A Climate-Change Opera, Performed From the Beach, Makes Its New York Debut

I know that there was a casting call put out by BAM for the extras in New York, and there will be another set of extras in Los Angeles, et cetera, but has any of the content of the work changed as you’ve presented it in different places?

Grainytė: The text and music were always the same, but of course when you arrive in a different space—whether it’s an abandoned swimming pool or baroque theater—it adds some extra elements. We always invite local people who don’t sing, but they lie on the beach and they bring their own habits and dogs and kids, and they just create this documentary layer and the specifics of the local beach.

And I understand your team was quite involved with picking the props and swimwear. Can you tell me a bit about developing the visual texture of a piece like this, beyond the 21 tons of sand?

Grainytė: Rugilė is the master of the details!

Barzdžiukaitė: We wanted the image to be really light and not make any demand on the visitor’s eyes. So the colors are really colorful, but they’re mostly pastels so they’re not attacking your vision. You don’t see any extreme colors, like bright red. It’s just to keep this very calm, peaceful atmosphere where you don’t have any domination. It’s like a choir of color.

Between the timeliness of its subject matter and its length, Sun & Sea feels like an archetype for the modern opera. Do you see yourselves continuing to mount it well into the future? And how do you see—or hope to see—the operatic form evolving in general?

Barzdžiukaitė: We have invitations on many continents—although some of them are a question mark because there were so many delays [due to the pandemic]—but it’s still on demand, the piece. Personally, as long as it is interesting to us, I guess it may be interesting for the audience too. And as for the documentary layer, it is never fixed and always surprises us. It’s still interesting to follow it.

Lapelytė: What we also learned is that the times are changing the work. After Venice, certain things that were put in prior to the pandemic became enlightened. For example, there is the scene with the people lying on the beach after the volcano eruption in Iceland, which happened some years back. But suddenly this kind of being stuck in one place had a very different aspect.

Grainytė: But if you’re wondering about the opera genre as such—if you go back to the roots of this genre, you would see that it usually has topics that are very big: love, hate, revenge—and in our case, we focus on mundane, micro stories. The term we use to describe Sun & Sea—as an opera performance—already creates some dissonance because opera relates to something traditional and performance to some modern art. Probably for us, then, opera is more like a marriage of different art practices and the possibility to meet each other as artists. The future of opera for us is the future of our collaboration.

Sun & Sea runs at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from September 15 through 26, after which it travels to Philadelphia; Bentonville, Arkansas; and Los Angeles. For tickets and more information about the BAM leg of its U.S. tour, click here. 

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