premiere of SUCKTION, a HyperOpera buffa

Anne LeBaron and Douglas Kearney (American Gothic with vacuum);
Nina Eidsheim

Sucktion, my cyber-erotic 'vacuum cleaner' opera with a libretto by Douglas Kearney, and direction by Nataki Garrett, premieres tonight in Los Angeles at REDCAT with performers from the band soNu: Nina Eidsheim, soprano; Gustavo Aguilar, percussion, and Phil Curtis, laptop / electronics. It all began around ten years ago with an extreme sonic experiment: feeding nails and other objects into half a dozen homeless vacuum cleaners (rescued from the streets of Pittsburgh) during an exploratory recording session, with the soprano (and composer) Alice Shields pushing them around and screaming lines such as ‘Oreck, I knew him well.’ When the ensemble soNu approached me to write a work for their group in 2003, I decided to move ahead with the vacuum cleaner idea, and construct a ‘wordless’ experimental piece. I soon invited Douglas Kearney into this process. We invented an initial version of the work, which I scored in blazing colors, in the Microsoft Word program, Excel (a guided improvisation, allowing the players quite a lot of freedom). A recording session for this first effort ensued. Then, in 2007, Sucktion was one of 40 new works selected for a the Multi-Arts Production Fund (a program of Creative Capital supported by the Rockefeller Foundation), from over 650 submissions.

Sucktion follows a woman’s cyber-erotic transformation from abject housewife into a self-sufficient cyborg via the subversive use of a vacuum cleaner. With elements of satire and science fiction, Sucktion critiques sexism, particularly how socially reinforced female dependence on male economic dominance reduces women to domestics without agency: “clean machines.” Sucktion’s narrative arc progresses through six songs: Soap Aria, Sucktion Remix, Anniversorry, Cleaning House, Rabbitroobabot'rumba, and Cyborgasm.

When we first meet Irona (the housewife), she speaks in a patois of jingles, daytime TV and soft rock. Sucktion’s text enacts her metamorphosis into a cyborg via her adoption of an artificial language imagined as creolized English, German and onomatopoeic approximations of appliance sounds. Sucktion furthers investigations of the intersection of written text and aural performance by fusing a typographically performative libretto with experimental concert theater. The text, with its visual collisions of careening type, is at once lyrics, stage directions and environment, recreating daytime TV’s barrage of housekeeping advertisements, chat shows and melodramas in one song and Irona’s appliance-destroying rampage in another.

There are two additional performances on Friday and Saturday (Aug. 1 and 2).

To the Blue Carp

On my way to purchase mailing envelopes yesterday morning, the dewy air was freshened by shopkeepers hosing down the pavement in front of their businesses on Annagasse---a narrow lane reminiscent of what Vienna looked like in the 18th Century. Looking up, always a good thing to do in Vienna, I saw Zum Blauen Karpfen, a former hotel, rebuilt in 1814, with striking reliefs by Josef Klieber. A noted architectural sculptor of the first half of the 19th century, he had many commissions from the Austrian, Bohemian and Hungarian aristocracy.

I’ve not written much about the substance of my work in these daily updates, perhaps because the four projects that loom before me are all works-in-progress. But the news of actual performance dates this summer in Los Angeles, for SUCKTION (a theatrical song cycle I’m writing for the group soNu) means that the whip is snapping like crazy now. The other compositions – my opera, CRESCENT CITY (with the writer Douglas Kearney, also true of SUCKTION), BREATHTAILS, for string quartet and shakuhachi, to texts by Charles Bernstein, and THE SILENT STEPPE CANTATA, for orchestra and chorus in Kazakhstan, are simmering along.