BRIC Presents WOW, Now thru 2/1

BRIC continues its inaugural season in the newly opened BRIC Arts | Media House (BRIC House), the organization's new 40,000-square-foot multi-disciplinary facility in Downtown Brooklyn, and presents work-in-progress performances of WOW, an experimental opera by Fort Greene residents Joe Diebes, Christian Hawkey and David Levine developed, in part, during a BRIC House Fireworks Residency. All three artists are known for trying to radically rethink or reinvent their respective backgrounds: musical composition (Diebes), poetry (Hawkey), and theater (Levine). And although they have, in the past, collaborated in pairs, the only form in which all three could share their drive for reinvention was, perhaps, the oldest multimedia spectacle of them all: opera. And, for their subject? The story of Milli Vanilli, a manufactured German pop duo whose spectacular rise and fall has become an American legend.

But Milli Vanilli's troubled history is not only tragically operatic in terms of its story; it is also a tragedy of the digital. WOW challenges the endless repetition of the CD-skip moment that led to the destruction of the pop duo's career with a real-time opera production environment in which the score, libretto, and staging intersect differently during each performance. Such intentional and non-intentional misalignments among voice, body, and language evoke new ways of thinking and feeling as well as new ways of feeling about a story that's not as simple as it first may seem.

Work-in-progress performances of WOW will take place today, January 23-25 and January 30-February 1 at 8pm at BRIC House, located at 647 Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn. Tickets are $15 advance/$18 at the door and can be purchased by visiting BRICartsmedia.org or by calling OvationTix at 866.811.4111. A group show of 17 artists whose work relates to the Milli Vanilli story will be on view in the gallery at BRIC House January 16-February 1, creating an exhibition by day and a soundstage for the WOW performances at night. The gallery exhibition will be curated by the artist team Merkx and Gwynne. In addition, the Project Room of BRIC House will become a resource room with videos related to Milli Vanilli and the scandal.

The developmental version of WOW uses nearly all of the architectural spaces inside BRIC House (gallery, ballroom/performance space, media production room and rehearsal studio) as a laboratory for a multi-layered experience. Using Milli Vanilli's four major videos as cardinal points on, and settings for, their journey, Levine's staging of WOW continues his examination of the relation of performance to work by taking the audience through BRIC's various spaces as they witness Milli Vanilli's rise and fall. Hawkey has generated a libretto using remixed, pirated, and appropriated language, including obsessively exact transcriptions of various Milli Vanilli press conferences and interviews; Hawkey is especially interested in examining how exploited labor and racism are often at the heart of manufactured fame. Diebes has constructed more of an information-processing system than a traditional score, recombining fragments from Wagner's Der Meistersinger von Nürenberg into a sound stream that jumps, skips, and loops. Both the orchestra and singers receive their parts 'just in time' on live feed video monitors as Diebes composes the score measure by measure live during each performance. Acclaimed downtown choreographer Clarinda Mac Low rounds out the creative team.

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