Details

Life Cycle of a Fever Dream premiered on the roof of the historic Bendix Building in Los Angeles on November 16, 2024. This opera in-the-round brought twenty-two musicians into conversation with a free-roaming audience.

This community-activated performance reconfigured listeners into performers, transmogrifying the opera into a collective artistic process. The experiment pulled questions about collectivity, resonance, interconnection and attention into relation with one another. We discovered different ways of tuning in to the acoustical architecture of the Bendix Building, to our surrounding cityscape, and to our changing world.

The opera experimented with geophone technology to expand the potential of site-specific, interactive, and 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. Can finding new ways to listen catalyze new ways of thinking about more-than-human ways of sensing space, place and time? What can we collectively learn about our rapidly changing world by finding new ways to experience listening, to pay attention? What does it mean to find new ways to listen, to pay attention, in these uncertain times? Can paying attention manifest as a kind of political act?

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, penguins, frogs, tortoises, 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 interspecies collaborations and 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. Lending an ear to beetles lends attention to sensing the world through vibrations. 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 other carcasses—and sturgeon—dinosaur-era fish capable of electroreception and survivors of multiple mass extinctions—to bring us into relation with long time.

The sighs of respiring Galapagos tortoises speak not only to a life lived on a more-than-human timescale, but to engaging with time itself in entirely different ways. These methusalean giants can go on wading in pond muck and feasting on wild guavas for two hundred years. They live slowly, breathe slowly and die slowly. At rest, their hearts beat 6 times per minute.

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.

Bristlecone pine trees and sea caves are sites for researching sonic and material decay. The resonance of a sea cave—activated by Rigby’s sound sculptures and cello bows—speaks to the way geologic time shapes physical space and acoustical range. The resonance of a bristlecone pine speaks to the ways that long time have acted upon a living organism. When we hear the vibrations of the pine tree’s fibers being activated by a sound sculpture, we are listening to the tree’s acoustical anatomy as well as its life history. Experimental lutherie tunes our ears to the deep past and the uncertain present. We are hearing the resonance of centuries of climatic phenomena—culminating in the case of this particular individual with a series of rapid, climate change-exacerbated firestorm events—acting upon an organism. And we are hearing the sonification of an organism that has witnessed the coming and going of ice ages, the rise and collapse of empires.

The sea cave is a site for thinking about physical and acoustical architecture, sonic and material degeneration, shifting seascapes, resonance and vibration, multispecies relationships and sensory ecology, and entanglements among humans and more-than-humans. It is a place to think about local and global environmental phenomena and how they intertwine. It is a place to think about growth and decay, loss and renewal, kinship and wonder, climate grief and climate futurities, deep time and breathing.

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. Megalodons, prehistoric sharks with bus-length bodies and jaws ten feet wide, once swam directly through what is now the Bendix Building. Now-extinct ammonoids (coiled-shelled cephalopods), saber-toothed salmon and sea turtles swam the waters where City Hall now stands. Later, after the sea’s retreat and the arrival of an ice age, Los Angeles was home to saber-toothed cats, ground sloths, mammoths and dire wolves. How can thinking about LA’s histories help us make space for imagining possible futurities?

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 squids 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.

The opera pulls questions about collectivity, resonance, interconnection and attention into relation with one another to ask: what happens to our understandings of kinship, care and worlding, and time when we expand our human-centered understandings of perception to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans? What does it mean to share physical and acoustical space with a vibrant spectrum of more-than-humans living on this planet? If knowledge is understood as the practice of living in relationship with more-than-humans co-inhabiting this space, what are new ways of learning from the intelligences of other living beings?

Projection-mapped moving imagery featuring Przewalksi’s horses and Golden-Headed Lion tamarins, whale sharks and swell sharks, scorpionfish and moray eels transformed the opera into an immersive sensory experience.

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, Hua Hsuan Tseng, 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. The ensemble improvised off of Rigby’s composition, creating an unrepeatable event. We wove instrumental music, noise, field recordings, live cityscape sounds like car horn honks and street traffic, and geophonic audio into unpredictable soundscapes.

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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.

Many thanks to Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, Bodega Marine Laboratory and Chapman University, where I recorded sounds made by hagfish, sea urchins, sea stars and more.

Tracks

1. Intro

2. The Fashion District

3. Geophone on the Roof

4. Overture

5. Whale Sharks

6. Upwelling

7. Sounding the Sousaphones

8. Butterflies Nectar on Rotting Figs

9. Fluorescent Pink Scorpionfish

10. A Bat Listens

11. Pharyngeal Jaws

12. Brumation

13. Life Cycle of a Fever Dream

14. Old House

15. Diatoms Live in Houses Made of Glass

16. Cicadas

17. Life Cycle of a Fever Dream (Reprise)

18. Swell Shark Eyes are Supernovas

19. Silk Moth Shivers

20. A Sea Star Walks on Glass

21. Fortissimo

22. Hagfish Stygian

23. Tortoise Breathing, Eating Guavas

24. Cormorants Roosting in the Salt Ghost Trees

25. Los Angeles Was Once a Prehistoric Sea

26. Finale

27. Epilogue: An Octopus Scrapes the Hydrophone With Her Radula