Music

Singers get chaotic at opening of MOAD’s ‘Where the Oceans Meet’

Written By Sean Erwin
May 23, 2019 at 2:06 PM

“You.” “Got.” “What.” “I. “Need!” Five singers stand in a circle in the Museum of Art and Design’s ballroom in Miami’s Freedom Tower. Each takes turns delivering one word from R&B singer Freddie Scott’s 1968 song “(You) Got What I Need.” In a performance worlds apart from Scott’s original honeyed inflections, these singers deliver the lyric in different musical styles — opera, R&B, death metal, reggaetón and salsero — in a serenade that ranges from a croon to a growl.

Crouching beside them in ball cap, brown bomber jacket and orange Nikes, dancer, choreographer and visual artist Andros Zins-Browne takes in a few rounds of his newest work, “The Chaos Opera,” then stops the singers and asks for more overlap. The premiere of Zins-Browne’s work on Sunday, May 26, coincides with the opening of the museum’s summer-long exhibition, “Where the Oceans Meet,” a four-month investigation of the work of Caribbean-French philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant and Cuban author and innovative social scientist Lydia Cabrera, on view through Sept. 29. 

The exhibition showcases archival material on the two authors together with 40 modern and contemporary artists whose works reflect Glissant’s and Cabrera’s diverse approaches to notions of identity, diaspora and the legacy of slavery. Sophie Landres, the museum’s curator of public programs, says, “the archival material invites the audience to engage more deeply with the writings of these thinkers. It shows that these ideas can take on the form of scholarly writing, visual arts and poetry.” 

As a French-trained philosopher, Glissant placed a premium on opacity of expression as a strategy of resistance to political categorization. Reflecting on this, Zins-Browne insists “The Chaos Opera” is not about fusing these very different musical genres. 

“The work intends to be chaotic, as the practice of a kind of politics,” he explains. “It embraces the idea that politically we don’t need to understand one another.”

For the operatic singer Celeste Landeros, Zins-Browne’s work challenges the vocalists to reach a shared place without abandoning their style’s specific physical techniques. “During our morphing exercises,” Landeros says, “I end up producing the sound from a different part of my body than I normally would. As we sing in unison, I work with the others’ voices but also approach a limit I never actually cross.”

“The Chaos Opera” will premiere 4 p.m. Sunday, May 26 at Miami Dade College’s Museum of Art and Design (MOAD), Freedom Tower, 600 Biscayne Blvd., in Miami. “Where the Oceans Meet” will be on view through Sept. 29. Tickets cost $12, $8 for seniors and military, $5 for students, and free for museum members, MDC students, faculty and staff, and children 12 and under.  Go to MDCMOAD.org.

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