to fight or surrender

audiovisual opera — Infrequent Seams

This pair of audiovisual operas question the nature of love and manipulation. Each tells the stories of powerful women who must choose at critical moments if they will fight or surrender—and the consequences of those actions. Julie Herndon’s “At That Time,” draws its narrative from history, presenting a richly nuanced retelling of the lives of modernist writer Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas. Davor Vincze’s “Xinsheng,” speaks of the present, or perhaps the near future, and is set in a quasi-dystopian world of tangled relationships, cutthroat competition, and medical malpractice. But while these two works diverge in their choice of subject matter, they also converge around common themes, including the clash of personal feelings with professional obligations, the sacrifices demanded by love, and the paradoxical intersections of intimacy and distance.

The works were directed by Heinrich Horwitz and performed by the Decoder Ensemble: Leopold Hurt, Carola Schaal, Sonja Lena Schmid, Jonathan Shapiro, and Sebastian Berweck, with soloists Jessica Aszodi and Nina Guo. The works were curated by the artistic director and composer Margareta Ferek Petrić for the Zagreb Music Biennale, with video by Heinrich Horwitz (director), Lara Rodriguez Cruz, and Jule Katinka Cramer and audio recorded by Anne Taegert and Carlo Grippa, mastered by Christopher Botta.