Details

Life Cycle of a Fever Dream premiered on the roof of the historic Bendix Building in Los Angeles on November 16, 2024. Julia Edith Rigby’s experimental, site-specific and interactive opera brought twenty-two musicians into conversation with the acoustical architecture of the Bendix Building. This community-activated performance reconfigured listeners into performers, transmogrifying the opera into a collective artistic process.

The opera experimented with geophone technology to expand the potential of community-activated performance. A geophone is a piece of seismological equipment used to pick up sounds normally outside of the human range of hearing, such as the low-frequency rumbles of a building experiencing phenomena like wind or human activity. It’s a means of putting a finger on the hidden pulse of a site, of rendering audible the inaudible.

The musicians roamed the roof while playing, and the audience was invited to move with them, to physically feel different kinds of instrumentation and vibration in their bones, to register various degrees of resonance in their bodies. Meanwhile, the geophone picked up on our movements and translated them into audible sounds. Audience members become listeners as well as sounders, agents in the creation of an ephemeral soundscape via their movements and soundings. The opera became a means of tuning into our surroundings as well as to one another.

The geophone enabled the musicians to improvise with their environment, bringing previously un-hearable sounds (created by the building, the street below, and the audience) into conversation with live instrumentation. Musicians and audience members engaged in a collective process of building new sonic worlds. Together we transformed the roof of the Bendix Building into a community-activated instrument, an acoustical commonage, and a space for collective listening and collective improvisation, radical noticing and regenerative world-making.

Sourcing field recordings from sea caves, atmospheric river events, decomposing trees, aquaria, animals and climatic phenomena, the opera expands our human-centered understandings of perception and world-making to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans. Wild bats and beetles, sea lions and tortoises, coyotes and hagfish, cicadas and cormorants, marine isopods and bees are among the many animals voicing the field recordings. The opera asks questions about multispecies relationships and interdependence--about more-than-human intelligence and multitudinous means of knowing and existing—while imagining futurities that complexify our understandings of sensory worlds and sense of place, loss and possibility.

Frog calls were recorded in Californian vernal pools, Midwest ponds, and a Costa Rican cloud forest undergoing climate change-exacerbated amphibian decline. Beached icebergs were recorded in eastern Greenland, melting and releasing bubble-pops of ancient atmospheres. Bugling tule elks—which sound like A string harmonics— guided the creation of compositions with viola harmonics.

Silk moths, frogs, Golden-Headed Lion tamarins and sea caves enter into conversation with live instrumentation. By bringing the sounds of sea caves local to Los Angeles into conversation with sounds from farther afield, the opera aims to cultivate relational thinking about geological time, ecological systems and socioenvironmental phenomena on local and global scales.

Life Cycle of a Fever Dream experiments with expanding our senses of perception to consider different understandings of time, sounding and sensing. When we hear the glassy bells of sea star tube feet, we are hearing those feet walking, tasting and smelling all at once. Recordings of echolocating bats open our ears to means of sensing via pulse and echo. Buzzing cicadas—echoes of the Jurassic period--reveal a world of sounding reliant on tympanal vibration and abdominal resonance. They also reveal a world of present-day insect population collapse.

Recordings of stridulating crabs speak to a time before the breakup of Pangea, when crabs started evolving the ridges that made possible their soniferous capabilities. The opera interweaves sounds of living fossils like hagfish—benthic scavengers who clean whale falls—and sturgeon—dinosaur-era fish capable of electroreception and survivors of multiple mass extinctions—to bring us into relation with long time.

The sounds of Pleistocene echoes like Przewalksi’s horses and Bristlecone pine trees—organisms that lived on this planet in the time of wooly mammoths and dire wolves—bring our attention to the soundscapes of previous geologic epochs.

Microscope slides of diatoms recorded at the UC Davis Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute’s Bodega Marine Laboratory in Bodega, California speak to the diatoms that once flourished in the prehistoric sea that inundated present-day Los Angeles.

At the Bodega Marine Laboratory, Rigby also recorded the following sounds: the radula of a predacious snail drilling through a mussel shell, abalone feeding on kelp, and sea stars and sea urchins walking on glass. Rigby recorded the sounds of hagfish tunneling into decomposing squid organs at Chapman University in Orange, California. She recorded audio of an octopus scraping the hydrophone with her radula at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in Long Beach, California.

Rigby performed live on viola as well as a sound sculpture that she welded from sousaphones, French horns and found brass objects salvaged from waste streams. She scored the composition for cello, viola, violin, sousaphone, French horn, tuba, piano, and choral elements. Among the vocalists present were two choirs: Liminal Voices and Orchestra (a vocal collective of LGBTQ+/Gender Expansive/BBIA communities) and 8TPS Choir (a vocal collective of trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive musicians).

The ensemble featured Nicki Chen, Rogelio Resendiz, Ben Kinsley, Leora Malka, Andrew Fong, Chris McKelway, Mason Moy, Simone Maura, Spencer Bowie, Grant Laren, Adrian Narro, Andrew Dalziell, Dr. Fabián Rodríguez Castro, Dylan Leisure, Jessica Joyce, Charis Tshihamba, Tanner Pfeiffer, Socks Whitmore, Perigee Vitz-Wong and Anastasia Gastelum.

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Credits

Opera hosted by Heidi Duckler Dance in LA. Heidi Duckler Dance creates site-specific performances that transform spaces. By migrating off the stage and into surrounding environments, Heidi Duckler Dance invites audiences to see their communities in a new light.

Audio recorded by Ben Kinsley.

Audio mastered by Michael Southard.

Video documented by Ring Road Sessions.

Supported by Heidi Duckler Dance, CultureHub Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture.

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