Composer Daniel Felsenfeld Librettist: Bea Goodwin
Commissioner: Transient Canvas APRIL 2020 (CANCELED COVID)
A rather loose adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s The Pursuit of the Well Beloved, Exposure is an opera that explores performance art by commenting on an institution’s iniquitous practices within its very walls.
I directly follow the formatting of Hardy’s novel: a story carved into three twenty-year increments where the artist ages and the muse remains the same age. I displace the span of 1800s England with the American eras of the Nixon impeachment, the Clinton impeachment, and 2016. I also changed the gender of the artist.
Aliana, a young photographer in the Lower East Side, meets Emily, a spunky model from Connecticut, in 1974. They share their views on what art should be; how it should function in their present day. While they begin to create, things get messy and lines get crossed. The studio lights go out and we then see Aliana, twenty years later as a 40-year-old photographer. Emily re-enters as the same 19-year-old model. Emily shares how her mother was a model and artist, but she passed away from the mental illness she developed. They shoot a series of photos about Still Life, and the gradient of beautiful life to withered death. Aliana explains the exposure process. Things get messy, lines get crossed. Emily decides she needs the exposure. The studio lights go out and lights up on Aliana, now 59 years old in the birth of the #metoo movement. Emily re-enters, 19 and bulimic. Aliana speaks of photoshop and airbrushing to solve Emily’s worries about her body. Emily explains she doesn’t want Aliana to touch her body, with photoshop or her hands…again.
Official TW / CW: Exposure is a piece of theatre that tackles abuse of power in the art industry. It is a tapestry of colleague’s voices and experiences. We believe that as we continue to break down the binary in all areas of life, our stories should represent that progress.
