Child singer needed for new opera set at the border
By hola | Published | No Comments
Images of scared children locked behind chain-link fencing and crying for their parents dominated the news in 2018 and 2019 when family separation became a topic of contention during the Trump administration. Children were openly and forcibly taken from their parents on U.S. soil by the U.S. government. To many, this atrocity seemed to come out of nowhere. However, forced family separation is a longstanding tradition in the United States. It has been used time and time again to overpower or enslave groups of people and has roots that date back to the colonial era.
Three years after the height of the crisis at the border, a federally commissioned task force has concluded that 3,900 children were taken from their families. While the families and the U.S. public continue to grapple with the effects of this ongoing tragedy, D.C. artists are taking the stage to help the U.S. look itself in the mirror.
Set in 2017, the libretto Zavala-Zavala tells one heartbreaking account of child-parent separation, as it happened at a specific time in U.S. history. Librettist Anna Deeny Morales, a professor of literature and culture at the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University, had a primary goal in mind while crafting the story: show the complicity involved in separating children from their families. Through research and interviews, she recreated the story of a young boy being separated from his grandmother.
“It’s the archives that tell the story,” Deeny says, whose intention was to channel those real-life events through her writing and onto the stage. While the script is guided by historical data, the libretto relies on the magic of theater to evoke a sense of intimacy and empathy with the Zavala-Zavala story and the countless others like it. The play will have done its job, Deeny says, if at curtain close, the audience more readily takes ownership of the tragedy and is willing to start “looking at our wounds,” she says.
While the production team has already cast the three adult parts, Deeny added a fourth character — a child — who was not part of the original commission, which only included three adult singers.
The details on the libretto and the casting opportunity are outlined below.
Could you tell us how you felt while approaching the topic and how those feelings evolved throughout the creative process?
Brian Arreola, a professor of voice and opera at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, invited me to write a libretto about the recent separations of families at the Mexico-U.S. border. I was already working on adapting a late 19th-century Spanish zarzuela set at the Mexico-U.S. border. Zarzuela is a form of opera; it’s what we would call an operetta in English. Although they’re about very serious and even tragic themes, zarzuela is generally a felicitous form. It’s a form with comedy. It’s a form with a lot of speaking just like our U.S. musicals — with speaking and operatic voice. It’s a form that ends on an up note, rather than a down note.
So, I was already working on setting this piece at the border. Before that, I had very quickly adapted a work, another zarzuela, which was written in 1930 or 1932 in Havana, Cuba. It was based on a mid 19th-century Cuban novel called “Cecilia Valdés” that was also about a child — Cecilia — of a relationship between a white plantation owner and a black enslaved woman. Cecilia had been taken by the father, basically kidnapped from the mother. So when Brian Arreola approached me, I had already, in operatic form, been working on these themes of family separation — or flat-out kidnapping — which the [U.S.] government is accused of at the border by people in the news and human rights advocates.
I’d already been working on historical strategies of oppression and enslavement and thinking about the zarzuela form at the Mexico-U.S. border. Separately, in my work as a translator and as someone who writes about poetry, I’ve worked on a lot of pieces dedicated to individuals [who] disappeared during the Southern Cone dictatorships. I’m also translating a poet named Gabriela Mistral who was the first Nobel Prize winner in Latin America for literature. She dedicated a book called “Tala” to children displaced from Spain during and after the Spanish Civil War. The point is that the separation of children from their parents or families is a massive topic, really. In fact, we can think about the separation of families as the foundational strategy for the creation of the Americas. That’s what it means to enslave people, you separate them from their families, right? You separate children from their parents forcibly. You rename them. You disappear them in the sense that you can’t find their names on a list — rewriting a child’s name, erasing a name, making it unfindable. That is really the foundation of the Americas. So this recent iteration of family separation under the Trump administration is just one detail, one grain of sand. That history has shown its head in a very blatant and aggressive way recently.
We also have to remember that detaining children and placing them in facilities that are not appropriate for children also has a very recent history. The protection of children — as people who are to a certain degree incarcerated or separated from their families — only came into place with the Flores settlement in the 1990s. So, this inhumane treatment of children who are incarcerated isn’t something that began with the Trump administration.
Did you identify with the topic?
When Brian approached me, I thought to myself, I’m not a West Coast Latina. I’m an East Coast Latina. My mom is Puerto Rican. The history of movement between the U.S. mainland and Puerto Rico is a very different history than the history of the diasporas between Mexico or Central America, which is where most of our immigrants are coming from now, in addition to Haiti. That’s a different diasporic history than my history from the Caribbean.
However, what felt closest to me was that this was my legal [U.S.] system that was carrying out these acts. I wanted to know how everyday people allow it. What are the everyday mechanisms through which such an atrocity can occur right now? That’s what I decided to research and found this case in particular, which was one of the first family separation cases in El Paso, Texas, in October of 2017. In particular, the case of Zavala-Zavala struck me because she was 65 years old at the time and the child was only seven.
In previous decades, what we saw were mostly waves of migration from Mexico. It was Mexican men — day laborers — who still faced deplorable conditions, but it was men sending remittances back home. Now, it’s children, girls and boys and grandparents. So, that voice, in particular, struck me, although it’s one case after another after another after another.
How did you adapt this massive topic into an opera?
Brian’s budget only permitted for a one-hour show, so this was intended as a one-act chamber opera. It’s impossible to address the landscape of family separation in an hour. So, I thought the only thing I can show is one story.
When I began doing my research, I had just finished another show right at Easter time. I was observing the Stations of the Cross this idea of the passage of an individual through a landscape [occurred to me]. When I first started sketching out the scenes and thinking about the structure of the piece, the first thing I thought of was the Stations of the Cross — also this idea that there were many cuts that this Christ figure received. It wasn’t enough just to crucify him. They cut him up. It wasn’t just that he was crucified by Pontius Pilate, he’s condemned by priests and judges. Everybody’s complicit in this act — everybody. That’s part of the importance of the story.
It’s not an uncommon image. There are other writers who have explored the same idea. A lot has come out in the media too, this idea of receiving the migrant who comes and asks for your help and the overwhelming sense that this was a death by many cuts. That it wasn’t just one blow that breaks a migrant down, it’s many, many cuts. Isn’t it enough that they had to leave their homes, cross from Honduras or Guatemala or El Salvador all the way through Mexico to reach the border? Then we have laws that do not defend them, or we do not obey laws intended to defend them, or we simply do not see them as worthy of our compassion. We do not recognize the histories of why they are at our borders.
About the boy role in the opera, how was the character inspired?
At first, again, the budget was for three singers. I wrote about these legal processes because I wanted to know how this stuff happens. The archive tells the story. They even tell how to breathe a story. In the courtroom proceedings, it always seems like Sergio Garcia, a lawyer I interviewed, can’t get a word in edgewise. It sounds like he’s breathless. So that really lends itself to operatic form.
Even though we had a budget for three singers, this child character — the characters come to you. You can’t deny them. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense; it’s like a dream. You can’t suppress it, they just come to you. So, this child was there and had to be present on the stage to be part of the representation of this story.
So, we’re looking for a child who is going to feel comfortable singing on stage. There’s one show at the Kennedy Center and one show at the McLean Community Center where we have a week-long residency. During that residency, we’re going to bring everybody together. The singers will come in with the orchestra and do the final round of rehearsals before the show opens. So, it has to be a child who’s going to feel comfortable doing them.
Is there a specific age range that you’re looking for the child to be?
In the original [libretto], he’s 7 years old, but the singer can be 12, 13 or even 14. Visually it’s not as impactful to see a large boy because it doesn’t reflect the precariousness of the character — of the reality of this individual. So, in this particular case, the body, the height, as well as racial characteristics, make a difference. It is important to represent the diversity of our experiences as peoples on our stages.
But it doesn’t have to be a boy. If we find a girl, those are vowel sounds that are easily changed in the libretto.
The child is in the beginning scene and the last scene [the epilogue] and has an entire [musical] solo in the last scene. So, a girl can easily play a boy, but she or he must have a treble voice. There are no big range requirements, not a lot of serious high notes and low notes.
One other option is a little less conventional. This could be a child who is comfortable singing in a really strong chest voice, almost like a healthy yell. If we found a child like that who might have experienced singing gospel music, mariachi, folk music or Latin pop, Brian could rework the child’s part to be in a range that would be safe for them.
The biggest thing is a kid who can bring the noise; gender does not matter.
Are there other personality characteristics that you think would be important for this child to have?
