{"id":101290,"date":"2016-08-08T17:54:04","date_gmt":"2016-08-08T21:54:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=101290"},"modified":"2016-09-22T12:04:50","modified_gmt":"2016-09-22T16:04:50","slug":"how-do-i-live-i-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/08\/how-do-i-live-i-live\/","title":{"rendered":"How Do I Live? I Live."},"content":{"rendered":"

La boh\u00e8me, live at Attica State Correctional Facility.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The mess hall at Attica Correctional Facility, 1977. Photo (c) Karl R. Josker. Used with permission.<\/p><\/div>\n

Opera audiences are all the same. There are always two bald guys seated in the third row, whispering a phrase-by-phrase critique. Someone cups his ear, frustrated by the hall\u2019s faulty acoustics. Everyone looks daggers at the miscreant whose phone interrupts an aria. And some listeners sit with their hands folded under their chins, eyes half-closed in reverie. One man perches literally on the edge of his seat, listening with his whole body; his chest seems to swell with the singers\u2019 every breath. Afterward, I\u2019m not surprised when he says that, before today, \u201cI didn\u2019t know that Latinos do opera,\u201d but \u201cfor a brief fifteen minutes, I<\/em> was up there, I was singing<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

On August 2, performers from the Glimmerglass Festival<\/a>, the summer opera festival based in upstate Cooperstown, New York, hit the road for a one-hour matinee of excerpts from Giacomo Puccini\u2019s lush, popular opera about Parisian artists, friends, and lovers, La boh\u00e8me <\/em>(1896). The cast waited onstage, in costume, while an audience numbering about 150 took their seats: emerging from the cellblocks, they\u2019d walked, in double rows, in groups of no more than forty, through several barred gates into the hall. Officers armed with batons ringed their seats, forming a standing-room only section. At the conclusion of the concert, when inmates leapt to their feet for a standing ovation, two officers shifted closer together, eyeing them: the ones who\u2019d risen sat down immediately. We were at Attica State Correctional Facility.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 1971, an uprising of prisoners at this maximum-security prison was quelled<\/a> when Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered in hundreds of state troopers. They shot on the crowds, killing thirty-nine people\u2014several employees and many more incarcerated\u2014and injuring hundreds more. But last Tuesday, Attica Superintendent Dale Artus had more recent history in mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the past three years, a lot of things have happened here. A lot of bad things, obviously. But I\u2019d like to think a lot of good things, too.\u201d Among the \u201cgood things\u201d he counted the Glimmerglass visits, inaugurated the previous summer. \u201cBad things\u201d might have been a reference to prison officers\u2019 brutality against inmates. Reporting on one unusually visible case that went to trial in 2015, Tom Robbins of The Marshall Project<\/a> quoted Soffiyah Elijah, Executive Director of the Correctional Association of New York, which inspects state prisons: \u201cWhat struck me when I walked the tiers of Attica was that every person, bar none, talked about how the guards were brutalizing them.\u201d Even Brian Fischer, formerly the state corrections chief, conceded that Attica should be closed: \u201cGiven the history of it, we\u2019d probably be better off if we did.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once, at a Metropolitan Opera performance of La sonnambula<\/em>, I saw one opera fan slap another for rustling a bag of cough drops. Nothing like that happened in the Attica chapel-turned-mess-hall where Glimmerglass performed. Nobody coughed. Nobody booed. If anybody was disturbed by the sound of gates clanging shut over and over during the performance, no one showed it. A lawyer and friend of the company told me that eighty-five years ago, \u201cThis space was built for art, but the theories of incarceration have changed \u2026 Maybe this will open the doors to some other programs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Raquel Gonz\u00e1lez as Mim\u00ec, on the Glimmerglass mainstage. Photo: Karli Cadel and The Glimmerglass Festival.<\/p><\/div>\n

