Bryce Dessner's Triptych (Eyes of One on Another)
$42.50-$72.50
Triptych (Eyes of One on Another)
Music – Bryce Dessner
Libretto – Korde Arrington Tuttle
Director – Kaneza Schaal
Doors at 7:00 pm
Show at 8:00 pm
Thirty years after the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, we still cannot turn away from what his photos reveal. Composer Bryce Dessner, librettist Korde Arrington Tuttle, director Kaneza Schaal and designer Carlos Soto, in collaboration with Roomful of Teeth and an eight-member musical ensemble, seek to capture the ways Mapplethorpe’s works compel an audience’s complicity and characterize them in the act of attention.
Growing up in Cincinnati, Dessner’s own exposure to the protests surrounding this galvanizing artist rooted a lifelong kinship to his pivotal body of work. Mapplethorpe’s pictures both unite and divide, provoking a consideration of perceived opposites – black/white, male/female, gay/straight, art/porn, classical/contemporary. His pictures seduce, shock, offend, excite, intrigue, and scare us all at once. Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) asks an audience to experience these reactions collectively. Through music, Mapplethorpe’s images, poetry by Essex Hemphill and Patti Smith, and use of both theatrical and photographic lighting techniques, the work puts the audience inside the artist’s viewfinder, inside his beautiful, bold, voracious view of how nature and humans look, touch, feel, hurt, and love one another.
“Witty and wicked... forbidding and seductive... Dessner is at his best... The language is stylized and extravagantly poetic, matching the photographs’ explicit sexual content while meeting their cool elegance with punk Romanticism.” – The New York Times
An ArKtype Production, produced in residency with and commissioned by University Musical Society, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Co-produced by Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel, Music and Artistic Director. Triptych was co-commissioned by BAM; Luminato Festival, Toronto, Canada; Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, Athens, Greece; Cincinnati Opera, Cincinnati, OH; Cal Performances, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA; Stanford Live, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Adelaide Festival, Australia; The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for performance as part of DirectCurrent 2019; ArtsEmerson: World on Stage, Emerson College, Boston, MA; Texas Performing Arts, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX; Holland Festival, Amsterdam; Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH; the Momentary, Bentonville, AR; Celebrity Series of Boston, MA; and residency development through MassMOCA, North Adams, MA.
*Disclaimer: Triptych will contain a frank discussion of sexuality, queer identity, and race, and may include photographs taken by Robert Mapplethorpe depicting sexuality, sexual acts, nudity, flowers, and classical portraiture.
Music by Bryce Dessner is used with permission of Chester Music Ltd.