InstanTopera by Elliott Sharp Operas

InstanTopera

InstanTopera is an opera reductio ad absurdum - a surreal and nonlinear collection of events and provocations ordered in time and realized with great spontaneity by Elliott Sharp with 14 local artists taking part in a workshop in Valencia, Spain, December 2017, organized by Dialeg Obert, a cultural society dedicated to radical performance. The participants brought a variety of talents and skills: musical, sonic, gestural/performative, and movement. All had some familiarity with improvisational practices and were well-versed in contemporary performance and theater.

The workshop began with exercises to hone selected techniques including development of abstract narratives, imitation and transformation, flocking behavior, gestural counterpoint (especially "doing the opposite"), and use of improvised "pop outs" from silence, from drones, and from groove. A structure was created that would give each performer an "aria" accompanied by varying permutations of the rest of the participants. Each aria was to be prepared in advance with the players making use of the online CutUp Machine of Brion Gysin and Google Translate as a way to transform into lyrics texts appropriated from the day's news or their own experience. Besides voice, some players' arias were performed on a musical instrument, some were purely gestural acts. Clusters of arias were interspersed among full ensemble actions with the finale of the work being a collective groove and drone.

The final output would be the performance of InstanTopera at Teatro al Musical, a gathering of the disparate threads of the individual and collective work.

Elliott Sharp: composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, author, leads Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics and Terraplane with compositional strategies including fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors. His collaborators have included Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Cecil Taylor; Debbie Harry; Hubert Sumlin; Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt