Composer, lyricist and vocalist Corey Dargel, whose praises I've already sung in an earlier post, offered a glimpse of a new music-theater piece on Monday night at HERE, a currently homely (due to renovation) but always cozy arts workshop in the un-nicknamed hinterlands between the West Village and TriBeCa. Presented under the auspices of an impressive festival of emergent multimedia theater dubbed Culturemart 2006, Dargel's Removable Parts will eventually be an evening-length work for himself and pianist/NYC cultural treasure Kathleen Supové. On Monday, the two presented excerpts from the work-in-progress, sharing a bill with Angelina, a new play by writer Timothy Braun and director Eva Burgess, with music by Ken Hashimoto. (I regretted not being able to stick around for the second piece, nor for the "Composer 2 Composer" interview of Dargel and Hashimoto by fellow composer Vivian Fung that followed.)
The lyrical content of Removable Parts is derived from case studies, blog entries and journal articles relating to physically disabled people -- amputees in particular -- as well as to a small subset of rare individuals psychologically either compulsively attracted to amputees, or to the prospect of being one. (I hope I've summarized that adequately.)
Tonight, we were treated to an overture in which Dargel calmly sang lines, once in a while affecting an operatic grandiosity, while Supové stabbed and juddered on an upright piano. Voicemail-like electronic interjections compelled the pianist to raise arms and shake legs in alternation, to which she responded with increasing irritation. Afterward, Dargel explained the serious premise of the piece; blowing soap bubbles, Supové pricked his solemnity.
The song that followed, "Fully Functional," provided what I took to be a deeper glimpse into Dargel's premise: physical handicap as metaphor for emotional blockage. "Your heart, like your leg, turned out to be hollow," Dargel sang, over the kind of poignantly simple melodic line he favors. It may look quirky on the printed page, but in performance, the song was deeply touching.
In a final excerpt, Dargel explained that in a spoken introduction, he would portray a therapist and Supové a patient whose husband had left her when he learned that she was faking a physical disabilty; in the song that followed, the two would reverse roles, Dargel singing as patient while Supové "played" the doctor. Despite willful oddities of staging, Dargel's song wrung gentle pathos from the case of a woman who pretended to be disabled simply to elicit the qualities of sympathy, care and love she'd been denied as a child. Supové supplied a gentle foundation; an electronic chorus swirled between the two live performers, eventually ascending to chipmunk-chirp timbre.
In all, the excerpts from Removable Parts amounted to about 20 minutes -- enough to provide a taste, to whet the appetite. Afterward, I asked Dargel when we might expect to see more. The prospects were unclear, he admitted; he wants to continue the work but needs to secure funding. And that has proven somewhat difficult, since the piece is neither purely music nor conventionally theatrical. (In effect, the work dwelt somewhere in the same zip code as recent Robert Ashley and maybe even Mikel Rouse, though certainly without any sort of elaborate staging at this point).
New Yorkers have one more chance to catch Removable Parts (and Angelina), tonight at 8:30pm. Everyone else can download a little, tiny taste of the piece by going to this page on Dargel's website and clicking on the graphic banner at the left of the screen. Either way, you're bound to want more; hopefully, someone will hand Dargel a big, fat grant sometime soon.
Playlist:
Antonio Vivaldi - Tito Manlio - Accademia Bizantia / Ottavio Dantone (Naïve)
Nasum - Inhale/Exhale (Relapse)
Nasum - Helvete (Relapse)
Ingrid Jensen - At Sea (ArtistShare)
Comments