an opera by Bethany Ides
June 25th & 26th
Performances at 7 pm & 9 pm both nights
w/
Flo Buddenbaum
Devin Lucid
Morgan A. Ritter
David Weinberg
+ music by Ryan Sullivan
childrengetstuckplacesunderground.blogspot.com
Free Admission
Children Get Stuck Places Underground is an opera by poet, performance and installation artist, Bethany Ides, modeled in the vein of those composed by the late Mister Rogers.
When memory is rendered make-believe, specters take shape. A dark hole’s hollow form animates as snake; its ability to shed its skin becomes infectious. Processed traumas wend a trail through one creature’s digestive track into another, moving from mouth to mouth. Four guises (played by Ides along with David Weinberg, Morgan A. Ritter and Devin Lucid) represent the four Greek humors, figured within the two sides of a single, shadowy figure: O/Doe, whose perispirit inhabits other well known children who’ve spent time singing to themselves below the surface.
The narrative of Baby Jessica McClure, epically rescued from a backyard well shaft in 1987, is woven together with those of Pauline Réage’s transgressive non-character, O, to effect a chronicle of possession, transformation and fortitude. Countless children (count among them Alice, Tikki Tikki Tembo and the Old Testament’s Joseph) have emerged from such holes wholly altered. This work celebrates their veracity and ingenuity.
Biography
Bethany Ides makes work thats interprets functions inherent to language. Ides’ solo text-based video and performance pieces have been presented at The Brooklyn Museum and PS122. Her recent, multi-phasic APPROX L was performed incrementally at venues in Seattle and Portland, including galleryHOMELAND, before culminating as an expansive, 3-room treatise on the evasiveness of proper names, in particular Lindsay. Approximate L, a chapbook-length prose poem which initiated the project was published by Cosa Nostra Editions in 2009. Ides served as founding editor of FO(A) RM, an interdisciplinary journal of arts and research throughout its run, from 2002 – 2006. In 2006, she co-directed and curated The Gilded Pony Performance Festival in Troy and Valley Falls, NY, shortly after receiving an MFA in Writing from Bard College. For the past two and a half years, Ides has tremendously enjoyed teaching all around the city and across departments at PNCA, Marylhurst and Lewis & Clark. This is what she anticipates missing most in moving back to New York at the end of this summer.