The story unfolds in a grand countryside manor where twelve women gather at sunset to mark the conclusion of El Milagro del Sol (“The Miracle of the Sun”), the single day each year when light briefly returns to their otherwise dark world. In Da Corte’s words, the opera is “set at a time when the sun only shines for one day a year, and the players at the party are all wondering how to move forward while holding on to their pasts.” In three acts filled with heartbreaking beauty as well as suspicion, fear, exposed intimacy, and resentment, the relationships between the women fracture, and violence erupts.
The Party is a work both of serious dedication to opera and a playful subversion of it. Da Corte worked in close collaboration with composer Austin Fisher to develop a score that draws on the formal intensity of Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppe Verdi, and Gaetano Donizetti. It also engages the work of Daniel Catán, particularly his role in expanding Spanish-language opera within contemporary practice. It is primarily sung in Spanish by a cast composed entirely of Latin American opera singers. Additional referents include the stylized theatricality of Klaus Nomi, cinematic orchestration, and musical popularization and even devolution, from lounge piano to operatic tropes most familiar from Looney Tunes.
The Party asks what it might mean to live fully yet remain dispersed, without the promise of integration. It considers what can be preserved from dreams circumscribed by circumstance, and what becomes of hope that never sees the light of day.
Alex Da Corte: The Party is co-organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it will travel following its debut in Buffalo. The exhibition is curated by Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Artistic Director, Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
