theglance

The Glance is a modern retelling of the Orpheus Myth. Set in the San Francisco Bay Area, Orphea obsessively follows her partner Eurydice’s every move in the real world and online. Eurydice, attempting to find her independence within their relationship, explores connections with a friend, Serpio, at a relative’s wedding. Orphea, enraged by Eurydice’s seeming indiscretions, loses herself to jealousy and physically assaults Eurydice, leading to her death. As Eurydice passes into the underworld through the tunnel of transformation, she experiences a newfound freedom and explores independence for the first time. In the underworld, Hades greets Eurydice, who sees his relationship with Persephone reflected in the struggles between Orphea and Eurydice. As Orphea travels to the underworld to find Eurydice, she passes through the tunnel; in the echoes and reverberation of her words, Orphea is forced to confront her use of control and violence in their intimate relationship. Is transformation possible? In his empathy, Hades allows Orphea to return with Eurydice to the living world, but Orphea cannot glance back at Eurydice. Can Orphea relinquish control within their intimate relationship? Will Eurydice want to return to the world of living with a partner who assaulted her and give up her newfound freedom for the chance to live again? Weaving together composition, choreography, costume, and set design through the creation of new electronic instruments, The Glance engages the laptop orchestra to physicalize questions at the root of the Orpheus myth, including fundamental questions around surveillance, trust, and the ways that we grow healthy, intimate relationships within our modern landscape and how we use our technological tools to deepen our connection to each other.

Excerpts

Paul Dresher Studio

January 18, 2025

Creative Impetus

My father spent his last decade working on a paper exploring the Orpheus myth as a warning about surveillance and mistrust. His interpretation was inspired by his first-hand experience as a physician witnessing the distrust and paranoia of some of his elderly patients toward their partners. In his interpretation, Eurydice’s death comes at the hands of Orpheus as a form of domestic violence. The backward glance is Orpheus’ inability to trust Eurydice or to temper the desire to control her. Inspired by my father’s work, I have been drawn to the power of this interpretation in our “always connected” modern life and to question how we use technology to support being in relationships, trust, and the growth of love. Utilizing the potential of the laptop orchestra and specifically the ability to design instruments that use surveillance technologies, the opera will explore the border between surveillance to control and witnessing as a form of love through the Orpheus myth. I chose to tell this story with music and, specifically, through the medium of a laptopera (an opera for live voices and laptop orchestra) to build instruments that support an embodied exploration of questions of surveillance via the technology surrounding us. I am inspired to share this new interpretation of the Orpheus myth, highlighting how technology can reinforce a culture of power, dominance, and control unless we choose to use it differently. Additionally, I intend to create space for a feminist reworking of this myth, exploring the growth within Eurydice’s character and acknowledging the many ways intimate relationships navigate power dynamics.

What is a Laptopera?

A Laptopera is an opera is for laptop orchestra and live voices. As described on the website for The Furies: A LaptOpera, “The laptop orchestra is a large-scale, computer-mediated ensemble that explores cutting-edge technology in combination with conventional musical contexts—while radically transforming both. This unique ensemble format comprises laptops, human performers, controllers, and custom multi-channel speaker arrays designed to provide each computer-based instrument with its own acoustic identity and presence. The orchestra fuses a powerful sea of sound with the immediacy of human music-making, capturing the irreplaceable energy of a live ensemble performance and its sonic intimacy. At the same time, the orchestra makes use of the computer’s capabilities to experiment with sounds, instruments, and new forms of musical expression. Offstage, the ensemble serves as a unique laboratory and classroom that explores music, computer science, interaction design, composition, and live performance.” For this project, the laptop orchestra will consist of 4 stations. Each station includes one laptop, stereo speakers, and various controllers, including GameTrak tether controllers, video and audio input to control varying output, including live audio, video, lighting, and haptic events (through low sounds). The Glance will also include a PA (house sound) system for a soundtrack of environmental and ambient sounds supporting the drama.

Instrument Design

Traditionally, Orpheus is a skillful musician and vocalist who relies on music’s charm to obtain his goals. Orpheus plays the lyre, a harp-like stringed instrument that accompanies a solo voice. In The Glance, I am “recasting” Orpheus with Orphea, a woman-identifying singer/songwriter. Her lyre will be an extended version of an instrument I created several years ago (the tape machine) from three deconstructed cassette players, one with a record function and two with playback housed in an instrument that guides a blank tape loop. The player records layers of sound onto the tape loop, building chords and sonic texture through an ever-looping soundscape. For The Glance, I will utilize this design to demonstrate the practices of manipulation through repetition. Imagine a line of text like “You are mine,” sung with a beautiful melody, recorded, layered in harmony, and looped over and over until what was once a passionate love song becomes a poisonous controlling earworm.

