August 27, 2013 - 9:02pm
Students in Marilyn Bowering’s creative writing and journalism classes at Vancouver Island University (VIU) may find a powerful lesson in her most recent personal writing project. Bowering is the author of many books of poetry, prose and fiction, and recently wrote her first libretto for Marilyn Forever, a new opera production based on a book of her poetry about Marilyn Monroe published more than 25 years ago.
The experience of writing her first libretto evolved more than four years ago, and came with a great deal of learning and patience – for both the librettist and the opera’s British composer, Gavin Bryars, Bowering says.
Premiering at Victoria’s MacPherson Playhouse Theatre Sept. 13 and 14, Marilyn Forever began its path to the stage when Bryars was introduced to Bowering’s poetic work, Anyone Can See I Love You, published in 1987.
“What I’ve learned over the years is that every time you move into another genre, no matter what you think you know, you have to throw most of it out the window, you start all over again,” says Bowering.
In her poetry, Bowering had written about the inner life of actress Marilyn Monroe, exploring the emotional core of a woman whose idealistic view of life of beauty and love may have led to her downfall. While the material was familiar, the process of creating the narration to an operatic work was entirely new.
A two-week residency at The Banff Centre in 2010 provided Bowering, Bryars and musicians from the opera’s producers, Victoria-based Aventa Ensemble, a chance to focus on a serious revision of the narrative she had created for the piece.
“After a particularly frustrating series of attempts, where I knew I wasn’t getting it, I suddenly got what opera does,” Bowering says. “You are taken by the music, you’re taken by the emotion, you are taken by everything on stage… the words are your frame, but the words do not have to make for any kind of continuous narrative at all. So when I let that go, I was just able to move on an emotional trajectory.”
Bowering says her goal was to provide a voice that speaks to the emotional core of Marilyn Monroe, whose character is played by Faroe Island’s premiere vocalist, Eivør Pálsdóttir. The opera, which is set on the night of Monroe’s death, examines Marilyn Monroe’s intellectual and emotional relationship to death and love. As the work progresses, the performance interweaves what is taking place on stage with the trajectory of Monroe’s life through relationships, fame and myth. Ultimately, the characters of the musicians as performers and men in Monroe’s life fuse with the forces that lead to her death.
Bowering has much praise for composer Bryers’ adaptation of her poems into the new operatic work. “Gavin’s music is very accessible, it’s new music, and it’s very melodic… he has had a long and varied career as a jazz musician and bass player, so a lot of the music is very jazz influenced and also influenced by the music of Monroe’s era, songs from the ‘50s.”
For more information and tickets to Marilyn Forever please see http://www.aventa.ca/
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