Experimental Opera Explores Earth, After People

Over a pulsing synthesizer, musician and composer Gelsey Bell ends the final song of her opera with the line ​“I’m struck by morning / the orange line of light / low and fast, revolving flight.” By then, however, to the listener the meaning of that first noun is ambiguous: does she mean ​“morning” or ​“mourning”? The line carries the weight of both meanings with ease. 

It’s part of Bell’s experimental opera MƆɹNIŊ [Morning//Mourning], which ​“inhabits a world in which all humans have disappeared from Earth,” Bell writes. ​“An ensemble of five vocalist/multi-instrumentalists witness and guide the audience through the changes on Earth as forests grow back, new species evolve, and the human-made world erodes away. The piece is a fantastical and playful exploration into the dire political and ethical contradictions that structure current human relations with nature.”

In a collaboration between the Peabody Museum and the Yale Schwarzman Center, MƆɹNIŊ will be performed in the main hall of the Peabody on Nov. 4; admission is free and a waiting list available.

A piece dealing with the end of humanity might seem at first glance to be, well, a little bleak. But the experience of the music itself isn’t so. There’s space to contemplate the heaviness embedded in the piece, but there’s also humor, and even wonder.

“The piece is designed so that people start off feeling apocalyptic. Then they can go on a journey that leaves them in a different place,” Bell said.

That journey mirrors Bell’s own research into the topic in order to write MƆɹNIŊ. ​“I was inspired by Alan Wiesman’s The World Without Us,” she said, a 2007 book that contemplates what will happen to the materials left by humans after humans are gone — what will survive (ceramics) and what will be transformed (dams will become waterfalls; cities will become forests) and how. Reading it, ​“I became so hopeful and in awe of the adaptability of so many creatures and the planet,” Bell said. The more she researched, the more that hope grew. So in the piece, ​“there is the heavy mourning of what is lost,” she said, ​“There are sections where it talks about nostalgia for humans … but also it’s about new beginning after new beginning.”

MƆɹNIŊ is light with its touch on why humans are no longer in the world. ​“The piece does not linger in any way about why humans are no longer there,” Bell said, meaning that it also offers no explanation. Bell has found that people in the audience often make up their own reasons for humans’ absence. ​“The show can be a bit of a Rorschach test” for ​“how people feel about the environment.” 

But Bell is more interested in exploring the present of the world she has created, and part of the hope in the piece comes from changing the perspective on the situation away from the human gaze. ​“It was so freeing to write a story about something other than humans,” Bell said. ​“Our humanness is still very present” in the piece, but ​“part of it is looking at the stories that aren’t about us.”

In telling the story, Bell found that opera afforded a range of possibilities other storytelling forms might not have. ​“I’m a composer, so it’s not just language, it’s music,” she said, and ​“there’s so much music in non-human places. The combination of music and language affords a real rainbow of techniques to talk about non-human things.”

In depicting a forest, she said, ​“there’s no language at all and it’s very instrumental,” echoing ​“sonic modes of communication that are not in language” but do exist in the natural world. Bell’s world is also full of animals, and ​“there are a lot of other animals that have drama as humans do — life and death drama. What happens to all the domesticated animals? What happens to cockroaches when we don’t have electricity any more? One winter in NYC and they would be gone.” She also explores ​“safe havens where wild animals live” that humans have unintentionally created, like the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, and examines how animals could ​“spread out from those areas” to reclaim the world. As the piece continues, it heads into straight-up science fiction by focusing on a ​“new species that has evolved,” Bell said. ​“The adventures of that species may feel like the adventures of humans,” but ​“they interact with the world in different ways.”

The variety of subjects lends itself to a variety of instrumentation. In a section on plastics, ​“the accompanying music is very synth heavy and two of us as singing into mylar,” Bell said. A wooden instrument is used to depict the forest, as ​“I’m literally trying to bring those natural sounds into the room.” As ceramics ​“are the vestige of humans that will las the longest on the planet,” Bell said, ​“we’re playing ceramics.” Birdsong and whalesong make their appearances as well.

“There’s always a dramaturglcal aspect to music that can bring in something,” Bell said, and she uses it all to tell her story of a world without humans, but not without hope.

Joint Effort

MƆɹNIŊ was originally commissioned and developed through the HERE Artist Residency Program and had its premiere at the 2023 PROTOTYPE Festival, which was where it caught the attention of Jennifer Harrison Newman, associate artistic director at the Schwarzman Center at Yale. 