The child definitely has to be able to be expressive on a stage. The whole first scene is of the grandmother with that child. And so, he or she has to have a sense of playfulness. It’s basically what I imagined the grandmother might be saying, telling the child his story the night before he’s taken away. It’s a tender scene of a grandmother telling a child a story, but it’s a story he’s already heard. So, he interrupts a lot. It has to be a child who is able to take those stage directions and memorize because he’s doing this while he’s singing.
Some acting experience and the ability to learn lines couldn’t hurt, but some kids don’t have any acting experience and can just do it right. We think there’s got to be a child in D.C. who can do this.
What is the casting timeline and the casting process?
To be considered for casting, please submit a video of the candidate singing a Spanish or the language song of their choosing and telling a 60-second true story. It can be a true story about something that happened to the teller or one shared with the teller. Either is fine, as long as the story is true. Video submissions are due by January 15, 2022.
Please send submissions to corinne@inseries.org. Using a Google Drive or WeTransfer.com to send in the video is preferred.
Is there a specific feeling or knowledge or anything that you hope the audience will walk away with after viewing it?
This is tough. I’m not sure shame is very productive because it doesn’t really move us into the future. I do think that we do need to look directly at wounds. I feel this way about Haiti [and the crisis over Haitian migrants at the U.S. border earlier this year], as well. We can no longer privilege the category of nation over the category of human — or the category of citizen over the category child.
Take those images [published earlier this year] of Haitian individuals and families being rounded up by men on horses at the border. They remind us of the surveillance of enslaved individuals and African Americans and Afro Caribbeans in previous centuries, as well as in our own times.
My hope for young people is that we can think of different models. We really need to think more regionally, as far as the health of ourselves and our planet’s health are concerned and the health of our children is concerned.
This idea of “Nation” is just a complete lie. Economically, it’s a lie. We don’t defend workers in our own nation. We take advantage of cheap labor. We don’t give them rights. We need to privilege the concept of humanity and define ourselves by our ability to care for children, not just for our biological children but for children who aren’t biologically ours, who don’t speak our language. I think that’s the bigger picture.
Sergio Garcia, the lawyer who has allowed me to use his name, said he was shocked by the (Zavala-Zavala) case. He’s a Mexican immigrant who earned his law degree here in the U.S. He said he thought it was like a case he had read about in school and had thought those times had passed. He was shocked to see the kinds of decisions judges and colleagues — who he thought were perfectly decent people — were making without guns to their heads.
What is going on that these people aren’t even under an acute dictatorial situation, and they’re making these types of decisions? What’s going on with the guards working in these places where migrants are being received — the guard receives the order: “Go take that kid.” Do you follow that order? You take a child? That’s each person’s nightmare. A lot of the people say that they couldn’t do it. But somebody did it. Enough people did it that thousands of people and thousands of children were taken [at the U.S.-Mexican border in recent years].
The third section [of the opera] — each section is called a “cut” and there are five cuts — actually comes from an interview I conducted with someone in the U.S. Department of Justice who didn’t want to be named. This person told me that when she goes to work, there’s an ethical line. During the Trump administration, she said, that line kept being pushed and pushed and pushed. At the same time, I just gave you a plethora of examples previous to the Trump administration, but something happened during the Trump administration. There was a general breakdown and a loss of belief in our institutions, which a lot of people say is dangerous, but loss of faith in our institutions is dangerous across the board. The question is how do you get back to the original, ethical line?— to saying: “No, I don’t do that.”
How do you undo the harm once you’ve acknowledged it?
I think we need to look at our wounds as peoples and face them. But that’s very, very hard to do because it means facing our histories and our decisions as peoples that result in the situations we have now, particularly with regard to migration.
Is there anyone who you would caution against perhaps seeing Zavala-Zavala?
It’s not a children’s show, but I don’t think it’s acutely triggering. Although, for anybody who has experienced family separation, of course it’s painful. But children aren’t the problem in the world; it’s adults. Adults are making these decisions. It was painful to watch the mass trials in which there are dozens of people in the courtroom. One after another, the judge is saying, here’s your sentence, do you have anything to say? And over and over again, they say, Where’s my child?
—Written by Jaclyn Porpiglia
—Interview by Hola Cultura’s S.P.E.L. Arts & Humanities team members Carolina Marin, Deanna González, Fernanda Poblete González and Jaclyn Porpiglia
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