Darkling
Darkling, the award winning poem by Anna Rabinowitz, was created for the New York City Off-Broadway stage by Michael Comlish, with music by Stefan Weisman and additional song by Lee Hoiby. The piece was developed in workshops spanning 3 years with American Opera Projects, and opened at the East 13th Street Theater in February 2006.
Though critically praised, the work was impossible to classify, as it combined opera, ensemble-style theater, stylized movement, and a complex vocabulary of early and mid 20th century theater forms. It was also considered “suitable for the Whitney Museum” because of its use of three dimensional space, video and sound-space.
Accoustic sounds intentionally clashed with traditional operatic voices, ripped through by the Flux Quartet. The theatrical experience, though disorienting and aesthetically demanding for some, called to mind Meyerhold, Ives, Brecht, Martha Clark and Richard Foreman. The work was previously presented as a workshop for the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series.
Stefan Weisman continues to work with variations on the music in his own compositions. An original and starkly different concert staging will tour Berlin in June of 2007, including for the opening the newly restored Henry Ford Theater at the Freie University.
