{"id":277439,"date":"2017-02-22T07:00:47","date_gmt":"2017-02-22T12:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newmusicbox.org\/?p=38902"},"modified":"2022-01-13T13:34:48","modified_gmt":"2022-01-13T18:34:48","slug":"where-is-evil-a-reaction-to-anatomy-theater","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newmusicusa.org\/nmbx\/where-is-evil-a-reaction-to-anatomy-theater\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWhere Is Evil?\u201d (a reaction to anatomy theater)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"epigraph\">Ed Note: David Lang and Mark Dion&#8217;s 75-minute <em>anatomy theater<\/em> sparked a great deal of critical commentary following the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.laopera.org\/season\/1516-Season-at-a-Glance\/Anatomy-Theater\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">LA Opera&#8217;s world premiere performances<\/a> of this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bethmorrisonprojects.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Beth Morrison Projects<\/a> production at the Roy and Edna Disney\/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in Los Angeles in June 2016 and again during its subsequent <a href=\"http:\/\/prototypefestival.org\/show\/anatomy-theater\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">New York premiere at BRIC House during the PROTOTYPE Festival<\/a> in January 2017. Boston-based pianist, poet, and artist manager Oni Buchanan was so deeply affected by the performance she attended in New York City that she felt compelled to add her own observations which she shares here.\u2014FJO<\/div>\n<p>The new chamber opera <em>anatomy theater<\/em> by David Lang and Mark Dion provides layer upon layer of revelation\u2014each peeling back from the opera&#8217;s heart like the transparent mylar overlays from an old anatomy textbook.\u00a0 The opera, set in early-18th century England, follows the trajectory of a young murderess, starting with her public hanging and continuing through the spectacle of her public dissection in which the parties involved hope to demonstrate \u201cscientifically\u201d that her evil is corporeally writ within her.<\/p>\n<p>The most immediate confrontation leveled by <em>anatomy theater<\/em> upon its audience proves to be the confounding experience of witnessing outright, unflinching, center-stage misogyny.\u00a0 The objectification of the female body can&#8217;t get more literal:\u00a0 Lang, Dion, and director Bob McGrath position a completely naked female\u2014a corpse, no less\u2014as the physical (and topical) focal point of the opera, laid out on a wooden pallet in the center of the stage.\u00a0 The second ghastly understanding comes from feeling the tsunamic power of abstract fear which drives the action of the opera.\u00a0 However coolly cultivated the applause of the bourgeois dissection spectators, however aggressive the swagger of the showman executioner, however dispassionately objective the assessments of the so-called anatomical \u201cspecialists\u201d\u2014it is ultimately the all-consuming, irrational fear saturating a society of great inequality which allows the horrors of this narrative to occur, to be \u201cjustified.\u201d\u00a0 Not simply gender inequality, but vast economic inequality as well\u2014the murderess comes from poverty.\u00a0 Take one imaginative step outward to include racial and religious inequalities as well, and the picture begins to look unsettlingly familiar, as Lang and Dion fully intend.\u00a0 And the alarming present-day familiarity of an opera based on outdated early 18th-century anatomical practices and spiritual beliefs leads to what might be the most disturbing, subversive act of the opera:\u00a0 Lang and Dion lead the audience through a normalization process that allows us to accept atrocity incrementally until suddenly we find ourselves staring at a spotlit fully-naked, blood-drenched female corpse emptied of its central organs and about to be carted out to \u201cthe back gate\u201d for further \u201cauction[ing] under the moonlight.\u201d\u00a0 How did we get here?<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/J2ZHXJfUuI4\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Let me briefly pause to consider how <em>I<\/em> got here, which should also serve to contextualize my remarks that follow.\u00a0 Coming from a childhood in which my exposure to television and media was drastically limited, I encountered a very steep learning curve in college where I had to cultivate\u2014almost from nothing\u2014the ability to access critical distance from media, and from movies in particular.\u00a0 In grade school, my exposure to media consisted of one TV show per week (an honor which was bestowed upon <em>Knight Rider<\/em>), as well as the incomprehensible splurge of stringently limited Saturday morning cartoons accompanied by French toast on TV trays (<em>Dungeons &amp; Dragons <\/em>and <em>Ghost Busters<\/em> being the high points of these sessions).