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Playing Hopscotch on Dangerous Ground: Site-Based, Transit-Oriented Opera in Los Angeles
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2023
Abstract
Hopscotch: An Opera for 24 Cars was a celebrated site-based and technetronic musical performance that sought to bring opera into various communities in Los Angeles, many of which were economically disadvantaged. In the process, this opera set off a firestorm of protests that ultimately resulted in confrontations with community members, protests that would test the very premise of the dissemination of opera and performance outside spaces of privilege and in communities of colour. Informed by the concept of transit-oriented performance, this article analyses some ways in which neoliberalism is distorting opera's modern-day resonances.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 Understanding that Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks’ term ‘site-specific’ performance has served as a benchmark for what works outside theatres, herein, I follow site-based scholars Penelope Cole and Rand Harmon by embracing ‘site-based’ as a way to account for ‘the multitudes of ways in which a “site” is employed in the creation and experience of the performance’. For more, see Theatre History Studies 38 (2019).
2 From the author's email exchange with Sharon on 14 January 2016.
3 STPLA, Tumblr post, 4 October 2015 (accessed March 2016).
4 Quotation translated from Spanish by the author; the conversation with this woman (she asked me not to use her name) was held in Hollenbeck Park, 10 October 2015.
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6 Benjamin Oreskes, ‘Stores Using Music Not to Soothe But to Deter’, Los Angeles Times (15 September 2019). In just one recent example, Pachelbel's Canon in D has been employed by the Dallas-based 7-Eleven franchise as part of a programme where they blast classical music outside their stores day and night ‘to steer homeless people away’. This is a programme that – their corporate headquarters was quick to point out – has ‘received very positive feedback’.
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8 There is as yet no word, term or phrase that completely and perfectly articulates the mass of community people discussed in this essay. All the nomenclatures available to identify them as a monolith bring with them deficiencies. To solve this and for clarity, the word Chicana/o will be privileged as a way to discuss, however loosely, these community members.
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16 The majority of scholarship concentrates on site-specific work manifestations in dance and art, leaving musical and theatrical site-specific performances largely unexplored; to date there is no monograph available on American site-specific theatre and only a dozen or so Canadian and European edited collections.
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21 Only one location along the Los Angeles River used a vehicle other than a limousine (a jeep) because of the rocky and uneven terrain.
22 Here defined as any performance that employs a vehicle, actual or virtual, as a unifying and centralising theme, idea or location to organise, house or transport a performance or narrative.
23 The Industry has produced three large-scale site-specific opera performances in Los Angeles going back to 2012. Its inaugural show, Crescent City, was a large-scale, interdisciplinary opera by Anne LeBaron and Douglas Kearney. In 2013, The Industry staged Invisible Cities, an operatic adaptation of Italo Calvino's novel, composed by Christopher Cerrone, and in 2015 The Industry presented Hopscotch.
24 Hopscotch official press release, 19 May 2015.
25 In an email dated 24 November 2015, the director stated that a reporter saw the protest discussed in this article. The reporter did not pursue the story. The Guardian also enquired about the events described in this article; on 6 April 2016, I sent a response on behalf of The Industry where I parroted the following: ‘Hopscotch looked to engage in positive dialogue with Serve the People-Los Angeles and it was dismissed by STPLA, as were all the good faith adjustments made to insure a peaceful coexistence with all other activity at the park. Everywhere else Hopscotch was performed (including elsewhere in Boyle Heights), the cast and creative team were met with enthusiasm, encouragement, and support from individuals, businesses, and organizations. Given the size and scope of Hopscotch, it is important to note that this isolated event was the exception and not the rule of an otherwise excellent community engagement.’
26 Alex Ross, ‘Opera on Location: A High-Tech Work of Wagnerian Scale is Being Staged Across Los Angeles’, New Yorker (8 November 2015), www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/opera-on-location.
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28 Mark Swed, ‘Musical Ride-Along: Moving Around L.A., “Hopscotch” Sometimes Can Transport’, Los Angeles Times (2 November 2015).
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30 ‘Hollenbeck Park Heights Tract [Advertisement]’, Los Angeles Herald 32/155 (5 March 1905), cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=LAH19050305&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1 (accessed 27 May 2022). This edition of the Herald has an advert for the Hollenbeck Park Heights Tract, subdivided by Elizabeth Hollenbeck, featuring two views of the park to lure prospective buyers.
31 Ferdman, Off Sites, 8.
32 Developers gave both financial support and facilitated Hopscotch's access to some of the historical buildings and spaces.
33 ‘New Year, New Chairman of the Board’, The Industry (7 January 2016), theindustryla.org/new-year-new-chairman-of-the-board/.
34 One of Asco's most famous works is titled Asshole Mural; it features Asco members occupying the space around the cloaca of the Santa Monica sewage drainpipe.
35 Carolina Miranda, ‘Watchful: Boyle Heights Has So Many New Galleries. Has Gentrification Begun?’, Los Angeles Times (16 October 2016).
36 Miranda, ‘Has Gentrification Begun?’
37 Ritchey, Composing Capital, 103.
38 Members of STPLA spoke under the condition that all quotes from its individual members be attributed to the whole of the organisation, in keeping with their communal code of conduct.
