Performance review

HATES IT!

THE REVIEWS ARE IN AND… DID WE SEE THE SAME THING? I’m talking about Innocence, the final opera by the late Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, which closed Wednesday at the Met. It’s about a school shooting and also a wedding, a wedding to the brother of the school shooter. Past and present flow into one another in a rotating set that’s at once wedding venue and international school. The set and lighting are great! The performances are uneven (that one dead girl Markéta, played by Vilma Jää, who sings like a squeezy chirpy toy—I think some Nordic folk thing—I love!!!!!) The story, with a libretto by Sofi Oksanen and Aleksi Barrière, is a concatenation of clichés, the characters are unresolved, the choreography is trite, and I know opera as a genre enjoys an abundance of exposition-as-dialogue but 105 minutes of it is a bit much… 2/5 well its run is over so if you didn’t see it you probably won’t. No worries.

Also saw Ohneotrix Point Never, with Freeka Tet doing visuals, at Pioneer Works. We were quote-unquote VIP so we watched from the mezzanine above which made me feel more secure about my hairline. Weird to be at a DJ thing where nobody dances? I liked the music and the projections/screens were so, like, 2010s in a way that felt soothing although I was like, Does all VJing look like ketamine+molly or do I simply have hallucinations when I combine ketamine+molly born of my obsession with watching screensavers and motion graphics? WHAT COMES FIRST THE MATRIX OR THE REAL? By the real I mean the vision, of course.

After the ADULT ELECTRONIC MUSIC IN THE FORMER INDUSTRIAL BUILDING we had pasta in a WOOD-CEILINGED RESTAURANT WITH EDISON BULBS IN MILK JARS hanging from OLD WAGON AND/OR BICYCLE WHEELS. I kept telling G—, WOW WE REALLY WENT TO BROOKLYN and he was like, Would you move to Greenpoint? and I was like, NOT EVEN IF IT WERE FREE!

We were in Red Hook, btw, but geography is always a fantasy.

Back to Lincoln Center Saturday for a Balanchine matinee. I really like Stravinsky, okay? The Bizet (Symphony in C) was flouncy and organized, the Agon (Stravinsky #1) was a lot of folding, dividing, felt very, like, modernist. Firebird (Stravinsky 2) with the Chagall costumes made me realize just how theatrical the music is, also, so many colors! I was sort of cross-eyed because I’d only slept two hours but…

Even more than Stravinsky, I can’t shut up about Moby-Dick,¹ so that same evening G— took me to see Moby Dick (no hyphen), an originally German production by Robert Wilson with music by Anna Calvi at BAM. (Back to Brooklyn, baby!)

The play(?) seemed like somebody’s idea of somebody’s idea of avant-garde theater. Like, if I wanted to write a parody of self-serious and nonsensical Art, I would come up with people speaking pointless lines somehow adapted from Melville in over-the-top voices while doing contrived hand motions and pausing and staging prat falls at random intervals in white face paint… although I don’t know if I would have thought to include corny indie rock that people danced around holding chairs to with such brave and surprising lyrics as “la la la la la la la la.” A lot of the audience was laughing. (There was also a laugh track, separately.) What was the joke? I felt it was on me. Incredibly boring! We left early to eat tacos… The tacos were a 4/5.

1. I can’t shut up in general…