Divide Light if you dare –

On August 13th (plenty of time to get your tickets!), the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California, will premier a new opera by Lesley Dill, Divide Light. The opera is “an interdisciplinary collaboration between New York visual and performance artist Lesley Dill and Colorado composer and conductor Tom Morgan” inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Of the many interpretations of Dickinson that we’ve noted over the last year–like Helen Noonan’s Lieder-Opera, a sing-along with Seattle’s Choral Arts, and Don Cook’s architectural take on Dickinson’s poems’ structures–this one sounds the strangest and possibly most wonderful of all. A multi-media opera, “Divide Light” combines music and words and movement in illuminating and beguiling ways:

In Divide Light, Dill redirects the classic form of opera to a sparer and more closely developed theatrical presentation. The haunting visual element will feature large projections on a back screen and multiple scrims. The images will be a combination of Dill’s stark, edgy and evocative black-and-white photographs and projected text from Dickinson’s poetry. Poems will stream, scroll, flash, swirl, twirl, pop out, edge in, seep out, fade in, fall down, and rise up on the screen and scrims. The performers will sing Dickinson’s words and wear them scrawled across their costumes. Poems will appear in unusual places throughout the opera, interacting with the audience in unexpected ways.

You can sample some of the music and images at the Divide Light web site. The music is haunting and a little troubling, particularly the repetitive and layered “Much Madness is Divinest Sense” and the subtle “I Am Afraid”. The video is a little more difficult to follow, since it’s disconnected from the context of the stage. All the same, the combination of images and music is affecting. Pictures of the costumes–stark and simple, black and white, covered with letters–give some indication of how the pieces will weave together.

I suspect that “Divide Light” won’t be to everyone’s taste: sensitive souls may come away with a few weeks’ worth of troubling dreams, if not outright nightmares. But it has every hint of providing a rich and provocative look into Dickinson’s poems and its place in the dark spaces of the mind.

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