Poetry-based performance explores themes of war, resilience

On Friday night, the lights in CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio dimmed as mezzo-soprano singer Fleur Barron and other instrumentalists sat in a semicircle. The audience, a crowd of adults and students, sat in chairs or bean bags placed on the floor, the low murmur of conversation lulling to silence at the chime of a handmade instrument, indicating the start of the evening's show. 

Over the course of 40 minutes, Barron and the other musicians took the audience through multiple operatic pieces — some fast-paced and hopeful, others slow and melancholic. Projected on the wall behind them, videos depicted the ocean, graves and people dancing with fire.

This performance, which also occurred on Thursday, was a sample of an operatic work based on Ocean Vuong’s poetry collection “Night Sky with Exit Wounds,” which tackles themes of war, grief and family.

The opera was conceptualized by Kaneza Schaal, a resident artist in Carolina Performing Arts’ Southern Futures program, and Grammy Award-winning composer Bryce Dessner. The project was taken on as part of the Southern Futures program, which supports work pertaining to the American South. 

The two were looking for a way to collaborate on another project when Schaal found Vuong’s poetry and sent it to Dessner.

“I find the work so stunning and beautiful and full of meaning, but also full of rhythm and full of musicality, so that it sort of tells me what it wants,” Dessner said in the Q&A following the performance.

The opera is still a work in progress, with Thursday and Friday’s performances showing a portion of what has been developed so far. The musicians involved in bringing the opera to life — including Durham-based ensemble Mallarmé Music — began rehearsals on Tuesday.

Anna Gatdula, an assistant professor in UNC’s music department and moderator for the Q&A after the Friday performance, said operas typically take years to develop before they are ready for an audience and that to see them in progress form is rare.

“I think even just opening up a workshop opera in the beginning phases is such a vulnerable thing for artists, and so I'm very grateful that they’re opening it up as much as they are to faculty,” she said. 

The performance included a mix of live and prerecorded music, with Barron being the only vocalist. Throughout the performance, Barron switched between singing pieces from the opera and speaking lines from Vuong’s poem “Immigrant Haibun,” which served as the main story throughout the performance. 

The poem follows the journey of two speakers, assumed to be Vuong’s parents, journeying through the sea from a “smoldering city” in Vietnam to America.

War was a major theme throughout the performance just as it is in Vuong’s work. In “Night Sky with Exit Wounds,” Vuong explores the Vietnam War and his family memories of Vietnam.

Amanda Graham, associate director of engagement for Carolina Performing Arts, said Schaal interprets Vuong’s poetry as descriptions of how war and trauma can continue to live in bodies long after the war ends. 

“I think that that is a story that a lot of Southerners are interested in, the contemporary vestiges of war, both in our bodies and in our landscape,” she said.

During Friday’s Q&A, Schaal also said the performance reminded her of all the women who lived and survived during wartime — a feeling she hopes to invite the audience into as she works on the opera over the next two years.

The filmography and instruments involved in the performance also embodied this theme. Prior to the start of the opera, a film described the history of land mines throughout Vietnam even after the war ended.

Two of the instruments used in the performance, a golden bell and silver plate chimes, were made out of unexploded bombs.

Both the film and instruments were created by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, an artist based in Ho Chi Minh City.

Over the next two and a half years, Schaal said she hopes to work on deepening audiences' understanding of these instruments so that they can see them in a new light by the end of the performance.

The final opera is expected to premiere in 2027.

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