"The last time that the composer Heather Christian's "Oratorio for Living Things" appeared on a New York stage, it was spring of 2022, and the act of gathering still felt a little brave. We had waited for it, some of us for years: Ars Nova first tried to mount "Oratorio," a sung-through, partly-in-Latin musical work that treats the "holy" notion of time, at Greenwich House, in 2020, but the pandemic shut it down. Two years later, Christian's composition for twelve voices was back,"
"During that first tentative season after the shutdown, "Oratorio" was staged in defiantly close quarters, with its audience crammed onstage in a tight oval of bleachers, as the chorus, dressed in blue, climbed the risers to sing before, above, behind, beside it. The show was transcendent-the rare quasi-religious, non-narrative, half-in-Latin hot ticket-but, when a few members in the company came down with COVID, Ars Nova was forced to cancel the final week of performances."
The Oratorio for Living Things is a sung-through, partly-Latin musical work for twelve voices that contemplates the 'holy' notion of time. Initial plans to stage the piece in 2020 were halted by the pandemic, and an early 2022 run was interrupted by illness. The production returned at the Signature with much of the original ensemble and a mini-orchestra. The staging places audiences in close proximity within a wooden oval and tiered seating, lit in deep indigo that evokes a ship's hold or an operating theatre. A bulbous paper chandelier hangs at center, resembling popcorn yet radiating like the sun or an atomic nucleus. Blue is described as the color of 'deep time.'
Read at The New Yorker
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