Long Beach Opera’s “The Horse” Is Neither Opera nor Fully Realized

I’ll be the first to say that “opera” is just an overly general label for a vocal tradition typically embedded in the grandiose. In fact, that’s exactly what I wrote less than a month ago in reviewing Long Beach Opera’s beguiling The Romance of the Rose.

Nonetheless, I’m willing to go on record saying that The Horse, a new LBO show that falls perhaps too hard on the heels of The Romance of the Rose, isn’t opera. With no plot, no narrative, no sets, no grandiosity or spectacle of any scope, and vocals that at their most “operatic” faintly resemble Clare Torry in Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” with less altitude, The Horse is simply a free-form solo dance piece to percussion and computer beats/samples/manipulations.

The fact that The Horse isn’t opera isn’t a problem per se (unless you bought a ticket because you wanted to see opera — in which case, uh-oh). Perhaps LBO can even be commended for a willingness to stretch the bounds of opera beyond the breaking point. Every performance (work of art, etc.) should be taken on its own terms.

But The Horse doesn’t succeed on its own terms, at least when comparing what we get onstage with what we’re told is given. There’s a short film shown pre-show on a loop that features creator/dancer Chirs Emile talking about The Horse along the same lines of what we read in two separate program teasers: “The Horse evokes the supernatural experience of spiritual possession, [… and] embodies ancestral knowledge, reverence for African religion, and the human-divine connection while reclaiming between body and spirit […],” writes LBO. “The Horse speaks to catharsis, ancestral memory, the subconscious ritual, and the rest,” writes Emile.

The only thing that happens onstage is five hooded, white-robed figures making music, to which Emile (also in white and hooded) moves. This, the program tells us, has to do with becoming a “horse,” which in the Vodun tradition is “a person who has been possessed and is being ‘ridden’ by a possessing deity.” True, if you visit the shrine installation onsite you’re put in mind of voodoo and Afro-Caribbean culture. But aside from a bit of sampled clippity-clop to help us think of horses, you have to project heavily on The Horse to see any of its intended meaning.

So okay, without audience projection this is simply a 45-minute dance piece with no semantic content. That might be fine, but for several shortcomings. For starters, the sound design is curiously incomplete. Although mic’d, in these nonreflective environs (grass, tree, open air) the percussion — particularly the hand drums — has little presence (if there’s any reverb, it needs to be cranked way up), a flatness underlined once Cody Perkins gets to work with his beats and samples from his laptop. Even when he and the percussionists find each other, there’s no sonic mesh — and it’s worse when they’re at rhythmic cross purposes, and worse still when Perkins does that thing where the beat is rapidly sped up so it becomes an electronic whine. Fleeting moments of musical confluence are sabotaged by such aural maneuvers, resulting in a notable overall lack of flow.

Although the music of The Horse has a few distinct sections (a couple being akin to karaoke, with Perkins not so much sampling as simply playing recordings (e.g., a jazz combo) that he and the onstage musicians overlay), there’s no arc to speak of. Alexis Vaughn’s vocals find a decent spot in the mix, but her wordless improvisations are stylistically unvarying until the show’s final five minutes (a soulful, nearly a capella cry of “goin’ over yonder”). The lighting design parallels all this sameness: five or six static, monochrome cues over the entire 45 minutes: blacklight, green, red, yellow . . .

Worst of all for those onstage on this particular night was that they just couldn’t locate the spirit. However much this is an occupational hazard for all live performers, improvisational music is where the peril is greatest. Emile’s frustration seemed to show straight through his hood, and what should have been a gallop for long stretches never got past a canter. This was particularly notable for anyone who watched the preshow film, because what Emile and company seemed to channel in the performance (rehearsal? development?) footage captured then never manifested in the now.

I have little doubt that opening night of The Horse will end up as the least inspired of the four-show run. Nonetheless, anyone who wants opera from this Long Beach Opera presentation is bound to be disappointed; and whatever it is meant to be, The Horse could be far more fully realized.
The Horse will be performed March 11 and 12 at 7:30 p.m.
Cost: $55 to $125
Details: (562) 432-5934; LongBeachOpera.org
Venue: Rancho Los Cerritos, 4600 Virginia Rd., Long Beach;