\u00a0 Probably since it wasn&#8217;t an animation, I experienced <em>Knight Rider<\/em> in particular with edge-of-my-seat intensity.\u00a0 There was no real person called \u201cDavid Hasselhoff\u201d or any modified Pontiac Firebird Trans Am; actors and props did not exist for me.\u00a0 There was only Michael Knight and KITT.\u00a0 I experienced danger and surging adrenaline in real time with them, making split-second decisions, skidding around corners at top speed, and escaping impossible situations when the alternative was death.\u00a0 As might be expected, I had no critical distance to understand \u201cparody,\u201d and when I was accidentally exposed (in first grade, in the basement of my cousins\u2019 house during an unsupervised hour of Thanksgiving) to an extensive excerpt of a horror spoof involving a serial killer who targeted a group of cheerleaders with rhyming names (<em>Pandemonium<\/em>), I suffered nearly unendurable nightmares for the decade to follow.<\/p>\n<p>Fast-forward to my first year as an undergrad, when a group of friends thought I might like to see <em>The Piano<\/em>, being a pianist myself.\u00a0 Inevitably I became so immersed in the narrative, so intrinsically aligned with Ada McGrath (no idea who Holly Hunter was), that when her jealous husband axes her finger at the dramatic high point, I involuntarily let out a blood-curdling scream in the theater, not even knowing it was me who was screaming.\u00a0 Over a decade later, despite plenty of \u201cmedia conditioning\u201d in the intervening years, I almost started puking inside a theater during <em>Pan\u2019s Labyrinth<\/em> and had to walk out midway sobbing uncontrollably.<\/p>\n<p>I offer this background to inform what follows.\u00a0 Because what struck me as maybe the most telling barometer of how insidious and how deceptively crafted <em>anatomy theater<\/em> was\u2014was that somehow I was able to sit through it.\u00a0 A film director friend of mine texted me, \u201cI wish I could have been there to watch you watch a woman be dissected.\u00a0 That seems satisfying.\u201d\u00a0 How had this improbability come to pass, when a dentistry-obsessed cheerleader murdered with her own electric toothbrush still haunts my days?\u00a0 How did David Lang and Mark Dion structure the music, pace the narrative, juxtapose the tonal shifts, overlay the absurdities and the acts of violence\u2014how did they achieve the sleights of hand that would be necessary to enable anybody, let alone me, to stay in their seats and be both witnesses and participants in all the gore, the misogyny, the incredible injustices?\u00a0 In a way, Lang and Dion deafened us all with the blaringly immediate vulgarity and loudness and ham-fisted manipulation, serving almost to distract from the actual lethal maneuvering under the surface.\u00a0 I was so horrified at my ability to navigate the opera that I actually went back to a second showing to see if I could track the layers of architectural construction, the kinds of \u201cduck and weave\u201d moves Lang and Dion exploited, that could make such an outcome possible.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/176479365\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/176479365\">Anatomy Theater excerpt<\/a> from <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/bethmorrisonprojects\">Beth Morrison Projects<\/a> on <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\">Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>SPOILER ALERT: Sarah Osborne (Peabody Southwell), the murderess at the center of the story, has committed the crime of suffocating her husband and both her children.\u00a0 In a meta-move, Lang\/Dion\/McGrath don&#8217;t allow us, the ticket-purchasing audience, to enter the performance hall and settle in before the show.\u00a0 Instead, we are led into the theater as part of the execution procession of the opera\u2019s narrative, with the executioner roughly shoving and restraining the convicted woman along the way, bystanders jeering, and all of us coolly walking behind, amusedly participating while also scouting out our seats.\u00a0 Already, Lang and Dion allow us, the audience members, to establish a nice comfortable distance.\u00a0 The opera calls us out on it throughout, so we feel sufficiently accused, but never quite implicated.\u00a0 Perfect, we were all put through the grinder just enough; our dues are paid.\u00a0 Even Lang and Dion are winking while pointing: isn&#8217;t this a great rhetorical device?\u00a0 Sarah Osborne implores us at the beginning of her confession, \u201cLet pity move your hearts,\u201d then describes the harrowing circumstances that led her to \u201cextinguish\u201d her husband and (instead of mother) \u201csmother\u201d each of her young children in turn.