Breathing Free: An Operatic Take on the Black American Struggle

Say you’re White (like me) and MLK has been your hero as far back as you can remember. Say you’ve lived your entire life aware that not only is racism alive and well in the United States but that to at least some extent the U.S. is racist. Say that you’re personally agonized by bigotry because you see it as injustice to us, the human family, and not simply to “them.” 

That’s great; but for all the White empathy in the world, you can’t feel racial discrimination the way Black people can. Your mind may be righteous, your heart may be true, but because you haven’t been steeped in a culture that marginalizes anyone with your pigmentation, racism hasn’t soaked into your bones.

For those who know this feeling far too well, undoubtedly Heartbeat Opera’s Breathing Free will provide the comfort of recognition. And for those of us who don’t, Breathing Free may communicate something of that lived experience by giving it soaring voice in a carefully curated song cycle drawn from Beethoven and Black American composers and complemented by an expressionistic visual element. 

Technically speaking, let’s keep it simple and just say the music is great. Bass-baritone Derrell Acon, tenor Curtis Bannister, and soprano Kelly Griffin are first-rate singers; and Jacob Asworth and Daniel Schlosberg expertly lead their eight musicians (overdubbed to fine effect) through excellent arrangements. 

But because the live spectacle of opera is the biggest thrill even for devotees (let alone the rest of us), there’s a sense in which Breathing Free isn’t opera per se. Rather, Heartbeat Opera has created a work with far broader appeal (and if it turns a few newbies on to the art form, so much the better).

“You will be repaid in a better world,” sings Bannister after a series of opening images that linger lovingly on Black skin. Although the words are Beethoven’s and in their original context couldn’t have less to do with the descendants of slaves in America, we already sense that a repurposing is in play. Clearly this is not a situation where the performers’ skin color is incidental: immediately we’re meant to know that Breathing Free is about Black experience.

That fact is made explicit in the second piece, Henry Burleigh’s “Lovely, Dark, and Lonely One,” which sets Langston Hughes’s “Song” to halting, weary piano:

Lovely, dark, and lonely one,
Bare your bosom to the sun.
Do not be afraid of light,
You who are a child of night.
Open wide your arms to life,
Whirl in the wind of pain and strife,
Face the wall with the dark closed gate,
Beat with bare, brown fists—
And wait.

The third piece, another selection from Beethoven’s Fidelio, furthers (in Heartbeat Opera’s recontextualization) this call for perseverance:

Come, Hope, do not let the last star of the weary fade
Come, light my goal, however far it may be
Love will get me there
I follow my inner desire and do not waver

The most intense moments of Breathing Free come with “I Would Not Tell You What I Know” from Anthony Davis’s X (The Life and Times of Malcolm X). With musical angularity amplified by Breathing Free’s most frenetic dancing, Malcolm’s aria (words by Thulani Davis, sung by Derrell Acon in iconic attire) pulls no punches:

I would not tell you what I know,
you wouldn’t hear my truth.
You want the story but don’t want to know.
My truth is you’ve been on me a very long time,
longer than I can say.
As long as I’ve been living,
you’ve had your foot on me,
always pressing.
[…]
My truth is rough,
my truth could kill,
my truth is fury.

From here the proceedings wind down into a wistfulness, including an a cappella “Motherless Child” and closer “Balm in Gilead”, whose simple message returns us to the hope that on the other side of perseverance is healing: “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole / There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.”

Breathing Free’s visual elements are quite simple. Vocalists lip-synch their pre-recorded tracks. With no context a man runs down the street, a woman looks directly into the camera lens. Dancers Randy Castillo, Tamrin Goldberg, and Brian HallowDreamz Henry do their thing on the beach and in various urban settings. But coupled with the songs’ semantic content (always subtitled) and the expressiveness of the faces, Breathing Free must be seen to be fully appreciated. Heartbeat Opera calls this “a visual album,” and justly so.

Although the program notes talk about the four Beethoven songs as “Heartbeat Opera’s adaptation of Fidelio” (“a Black Lives Matter activist […] wrongly incarcerated by a corrupt prison warden…”), it’s non-Fidelio numbers which have the strongest visual subtext. A straightforward example is “Lovely, Dark, and Lonely One”, where Curtis Bannister heart-wrenchingly confronts his enervated image in the mirror, exhorting himself to “not be afraid of the light” and “[o]pen your arms to pain and strife” — easier said than done. 

A subtler but no less powerful sequence comes in “Motherless Child”, where shots of a spiritually depleted Kelly Griffin delivering the dark lament (“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child / A long ways from home, a long ways from home”) alternate with dancers who seem to struggle against the very air itself as they attempt the simplest tasks — standing on the sidewalk, reclining in a garden, walking up the stairs. One dancer breaks the mold, gyrating effervescently, but in the end his joie de vivre deserts him. 

Note that apparently these are not the burdens of poverty: the garden is verdant, the stairway shining with pristine hardwood; the dancers are casually well-kempt. Rather, director Ethan Heard and movement director Emma Jaster seem to present these poor souls as weighed down by the mere fact of having been ancestrally transplanted into a land that hundreds of years later still does not allow them to move and breathe and simply be free. “Sometimes I feel like I’m almost done / A long, long ways from home, a long ways from home.” Even with a nice place to live and cash in hand, if you’re Black in America, you still haven’t gotten out from under. Not yet.

Opera and America belong no less to Black people than to anyone else. Needless to say, right? Except these last four years suggest that tens of millions of Americans want only White people to fully enjoy the benefits of our shared culture. So this is for them: Opera and America belong no less to Black people than to anyone else. Breathing Free, whose West Coast premiere coincides with Black History Month, fittingly stakes a simultaneous claim to both. After all, could any subject be more operatic than the struggle of Black Americans?

The Board Stage presents Heartbeat Opera’s Breathing Free, A Visual Album. February 10 & 13, 7pm, followed by panel discussions. For tickets and more information, visit thebroadstage.org.