Opera Cabal is rapidly depleting IKEA’s inventory of straight-back kitchen chairs. As part of its Chicago premiere of USW, a bold sensory exploration of Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, the progressive company is smashing prefab furniture. A 19th-century cello and 21st-century MacBook Pro have also been victims of the fledgling opera company’s production—the former courtesy of American Airlines baggage handlers, the latter stolen by an “anonymous jerk,” according to music director and cofounder Nicholas DeMaison.
The experimental group commissioned the work from Ohio-based composer Lewis Nielson, chair of the composition department at Oberlin College’s Conservatory of Music, from which DeMaison, 30, graduated. While in school, DeMaison formed an ensemble that Nielson coached. The 59-year-old composer later attended a 2008 Opera Cabal performance of his work. DeMaison approached the visiting chamber- and orchestral-music composer and enthusiastically asked him to write something for Opera Cabal. The request was just as enthusiastically turned down. “Nielson insisted that he could not possibly write an opera, that he did not believe in opera and did not and could not support the institution of opera,” DeMaison recalls. Yet two months later and without warning, Nielson called the young music director to discuss the piece he’d begun writing for Opera Cabal.
“We gave Lewis free rein to write the piece he wanted to write,” DeMaison explains. Free of the constraints of traditional opera, Nielson set out writing a multimedia, theatrical and abstract representation of the chaotic life and politics of Spartacist League founder Luxemburg. “Rosa Luxemburg was the most important theorist, activist and revolutionary of the left after Karl Marx,” Nielson says via e-mail. “I thought of her as a crucible through which to project the conception of real humanity and social reciprocity.”
With no libretto other than recorded texts of socialist writers such as Friedrich Engels and the fragments of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “We Leave Tonight,” much of the action of USW is left to multiple video projections, with screen content and stage direction chosen by the opera company. DeMaison brought on Emmy Award–winning stage director Habib Azar and video designer Alex Overington to help take the composer’s open-ended staging to its logical avant-garde conclusion: kittens being birthed, the disturbingly disembodied head of Cabal cofounder Majel Connery and hard-core vintage porn.
A thrilling contrast to Lyric Opera and Chicago Opera Theater, Opera Cabal has attracted a more diverse, if smaller and less affluent, audience. Formed in 2006 with the help of a University of Chicago Summer Arts Council grant, Opera Cabal hosts a monthly salon series in Hyde Park, “a forum for artists and scholars producing uncommon work difficult to program in conventional settings,” DeMaison says.
As director of Ensemble Sospeso and Florilegium Chamber Choir in New York, DeMaison splits his time between Chicago and Manhattan. “Chicago has been the perfect incubator for a nascent opera company working to redefine a genre,” he says. “I cannot possibly imagine trying to do in New York what we’ve done in Chicago. Plus Chicago has a tradition of experimental and indie theater. We like the idea of bringing opera to that audience.”
Opera Cabal exhibits the audacity and daredevilry rarely found in anything calling itself “opera” these days. DeMaison says, “I want the crowd saying, ‘I didn’t know opera could be like that! I didn’t know I loved opera!’”
- Doyle Armbrust
published in Time Out Chicago on February 17, 2010