39 STPLA.
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41 STPLA, Tumblr post, 4 October 2015 (accessed March 2016).
42 Conversation with STPLA members at Hollenbeck Park, 8 November 2015.
43 After this altercation, the production team of Hopscotch decided to bring in the present author as a translator (English/Spanish) for their promotional material, hire a community member as a security guard, and offer a lottery for free tickets to people from the zip codes in the area.
44 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC, 2003). I draw from Diana Taylor's work on The Archive and the Repertoire primarily for the way it reasserts the power of an embodied and ephemeral repertoire as a means of storing and transmitting historical, political and cultural knowledge through gestures, dance and song. Taylor's work is also useful in framing points of contact between diametrically opposed groups thrust into settings of discovery and conquest.
45 STPLA, Tumblr post, 4 October 2015 (accessed March 2016).
46 STPLA, Tumblr post, 4 October 2015 (accessed March 2016).
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48 Brittny Mejia, ‘Boyle Heights Vandalism Seen as Possible Hate Crime: Graffiti on Art Galleries Could Be Reaction to Gentrification Fears’, Los Angeles Times (4 November 2016).
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50 Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik, eds., Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces (Gainesville, 2009).
51 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire.
52 Elin Diamond, Unmasking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre (London, 2006), vii.
53 The Industry, Hopscotch: A Mobile Opera Commemorative Show Booklet (Los Angeles, 2015), 7.
54 The Industry, Hopscotch: A Mobile Opera Commemorative Show Booklet, 8.
55 STPLA, blog post, 25 November 2015.
56 Sarah Beaty specialises in contemporary music; she premiered Invisible Cities with The Industry and is a founding member of the contemporary chamber ensemble Blue Streak. Victor Mazzone is a native Kentuckian who landed in Los Angeles via a degree in voice studies and theatre from Northwestern University. The supporting cast for this episode also included Logan Hone as a saxophone player, Stefan Kac on tuba, Isaac Schankler on accordion and T.J. Troy as another percussionist.
57 The show's format had only one audience group aboard the limousines to begin the show. The other group of four simply followed the performers from the waiting area.
58 Phelan, The Politics of Performance, 3–4.
59 Cortéz would later marry La Malinche off to one of his subordinates.
60 STPLA, Tumblr post, 4 October 2015 (accessed March 2016).
61 ‘First Kiss’ scene text, written by Erin Young.
62 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London, 1972).
63 The instruments consisted primarily of the brass section of a band and included tubas, trombones, trumpets and saxophones.
64 Email exchange with the author, Friday 8 April 2016.
65 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minnesota, 1999), 4.
66 Rory Carroll, ‘“Hope Everyone Pukes on Your Artisanal Treats”: Fighting Gentrification, LA-Style’, The Guardian, 19 April 2016, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/19/los-angeles-la-gentrification-resistance-boyle-heights (accessed 24 June 2016).
67 Phone conversation with park security on 10 December 2015.
68 This claim of residency by this cast member is disputed by STPLA.
69 STPLA, Tumblr post, 16 November 2015 (accessed 17 November 2015).
70 Phone conversation with park security on 10 December 2015.
71 Alex Ross, ‘Opera on Location’.
72 Interview with audience member, October 2015.
73 Because all three of the main characters were played by different actors, subjectivity is purposefully and blatantly underdefined in the piece.
74 ‘L.A.'s Crazy Opera Inside a Fleet of Moving Limos’, LA Weekly (20 October 2015), https://www.laweekly.com/l-a-s-crazy-opera-inside-a-fleet-of-moving-limos/ (accessed 5 May 2023).
75 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 54.
76 Jessica Gelt, ‘Long Beach Opera Reaches for a Star’, Los Angeles Times (21 November 2019).
77 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 65.
78 Alex Ross, ‘Opera on Location’.
79 Ritchey, Composing Capital, 113.
80 STPLA, Tumblr post, 4 October 2015 (accessed March 2016).
81 A Mexican citizen who was also the first indigenous opera composer in all the Americas.
82 Tania Arazi Coambs, ‘Redefining America Through Opera: Representations of Latin/o Americans and a New Tradition’, University of Illinois (2020), https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/116343.
83 STPLA, blog post, 25 November 2015.
84 Posted on Facebook page of Undeportable Productions on 22 November 2015.
85 Figure from the 2015 990 form for The Industry Productions Inc.
86 Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It, 32
87 Carroll, ‘Fighting Gentrification, LA-Style’.
88 Phelan, The Politics of Performance, 5; following Roy Schafer, ‘Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue’, Critical Inquiry 7/1 (1980), 29–53.
89 Christopher Hawthorne, ‘A Window into L.A.'s Complex Allure’, Los Angeles Times (21 November 2015).
90 Ritchey, Composing Capital, 111.
91 Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez, Penelope Cole, Rand Harmon and Erin B. Mee, ‘Ethics and Site-Based Theatre: A Curated Discussion’, Theatre History Studies 38 (2019), 166–95.
92 Phone conversation with park security, 10 December 2015.