Composer George Lewis Gets Struck by a Comet

Director Yuval Sharon, Founder and Co-Artistic Director of The Industry [Sweet Land, Invisible Cities Hopscotch], never shies away from making bold choices. Certainly his desire to find a way to bring Monteverdi’s 1643 opera, L’incoronazione di Poppea into our modern age is amongst them. Though he wasn’t entirely sure how to do it. Until he spoke with composer George Lewis at a conference at Columbia University in New York.

“Yuval was very complimentary about Afterword, which was great for me,” Lewis told me recently of Sharon’s response to Lewis’ 2015 opera. He continued, “So at some point he called and said he was interested in double consciousness. I had just been reading The Comet, which is a short story by W.E.B. Du Bois. a kind of proto-Afrofuturist.”

The end result is The Comet / Poppea which combines parts of Monteverdi’s opera with Lewis’ The Comet. Performances begin at The Warehouse at Geffen Contemporary at MOCA on June 14th and run through June 23rd. The libretto is by Douglas Kearney.

In Du Bois’ story, a comet has struck the world and all that survived is a Black man and a white woman.

Lewis then discusses the plot of this short story. “They find each other and they start to think about what life has been like and what it could be like, perhaps under a new regime. And this is something where Du Bois gets a chance to think about social forces and their role in upholding white supremacy, patriarchy, and so on.”

But it still seems like a stretch to combine a new opera with Poppea. But Lewis tells more.

“They’re both about power and privilege and about patriarchy and time travel, or travel across dimensions or parallel universes. So there’s a double science fiction aspect. That becomes already something where you get maybe more than double consciousness as you get multiple consciousness.”

Perhaps to better understand how this might work together, perhaps defining double consciousness would be helpful.

“I think the original Du Bois formulation, as I recall, was that you were sort of like The Bourne Identity,” Lewis said. “Black Americans used to hear about this consciousness themselves as human beings, that’s how it should be and then as a Negro. How those two inform and deform, their everyday experience.” Though Lewis went on to fully reveal the full story, reading Du Bois’ writing or seeing The Comet / Poppea is a better way to have it unfold for you.

If it sounds confusing, rest assured Lewis is more concerned with where his works lead you as opposed to whether or not you understand them.

“Some people don’t have to understand what I was thinking. They can come to their own ideas about it and then they can enjoy that. I’m more interested in this: I want people to come out of the experience, thinking, wow, that was really different. I’ve never heard anything quite like that before. And then the next step in their thinking is, that was different. So I wonder what else around here could be different? What needs changing. You’ve already changed me.”

Since that is a philosophy at least in some part shared with Yuval Sharon, their partnership on this project makes complete sense.

“I think that this is something that Yuval has managed to do throughout [his] whole time with The Industry – which is to make make things that not only challenge you, but to cope with experiences you’re not going to be able to predict in advance. Even if you’ve heard it several times, you can hear it again and you still don’t quite know how it’s going to be. I think that’s very important to sort of play around with memory and to make sure that memory is something that we have to build, that we just can’t accept nostalgia. I think that’s what’s going to happen in this opera.”

Sharon and has team have carefully blended to the two works into one seamless production. The Comet / Poppea is performed on a rotating stage allowing audience members to see different aspects of the story as the stage rotates – thus creating a physical double consciousness.

“We want to give the audience freedom. That’s why we don’t make fixed relationships between the music and the dance, because we want to give people freedom to create their own relationships. We’ve created one relationship. But it’s not a matter of just decoding what the composer and the creators think. It’s kind of using this as a springboard for your own thinking.”

Lewis is also looking for new ways for himself to think. To create. To evolve. Yuval is doing the same as are other directors working in the opera world. This production allows both of these men to move the needle, yours and the art form’s.

“It’s not like you’re looking for influence. What you’re looking for is the possibility for other people to do things. What’s happening is that ideas are sort of moving back and forth between the historical realms, which are always making new histories. I’m looking at this more as increasing the amount of freedom or the feeling of freedom that we have to make these kinds of interventions. I think that anyone who sees this, it’s going to be wow, that was different. I guess I could do stuff different too, which means I’ll probably have to change a lot of what goes on now.”

If you surmise this deep-thinking composer is concerned about his legacy, you’d be as mistaken as I was when I asked the question.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen there. I mean, I wrote a few books. I wrote a lot of articles. I contributed to various fields trying to write music. Who knows what happens with it, you know? I try to help people in general, whatever it is, writing or music, writing or whatever. Maybe there’s something that takes a spark in them, and then you hope they go out and help other people. I hope I was helpful.”

Main Photo: George Lewis at a rehearsal of The Comet / Poppea (Photo by Erin Baiano/Courtesy The Industry)