Happy Nice Mall

In May 2019, as the art world competed on the first preview day of the Venice Biennale, few of us set out for a naval base in the northeast corner of the city.

There, inside a damp warehouse confiscated as a temporary pavilion for Lithuania, we climbed onto a pier and looked down. an astonishing sight: a big beach. Children below us playing with buckets and shovels; dogs dozed and barked; and more than a dozen cast members sang delayed flights and erupting volcanoes to a reserve, persistently catchy electronic note.

No one had identified this as the most important event of the biennial. But in a changing climate, it soon proved to be a cultural masterpiece: a frighteningly rare subject for art, given its urgency. “Sun & Sea” three days later (title like music is only superficially benign) won the show’s top award, Golden Lion, even as the creator of three young Lithuanians – director Rugile Barzdziukaite, librettist Vaiva Grainyte and the composer Lina Lapelytewhile working with Italian curator Lucia Pietroiusti — rushed to get funding to finish the run.

“Sun & Sea” is now on tour, although the pandemic hasn’t made it easy. The beach resurfaced earlier this summer in an empty Bauhaus swimming pool outside of Berlin; in a warehouse in Piraeus, Greece; and at the orchestral level of the 18th century Roman theatre. Arrived at BAM Fisher in Brooklyn this week, where the largely Lithuanian cast (some with “Sun & Sea” since it first came out) first presentation Exhibited at the national gallery in Vilnius in 2017) was augmented by redundancies in the New York area, which significantly increased the beach’s tattoo rate.

Squeezed into the black box theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, opera has lost some of its dizzying effect. And dreams of carefree international travel feel like a pre-pandemic time capsule. But “Sun & Sea” remains one of the biggest successes in performance of the last 10 years: sarcastic, seductive, and cunning in a way that will show itself days or years later. It’s a performance that makes the extinction of genres as delightful as a perfect pop song and at the same time unforgettable.

The New York run is sold out, but wait tickets are available, and tickets are selling out fast for next stops in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Bentonville, Ark. It is held here for five hours every day, and ticket holders can enter halfway through. at hourly intervals and stay as long as they wish. (The score runs in a loop for a little over an hour.)

Looking down from the mezzanine, you see beachgoers singing solos or duets, each of a few minutes, sometimes interrupted by stray children or a flying beach ball. The two lovers argue what time they will wake up to go to the airport the next day. An elderly woman reads the multilingual label on a tube of sunscreen. A Nouveau rich mom (soprano Kalliopi Petrou, in a chaise longue) celebrates her last family vacation in Australia, free piña coladas, and coral “with its bleached, pale whiteness.”

Only gently, from afar, these characters perceive that the summers are a little warmer than before, the waves are a little scarier. A young woman (Nabila Dandara Vieira Santos lying on a beach towel) holding a yoga mat and a self-help book marvels at the red sunshades, the green plastic bags, the fish-killing algae blooms: so many colors!”

This episodic structure and its repetition over the hours is central to the power of “Sun and Sea,” which looks at climate change in a directionless, immersive way with the same everyday concern of most vacationers (or, frankly, most legislators). Soloists often sing the same melody twice; they turn once to the banal talk about their day at the beach and once to the poetic, cosmic and climatic.

A perpetually angry beach resident (mezzo-soprano Egle Paskeviciene) sings an aria about tourists who don’t go after their dogs; He then marvels at the same octave-bouncing melody, how last Christmas “feels like it could be Easter.” A corporate workaholic (delicate bass Vytautas Pastarnokas in a maroon swimsuit) sings constantly in rhythm with the pulsating monotony of the music – first about the difficulties of relaxation, then about the “repressed negativity” pouring out “like lava”. like lava, like lava, like lava.”

The entire staff sings an adagio Holidaymakers Choir – “You should not leave your children unattended!” – this is reset at the end of the opera’s hour-long cycle with Grainyte’s most poetic call for habitat change. “Eutrophication!” beachmen sing. “Our bodies are covered with a slippery green fleece; our swimsuits are filled with algae.”

Then the first chorus repeats. Fun follows fear, horror follows fun, neither makes a big impact on the other. The world is warming and singers are putting on more sunscreen. On the other shore, the forests are burning, we line up for brunch with smoke in our eyes. Barzdziukaite, Grainyte, and Lapelyte are among the few artists ready to deal with climate change on this scale, with this seriousness: not as a single impending disaster, but as a whole era in which pleasures and disasters will collide and never end. income.

Grainyte’s words are still reminiscent of our “northern plain”, a Schengen area idyll reached by discount European air carriers, although the beach at BAM has been partly taken to New York: the bodega package nestled in the sand next to the Lithuanian word search booklet. serving trays. and a bag from the Park Slope Food Co-op. Not that the translation to New York was seamless. BAM Fisher is the wrong venue for “Sun & Sea,” with singers and extras crammed into a very small sandbar, pinned to ugly gray walls.

And the mezzanine is low, getting us too close to the singers and preventing us from getting a bird’s eye view – or eye of the drone — The image of the inhabitants of the coast, which was crucial for the staging of Barzdziukaite. “Sun and Sea” is choreographed to appear above our heads from a judicial distance, as if we were sun gods, looking at our creation from head to toe. Yet this protective distance is deliberately denied by the new conditions of performance audience: first of all, phones used by the majority of the audience. (We could say that one definition of performance art that works as distinct from opera or theater is that audiences are allowed to use their phones.)

Barzdziukaite gets the perfect shot by putting us above the singers; After all, he is a film director and same point of view In documentaries about habitat degradation. First in Venice, then in Rome, and now here again, I watched my audience members hold their phones in their hands throughout the performance as if they had to make an aerial view. They held them parallel to the scene below so that the screen was completely filled with sand.

By design, then, this episodic opera is further divided into shareable snippets, or images that we can then scroll through, as if they were our own vacation photos. Although somewhat diminished in BAM, this overwhelming success of “Sun & Sea” continues: it records our ecological unrest and technological instability, turning the endless vacation of opera into ourselves. In a new climate, we have become new people with new eyes and ears, and we are still lazing around.

Sun and sea
At BAM Fisher, Brooklyn, through September 26; 718-636-4100, bam.org.