Similarly, Eurydice will also have an instrument that defines her role and connection to the world as a character. Drawing inspiration from one of the instruments used in The Furies, I intend to build an instrument into Eurydice’s costume design. It will be a hoop skirt, but bound by tether lines in all directions, demonstrating the external forces that constantly tug on her. The tether lines will essentially be extensions of multiple GameTrak tether controllers, each sending X, Y, and Z-axis information to the laptops, where discrete programming and machine learning will train nuanced sonic interactions based on the movement of the tethers. Eurydice’s skirt will affect the character’s movements and the sound world surrounding her. The costume will visually and sonically define her lack of independence. Only when passing to the underworld, when the skirt is lost, will Eurydice feel and hear her newfound freedom.

Michele Kennedy (Eurydice) in her sounding skirt with Shauna Fallihee (Orphea).

The final instrument for this opera is a tunnel that serves as a sounding instrument. The instrument will use live video input for motion tracking to respond to the singers and control live vocal processing accompanying their passage through the tunnel. This instrument will exist as a psychological space where “passage through” is a metaphor for transition and the opportunity to change. The ways that the tunnel reverberates, as an instrument, will depend upon what the character must confront about their role in the partnership. Movement and sound will be designed together to externalize each character’s internal battles.

Michele Kennedy (Eurydice) explores her newfound freedom of vocal range and movement within the tunnel.

CREATIVE TEAM

Anne Hege (Creator, Co-Librettist, Composer, Instrument Designer)

Anne Hege creates musical worlds that invite an awareness of and attention to the body and our present moment. In her work as a composer, vocalist, conductor, instrument builder, and scholar, she explores the roots of musicality in the intersection of ensemble interaction, technology, embodiment, and expression. Her works have been performed by So Percussion, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Princeton Laptop Orchestra, Stanford Laptop Orchestra, Google Mobile Devices Ensemble, loadbang, Ensemble Klang, NOW Ensemble, Voce in Tempore, Newspeak, Piedmont East Bay Children’s Chorus, Resound Ensemble, and Volti SF. From 2008 to the present, Hege has composed musical scores for Carrie Ahern Dance, with over 50 performances of these works in locations including the vaults of a Wall Street Bank, a retired Lyceum, and Dickson’s Farmstand in Chelsea Market. The New York Times praised her score for Ahern’s SenSate. Hege has received awards and grants, including a New Music USA Project Grant, Mark Nelson Fellowship (Princeton University), Composer in Residence (Resound Ensemble), Visiting Artist (CCRMA, Stanford University), Research Affiliate (CACPS, Princeton University), Elizabeth Mills Crothers Prize (Mills College), associate artist residency (Atlantic Center for the Arts), and a Dresher Ensemble and Artist Residency (Oakland, CA).

In 2022, Hege pioneered and premiered her first laptopera, The Furies, an opera for laptop orchestra and live voices produced by the Stanford Laptop Orchestra to rave reviews. The work premiered at Stanford University and Mills College, with live excerpts performed by Sideband Touring Laptop Ensemble in 2023 at Wesleyan University, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Carnegie Mellon, and Rhizome performance space. Hege is currently the artistic director of the Peninsula Women’s Chorus.  She performs regularly on her analog live-looping instrument, the tape machine, in her electronic duo New Prosthetics, and with the laptop ensemble Sideband.

Kim Anno (Art Director and Co-Librettist)

Kim Anno is a painter, photographer, author, and film/video artist whose work has been collected and exhibited by museums nationally and internationally. Her recent interests and expertise have been in the intersection of art and science, particularly in aesthetic issues surrounding climate change, water, and adaptation. She is currently working on “¡Quba!”, her first feature documentary film, and “90 Miles From Paradise,” a film about adaptation to sea level rise for both southern Florida and Havana, Cuba. The influence of abstraction and abstracting something remains prominent in Anno’s practice, with resulting work that remains “open, playful, and engaged with a difficult ephemeral beauty.” Anno’s work has been collected by SFMOMA, Berkeley Art Museum, Honolulu Academy of Fine Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Crocker Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, Columbia University Library, University of Texas, Austin, Getty Research Institute, Goethe Institute, among others. https://www.kimanno.com/

Carrie Ahern (Choreographer)

Since 2005, NYC choreographer Carrie Ahern has used the medium of the body to investigate spaces of taboo with her dance company: Carrie Ahern Dance.  She has a reputation for extensive research combined with an ability to make viewers deeply uncomfortable and comfortable simultaneously. Current multi-year project: “Sex Status” series (2018-present), performed in private homes, open to the public, that seeks to expose women in their sexual and quotidian lives. For her multi-year project about modern death “Borrowed Prey” (2011-2016) Ahern learned to hunt, butcher and slaughter animals to learn more about the animals we consume and worked as a hospice volunteer.  “Ahern’s choreography is striking and original…powerful” The New Yorker Ahern has collaborated with Anne Hege since 2009 beginning with “SeNSATE” (2009)–a 3 hour, multi-floored performance installation; “Borrowed Prey: Part I” (2012) & “II”(2013); and “Carnal Spill” (2022). www.carrieahern.com

Michele Kennedy (Eurydice)

Praised as “an excellent and impassioned” soprano possessing “a graceful tonal clarity that is a wonder to hear” (San Francisco Chronicle), Michele Kennedy is a versatile specialist in early and new music. Her recent venues include Carnegie Hall, Davies Symphony Hall, Lincoln Center, Tanglewood, and Washington National Cathedral. She is a Winner of the 2023 American Prize in Voice.