“I had no idea what I was going to see,” Newman said, and ​“I just came out of there struck that I spent and hour and a half mesmerized by this tale that was being woven in front of me.” Though the piece dealt with a world without humans, ​“I felt charmed, soothed, at ease,” she said. ​“I didn’t feel depressed at all.” She also thought: ​“How cool would this be” to bring it to New Haven? At the time, the Schwarzman Center was just opening. ​“We were a brand-new center,” Newman said, and she was guided by a few basic questions. ​“What are the spaces that we have? What are we trying to activate? Who is our community?” She already had something of an answer to the last one, as she knew New Haven was ​“passionate about the arts and super-interdisciplinary.”

But even with the resources at the Schwarzman Center’s and the Peabody’s disposal, Newman said, ​“it’s so wild how long it takes for something to happen.” 

Newman invited Bell to visit the Schwarzman Center, originally thinking of it for the center’s dome room, a large circular room with a domed ceiling, where ​“you could see immersed in the sound,” Newman said. But they quickly realized the space wasn’t quite big enough. The Newman took a tour of the Peabody Museum just before it opened to the public and connected with Chris Norris, the Peabody’s director of public programs. They agreed that the museum ​“is where it has to happen,” Newman said, for a few different reasons. To begin, ​“this opera is directly speaking to research” the Peabody is doing, Newman said. ​“It’s telling the story in a different way.” 

Norris agreed. ​“We tell stories primarily through the objects and exhibitions” in the museum, ​“but you can tell stories through dance, spoken word, music.” As the Peabody reopened, he said, ​“we were really interested in the potential of bringing in other ways of storytelling.” This has begun with some of the exhibition pieces themselves, such as a display of ancient artifacts built around a piece by celebrated New Haven artist Mohamad Hafez. ​“We try to surprise visitors” by ​“having them see — and this case hear — something they haven’t seen before.”

Part of the appeal lay in MƆɹNIŊ ​“being thematically appropriate,” Norris said. It is in part an opera about extinction, ​“one of the big stories that we tell.” So ​“why not try doing it in a space underneath two giant, extinct reptiles?” It creates connections that wouldn’t be available in a regular performance space.

The Peabody also appreciated the ​“interesting challenge” of putting on a small opera in the dinosaur hall, ​“designed to be a space that most visitors would pass through,” Norris said. There was an advantage in that ​“the requirements of staging it are relatively simple”; the fossils in the hall are the scenery. ​“We’re going to set it up and take it down in a short time,” Norris said. ​“It’s almost like a pop-up opera.”

Staging an opera is in keeping with the Peabody’s new approach generally. If the previous iteration of the museum was relatively static, the present-day version is seeking to make sure there’s something new there as often as possible. ​“The way I look at it is not so much that you come here to see things” even though ​“it has things you can’t see everywhere else,” Norris said. Rather, the Peabody hopes to tell ​“a multitude of stories in different ways” and ​“keep surprising people when they come back.” He’s hopeful that MƆɹNIŊ is the first of ​“a lot of times where we push the envelope for what we can do with the space and how we do it.”

In It Together

The collaboration between the Peabody and the Schwarzman Center, even though it’s happening within Yale’s institutional structure, is another example of places working together that New Haven has seen more of in the past year, from the International Festival of Arts and Ideas to Open Studios. 

“People are super-curious, super-lovers of the arts,” Newman said, but even so, ​“in terms of producing the arts in general, it takes a lot of emailing, a lot of work.” People working in the arts are often ​“already at their maximum capacity doing what they do,” and ​“collaboration requires another layer of effort and attention.… The gift of being at the Schwarzman Center is to be that extra resource.” She likened her position to being ​“the synovial fluid between the joints” in a human skeleton, helping everything move better. ​“That is such a gift,” she said. ​“I love being able to do that — there’s always so much incredible stuff going on,” and it is gratifying ​“to be able to lift it up sometimes.”

From her vantage point looking out over greater collaboration in the arts world, Newman also sees that ​“ultimately what we’re finding is that it’s about survival. It’s comnunity building ​‚caring for one another.… You’re not going to survive alone. You need a community.” For artists and institutions, ​“it’s one of the things we take away from 2020 to 2022 — we have to come together and we have to work together.”

Newman has also found advantages to collaboration over competition in the arts. ​“Actually we all do better work when we collaborate. The work is seen by more people,” she said. ​“You extend your audience.” Coming out of the pandemic shutdown, ​“that was an eye-opener for a lot of organizations,” that ​“together more people get to experience what you’re trying to do.”

In bringing MƆɹNIŊ to New Haven, Bell said, ​“I’m really happy it’s happening at the Peabody. The ability for the audience to connect it with the exhibits that are there adds so much.” And ​“it’s really exciting that we’re the first musical performance happening in that space.” 

“This is the first time for an experimental opera” at the museum, Norris agreed. ​“I hope it’s not the last.”