Kalup Linzy's Four Saints in Three Acts

The BART debacle isn't the only thing worth talking bout in San Francisco lately. There's The Steins Collect show at SFMOMA, and at the nearby Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the much-anticipated Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts opens on Thursday night. Performance and video artist Kalup Linzy is modernizing the piece in a collaboration between the artist, composer Luciano Chessa, and contemporary opera organization Ensemble Parallèle. SFMOMA interviewed Linzy yesterday:

There’s the generic interview question that goes, “If you could invite anyone to dinner who would it be.” What I want to know is, what would you serve?

Agnes Nixon—she was mentored by Irna Phillips, who created the first soaps. Nixon later created All My Children and the character Erica Kane. I study soap operas and Agnes was writing this thing in her house in Chicago and they were recording them on the radio and broadcasting them to the world. It was very guerrilla in the beginning. I would like to sit with someone who started something in their home and then it went to into the world and became something else. It would be a steak and potatoes powwow.

And they do talk about the production itself:

What should I ask you?

I thought you were going to ask me to go into detail about the process of the production. It’s been a year and a half in the making—from early conversations in 2009 to me having meetings with SFMOMA in 2010 when I was doing a residency at the Headlands, a number of Skype conversations, some hold-ups getting the production approved, waiting for the various stakeholders to approve certain things. There were days of confusion around how I was going to pull together the video. I didn’t get everyone I wanted in the videos, but I’m pleased with what I got. And I’ve had some emotional ups and downs. The rehearsals are taking me back to when I was in theater in college, when you go through that process of feeling it’s really rough and you barely remember your lines and then the next thing you know you remember your lines and you get into the groove and then it just comes together. I’m looking forward to being creative and on stage, not just presenting the video, to performing. That’s what’s bringing me into the present. It’s giving me something to think about. I don’t sing opera, but hearing the singers sing will influence what I do in the future, because I’ll have had the new experience of working on an opera. And I’m bringing something I do, something that couldn’t have been done before, into something from the past. Everybody is approaching this in an avant-garde way—all these different approaches are coming together.

Working on the opera here has also let me see things I can benefit from and take from, and learn how to organize my own productions and go out there and raise the capital and put together the teams necessary to do larger productions. It’s given me a look at the infrastructure up close. I’m learning what you need to do in order to do things on a larger scale. When I did General Hospital I was just in my dressing room, and you just go into hair and you go into makeup, but here I’m watching how Frank [Smigiel, curator of public programs] is working every day, you can see Stella [Lochman, public programs assistant] there, you can see Michael there, the conductor, the choreographer, and I’m the video person and a performer too. I remember Frank going through the different stages [of getting the production under way]—there were times when it was slow and then things picked up. It’s okay if it takes two years. We started talking in 2009. This will teach me patience.

SFMOMA also posted a preview of the production today. Watch it here.