Documenting Perfect Lives Manhattan

The newly formed performance collective Varispeed will be performing our new arrangement of Perfect Lives, a site-specific version of the classic opera for television by Robert Ashley. The performances will take place all over Lower Manhattan, and videographer Robert O'Haire has generously offered to record and edit all seven episodes for a discounted rate. We need just $650 to fully fund a high-quality documentation of this performance. It's a free performance, so please consider giving a bit to help out with this cost.

Varispeed

Varispeed is a newly formed collective of composer-performers from music and theatre groups Panoply Performance Laboratory, ensemble thingNY, and Why Lie? that creates site-specific, sometimes-participatory, oftentimes-durational, forevermore-experimental events.  Founded by Aliza Simons, Dave Ruder, Paul Pinto, Brian McCorkle, and Gelsey Bell, Varispeed came together in June 2011 to perform a twelve-hour celebration of Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives.  Future projects include, among other all-day musical events, John Cage's Empty Words.  For more information and documentation on Varispeed's Perfect Lives, visit http://perfectlivesbrooklyn2011.wordpress.com/.

Perfect Lives

Robert Ashley, a major figure of post-war American composition, has written almost exclusively for opera during the past thirty-five years, and Perfect Lives was his first major opera.  Its seven episodes weave the intersecting stories of the people in the American Midwest, centered around a mysterious crime, an elopement, and the mischief of two itinerant musicians.  Ashley uses the everyday expressions of the region to create a poetic mix of the quotidian with the lofty.  The text is delivered by a primary narrator, using rhythmically precise speech, and is supplemented by an interjecting backing chorus.

Perfect Lives: Manhattan

Perfect Lives Manhattan takes the events of a day in a small Midwestern town and remaps them onto Lower Manhattan, starting at 11 AM and continuing intermittently until 11:30 PM. As performers and audience members journey from location to location, participants re-imagine the big city as a folksy town where the bank tellers know the captain of the football team and everyone drinks together at the end of the night.  Varispeeds performance will use spatial intimacy to help animate the story -- performances will happen inside homes, parks, and businesses, over shared snacks and shared readings, rather than on stages or behind lecterns.  Perfect Lives Manhattan will bring together musicians, performers, fans and community members alike in a celebration of American opera. 

Get involved

Nov. 6, 2011. Put it on the calendar. The best thing you can do is come out and join the crowd as we parade from place to place making experimental opera on site.

If you know Perfect Lives, you'll know seeing it live is something really special. If you don't know it, here's your chance to get to know this amazing piece by arguably the most prominent American composer of music theatre.

Help us spread the word about the performance and consider funding this free-to-the-public performance.