\u00a0 Nevertheless, her guilt has already been decreed, and in a swift inexorable matter of minutes, a hood is muscled over her head, a noose tightened around her neck, and with a blunt shove, her motionless body swings limply before us.\u00a0 How did we get here?\u00a0 \u201cJustice!\u00a0 Is!\u00a0 Delivered!\u201d announces the executioner, and signals the audience to applaud, which we do.<\/p>\n<p>Why isn&#8217;t the opera already over?\u00a0 The main character is dead within the first five minutes. However, as the executioner Joshua Crouch (Marc Kudisch) points out, it&#8217;s not enough to convict Osborne for her \u201cmost heinous of crimes&#8230;that of being poor and desperate&#8230;that of being born a woman.\u201d\u00a0 And it&#8217;s not enough to execute her.\u00a0 We aren&#8217;t finished with her yet\u2014and <em>not being finished<\/em>, not having any kind of boundary where we can be satisfied and allow our endeavor to come to a close, is one of the most gruesome problems placed before us by Lang and Dion\u2019s opera.\u00a0 As Osborne\u2019s painful account detailing the unjust and unbearable conditions of her life remains apparently insufficient to explain her actions, we the survivors are left looking for a more grandiose motivator, and settle upon the abstractness of \u201cevil.\u201d\u00a0 How can we explain the presence of evil?\u00a0 Where does evil come from?\u00a0 Can we locate a corporeal source, a physical manifestation of this hideous motivator, that we might protect ourselves from it going forward?\u00a0 If the source of evil lies in Sarah Osborne\u2019s body, specific to the female form, how can we control that form and thereby suppress the threat of the evil that women carry within them?\u00a0 Thus begins the exploration of the opera\u2019s central aria: \u201cWhere is Evil?\u201d as well as the breathtaking misogyny intertwined with the interrogation.<\/p>\n<p>And thus opens the \u201cdissection theater\u201d with its \u201cfresh quality female\u201d!\u00a0 Crouch, the executioner-turned-emcee, parades the body onto the stage, fully covered in a sheet.\u00a0 He reveals the body incrementally, first unveiling the head.\u00a0 We recognize Osborne\u2014is it really her, though?\u00a0 A mannequin of her?\u00a0 A wax likeness?\u00a0 Is there really going to be a dissection?\u00a0 How is Lang going to accomplish this?\u00a0 How realistic will\/can it even be?\u00a0 And thus begins our incremental acceptance of what follows.\u00a0 Soon Crouch pulls the sheets back from Osborne&#8217;s legs, stroking them with loathsome arousal.\u00a0 Is Lang really going to go there?\u00a0 He just did.\u00a0 Well at least the rest of her body is covered, other than her head and her legs.\u00a0 Her body could be clothed, for all we know.\u00a0 Crouch keeps peeking under the sheet which covers her chest, shuddering with desire and commenting on the rareness of such a young, \u201cfresh and exemplary\u201d female body.\u00a0 Not long after, he tears off the sheet covering Osborne&#8217;s torso, revealing her to be utterly naked from the waist up, as well as from the thighs down.\u00a0 Is Lang really going to go there?\u00a0 He just did.\u00a0 Well, her pelvic area is still covered.\u00a0 \u201cAt least her pelvic area is still covered!\u201d we think, as we recover from the shock of her upper body being completely naked and exposed before the audience.\u00a0 Who auditioned for this role anyway?\u00a0 Well, we haven\u2019t ruled out the possibility that the body may still be a wax mannequin, after all.<\/p>\n<p>Crouch now makes a bombastic introduction of the highly-reputed anatomist and scholar, Baron Peel (Robert Osborne), who makes his bloviating entrance by belting out, \u201cPresently, I shall reveal (\u201cand explicate!\u201d interjects Crouch eagerly) the instruments necessary.\u201d\u00a0 Crouch lifts each of the \u201c15 instruments\u201d in turn, gesturing lewdly with each one toward the female corpse, and announcing them one by one (\u201cThe knife! The probe! Bone nippers!\u201d Actually, to my count and re-count, there were only 14 instruments, but we were all too distracted to notice).\u00a0 Classical hand-drawn anatomical illustrations are gorgeously projected across a giant scrim separating the main action of the stage from the audience (yet another dermis, yet another deflection into beauty traced artfully over brutality).\u00a0 Meanwhile, the Igor-like Ambrose Strang (Timur), Peel\u2019s assistant, has lurked onto the stage and has begun to prepare his various steel trays and buckets in the corner.\u00a0 Where did HE come from?\u00a0 Too late; Strang turns toward the audience and launches into the thick of the song, with himself and Crouch reverentially echoing Peel&#8217;s assertions (\u201cPresently!&#8230;He shall reveal!\u201d).<\/p>\n<p>The absurdity and cognitive dissonance have gotten so over-the-top by this point that the audience is teetering at a breaking point.\u00a0 Lang has to make an artistic decision. Does he pull back? Does he relentlessly push ahead?