Contemporaneous & Fifth Wall Performing Arts presents 'The Precipice,' June 27 & 28

Weaving together text and music from Fifth Wall Performing Arts’ co-artistic directors and creators of Einstein in the HOUSE KARL and Grey Rose Grant, the upcoming chamber-rock opera – The Precipice – frames two parallel journeys of self-mythologizing via trans/queer and cis/straight perspectives.

The NY premiere of the production directed by Corey Smith will be performed by musicians from Contemporaneous Ensemble alongside vocalists Morgan Mastrangelo and Wayne Arthur at The Space at Irondale on June 27-28

"So many delicious little details... a sly and wry technical prowess." – Nico Muhly

On June 27 & 28, 2024, Brooklyn-based new music ensemble Contemporaneous and experimental performing arts organization Fifth Wall Performing Arts will give the NY premiere of The Precipice, a new chamber-rock opera written by composer/performer KARL (Karl Ronneburg), at The Space at Irondale.

The 100-minute abstract opera explores the formation of self and our relationship with moments of transition by highlighting two stories of becoming, from both a trans/queer perspective and cis/straight one. With music and libretto by Fifth Wall Performing Arts’ co-artistic directors KARL & Grey Rose Grant and direction by Corey Smith, the opera creates a singular, yet kaleidoscopic journey of self-mythology through the use of journal entries, poems, and past works by KARL & Grant, stitched together into a series of abstract conversations and paired with a distinctive movement language developed during the opera’s workshop residency at Avaloch Farms in 2022.

"Grey sent me a number of their old pieces and fragments of musical material related to the story,” KARL says, “and I also dug through five-or-six years of my own compositions and voice memos to find musical memories to incorporate. Then, just like the text, I stitched it all together (writing a significant amount of new music along the way) to make the final score.”

The end product features KARL and Grey as vocalists in a rock/folk idiom, supported by operatic "voice doubles" – represented by vocalists Morgan Mastrangelo and Wayne Arthur – who act as the duo's narrators, conscience, and inner monologue alongside an accompanying seven-person band comprised of clarinet, piano, violin, cello, electric guitar, electric bass, and percussion. Though The Precipice is described by its creator as a "chamber-rock opera," it is truly a genre-fluid soundscape inspired by minimalism, improvisation, post-modernism, theatrical operatic gestures, prog-rock, and much more.

The “precipice” itself represents irreversible change–growing up, leaving home, and moving from past places, relationships, and visions of self. The show asks: is making ourselves a tragic act–a leap from the precipice–a great wrenching? How do the metaphors and myths by which we construct our identity hold us back? How do you leave behind a relationship, place, or self-perception without losing the part of it that made you who you are? And, finally, do we do this alone–is the formation of self an individual or collective act?

Like The Precipice, Fifth Wall Performing Arts was founded on telling intimate stories in an experimental and contemporary format. KARL states, “… if breaking the fourth wall is when a performer acknowledges the existence of the audience and the stage, then breaking the ‘fifth wall,’ as we define it, occurs when a performer stops playing a character and appears as their honest self, devoid of performative action or inflection... the future of live performance relies on just this: breaking that fifth wall, acknowledging the existence of the performers themselves as human beings… vulnerable and in need of connection as we all are.”

PRODUCTION TEAM

Created by KARL (Karl Ronneburg) 
Music & Text by KARL & Grey Rose Grant 
Performances by Contemporaneous Ensemble, with vocalists Morgan Mastrangelo & Wayne Arthur 

Direction, Set Design, & Costume Design by Corey Smith 
Lighting by McKenna Ebert 
Sound by Charles Mueller 

ABOUT THE COLLABORATORS

KARL (he/him) is a composer, percussionist, and performance artist based in New York City, where he is the Associate Dramaturg at the Metropolitan Opera, helping to shape commissions and new works from their inceptions to their premieres. He is the co-founder and co-artistic director of Fifth Wall Performing Arts with Grey Grant, and has worked with artists and companies including Radiolab, Meredith Monk, Carnegie Hall, Nico Muhly, So Percussion, Elliot Cole, Alkemie Early Music, Missy Mazzoli, Contemporaneous Ensemble, New Music Detroit, Anthony Davis, Christopher Rountree, Joyce DiDonato, Metropolis Ensemble, Jeanine Tesori, and the Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors’ Lab. KARL is a teaching artist in incarcerated communities with the non-profit Musicambia and is also the inventor of the Snaxophone, an electric Pringles can instrument. He hosts annual Fluxus-inspired parties and his work has been performed by bell towers, rock bands, orchestras, arcade machines, and people dressed in squirrel costumes, among others. More Info

Grey Rose Grant (she/they) is a composer, performer, and librettist, whose music: “[Crafts] a work that is moving, evocative and, by the end, exhausting (in the best sense)” and writes “demanding music with precision and nuance.” (Michigan Daily). Grey’s recent work includes Little Histories, a folk opera in four acts and Glitter Orgy, a dance theatre work in three acts. Their opera, Michigan Trees: A Guide to the Trees of Michigan and the Great Lakes Region (2019) received a BMI Student Composer Award in 2021. Grey has received commissions from the Regenerate! Orchestra, Contemporaneous Ensemble, the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, Tesla Quartet, The Detroit Women’s Chorus, and more. She is a co-founder and creative producer of Fifth Wall Performing Arts, an artist-led experimental performing arts organization based in MI and NYC. North Carolina born, they currently reside in Ypsilanti, Michigan. More Info

ABOUT CONTEMPORANEOUS