EL NIÑO
John Adams's enigmatic nativity oratorio, with a libretto compiled by Peter Sellars, staged as an apocalyptic miracle play.
Commissioned by Spoleto Festival USA
Costume designer Magali Gerberon | Lighting designer, Marcus Doshi
"A post-apocalyptic world obviously in need of redemption and miraculous intervention... superb performance”
NEW YORK TIMES
“A haunting new production... was a richer experience, exploring the multiple layers of this deeply felt composition.”
WALL STREET JOURNAL
“Treating El Niño as a kind of Christian mystery play... ensures that the story is arrestingly told”
FINANCIAL TIMES
John Adams El Niño at Spoleto Festival USA, directed and designed by John La Bouchardière; costumes by Magali Gerberon; lighting Marcus Doshi; puppets by Sally Todd.
John Adams El Niño at Spoleto Festival USA, directed and designed by John La Bouchardière; costumes by Magali Gerberon; lighting Marcus Doshi; puppets by Sally Todd.
John Adams El Niño at Spoleto Festival USA, directed and designed by John La Bouchardière; costumes by Magali Gerberon; lighting Marcus Doshi; puppets by Sally Todd.
John Adams El Niño at Spoleto Festival USA, directed and designed by John La Bouchardière; costumes by Magali Gerberon; lighting Marcus Doshi; puppets by Sally Todd.
A deeply human Messiah comes to Spoleto Festival USA
“As people took their seats at John Adams' El Niño at Spoleto Festival USA, figures made their way onto the darkened stage. Some made it farther than others, but all eventually collapsed in the mire. Some dropped from fatigue, others from desolation. Some came to help or investigate, but soon lay down in hopelessness. They were of all ages and races, societal outsiders and insiders. By the time the production opened, the stage was covered with fallen humanity.
El Niño is a 21st century retelling of the birth of Jesus, with iconic images mixing with current fears. Different perspectives of the same story are pieced together in a way that flows from illumination to gritty realism and back, showing how this story of miracles plays out in a contemporary setting.
A dramatic oratorio, El Niño is told through scriptural and non-scriptural texts, using lighting, puppets and projections to help narrate. The production at Spoleto Festival USA was directed by John La Bouchardiere, who designed a set both nimble and iconic. At the back of the stage, a row of austere alcoves held shadowed figures, reminiscent of a dark cathedral. When a biblical character was referenced, an alcove lit up with a stained glass window revealing the puppet figure. The puppets joined the story, beginning with the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary.
Three countertenors provided the voice of the angel, as well as much of the narration, giving these pieces of text an other-worldly feel. Mary was sung by a mezzo-soprano and a soprano. The two voices of Mary might be puzzling in a staged opera, but here they show two sides of a very human 16 year old. She handled her annunciation, pregnancy and motherhood with as much mortal fear as religious ecstacy, as much rejoicing as mourning. Conversely, a single baritone sang the roles of Joseph, Herod and (sometimes) God.
As Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem (and later to Egypt), the narration was illuminated by shadow puppets that made their way across an impromptu screen. Intentionally primitive, these projections wobbled and loomed, like they have through history. We've told these stories through pictures and light for millennia. When they reached Bethlehem, Mary was both ready and not ready to deliver her baby. The text for the end of Act I is "The Christmas Star", by Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral:
“A little girl
comes running,
she caught and carries a star.
She goes flying, making the plants
and animals she passes
bend with fire.
Her hands already sizzle,
she tires, wavers, stumbles,
and falls headlong,
but she gets right up with it again” (excerpt)
A human chorus surrounded the travail and birth. When the baby was delivered, the chorus parted so we could see Mary and the baby. Where the baby lay, a light shoneinto the audience - so painfully bright nothing else could be seen.