\u00a0 What happens next defies expectation and yet is the fully logical extension of what has preceded.\u00a0 Lang directs the \u201cPresently, I shall reveal\u201d song toward the pinnacle of campiness, of (dare I say) \u201cgallows humor.\u201d\u00a0 The three male characters, spaced evenly across the stage, launch into a lunatic hybrid of the song, reminiscent of a cross between Pachelbel&#8217;s Canon and Madonna&#8217;s \u201cVogue.\u201d\u00a0 Each man is spotlit in quick succession, sings the word \u201cPresently!\u201d and strikes a pose, over and over, faster and faster, all in perfect 4\/4 time, outlining harmonies.\u00a0 Are Lang and his creative team really going to go there?\u00a0 They\u2019re going there right now.\u00a0 They\u2019re there.\u00a0 We\u2019re all laughing, kind of bemused and marveling at the same time.\u00a0 This is really happening.\u00a0 The body is still right there, center stage.\u00a0 In an appropriately satirical stroke of luck, the performances of <em>anatomy theater<\/em> are sponsored in part by Tofurky.\u00a0 How did we get here?<\/p>\n<p>Now begins the dissection of the corpse, and our repugnant voyeurism alongside.\u00a0 Conveniently, the pallet is raised and tilted toward the audience to make sure that all of us can rubberneck.\u00a0 \u201cWhere Is Evil?\u201d\u2014the central song of the opera\u2014introduces the endeavor to discover the exact physical location of evil through a thorough examination of the three major organs of Osborne&#8217;s body:\u00a0 her stomach, spleen, and heart.\u00a0 This whole while, the corpse has lain statuesque and pristine, a voiceless onlooker to the men\u2019s assertions of authority and expertise.\u00a0 Now back to business.\u00a0 Somehow the loony, spotlit trio of \u201cPresently\u201d provides the momentum and disorientation needed for the audience to swallow the fact that the dissection is going forward.\u00a0 We\u2019re game.\u00a0 Blood and entrails follow.\u00a0 A lot of blood.\u00a0 An intestine pulled out so endlessly and grotesquely that audience members are groaning and covering their eyes.\u00a0 One audience member actually leaves the theater to vomit in the restroom, <em>then returns<\/em>.\u00a0 Organs are removed, held up to the light, squeezed, cut into pieces, weighed, examined, \u201cintimately interrogated.\u201d\u00a0 Peel orders Strang to \u201cbring forth the chest riches\u201d and the heart is cut out of Osborne\u2019s body.\u00a0 We still hope it&#8217;s a wax body, even though the glossy shine of the now blood-drenched torso appears to reveal what can only be Peabody Southwell breathing.<\/p>\n<p>Without proselytizing whatsoever, without any kind of reflection among the characters (in fact, because of their lack of self-awareness), Lang and Dion examine in persuasive and grisly detail the very fine boundary between objectivity and inhumanity.\u00a0 What is the distance between the physical and the spiritual, \u201cthe heart\u201d and \u201cthe heart\u201d?\u00a0 \u201cLet pity move your hearts,\u201d Osborne had pleaded.\u00a0 After the physical heart is removed from her body, Osborne\u2019s corpse draws in a gasping breath and exhales the words, \u201cMy heart&#8230;\u201d\u00a0 Another gasping inhale, then \u201cMy heart&#8230;\u201d again, exhaled in a scalar melody.\u00a0 A third \u201cMy heart&#8230;\u201d and one recognizes the melody as itself a dissection from a 2001 song of Lang\u2019s called \u201ci lie,\u201d written for women\u2019s chorus.\u00a0 I am overtaken by Lang\u2019s fascinating move to extract the vital melodic line, a coronary artery perhaps, from another body of women, and allow it to re-animate this female corpse.\u00a0 Osborne gathers her breath and delivers a ravishing elegy for her heart (\u201cThis was the heart that in my youth was open\u201d) while Strang delivers the stats: \u201c271 grams&#8230;unblemished and without corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Inevitably, when Osborne\u2019s stomach, spleen, and heart are found to be perfect specimens, with no evidence of evil or malformation of any kind, Peel announces that the uterus must be removed and examined, the uterus, the \u201cvery seat of hysteria&#8230;filled with animal vitality.\u201d\u00a0 He tears the remaining pelvic cloth from her body, and Osborne lies fully exposed, all her privacy literally stripped away.\u00a0 Is Lang really going to go there?\u00a0 He just did.\u00a0 We knew from the beginning he would.\u00a0 We were waiting for him to get there, we, the complicit \u201cGentlemen\u201d of the paying audience.\u00a0 Let\u2019s fast-forward.\u00a0 The uterus reveals only perfection, the formal \u201cdissection theater\u201d comes to a close without locating the physical seat of evil, all four characters sing a glorious rendition of \u201cWhere Is Evil?