Elytra I just saw the "cybernetic opera" Elytra with JP at the
Vortex Theater this evening. I saw it when it first came out a few years ago, and its 3 predecessors the X&Y trilogy... fun weird surreal stuff! Strange electronic music (that is initially perhaps offputting, but really grows on me...) with live singing by people in truly bizarre hallucinatory insectoid mechanoid alien sexy costumes with utterly crazy incomprehensible plotlines and nutty sometimes robotlike jerky dance and performance. It's insanely risky theater, but they pull it off. (Though admittedly I know some friends who have seen one or more of these and just didn't like them at all.) I love that there are theater groups that actually create and perform this kind of wondrous madness.
The program comes with a synopsis that more or less involves a woman playing god with 4 women (the Elytra) in a "toy" universe (who themselves seem to be playing god to another subuniverse):
Elytra Phase One1.
"Play" Heaven lies in the drifting corpse of GoldSun. The domains of Heaven are empty and dead. Pupawhorycon enters with her box and reveals four insects. The voice of a young male Umbrapock describes the game that he made for his sister's birthday: the House of Strings. The game inserts 4 Elytra into Heaven's four domains GoldSun Heart, Brain, Liver, and Sex.
2.
"Ssspittt to the Non-Wheelers!" Malthus awakens from the nightmare of the Pupawhorycon and finds herself in the Heart Garden of the Lampyria. Circus enters like a wild beast. They battle, and Circus overpowers Malthus.
...
and so on for 26 scenes. If you've not seen any of these, the closest familiar comparison I can think of is the alien opera scene in Fifth Element, but much much weirder and incomprehensible. If you don't like really weird live theater, you'd probably hate these "cybernetic operas". But if you enjoy weird unusual theater, check it out.
I particularly enjoyed the singing of the character Ovovia who had a really strong yet gentle appealing voice and had a very cosmic solo early on in scene 3, and Karnika who was very sympathetically expressive in her movements and has a surprisingly touching and sexy duet with Ovovia in scene 21 when they fall in love.
It was also fun to run into my old Kinesoft cohort Lance before the show - we'd each been thinking about the other because we'd seen Elytra and the X&Y Trilogy together in the past.
( 2 vortex photos of elytra )