Photo c. Rush Varela Photography

Life Cycle of a Fever Dream is an experimental, immersive and community-activated opera that explores entanglements among humans and more-than-humans, transforms historic buildings into instruments, and reimagines opera as a collective artistic process.

The first iteration of this project premiered on the roof of the historic Bendix Building in Los Angeles on November 16, 2024. The open-air opera in-the-round brought twenty-two musicians into conversation with a free-roaming audience and the soundscapes of a bustling city. For those fifty-three minutes, the sonic landscape of Los Angeles co-existed and co-evolved with the sonic landscape of the opera. We practiced deep listening on local and global scales. We experimented with geophone technology to transform the Bendix Building into an instrument and a fellow artistic collaborator.

The opera hybridizes sound sculpture, field recordings, live free improvisational instrumentation, and multi-channel video to create an interactive and immersive ecosystem that aims to open our minds to more-than-human timescales and introduce new ways of thinking about ecology, history and multispecies relationships.

Life Cycle of a Fever Dream crawls into the sensory worlds of cicadas and sea stars, hagfish and herons, beetles and bats. The opera interweaves vocals from humans, birds, frogs and tamarins. It reconfigures listeners into performers, catalyzing new possibilities for operatic expression.

Pulling questions about collectivity, resonance, interconnection and attention into relation with one another, the opera asks: how can learning the stories of our more-than-human neighbors help us better understand—and reimagine—the stories of Los Angeles? How can collective listening and collective improvisation cultivate attunement to our surroundings as well as to one another?

With its x and interactive score, the project interweaves multiple perspectives of the city’s histories, carrying us back into deep time and forward into the future.

Can exploring different means of listening, sensing and sounding support radical re-imaginings of potential ecological futurities?

What happens to our understandings of care, world-making, and time when we expand our human-centered understandings of perception to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans?

What is it like to share physical and acoustical space with a vibrant spectrum of more-than-humans living on this planet?

What are new ways of learning from the intelligences of other living beings, and how are our lives entangled?

The ensemble performing Life Cycle of a Fever Dream on November 16, 2024 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, Julia Edith Rigby and Anastasia Gastelum.

Instruments present for the performance included: a sound sculpture of welded brass amalgamating sousaphones, French horns and brass objects, cello, viola, violin, sousaphone, French horn, tuba, piano, and voice. 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).

Rigby recorded the sounds of hagfish tunneling into decomposing squids at Chapman University in Orange, California, sea stars and sea urchins walking on glass at the UC Davis Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute’s Bodega Marine Laboratory in Bodega Bay, California and audio of an octopus exploring a hydrophone at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in Long Beach, California.

Opera hosted by Heidi Duckler Dance in LA.

Audio recorded by Ben Kinsley.

Audio mastered by Michael Southard.

Video documented by Ring Road Sessions and Rush Varela Photography.

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