Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Richard doled out props at every rehearsal: gas masks for the players to wear during the third song. Malay shadow puppets to wave in the air. Kalimbas, which he got Els to write into the percussionist’s part. Els prayed that the Salvation Army would run out of treasures before the players ran out of patience.

Long after the performers headed off to Murphy’s each night, Bonner insisted that he and Els huddle up and keep tinkering. He had other obligations — thesis, theater performances, maybe even a personal life, though Els saw no hint of one. And yet, for this one volunteer project — someone else’s graduate recital — he had endless energy. Els wondered if he might be addicted to pep pills. But Richard had no need of amphetamines. He ran on sufficient built-in demons — hellfire father, suicide mother, a younger sister sealed up in cortical seizures — that no amount of labor would ever exorcise.

Bonner’s plans for the Borges Songs called for costumes, a bank of sixteen-millimeter projectors, and dance. He alone saw how all the moving parts would come together. Richard mapped out the steps he wanted from Maddy — the spastic thrusts, flicks, and slashes. He demonstrated, and his clumsiness came so close to unfettered happiness that Els had to look away.

Maddy froze up at the choreographer’s weirder requests. I can’t do that.

You can. It gets easier.

I’ll look like a fool.

You look like a force of nature. You’ll see.

Els sat in the empty theater, watching his songs turn as strange as death. Maddy thrust out her arms and canted her shoulders, a holy clown. Els wanted to protect the gawky, ambushed soprano from this fate she didn’t sign on for. But she needed no protection. The game was already lost, and she meant to face doom bravely.

To Bonner, Madolyn Corr’s every inept plié was found art. The man couldn’t stop choreographing. He stood in front of the flinching quintet, left hand clasping his right elbow, two fingers pressed to his hairline, smirking as if all history were one long shaggy dog joke whose punch line he was now permitted to deliver. He’d scan the score, regard the palette of possible victims, and swoop.

The percussionist dug Bonner’s hijinks; the pianist just laughed. The other three threatened a walkout. Bonner faced them down.

You gonna sit there with a broom up your sphincter, afraid to tap your feet? You’ve all forgotten where music comes from. Why do you think they’re called movements?

And, howling all the way, the musicians turned back into dancers.

The piece was one of those commercial flights to Paris that found itself heading down to Havana. But by December, Els’s embarrassment at the hijacking turned into excitement. He expanded the score where Bonner’s shambolic theater called for more. The academic piece began to breathe and bleed. The pair of them — pushing and prodding and trumping one another — lifted the notes into a new place.

Fights: Yes. Fits of temper and pique. Too many stressful hours together for anything less. But Richard turned even war into creative charades.

The collaborators were crossing the dark Quad one icy night, wasted by hours of rehearsing, but carried along by the strangeness coming alive under their care. Richard stopped on the long diagonal, his hands conducting the air. How do you like seeing your cold little fish swimming in the great big ocean?

Els drew up next to him. How do you like seeing your random thrashing get some form?

The choreographer craned toward the gibbous moon. Maestro. We work pretty well together, don’t you think? It seems to me that half of life’s problems would be solved if one of us had a vagina.

Els recoiled. His boots slid on the packed snow, and he would have fallen if Bonner hadn’t grabbed his elbow. Bonner smacked Els in the back of the skull and cackled.

Oh, fuck off! Don’t look at me like that, man. You got a problem with something?

Richard snapped his finger and waved the parade onward. After a hundred-yard silence that he seemed to feast on, he grabbed Els again. Maestro, listen. I’m happy, for you, that she has one. And a marvelous one, I have no doubt.

Then he was all business again — Borges and Brecht and new plans for getting infinity up onto that cramped little stage.

There’s joy in a minor key, a deep pleasure to be had from hearing the darkest tune and discovering you’re equal to it.

The performance was set for late January, the day before Peter Els’s twenty-seventh birthday. Bonner’s notoriety was good for business. Maddy’s Vertical Smile groupies turned out to hear the band’s lead singer. Peter’s composer friends showed up, to gauge the competition. Mattison was there, near the front of the hall, waiting to be unsatisfied. Word had gotten around that the patients were running the asylum. It made for a decent house.

As the room filled, Bonner staked out a seat halfway down the right aisle. When the players came onstage to polite applause, Richard retreated to where Els sat, in the back of the hall. The horn started its stutter-step stall, a figure picked up by the cello, then the oboe. As the three instruments played their patient delaying game, Madolyn crept down the right aisle in a gray tunic — Cleopatra with a gecko-skull brooch and a cicada in her hair. She edged toward the stage, stopped, cringed and recoiled, then retreated to the chair Bonner had vacated. The audience was baffled, but the band played on.

Ratchet and wood block prodded the delaying motif, which cycled through dissonant parallel intervals in the cello, horn, and oboe. Maddy rose from her seat, lurched toward the stage, hesitated, lost her nerve again, and sat back down. The audience tittered, as nervous as they should have been.

The piano blasted through the stuttering material and broke it loose. All five instruments fell into a flowing stream. Maddy bolted from her seat and jerked her unwilling body up the stairs and out to center stage, where, shocked by a sudden rush of will, she sang:

The truth is,

truth is,

truth is. .

The truth is that we live out our lives

putting off all that can be put off. .

On a downbeat, the pitch group changed to Hypophrygian, an old church mode. The instruments circled in tight stretti of dense materials. Then the projectors fired up — twin beams from opposite sides of the hall, coating the singer in colors. Near the bottom of her register, Maddy sang a legato line that twisted like a tunnel in an ancient tomb:

Perhaps we all know deep down. . that we are immortal.

At the word immortal , the lines sailed up into a series of ringing forte chords in the piano and a frenzy of handbells.

The three melodic instruments reached a blistering peak of arpeggios, then froze. The projectors blacked out. The sound decayed in the dampening hall. Awkward Maddy beckoned out over the audience’s heads. Her grasping hands and desperate glances made half the room turn and look. Then, over the pianissimo horn and oboe, she wove through the four pitches of a diminished seventh:

And that sooner. .

Sooner or later. .

Sooner, or sooner or later. .

Later. . or later. . later. .

The projectors blazed again, along with a choir of antiphonal taped voices. Images pelted the hall’s walls in a time-lapse cavalcade that ran from Edison’s electrocuted elephant to Edward White tethered to his Gemini capsule by a twenty-five-foot umbilical above the blue Earth. The pianist placed his forearms across the keyboard and undulated. Horn, oboe, and cello built a corona of minor seconds while the percussionist rolled sponge mallets on a suspended china cymbal. On a fixed pitch in the middle of her range, rising three steps at the end of the line, Maddy, motionless, intoned: