THE ECHO DRIFT – Prototype Festival 2018 – AOP online video presentation of the piece

“RECOMMENDED: MUSIC WE THINK YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO

American Opera Project TV, The Echo Drift: One of the big hits of Beth Morrison Projects and HERE’s 2018 Prototype Festival, this incredible 78-minute jazz/rock influenced opera is about prison and how your own mind can turn against you when you’re in solitary confinement. Commissioned and developed by BMP, HERE, and American Opera Project, out of a workshop production at the Swedish Embassy in D.C., it’s a brilliant wedding of words and music, tightly staged by director Mallory Catlett and powered by a leave-it-all-out-there performance by Blythe Gaissert. You may not have heard of composer Mikael Karlsson before, but look him up after you see the show. There’s a lot of good music out there with his name on it.”

• Michael Zwiebach, San Francisco Classical Voice May 12 2020

– San Francisco Classical Voice

THE ECHO DRIFT – Prototype Festival 2018

“THE ECHO DRIFT EXPLORES HUMAN NATURE

Walker Loats’ day revolves around soup. The arrival of lunch is one of two ways she keeps track of time in solitary confinement. One bowl, however, contains an insect cocoon that hatches into a Moth offering Walker the chance to transcend her negative self. Can human nature change in isolation? Is a creature human without companionship? The Echo Driftopera rotated around these questions for seventy immersive minutes of six-channel surround sound and projected animations at the PROTOTYPE festival on January 12, 2018.

A cube within a cube sat center stage in front of a projection screen in Rose Nagelberg Theatre at Baruch College. Inside the cube’s scrim-covered outer frame was a grey prison cell furnished with a bed, desk, and chair. Eventually the set rotated, turned primarily by The Moth as it interrogates Walker and time loses its linear sequence. To its left sat conductor Nicholas DeMaison and The International Contemporary Ensemble, occupying nearly an equal third of the black box stage just as the acoustic music had equal footing with the digital elements. During the overture, drawings were projected onto the cube and screen and returned at crucial dramatic moments. We learned from The Moth that “The Echo Drift” is a point of space and time, or “state of things … where all is an event” that Walker can access if she relinquishes her obsession with control. Just as the creature offers new dimensions to Walker, the multidimensional elements enhanced the audience experience. In one of the most striking visuals of the show, white envelopes thrown in the air seemed like expanded versions of earlier 2D moth projections.

Mikael Karlsson’s music deftly avoided a sense of both meter and ambiguity, underscoring and propelling the stark plot without making it linear. The score was modest, absorbing, and lush; sweeping gestures including bassoon, bass and alto sax, and double bass were punctuated by surprisingly prickly harp and a cello that echoed Walker’s emotional peaks. A stronger meter emphasized her obsessive details about clock mechanics, she dribbled soup from her spoon to a downward electronic sloop, and the instruments surged upwards during an exciting moment of thunder and lights. Still, the snippets of text painting were woven into something wider and more liquid. Aaron Likness on piano anchored the ensemble without dominating it; ICE was well balanced with tasteful digital music, live sound manipulation, and tightly controlled dramatic silences.

For a story about a convicted murderer in solitary confinement, The Echo Drift is surprisingly accessible and apolitical. The program notes explained that the opera explores the extreme between “the true nature of a person versus her better intentions,” and Walker’s sensory deprivation only augments the deep human needs she has always had. In this state, she invents a companion to both explore and resist her better self. Mezzo-soprano Blythe Gaissert gave an intelligent, mercurial performance of the struggle, but it was The Moth, spoken by performance artist John Kelly, who became the opera’s most transfixing and human character with wisdom, self-acceptance, and zing wit. “Your resident moth,” it calls itself as it teases, advises, and confronts its way through the libretto by Elle Kunnos de Voss and Kathryn Walat.