A lifelong advocate of new works, Michele has sung premieres with Experiments in Opera, Harlem Stage Opera, Seraphic Fire, Kaleidoscope Vocal Ensemble, The Crossing, and The New York Philharmonic.  This year, she is traveling with Lorelei Ensemble in a world premiere tour of Julia Wolfe’s Her Story – an outspoken celebration of women’s civil rights – in concert with the Nashville, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston Symphony Orchestras, culminating with the National Symphony in her debut at The Kennedy Center.

Michele completed her musical studies at Yale University, Yale School of Music, and NYU. A lover of Redwood groves and Bay vistas, she lives with her husband, visual artist Benjamin Thorpe, and their adventurous daughter, Audra May.

Sidney Chen (Hades)

Bass-baritone Sidney Chen, whose voice has been described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “expressive and richly mellifluous,” is passionate about creating new work through collaboration with artists of all disciplines. Recent projects include touring with ODC/Dance as a guest performer in KT Nelson’s Path of Miracles; premiering Ryan Brown’s theatricalized “medical oratorio” Mortal Lessons; collaborating with the Friction Quartet on a program of new works for vocal quartet and string quartet; and creating the role of Alex in Lisa Mezzacappa’s serial podcast opera The Electronic Lover. As a member of iconic composer/choreographer Meredith Monk’s Vocal Ensemble, he has performed in Monk’s music-theater work On Behalf of Nature, which toured internationally and was recorded for ECM Records. With the San Francisco Symphony he traveled to Carnegie Hall to premiere Monk’s chamber work Realm Variations. He is a co-founder of The M6, a New York-based vocal sextet, which has been heard on NPR and featured in The New York Times. In his hometown of San Francisco, he regularly performs with the new-music chorus Volti, and is a member of the acclaimed nine-man ensemble Clerestory. His solo performances often include his DIY music boxes, which were featured in a SF Chronicle Datebook cover story. sidneychenarts.com

Daniel Iglesia (Instrument Design and Motion Tracking)

Daniel Iglesia creates music and media for humans, computers, and broad interactions of the two. His works have taken the form of concert works for instruments and electronics, live audio and video performance, generative and interactive installations, and collaborations theater and dance. He is an accomplished technologist, and brings ideas of computational aesthetics and elegance into the combination of electronic media and human performance.

His work has been presented throughout New York City in such diverse venues as Lincoln Center, Eyebeam Gallery, The Stone, the Kitchen, and many others. It has also been presented at concerts and festivals throughout the US and abroad, including the Experimental Media Series at the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington D.C.), Art.Tech@The Lab (San Francisco), the Hamburger Klangwerktage (Hamburg), the Guangdong Modern Dance Festival (Guangzhou), and the World Expo 2010 (Shanghai). His concert works have been performed by the California EAR Unit, So Percussion, the SEM Ensemble, the Talea Ensemble, the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Ostravska Banda, and many others.

He has a doctorate in Music Composition at Columbia, where he spent a lot of time at the Columbia Computer Music Center. His writings have appeared in the Cambridge Journal Organised Sound. He has taught at Columbia, Pratt, and Princeton, where he was the 2010-2011 co-leader of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk). He recently gave a talk on  PLOrk at the TEDx conference in Brooklyn, and is now a member of their permanent touring ensemble, Sideband. He is the recipient of the 2011 Van Lier Fellowship from Meet the Composer. He recently moved back to the SF Bay Area and works for Google.

Curtis Ullerich (Instrument Design and System Architecture)

Curtis Ullerich is interested in the expression of live physical gesture as musical gesture, with forays into live coding, fixed-medium and improvisational electroacoustic music, interface/instrument design, and symbolic systems.

Curtis has performed with myriad ensembles on saxophone, electronics, and trombone, including the Stanford Symphony Orchestra, Stanford Wind Symphony, Stanford Saxophone Choir, SCU’s SCLOrk, the Google Mobile Orchestra led by Dan Iglesia, and now SideLObe/SLOrk; he joined Sideband at PdCon 2016 and their 2018 west coast tour. He showcased his undergrad honors thesis work in music HCI (contributions to Virtual Environment Sound Control, PI Dr. Christopher Hopkins) at SEAMUS 2013. Selected projects are at curtis.in/projects/music.

By day, Curtis is a software engineer at Google, where he builds platforms for teaching young people STEM, with an emphasis on symbolic math systems. At other times, you can find him making music, splitting firewood, volunteering with 4-H, or running an ultra.