Sung, spoken and danced performance in a prologue and four acts - for six performers

AN EXPERIMENTAL PIECE

Deserting Las Vegas is a project bringing together musicians, dancers, singers, artists and intellectuals. The libretto and music were written for the occasion. The performance presented is a work in progress, involving the performers in the creative process. Loosely inspired by Bertold Brecht’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, the play features characters in search of meaning, torn between their contradictory desires to think, entertain and make money. Deserting Las Vegas was created for the Eternal Tour 2011 festival, which runs from New York to Las Vegas from December 2 to 23.

THE TEXT: SIX CHARACTERS IN THE MIDDLE OF A DESERT

The opening of Deserting Las Vegas takes place in the middle of a desert. This desert has several semantic dimensions. It refers to a geographical location: the Mojave Desert, named after the Amerindian tribe that inhabited the land between the present-day states of California, Nevada and Arizona. But the desert is also, symbolically, the place in which we are today called upon to think about the contemporary world. The disappearance of the question of being, in the most nihilistic phase of Western metaphysics, is the horizon within which the desert advances. Six characters, four of whom embody both existential and philosophical positions, deploy a variety of strategies to try, as best they can, to escape from the absurd abyss within which they are circling, an abyss that separates meaning and nonsense, being and nothingness. Boredom becomes an affective disposition conducive to questioning. Entertainment can no longer distract us from this task: how can we think after the devastation? Gone are the various utopias and communitarianism! The very expansion of consciousness, advocated by the apostles of psychedelism in the 1960s, has become “hygienic”: a trip on the Strip (in Las Vegas), but within the bounds of legality, the ultimate thrill but without substance abuse, neon powder as the sole vector of ecstasy. In this disenchanted context, artistic expression appears to be the ultimate place for a hypothetical overcoming of nihilism. Gender, class, minorities, domination, destruction, Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Arabs: each is the Indian, the outcast, of another… How can we be, despite everything, together, in the age of contemporaneity? This is the leitmotif of this performance.

BETWEEN POPULAR AND LEARNED MUSIC

Inspired by popular music, both religious and secular (polyphonic chant, gospel, ballads, ritornellos), the composition of Deserting Las Vegas blends different styles and techniques, without hierarchy. It develops using the energy of the repetition process, in the heritage of the American minimalists and in the perspective of the show’s leitmotif, boredom being materialized by circular movement. In addition to internationally renowned opera singers, the occasional participation of amateur singers pays tribute to popular tradition. The aim is to propose, experiment and risk new avenues for contemporary opera.

The musical creation is designed to match the touring dimension of the show. The solo and chorus parts are mainly a cappella. The instrumental and electroacoustic musical parts are played on record players and computers. The musicians are replaced by the two composers turned DJs.

SPACE AND PLAY: A POLE, A ROPE AND A CAR GARAGE

If being is the key philosophical question, unresolved and inexhaustible, it is nevertheless appearing that guides our being-in-the-world, according to Hannah Arendt. Appearance: I exist in the midst of the post-war desert because someone is looking at me, and because I’m listening to someone else. In the middle of the desert: how to (inter-)act? how to dance? how to sing?
The performance’s scenography revolves around a pole, for dancing; it’s also a pole that suggests Géricault’s Le Radeau de la Méduse and enables the characters to survive. A pole is a pole, beyond what it can represent and evoke. Las Vegas seems like an oasis in the desert: how can we describe and apprehend this city that at first glance is a mirage? With a lyrical voice, music-hall choreography, contemporary music and a soundscape? How do you move in and out of this space? Gestures can be minimal and sufficient: everything is heavily loaded. Or, on the contrary, do we need to move and amplify body and mind, to celebrate life, beyond any kind of illusion, because “art is life”?
The link, found in the metaphorical form of a rope, is perhaps the answer to the inability to homogenize verbal and non-verbal languages, authorizing a plurality of simultaneous expressions, a juxtaposition of genres and schools concentrated in a singular location, a car garage. The garage, where artists have their vehicles repaired, is a ready-made setting. It is a place where movement is temporarily halted, hoods open and engines silent. It is precisely from this stand-by and silence that Deserting Las Vegas emerges and unfolds.