THE HANGOVER REPORT – The Fures’ glacial, immersive tone poem THE FORCE OF THINGS contemplates a cosmic/microscopic/spiritual consciousness outside of the human experience

Ashley and Adam Fure's "The Force of Things" at Gelsey Kirkland Academy, a Mostly Mozart Festival offering.

Ashley and Adam Fure’s “The Force of Things” at Gelsey Kirkland Academy, a Mostly Mozart Festival offering.

Last night, I caught Ashley and Adam Fure’s wordless immersive art installation cum contemporary music piece The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects at the Gelsey Kirkland Academy of Classical Ballet in Dumbo. The hybrid production, one of the final offerings of this year’s Mostly Mozart Festival (the production concludes its brief run with a pair of performances this evening), contemplates the universe(s) beyond our limited comprehension.

Through Ashley Fure’s droning, unhurriedly evolving tone poem-like score – which features beguiling and inventive use of percussion, strings, horns, woodwinds, the human voice, and electronic music, all played gamely by the International Contemporary Ensemble – we get a glimpse of a world without humans, and perhaps even of the glacial process of creation itself. Time and space are expanded and compressed (as you will) in the piece’s 55 minute, suggesting a cosmic and/or spiritual consciousness outside the realm of the human experience, whether on a molecular or unfathomably large scale. The work is also aided visually by the enveloping, evocative architectural design by Adam Fure (Ashley’s brother).

Fascinatingly and coincidentally, I ended up pairing The Force of Things with a return visit (my third!) to another wordless fantasia, Basil Twist’s masterpiece Symphonie Fantastique (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) at HERE Arts Center in Soho. I’m happy to report that Mr. Twist’s inspired artistry continues to be on full dislplay. Indeed, his aquatic puppetry – set to a piano version of Hector Berlioz’s score – danced and spun as enchantingly as ever. But last night, I saw the piece in a new light. I associated Mr. Basil’s work, thanks to my previous experience at The Force of Things earlier that evening, with the mystical process of the creation of biology as we know it – his inquisitive, selfless puppets struck me to be the first life forms, joyously twirling about in the universe’s primordial soup, sans humans.

RECOMMENDED

 

THE FORCE OF THINGS: AN OPERA FOR OBJECTS
Music
Mostly Mozart Festival at Gelsey Kirkland Academy of Classical Ballet
55 minutes (without an intermission)
Through August 8

Categories: Music, Off-Broadway, Theater

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