The Visitation
an opera for a vanishing world
music: Christina Campanella
text: Stephanie Fleischmann
photo: Damian Calvo
An epidemic of loneliness is sweeping the city. Its solitary inhabitants dwell in little box-like apartments, cut off from the natural world, their dreams haunted by the deer who appeared in a city park in Harlem a few years prior. A woman who builds dioramas eavesdrops on her next-door neighbor—an elderly, housebound naturalist who conjures the rapidly disappearing topography of the planet earth by reciting a forgotten language. In the city park across the street, a park gardener ponders the deer’s route as elsewhere, a vocalist confined to a sound booth voices the creature, periodically stepping out of the booth to embody a woman who dreams of riding through the woods on the back of a deer. A rainstorm like no other pummels the city. As the storm clears, a chorus of agoraphobics steps outside and looks up at the sky.
Recipient of an OPERA America Opera Grant for Female Composers, supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation.
This atmospheric new music-theater work shot through with solastalgia (a longing for a lost natural realm) explores a dreamtime and a heartspace that can only be experienced in the context of music. Deploying a dramaturgy of miniature gestures that trigger epic ripples through a hermetically sealed universe, The Visitation investigates the ramifications of the built world on the ever more fragile wild, and plumbs the loneliness of the urban environment.
Development: Workshop 1 — Tape Kitchen, Gowanus, Brooklyn, June 2022. With: Kasper, Alma Cuervo, Michael Chinworth, Mark Spencer, Sammy Baker, Brian McCorkle & Aviva Jaye. Production support: Ryan Gamblin, Lisa McGinn, Hayley Karlich.
The naturalist
Bosky woods, coppice, copse,
boscage, thicket, spinney, holt, glade.
Edgeland, upland, meadow.
Tall grass, lichen, moss,
brattlings, bats, lightning bugs.
Long dusk,
civil twilight
across the fen,
a grove of trees
an opening
leading on
beyond
the edges of the known world.
The diorama builder
I have a next-door neighbor.
I never see my neighbor.
But I know she’s there.
I know she’s old.
I hardly ever hear her
moving about,
but I know she’s there.
Keeping me company,
as we both look out
at the park across the street
as the sky turns red
through a weave of barren branches
as the sun rises
on the concrete cold—
The park gardener
Little dogs on their leashes.
Big dogs running rogue.
Squirrels, American grey.
Sparrows,
a red-tailed hawk swooping down.
Chipmunks, frogs, possum,
a great-horned owl,
and plenty of City rats—
they’re all here
dwelling
in my small piece of park.
Vocals: Justin Hicks; guitar: Mark Spencer
Renata Pequodia
Renata Pequodia has a dream of a deer in a park.
The Deer
This deer doesn’t speak words, but she sounds.
And sometimes she sings as a very old tree.
Vocals: Gelsey Bell; piano: Brian McCorkle
& the band
piano, synth, Ableton, guitar/bass, pedal steel, drums, percussion