CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS & GREGORY SPEARS

creators, "Wolf-in-Skins"

AOP: Greg, we produced and watched your previous opera, Paul’s Case undergo several amazing transformations, culminating in a performance with Philadelphia Center City Opera.  Now we are looking for funding for a production of Wolf-in-Skins possibly in 2013. Of course, Greg introduced us to Christopher, and watching the two of you conceive your new piece has been amazing.  Christopher, I hear that, down the road, you envision something on a grander scale?

Christopher: Well, interestingly, the work is completely scalable.  I have a very large vision for it in my mind, but said vision is one that can expand and contract according to the needs of presenters.  I imagine it ultimately as a cycle of the Wagnerian ilk, but we are only at very nascent stages right now.  I imagine that each libretto in the cycle has exactly 9 scenes, but the libretti are designed so that each of these 9 scenes could be shown as an independent fragment.  Wolf-in-Skins is the third evening-length libretto of six, a complete tale in its own right drawing inspiration from the fourth branch of the Mabinogion, which is a cycle of adventure tales found in various 14^th century Welsh manuscripts. 

AOP:  Let’s talk more about storytelling. The traditional question of, “which came first, the music or the words?” doesn’t apply here because in your process, it seems that the two are intrinsically linked, which is what fascinated us at American Opera Projects from the beginning.  There are different ways of telling stories that we haven’t even thought of yet and that is what audiences, I think, are thirsting for, and what rings true when looking towards the future of opera.  

Gregory:  And that is what fascinates me about working with dance and opera and their potential for a shared world. Dance because it’s not text-based must show stories rather than tell them. Coming from the opera world, I feel that even the most traditional ballets, take Sleeping Beauty for example, are very strange and unique in the way they create dramatic tension, and in the way characters develop and transform over an evening. I’m keen on exploring how the dance and opera conventions can complement each other, but also how they challenge and perhaps even threaten one another. My hope is that this large-scale opera/dance collision mirrors the friction that plays out in the story between characters, cultures and languages.

AOP: Did you feel like you had to bone up on your Welsh? And what is it about this language that makes dance work for you?

Christopher: Well, I’ve always conceived of the supernatural characters as innately mystifying, so I want their language to sound obscure to our mundane ears.  There could be supertitles to help the audience understand the meaning of their texts, of course, but the “fay” manner of expression should have a strange, unfamiliar cadence - something beyond ordinary.  And that’s why I chose the Insular-Celtic languages for this piece.   I’m hoping to write parts of each branch of the cycle in one of the six surviving languages that sprang from the Celtic root.

AOP: What always struck me in rehearsals was the emotional content, and how you’ve been able to tap into the English language with this very large quantity of passion.  Do you change between those two language worlds on purpose?

Gregory: My hope is that as an audience member, when one hears Welsh sung alongside a dance, one naturally tends to look to the movement to interpret the text. In this sense, the movement helps translate the meaning in visceral terms. Then when you hear an aria that’s all of a sudden in English, performed by an onstage singer, the movement has an amplifying power. I should mention even the English parts of the libretto are written in an ornate form of old English, so to our ears the vocal aspect of the piece is always mediated – by style, different languages, and of course by the music. When we hear “English” the denotative meanings just seem to rise to the surface a bit more. I’m also interested in how this language shift suggests the emotive cultures of the different characters, their different ways of communicating or failing to communicate with one another.

AOP: Greg, it has been interesting to watch you composing for the voice, particularly in how you deal with the grace notes. Whenever we have auditions for Greg’s pieces, we focus on how they sing the grace notes.  And I think you took it to another degree here.  Why so many ornamentations?

Gregory: I like the dramatic possibilities of decorative vocal writing, and in Wolf-in Skins, I’ve found that this style helps me to compose out certain paradoxical qualities Christopher has given to the characters.  For instance, in Gilfaethwy’s aria, his grace notes are written and sung in a way that hopefully evoke his martial confidence alongside his swooning, love-sick interior. In other words, his decorated lines could be interpreted by the singer (and the audience) as war-like cries on the one hand or as a lamentoso sighs on the other. For another character Gwyn, I was looking for a type of grace note figure that could signify his sophistication and his savage anger in a single gesture. I’m interested in the problem or paradox at the core of each character, and so I try to develop a style for each that can best capture that complexity. The next challenge is to find  a form that can sustain and develop it over the span of an evening.  

AOP: Which came first, the movement or the music, or has it gone back and forth?  Does one of you get an idea and then the other one develops it?  And Christopher, for us musicians and composers out there, what is your dance process?  Does the movement come from the sound you hear?

Gregory: Well, in the case of the material for the fay milkmaids, Christopher videotaped a rehearsal and I actually wrote the piece to the film – then I re-wrote the piece later using the Welsh text.

Christopher: Gregory sometimes gives me fully fleshed-out scores and I just completely respond to them physically.  We’ve also done the exercise where I introduce a text to Gregory and we discuss how music would embody it, as well as how it might be embodied in the dances.

Gregory: Over the years, we’ve learned how to set challenges for one another. In fact we have a whole set of pieces that we used as studies or etudes for Wolf-in-Skins.  The music I write for Christopher is different than the music I write for any other occasion. I’m grateful because I wouldn’t write music like this if it weren’t for you!

Christopher:  And vice versa!  The scores that Gregory comes up with just blow my mind, and I can’t help but imagine movement when I hear them.  When I close my eyes and listen to his music, emotional and physical impulses arise in me that compel me to embody the fantastical worlds I dream up.  And I love that question about my process, since with this piece I have been pushed to discover new ways to approach the design of movement.  I am usually a kind of “old-school” choreographer in that I make every step and then I teach it to the dancers.  A lot of people ask for movement suggestions from their performers and shape it, but I like to craft every movement myself.  And in the recent case of choreographing on a singer, it was a bit different.  I started with the music and I worked alongside his “non-dancer” body while designing each step, and I found that certain things worked better than others in terms of his actually producing sound while moving.  Also, as a singer, he had fewer preconceived notions about how to move than my dancers would.  His interpretation of my movements was unencumbered by learned affect- so Drew’s portrayal of Gilfaethwy is so beautiful to me, because he simply executes the movements I gave him, there’s no psychological obfuscation going on.  It’s gestural truth!  I find that really amazing and I’m really excited to choreograph on singers more.

Gregory: Ah, that’s why I love working with Christopher, because he uses phrases like “gestural truth!” I think at the root of our process is the question: how can one use dance gestures and music gestures to re-imagine old stories and sensibilities? Within the libretto there are already movements (or gestures) coded into the metaphors and imagery, which inspire my musical structures.  When I have set the libretto to music and give it back to Christopher as a score, it moves through time in a way that is both foreign and familiar.

AOP:  In what sort of venue do you envision this work being produced, and by what kind of producer?  Opera company, dance company, presenter, how do you envision it being realized?

Christopher:  I have to admit that I dream of staging it on a traditional proscenium stage where there’s a full pit to hide the instrumentalists, and where you get a vast amount of space to do some interesting spatial choreography. But I want really weird things to happen in that traditional space, because that’s what I love - I love creating the oddest things you can within strict constraints.

As told to AOP General Director Charles Jarden
New York, NY
December, 2011

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Wolf-in-Skins is currently in development at American Opera Projects.