Dear Land

Two monodramas directed by Lydia Steier

Peter Maxwell Davies: Eight Songs for a Mad King
Du Yun: Zolle    WORLD PREMIERE*

October 27-30, 2005

Performance Space 122
New York City
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Eight Songs for a Mad King
Eight Songs for a Mad King photos © Lydia Steier

We live in an age of ownership where, paradoxically, nothing is really ours. The anonymous persona we’re able to maintain by means of today’s technology leaves us utterly exposed—our critical details, contact information, total identities. Rather than staking a defensive and proprietary claim in this vast new digital wilderness, we tend to run in the opposite direction, toward exposure, exhibition and other avenues of “anti-privacy”. Whereas land and legacy marked the life’s pride of our forebears, today’s identities are sown from fields of binary code and measured in Google “hits”…

Dear Land examines two figures torn from the solidity of their countries, their home soil. Eight Songs for a Mad King explores the late stages of the mental demise of England’s King George III, after losing the American colonies, and his own throne at the hands of his ambitious son. His bewilderment and anguish at his fallen state is cut through by strains of desperate nostalgia for simpler, saner times.

Zolle’s protagonist considers her break from self and substance in the gray light of her recent death. Having been torn from her roots in rural China as a child, and unable to find solid ground in her adopted homeland, New York, she wanders through dreams and remembrances, deprived in death from the comfort of owning and belonging to a place—just as she was in life.

We have decided, in considering this production, to use our contemporary technological dystopia as a launching point for Dear Land. Drawing inspiration from “videocam diary” culture, where extreme emotional distress can be broadcast for macabre posterity and mass consumption, our George III delivers the rants and musings of Eight Songs for a Mad King to a stationary camera—his image then projected onto a very large screen. This creates the disorienting juxtaposition of voyeurism on the part of the audience, as well as a strong perception of the character’s own exhibitionism. Also, each musician is observed by a small spy camera, projecting distorted, ever-shifting images onto television screens. The cumulative resulting illusion begs the question, “who is watching who?”

The voice of Zolle’s protagonist is already split in two, one rational, one visceral—the former unable to properly internalize the depth of her loss, the latter incapable of rationalizing it. The rational voice, in the form of a narrator, appears as a headless giantess, whose speaking face, severed from the body, only appears as a projected apparition. This image is interspersed with animations created from the form of the visceral embodiment of the protagonist, as well as the stunning photography of Frank Dituri, whose art inspired the composition of the work itself. Thus, in counterpoint to the movements of the “visceral” and “rational” personages, a series of hypnotic, constantly changing images will represent the rational consciousness torn from the body itself, the nostalgia for a lithe, whole body that has been lamentably replaced by one incapable of grace, and the hazy gray memories of a beloved homeland blanching into unarticulated, anonymous whiteness.

We are using technology itself (in the form of live projection and video art) as a psychological counterpoint for today’s deepening ambiguity, which affects identity, experience, memory, and the idea of belonging—as opposed to simply owning.

Dear Land is such an exciting project for a number of reasons. Certainly it is an opportunity to work with some of today’s most jaw-droppingly talented musicians, on an acknowledged masterpiece of contemporary music theater, as well as a brand new work of astonishing depth and craft by a truly gifted composer of my own generation. Additionally, Frank Dituri is an established master, whose images we are fortunate and honored to incorporated into the video art of emerging multimedia artist John Ritchey. Designer Anka Lupes has taken this production to a new level with remarkable aesthetic choices. Aaron Mason, an incomparable collaborator, creates landscapes in light often too beautiful to be believed.

I know I speak for ICE, Performance Space 122 and our generous supporters in expressing my complete enthusiasm for Dear Land. A project of such bold musical and aesthetic vision is seldom able to address the unique pressures of our time with such eloquence and power. Thank you for supporting ICE’s Dear Land.

Lydia Steier
Director Dear Land
8.3.2005

PS 122 Debut October 27-30, 2005
PS 122 Debut October 27-30, 2005
PS 122 Debut October 27-30, 2005