*<\/p>\n

The Glimmerglass visits were organized under the leadership of Dr. Teresa A. Miller, Vice Provost at SUNY Buffalo School of Law, filmmaker (Encountering Attica<\/em><\/a>, 2009), and volunteer with Attica\u2019s Lifers Organization<\/a>. According to Dr. Miller, Mr. Artus \u201cis a visionary among the rank and file of correctional administrators. He immediately embraced the idea of opera and Attica, and saw the transformative potential for both inmates and correctional officers.\u201d<\/p>\n

But why La boh\u00e8me? <\/em>Unlike two other Glimmerglass shows this season\u2014Robert Ward\u2019s The Crucible <\/em>and Stephen Sondheim\u2019s Sweeney Todd<\/em>\u2014La boh\u00e8me <\/em>has nothing to do with justice. There\u2019s no hint of resemblance between Rodolfo\u2019s \u201chappy poverty\u201d and the 1971 Attica Prison Liberation Faction<\/a>\u2019s demands for drinking water, toilet paper, and fair, safe, paid labor<\/a>. Colline\u2019s overcoat aria can\u2019t speak to the moment when I watched a staffer process the bag of parole clothes\u2014shirt, socks, boxers\u2014a visitor had brought for a loved one.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Poster for the 1896 production of Puccini’s\u00a0La boh\u00e8me, by Adolfo Hohenstein<\/p><\/div>\n

Maybe La boh\u00e8me<\/em>\u2019s great merit is that there\u2019s nothing didactic or constructive about it. It doesn\u2019t presume to represent the inner lives of an imprisoned audience, or to solicit their validation. The ruling classes have a long, ambiguous history with institutional art, including opera programs: as Professor Aur\u00e9lie Vialette writes, Richard Wagner\u2019s music was first introduced to nineteenth-century Spain for a workers\u2019 chorus<\/a> performance of Tannh\u00e4user <\/em>excerpts. Were such programs meant for workers\u2019 edification, or gratification for the bourgeoisie? A shift in control of cultural capital, or the channeling of revolutionary impulse into art appreciation?<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel that the performing arts are essential to rehabilitation,\u201d one of the audience told me, mentioning the work of the poet and actor Michael Rhynes<\/a>, who\u2019s trying to start an Attica theater group, like the Phoenix Players Theatre Group<\/a> he co-founded at Auburn Correctional Facility. Rhynes has written, \u201cOne of the reasons I created PPTG is because we\u2019re not allowed to have any input into our own transformation \u2026 I don\u2019t believe people from outside of any situation should come in to solve problems without conferring with the people who are affected by what\u2019s going on in that particular situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not inconsistent to state that rehabilitation is both crucial and desperately underfunded, and also to question who controls its discourses. What I hope is that, in the space allowed by La boh\u00e8me<\/em>\u2019s apolitical, melodramatic, sublimely indulgent irrelevance, the audience might choose to feel only enjoyment. Or indifference. Or they might take a little nap. Or even, possibly, resent the opera\u2019s glorification of artistic and emotional freedom, before a roomful of people imprisoned for life. The freedom not<\/em> to like an opera is, judging from booing culture, the most strenuously exercised privilege at the Met. And art has no value in any institution unless it encourages the profoundly idiosyncratic, private responses that any people, anywhere, might choose to feel. But those responses also include curiosity. Generosity. And enthusiasm and encouragement.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The interior at Attica Correctional Facility, 1977. Photo (c) Karl R. Josker. Used with permission.<\/p><\/div>\n

*<\/p>\n

I know nothing about life in prison, but I do know opera fans when I see them. After \u201cMi chiamano Mim\u00ec,\u201d one man rocked back in his seat, saying magisterially, \u201cBravo. Bravo!\u201d When Glimmerglass\u2019 General Director, Francesca Zambello, explained Rodolfo\u2019s despair that his poverty had exacerbated Mim\u00ec\u2019s illness, several people nodded vigorously. One very young man who\u2019d been whispering the whole time to a friend, seemingly paying no attention, stole the Q&A with his analysis of the singers\u2019 character development. Opera audiences are all the same, except that some are kinder and more engaged than others, and this was one of them.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a moment in Mim\u00ec\u2019s renunciation<\/a> (recording by Leontyne Price, 1971) of Rodolfo\u2014\u201cBada, sotto il guanciale\/ C\u2019\u00e8 la cuffietta rosa\u201d\u2014that sounds like the distillation of all regret, grief, love, and loss. A caress touching your own face for the last time, making you shiver. In the film Moonstruck, <\/em>those lines move the opera skeptic to tears. A cinematic clich\u00e9, maybe\u2014but at Attica, when soprano Raquel Gonz\u00e1lez<\/a> sang the lines, a tremor ran through the audience.<\/p>\n

I visited Attica thinking about the words of a former cop, Frank Serpico, who blew the whistle on NYPD corruption in the 1960s and survived a retaliatory shooting. He\u2019d written to me, \u201cOpera was always an escape from reality, making it more bearably onstage.\u201d Opera matters not because it\u2019s classier or more moral or constructive than any other art form, but because all art exists to make life more bearable. Because someone wants and needs opera, finding it a relief, a joy, a conundrum, an essential beauty\u2014a reason to want to be part of the world.<\/p>\n

When a singer\u2019s voice starts to ascend a high note, sometimes the listener\u2019s hand, palm facing up, also swoops high. As tenor Chaz’men Williams\u2013Ali<\/a> sang \u201cChe gelida manina,\u201d the man sitting directly in front of me lifted his hand that way, as if his gesture, his appreciation, could help buoy the singer toward the skies. The word that soared was \u201csperanza.\u201d Hope<\/em>.<\/p>\n

La boh\u00e8me plays at the <\/em>Glimmerglass Festival<\/em><\/a> through August 27 in Cooperstown, NY.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is Alison Kinney<\/a>\u2019s second piece for Songs to the Moon<\/a>, an exploration of fandom and how the music, art, and artifacts of opera transform cultures and desires. Alison<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>is the author of<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>Hood\u00a0<\/em>and a columnist for the\u00a0<\/em>Daily. Her writing has appeared online at <\/em>Lapham\u2019s Quarterly Roundtable,<\/em>\u00a0The Atlantic, Hyperallergic,<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>New Republic,<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>The New Inquiry,<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>The Mantle,<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>VAN Magazine, and\u00a0<\/em>The\u00a0New York Times.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

La boh\u00e8me, live at Attica State Correctional Facility. Opera audiences are all the same. There are always two bald guys seated in the third row, whispering a phrase-by-phrase critique. Someone cups his ear, frustrated by the hall\u2019s faulty acoustics. Everyone looks daggers at the miscreant whose phone interrupts an aria. And some listeners sit with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":907,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22700],"tags":[35,23805,23809,23812,23807,14279,5965,23806,19436,5991,16837,23811,2204,23813,8902,19035,23808,24672,23810,16252,11471,12807],"class_list":["post-101290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-correspondents","tag-art","tag-attica-state-correctional-facility","tag-brian-fischer","tag-chazmen-williams-ali","tag-dale-artus","tag-fandom","tag-fans","tag-glimmerglass-festival","tag-incarceration","tag-la-boheme","tag-labor","tag-melodrama","tag-opera","tag-phoenix-players-theatre-group","tag-prison","tag-rehabilitation","tag-soffiyah-elijah","tag-songs-to-the-moon","tag-teresa-a-miller","tag-the-met","tag-tom-robbins","tag-work"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLa boh\u00e8me, Live at Attica State Correctional Facility<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The freedom not to like an opera is, judging from booing culture, the most strenuously exercised privilege at the Met\u2014but at Attica it\u2019s different, Alison Kinney writes.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/08\/how-do-i-live-i-live\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Do I Live? 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