Staging
Composer Jon Gibson's score for Violet Fire calls for six principal singers and chorus, and 12 musicians, in a one-act performance that runs about 90 minutes. In performance, the chorus has ranged from four (at the Temple University performance) to sixteen (in Belgrade and New York). Gibson's accessible and eclectic score features lyrical vocal lines floating over densely textured, groove-based sonic fields. His music integrates sampled and treated sounds from sources including lightning, cooing pigeons, and sound effects from early science-fiction serials.
Violet Fire's sets sets, props and costumes were created by leading Serbian theater designer Boris Caksiran. Media designers Sarah Drury and Jen Simmons created a visual through-line with multi-planed digital projections and live animation elements, and lighting designer Mary Louise Geiger created the lighting design. Choreographer Nina Winthrop developed movement for a single dancer who doubled with a singer to create the multidimensional persona of the White Dove. Director Terry O'Reilly brings his background in experimental theater to synthesizing all these elements, merging performers, music and imagery in a powerful and immersive experience.
The music to Violet Fire should sound familiar to most listeners, as it uses harmonies and rhythms that can be readily found in various classical, jazz and popular western music, and is performed by traditional music forces —voice and instruments, along with some sampled and treated sounds. The music can be described as pulsing sonic fields over which the libretto is sung. It is meant to complement the singers and bring out the libretto. Texture, repetition, stasis, rhythem and melody establish themselves and then change, sometimes gradually, sometimes abruptly in an ongoing shifting blend of musical elements. -Jon Gibson The extravagant imagination of inventor Nikola Tesla led to his groundbreaking discoveries in alternating current, radio, robotics and other fields. His connection with a white pigeon, and the vision he had on her death, was for me a poignant emblem of his astounding inner life. Making their relationship the core of the libretto, and letting the pigeon sing, allowed me entry to a dreamlike world in which others, including Tesla’s friends Mark Twain and Katharine Johnson, and the author Margaret Storm, could join in and have their say. The text includes or adapts the actual words of all these people, as well as newspaper headlines and Tesla’s own writings. -Miriam Seidel |