In their program notes, the co-creators write that opposing extremes such as physicality versus psychological, space versus place, and limitation versus eternity make multidimensional media necessary. What emerged from these intentions was an emphasized human nature and its need for companionship.  Walker has no stimuli for change, both denies and imposes limitations, and is an ambivalent murderer; The Echo Drift allowed her the complexity of unresolved extremes while suggesting that self-reliance is a destructive choice and change cannot happen in isolation. “That’s your choice,” rebukes The Moth. “That’s not survival.” Gaissert and Kelly fully embraced the sophisticated score and meta set, and The Echo Drift balanced an immersive multidimensional experience with a refreshing affirmation of human solidarity.“

• Lana Norris, I Care If You Listen January 26 2018

– I Care If You Listen

ESCAPIST (by Alexander Ekman) – Royal Swedish Ballet, 2019

“IN CROWDED MASS SCENES AND INDIVIDUAL OUTBURSTS, ALEXANDER EKMAN WITH ESCAPIST AT THE ROYAL SWEDISH OPERA GOES COMPLETELY INTO IMAGINATION AND PLAY

Play is a state in which the inner reality prevails over the outer. We play to learn about ourselves and the world around us – and at the same time forget about it for a while. To process pain and understand what it is to be human. The game is strongly linked to knowledge and creativity, and also requires construction, rules and roles, creative cooperation. Just like the performing arts.

Just like what Alexander Ekman does. Just play is a pronounced key word for this Swedish choreographer, raised in ballet and now a free artist with the world as his workplace. And as he plays. He can fill the stage floor with 8,000 liters of water as in “A swan lake” at the Oslo Opera 2014, with swirling hay as in “Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Stockholm Opera 2015, or with a sea of ​​40,000 green balls as in “Play” at the Paris Opera 2017. Above all he can fill it with a very large ensemble and make everyone play together, harmoniously and disobediently.

In this world premiere, he has 38 sharpened dancers in the Royal Ballet who together build multiple worlds and shape inner realities on the Royal Opera stage. In the commute between crowded mass scenes, neat duets and individual outbursts, “Escapist” captures a theme that was also seen in, for example, “Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Is it possible to step out of context and stand next to the collective? Just being inside for a while? In “Escapist”, Ekman goes completely into the game and the dream. It looks like he, in the same way that David Lynch seems to be able to do on film, has taken screenshots of his own dreams and recreated them on stage.

To help with that, he mainly has two playmates. Permanent co-creator Mikael Karlsson, the Swedish New York-based composer who moves freely between art music, collaborations with artists such as Lykke Li and Anna von Hausswolff and the music for the computer game “Battlefield: Bad company”, opens secret doors with elusive sound mats, muscular beats, nightmare-like creaking and fine-tuned cello.

Danish fashion designer Henrik Vibskov, also cross-border in terms of fields of work and who collaborated with Ekman in, for example, “Cow” at Semperoper Dresden 2016, supports the commute between collective and individual. Black and white stripes form a strong graphic effect in the mass scenes and are broken by surrealistic surprises such as green swamp monsters or a gravity-contemptuous dress of red velvet sausages.
Some are recognizable from previous works in the Alexander Ekman universe. He has his tools and his signature, a powerful tone that fears neither entertainment nor intellectual pretensions. He uses his cinematic skill for strangely imperceptible scene changes, through movements, light and scenography – with a dynamic stage floor that is raised and lowered in parts.

Oscar Salomonsson has a perfectly dreamy expression in the title role as The Escapist, who thinks it is so nice with “the time between the times”, the moment when the inner reality takes over. In an efficiency- and measurability-fixed contemporary, “Escapist” is a fun, grand and beautiful defense of standing next to and thinking for yourself, of play, imagination and dream.

• Maina Arvas, Dagens Nyheter, April 6 2019

– Dagens Nyheter

COW – Semperoper Dresden 2016

“EKMAN’S COW: A CASE FOR NEW MINDFULNESS AT THE SEMPEROPER

COW, a bombastic ballet by Swedish choreographer Alexander Ekman which premiered at Dresden’s extraordinary Semperoper, features twelve successive scenes that tickled our senses, rattled our funny bones, but challenged our perception of ourselves and our society.

