The work inside the scenery
The graveyard in Lincoln in the Bardo gives bodies to more than its characters: the surroundings themselves take form. At New York’s Metropolitan Opera, where the production runs through 14 November, Adam Rigg’s wooded cemetery shares the stage with James Ortiz’s puppets and Raja Feather Kelly’s choreography. Peter Mattei’s Lincoln visits the grave of his son Willie. Lileana Blain-Cruz’s account of development makes the choice of this world concrete: turntables and large moving pieces were considered, holograms were explored, and a tactile environment emerged.[1]
One early version needed 20 people to move the scenery. Blain-Cruz says conversations with Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek led away from that plan. The interesting change involves more than replacing one image with another. Puppets, costumes and bodies working together could make the surroundings part of the same material world as the performers’ movements. Artistic necessity alone would be a narrow explanation, however: the labour and movement required by large pieces could also have made smaller tools attractive. The director’s stated aim was a world that did not feel too distant from the nineteenth century.[1]
The performer inside the notes
This world does not offer its singers unlimited freedom. The music, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, fixes some of the durations a director could stretch in a spoken play. That makes Blain-Cruz’s small example valuable: Lincoln repeats words about his son’s first suit three times. The repetition and its musical position are set; the acting question concerns how he approaches that memory on each return. The director describes identical notes at the same volume being sung with different intentions, including anger or self-reproach.[1]
For me, the production’s stage tension lies here: as the visual world approaches the body, the body’s movement and voice negotiate with music. Reading puppets only as vehicles for strange creatures, and the score only as a ruler for duration, misses that exchange. A gesture preceding, meeting or following a sung repetition makes a different reading of the same memory possible. This is an interpretation of the method the director describes, rather than a conclusion about an audience’s response to a particular performance. The work carrying Lincoln’s grief becomes concrete in the distance between the graveyard’s large image and a singer’s small intention.[1]