Opera Chicks : Artists E.V. Day and Lesley Dill Interview Each Other About Opera
E.V. Day: How did your opera project come about? So many artists have designed props, scenery and costumes for opera, but it is an exceptional undertaking for an artist to do it all.
Lesley Dill: It was fabulous to initiate a tremendous world from step one. It felt as if I had an ocean inside, and the music, the visual projections, the costumes emanated from that internal place like tidal forces. It gave a core unity to the end result. So, this is how Divide Light began...I had been collaborating musically and linguistically for 7 years with Tom Morgan, the director of Ars Nova Singers in Boulder, Colorado. We had already done a CD of songs, I Heard a Voice, and we were looking for another project to work on together. Tom said "Let's do an opera!" and I said "based on Emily Dickinson!"... and we were off and running. Tom had to drop out, and then Richard Marriott, a composer from NY, stepped in to work with me.
Lesley Dill: How about you, E.V.? For me your work is wonderfully loaded with drama, expression, sex, violence, and scale, so it makes a lot of sense to me that you would work within the operatic metaphor.
E.V. Day: The project started when George Steel, the then newly appointed New York City Opera General Manager and Artistic Director asked me if I'd be interested in making an art installation in the Promenade space at the David H. Koch Theater in Lincoln Center. He said, "Why don't you just come up with your wildest dream...?" and we went through the costume archives, which were just filled with fabulous stuff. My piece in the end wasn't about opera per se, but was for celebrating the opera. It was a statement about what opera is thinking about, it's about inviting the artist to talk about opera and starting a dialogue about opera. The vehicles that I use in my work are often American cultural clichés and so, within the world of opera, I chose to use the most well-known female characters in the opera universe. Super-heroes or super-martyrs, like Carmen, Mimi from La Boheme, and Cio Cio San (Madama Butterfly).