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The American Dream of <em>TAKEABITE</em>: Migrating from Video to Opera

2020; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 61; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.13110/framework.61.1.0071

1559-7989

Cruz,

Cinema and Media Studies

The American Dream of TAKEABITE:Migrating from Video to Opera David Antonio Cruz (bio) For my multidimensional piece TAKEABITE; elduendealwaystravels … light (USA, 2013), I explore my interest in video, performance, music, film, adaptation, remixing, and appropriation. TAKEABITE is a dark, messy, and humorous attempt at exploring migration, greed, race, and consumption of the unattainable American dream. In TAKEABITE, I drew inspiration from Gore Vidal's The City and The Pillar (1948), James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956), 1950s sitcoms, and early Disney animations. These were references that informed my coming out experiences and understanding of American culture that seemed so foreign to me. I grew up in a conservative and religious household that encouraged a cultural and moral barrier. My parents moved to the States before I was born. I grew up feeling like I wasn't given access to or allowed to partake in the culture around me. American pop culture was foreign to me, as it was to my parents. My first introduction to pop culture was my weekly trips to my grandparents, where I was allowed to watch TV. The costuming, sounds, and language in TAKEABITE are flashbacks to the things I consumed. The costumes were influenced by 1950s couture, Victorian clothing, black and white television shows like Leave It to Beaver, and the stretched bodies in Salvador Dali's The Enigma of William Tell (1933) and Soft Boiled Construction (1936), which I saw on my first trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a child. These were things that haunted my childhood. One half of the video was filmed at Monet's Gardens in Giverny, France, and the other half, the kitchen scenes, were filmed in Brooklyn, NY. The video contains film and audio samples from Snow White, Rebecca, West Side Story, Misery, Tarzan, [End Page 71] Cinderella, A Streetcar Named Desire, Paris Is Burning, Toni Braxton's Breathe Again, Leave It to Beaver, and 1950s commercials.1 A year after finishing the video, I decided to adapt TAKEABITE into an opera, which premiered in 2013. "theOpera" was my first large commission by El Museo del Barrio. The challenge was how to bring to life sounds that I had composed, remixed, and layered to create a haunting story of wanting, belonging, and failure. The performance featured three leading performers and artists, Elia Alba, Mickalene Thomas, and David Antonio Cruz, in full costume. Each stood on lightboxes that restricted their movement—backed by an orchestra, a jazz singer, an operatic soprano, ten actors, and a special effects sound mixer. Every aspect of the original sound was rendered visible. The sound of turning on and off lights became raindrops. Each piece became part of the orchestration. The video was projected behind the performer, and the stage was covered with 2,500 paper planes. Like the colorful flowers at Giverny, the paper planes (made from printed images and text) circled the performers and the instruments. Even the slightest movement rippled across the stage, causing everything to move in unison. We were all breathing and speaking as one. David Antonio Cruz David Antonio Cruz is a multidisciplinary artist and a Professor of the Practice in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. His video work explores and critiques the history, visibility, and intersectionality of brown, black, and queer bodies. note 1. Snow White (Disney, USA, 1937), Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1940), West Side Story (Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961), Misery (Rob Reiner, USA, 1990), Tarzan (W. S. Van Dyke, USA, 1932), Cinderella (Disney, USA, 1950), A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, USA, 1951), Paris Is Burning (Jennie Livingston, USA, 1990), Toni Braxton's Breathe Again (1993), and Leave It to Beaver (USA, 1957–63). Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View...