David T. Little: Black Lodge staged in Malmö and Stockholm
Following recent stagings in Rotterdam, Los Angeles and New York and its nomination for a 2024 GRAMMY® Award, David T. Little’s Black Lodge travels to Sweden in November, with performances presented by Malmö Opera and Folksoperan in Stockholm.
David T. Little’s ritual opera theater piece Black Lodge receives its first Scandinavian performances in November in the acclaimed Beth Morrison Projects production directed by Michael Joseph McQuilken. Scored for tenor, rock band, string quartet and backing track, the 70-minute work – setting a libretto by Anne Waldman – combines live performance by Timur & the Dime Museum with action and music on film. The Swedish premiere performances are presented at Malmö Opera on 21/22 November and Folksoperan in Stockholm on 25/26 November.
> Visit the Malmö Opera website
> Visit the Folkoperan website
Drawing on the complicated mythologies of the surrealist writer William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Black Lodge uses dance, industrial rock, classical string quartet, and opera to take viewers through a Lynchian psychological escape room. Black Lodge is an immersive live experience in which the audience follows the protagonist through dark corridors among trapped shadows, tormented souls and mysterious creatures, in order to perhaps find a way out.
Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her.
While Black Lodge echoes the dark, existential feel of previous David T. Little projects – Dog Days, Haunt of Last Nightfall, Soldier Songs – this work pursues a new element that Little describes: “I was seeking something beautiful in Black Lodge, though deep down I still believed Burroughs’ notion that ‘you have to live in hell to see heaven.’ I now see that I had both written myself into and out of that hell. In going through it, I found a new and healthier way of being that I didn’t consciously know I was seeking – a resolution the Man in Michael Joseph McQuilken’s artful screenplay is not granted.”
Black Lodge was commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects and the Allen R. and Judy Brick Freedman Venture Fund for Opera. The work was first presented at Opera Philadelphia’s Festival O22 in 2022, and staged subsequently at the O Festival in Rotterdam, the United Theater on Broadway in Los Angeles and the Prototype Festival in New York. The recording was released digitally in 2023 on Cantaloupe Music.
> Listen to or buy the Black Lodge recording
In May David T. Little visited Montreal where What Belongs to You, his full-evening score for tenor and sinfonietta, won the award for Best New Opera conferred by the Music Critics Association of North America. The awards committee commented that “What Belongs to You is a poetic and sensitive work that conveys the chaos of adult desire and the traumas of gay childhood… the text is often raw and occasionally shocking, yet Little’s score is perhaps his most refined creation to date, blending recollections of Schubert and Britten with more experimental textures. The writing for voice is elegant throughout, the instrumentation intensely atmospheric.”
> Further information on Work: Black Lodge
Photo: Beth Morrison Projects