Act II began with the wrath of Herod and his order of genocide. Following the slaughter, we heard “Memorial de Tlatelco”, by the 20th century feminist novelist and poet Rosario Castellanos, which tells of a mass killing of students in Mexico City during a time of political unrest. The text references how it's not covered in the news, and no one speaks of it. “Don't sift through the archives”," it says, “because nothing has been recorded there”. Instead of facing evil, we fill our news with celebrities and entertainment. Does it take a miracle to shine a light in the darkness? And would we recognize a miracle today if we saw it? Following the slaughter, stories of Jesus' miracles began. They read like folktales, with tinges of magical realism. Dragons emerged from a cave to worship the infant. A palm tree bent at the child's command, giving its fruit to sustain his mother. It's this idea – this miracle – of a child ministering to an adult that we were left with. In the end, the miracle is life and birth. It's the miracle of children, coming from chaos into light. We see miracles every day.
I love watching where John Adams' mind goes. He doesn't tell stories as much as immerse us in ideas, coaxing us into them through music. Like in Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and Dr Atomic, I came out of El Niño a little wiser, a little richer and a little fuller. Sometimes the light we shine on a particular element of a story is so bright, it's impossible to see what surrounds it. In El Niño, the lights come on where we do not expect them, and the darkness demands us to adjust and look.”
BACHTRACK
Performed by Westminster Choir
Conductor, Joe Miller
Director's notes
Brought up to believe that biblical stories were metaphors, John Adams wrote El Niño “to understand what is meant by a miracle." While accepting the New Testament’s basic premise— that Jesus was the Messiah and thus the fulfilment of promises made to God’s people in the Old Testament—Adams looks beyond the literal description of events relating to the Nativity, towards what they might represent today.
“A Messiah for the modern age” (LA Times), El Niño tells the story of Christ’s birth in ways that reflect the time that has since passed. Compiled from a wide variety of sources, ranging from the Old Testament to late twentieth-century poetry, its texts examine both the original story and our relationship to it. In between are passages from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the eras that strongly influenced how we see and understand Christianity today. In essence, Adams takes a contemporary perspective on the Nativity, seen through a medieval window.
During the Middle Ages, miracles were accepted as factually true, and official doctrine went largely unquestioned. By comparison, Adams’s use of unofficial gospels introduces unfamiliar stories that lie beyond our received knowledge; he shifts the viewpoint away from the establishment’s idealised vision of the Nativity towards one that considers the miracle of birth through modern female eyes, adding Spanish texts to the English of his religious upbringing to offer an earthier tone that reflects the increasingly polyglot nature of present-day America. Adams presents Rosario Castellanos’s “Memorial de Tlatelolco” as a contemporary parallel between Herod’s slaughter of the innocents and more recent massacres: here, the soprano rails at society for turning a blind eye to the slaughter of innocents in any age; Adams’s placement of this, just before the young Jesus performs his first miracles, suggests that only by accepting our own complicity in such crimes can we enjoy the rebirth offered by Christ. Thus, while Handel’s Messiah was an unqualified celebration, Adams’s El Niño asks sincere but challenging questions, not so much of the Bible as of ourselves.
As an oratorio, El Niño was not written in a dramatic form. The performers usually describe action rather than act it out; no one voice is allowed to become exclusively associated with a single character, as performers share and switch between identities; Adams does not even make time for practical issues like changing scenery or exiting the stage. In short, although he wrote El Niño to be performed either staged or in concert, Adams deliberately prevents the piece from functioning as conventional drama, as if—like conventional wisdom—that were inappropriate for understanding what might be meant by a miracle.
Adams does reference one theatrical form: the opening scene of the Annunciation is taken from a medieval miracle play, linking El Niño not only to the oratorio but to a long tradition of drama aimed at spreading the story of Jesus, including the puppet-plays that Franciscan monks used to convert indigenous Americans nearly 500 years ago. In such traditions, the life-like characterisations and realistic spaces of modern naturalism were not expected. Performers would travel by walking between various locations indicated on an open set, and the very distance between the identities of character and performer was indicative of the audience’s understanding of the drama itself. Somewhat in the matter of Berthold Brecht, it is not pretending to be the biblical characters in El Niño that creates meaning, but witnessing them.
John La Bouchardière, March 2014