As a prelude, a man in a business suit − the cow − bumbles onto the stage on all fours, his bottom pushed up high, his eyes blank and unengaged. He (Christian Bauch) tells us emphatically to expect the unexpected when the curtain opens. Soon enough, a cantankerous couple descends from the heights in a ‘cage’, both of them leveling stinging accusations at the other. Once down, however, their acid turns to honey. “I’ll love you forever,” they parry back and forth as the cage goes up again. Is this a ballet about the ups and downs of that marriage, then? Upstage, another dancer repeatedly catapults into a brick wall, slamming into the blockade again and again. While the detail is absurd, it stands for something we human beings often do: we blast against life’s obstacles one way or another.

What the program notes hail as “undiscovered creative ways” of approach to dance allude to the humour and slapstick prevalent in Ekman’s work. Admittedly, the work verges far from classical ballet seriousness. Yet the clowning points to various human attributes and sensitivities, whether tolerance, our approach to the arts, our reactions to conflict or perception of terror. The ‘stampede’ scene whose 30 dancers begin from the floor, rise in a frenzy and gyrate like dervishes as the amplified music escalates, is truly spectacular. It is at once utter joy, confusion, and visual delight. But we in the audience don’t get off lightly. Instead, we are asked to confront our own reactions, asked even to place judgment on what’s transpiring on stage. “Does this appeal to you?” is flashed on a screen. “Is his expressive enough?” The chance to assess a performance mid-stream is new to me, but makes me take part in the performance.

The ballet also made a case for the power of the crowd, a phenomenon not without its strong associations in Germany. If a single dancer set himself apart to begin a certain action − laughing loudly, popping the sound of an cork, stomping hard in wooden clogs on the stage floor − the others quickly picked up the action and magnified it 20-fold. While this was the herd of followers at its most innocent, the foreshadowing of group violence did not go unnoticed. Further, when ending the scenes, the dancers often just walked off stage casually, as if at a rehearsal. This casual approach to performance, the deflating of the theater’s pomp, implies these were just ordinary people who would be accountable for ordinary things.

Mikael Karlsson’s original score peaked the senses and ran a whole gamut of expression, even bringing sustained energy and humor to the choir of distorted “moos”. My only reservation about the music was that there wasn’t more of it; some segments had only the barest of accompaniment. The Steve Reich influence and Romantic quotations were palpable, but even more pervasive were the stardust and muscular beats of Karlsson’s own personal hand.

Highly commendable was Ekman’s staging, which derived terrific effects from the simplest of means. The reams of transparent white fabric raised above the stage to billow like clouds made a restful interlude. A video projection was also a key feature in the performance. Projected in the second half, the clip took us to the farm first, showing a real cow – “totally calm” and “completely natural”, no pretention, no mania, just “a cow among cows”. Then in one hilarious segment, the company’s dancers were seen herding on all fours through the labyrinth of corridors backstage in the opera house itself. Christian Bauch speaks of the herding instinct “that dancers know something about”. Witness the scene when the whole company – dressed in white, with skullcaps that cover wigs of acrylic neon orange hair – danced in one single line like the burlesque finale. There, the dancer is the master of compliance.

Not surprisingly, all the dancers − complete with their little black dresses and designer interiors − slowly fall into the belly of the stage and disappear at the end of the performance. The effect of Ekman’s COW, then, goes far beyond the parameters of dance; the ballet shows humankind for its incorrigible pettiness, contrariness, and nervous ineptitudes, an entity destined to go down. By contrast, it is the mindful cow that survives to look over the landscape, satisfied with little, and frontrunner all the same.

****“

• Sarah Batschelet, Bachtrack March 14 2016

– Bachtrack