\u201d this time with Peel pointing outward to specific members of the audience rather than at Osborne\u2019s corpse: \u201cThere it is.\u00a0 There.\u00a0 There it is.\u201d\u00a0 Great, we get it, we already got it, and Lang\/Dion use this conclusion-facade as a deceptive cadence of sorts.\u00a0 Lang\u2019s opera has come to a close, and yet, the action of the opera continues after it ends, with Crouch issuing an invitation to the Gentlemen of the audience to \u201cmeet me by the back gate\u201d for \u201cfurther inspection of the parts&#8230;that haven&#8217;t yet been removed.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/0UHE8yfZHQk\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Whether we have met Crouch by the back gate or not, eventually we all wend our way home humming \u201cWhere Is Evil?\u201d to ourselves.\u00a0 The opera metastasizes through our real-time physical landscape.\u00a0 Sure, there\u2019s our complicity in participating in the narrative, but after all, it\u2019s a piece of art, and that bait and switch was part of the show.\u00a0 But at some point over the course of our homeward commute, the hitherto unidentified and most insidious journey Lang and Dion have led us on comes blistering to the surface.\u00a0 Through their pacing of the putrid, excruciating action, through their measured dosages of barbarity cut with slapstick, somehow they were able to feed us the whole rank slopbucket.\u00a0 Each one of us ingested it.\u00a0 And that revelation of our own individual ability in the very real world\u2014beyond our intention and our professed morality and even our full awareness\u2014survives as the \u201cfinal\u201d (and yet ever-expanding) horror of <em>anatomy theater<\/em>.\u00a0 The various processes of rationalization we yielded to begin to dawn on us.\u00a0 Sure, this was a piece of art, but what else could we accept, not quite cognizant we were accepting it?\u00a0 Lang and Dion take their outrageous risks pitch-perfectly, lowering our guard all the while.\u00a0 Nothing dogmatic, only the actions speaking for themselves, drenched in satire, drenched in blood.\u00a0 How did we get here?\u00a0 How did <em>I<\/em> get here?\u00a0 Moving from the dissection theater to the theater of a present world narcotized by the toxic elixir of fear and complacence, I am led by the performance to ask, \u201cWho am I?\u00a0 And what am I capable of?\u201d<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/newmusicusa.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/OniBuchanan.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-38908\" src=\"https:\/\/newmusicusa.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/OniBuchanan.jpg\" alt=\"Oni Buchanan\" width=\"960\" height=\"960\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.onibuchanan.com\/\">Oni Buchanan<\/a><\/strong> is a poet, pianist, and the founder and director of the <a href=\"http:\/\/arielartists.com\/artists\/\">Ariel Artists<\/a> management company. As a poet, Buchanan is the author of three poetry books to date &#8212; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.uiowapress.org\/books\/2012-fall\/must-violence.htm\"><em>Must a Violence<\/em><\/a>, <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.press.uillinois.edu\/books\/catalog\/53fww3ye9780252033643.html\">Spring<\/a><\/em>, and <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ugapress.org\/index.php\/books\/what_animal\">What Animal<\/a><\/em>. Buchanan toured as a solo pianist for over a decade, and ArpaViva Recordings has just released her fifth album, <em><a href=\"http:\/\/arpaviva.org\/arpaviva_content\/HIEROSGAMOS.html\">Hierosgamos<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The most immediate confrontation leveled upon its audience by David Lang and Mark Dion&#8217;s 75-minute chamber opera <em>anatomy theater<\/em> proves to be the confounding experience of witnessing outright, unflinching, center-stage misogyny. Lang and Dion lead the audience through a normalization process that allows us to accept atrocity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":715,"featured_media":435210,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,3],"tags":[1048,98],"nmb_categories":[6],"how_to_category":[],"nmb_tags":[],"internal_taxonomy":[923],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>\u201cWhere Is Evil?\u201d (a reaction to anatomy theater) - New Music USA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/newmusicusa.org\/nmbx\/where-is-evil-a-reaction-to-anatomy-theater\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u201cWhere Is Evil?\u201d (a reaction to anatomy theater) - New Music USA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The most immediate confrontation leveled upon its audience by David Lang and Mark Dion&#039;s 75-minute chamber opera anatomy theater proves to be the confounding experience of witnessing outright, unflinching, center-stage misogyny. 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