Event Information
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Wed09Oct2019
Triptych: Eyes of One on Another
8:00pmwith Roomful of Teeth
Thirty years after the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, we still cannot turn away from what his photos reveal. Composer Bryce Dessner, librettist Korde Arrington Tuttle, director Kaneza Schaal and designer Carlos Soto, in collaboration with Roomful of Teeth and an eight-member musical ensemble, seek to capture the ways Mapplethorpe’s works compel an audience’s complicity and characterize them in the act of attention. Growing up in Cincinnati, Dessner’s own exposure to the protests surrounding this galvanizing artist rooted a lifelong kinship to his pivotal body of work. Mapplethorpe’s pictures both unite and divide, provoking a consideration of perceived opposites – black/white, male/female, gay/straight, art/porn, classical/contemporary. His pictures seduce, shock, offend, excite, intrigue, and scare us all at once. Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) asks an audience to experience these reactions collectively. Through music, Mapplethorpe’s images, poetry by Essex Hemphill and Patti Smith, and use of both theatrical and photographic lighting techniques, the work puts the audience inside the artist’s viewfinder, inside his beautiful, bold, voracious view of how nature and humans look, touch, feel, hurt and love one another.