Zinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter
From left, Robert Osborne, Karma Mayet, Carla Duren and Darynn Zimmer
in the premiere of Robert Wilson’s opera, presented by Peak Performances
at the Kasser Theater at Montclair State University in New Jersey. (Stephanie Berger/New York Times)
Sergio Mims forwards this link:
New York Times
A young woman wearing a boldly patterned dress emerges from a
door-shaped opening in a brightly painted curtain. She grins widely.
“I’m Clementine Hunter,” she exclaims.
As a “life of” piece, “Zinnias,” which opened on Saturday as part of the Peak Performances
series at Montclair State University, is a throwback to Mr. Wilson’s
early years. He made his name in the 1960s and ’70s with a series of
slow, sprawling abstractions posing as biographies: “The Life and Times
of Sigmund Freud,” “The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin,” “Edison” and
of course, “Einstein on the Beach,” his epochal collaboration with
Philip Glass.
The ostensible subjects of those frequently mystifying pieces would
never stoop to something as conventional as introducing themselves.
Einstein does a lot of violin playing but says nothing throughout a
five-hour opera.
So the forthright enthusiasm of Mr. Wilson’s Clementine Hunter, in real
life a black plantation worker in Louisiana who achieved renown as a
self-taught painter, comes as something of a shock. Mr. Wilson has made
“Zinnias” recognizably his own while working with a sweetly easygoing
score by Bernice Johnson Reagon, a founder of the a cappella ensemble
Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Toshi Reagon, her daughter; and a book by
Jacqueline Woodson. Its colored-light backdrops, elegant white furniture
and angular, repetitive gestures will be familiar to his fans.
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