly calls itself a film soundtrack and fully deserved a Grammy, no matter the category). But Timur’s live performance added another otherworldly level of exaltation for which neither film nor deafening amplification can enhance.
Little, Waldman and Timur have entered an operatic (if you must) bardo, where every emotion is exposed and then erased, seemingly preparing us for the unknown. We don’t know where we will go. We do, however, recognize something new and important, and we need to trust it, not blast it to smithereens, leaving us more shaken than stirred.