








































REVIEWS

Performance Reviews

Sweet Land, a new opera by The Industry. 
February 29–March 15, 2020, Los Angeles State Historic Park.
Creative Team: Raven Chacon, Composer; Du Yun, Composer; Aja Couchois 
Duncan, Librettist; Douglas Kearney, Librettist; Cannupa Hanska Luger, Direc-
tor and Costume Designer; Yuval Sharon, Director. Program notes and video 
streaming available on demand: https://theindustryla.org/sweet-land-opera/.

Jelena Novak

Opera and musical theater continue to serve as forums for debate, invoking 
a wide range of topics in history, mythology, power, and politics. Recent 
North American operas are no exception, with composers and librettists 
often being preoccupied with questions of power and colonization. Let me 
cite just a few examples. One of the first contemporary operas I ever saw 
was Philip Glass’s and Robert Wilson’s O Corvo Branco (The White Raven) 
(1998) about the Portuguese age of discovery, an age marked by the con-
quest of new worlds and above all by the famous expedition led by Vasco da 
Gama, who pioneered the sea route to India that gave Portugal a dominant 
position in the spice trade of the time. Another opera by Philip Glass, The 
Voyage (1992), was commissioned and first performed at The Metropolitan 
Opera house to mark 500 years since Christopher Columbus’s discovery of 
America. Curiosity and courage, overcoming a fear of the unknown, the 
discovery and conquest of the new worlds, the effects of colonization; these 
are all among Glass’s themes in this work. The composer John Adams and 
director Peter Sellars likewise turn to American history and mythology 
in their operas. They typically zoom in on some of the most spectacular 
and politically charged events from the United States’ complex history—
the gold rush in Girls of the Golden West (2017), the Trinity nuclear test 
in Doctor Atomic (2005), and, famously, Richard Nixon’s historical visit to 

Sound Stage Screen, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2021), pp. 275–283.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. DOI: 10.13130/sss15390.

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Mao Zedong in Nixon in China (1987). One might also mention here Steve 
Reich’s and Beryl Korot’s Three Tales (2002), one of which is dedicated to 
the testing of atomic bombs on Bikini Island, a grim episode from the Cold 
War nuclear arms race. And finally there is Laurie Anderson, who prob-
lematizes what it really means to be American in several of her works, for 
example in Homeland (2007). In all of these there is an attempt to discuss 
and illuminate, often critically, important dimensions of American history 
and mythology.

In mapping out this context for Sweet Land (2020), the newest opera 
of the Los Angeles-based opera company The Industry, I am tempted to 
invoke the arrow John Cage fired into the operatic relationships between 
Europe and United States: “For two hundred years the Europeans have 
been sending us their operas. Now I’m sending them back.” On the oc-
casion of the production of Cage’s Europeras 1 and 2 by director Yuval 
Sharon, The Industry’s founder and leader, this quotation was singled out.1 
It signals the duality between European and American operatic worlds, 
a duality that appears to be of central importance to the poetics of Sha-
ron himself. His career as an opera director has developed successfully 
along two separate tracks. He has created site-specific ground-breaking 
contemporary operas with The Industry, mostly with American artists—
productions include Invisible Cities (2013), Hopscotch (2015) and War of the 
Worlds (2017)—while in parallel directing conventional, mostly European, 
operatic repertoire in opera houses and festivals both in Europe and in 
the United States. Recently Sharon’s position in the world of conventional 
opera in the US was institutionalized when he became director of Michi-
gan Opera Theatre, while at the same time remaining artistic director and 
leader of The Industry.

On a different note from these North American composers and direc-
tors, there are at least a few made-in-Europe operas dealing more specifical-
ly with American culture, myths, and stereotypes, and in particular with 
the “Wild West”: ROSA: The Death of a Composer, a horse drama (1994) by 
Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway, and The Collected Works of Billy 
the Kid (2017–2018) by Gavin Bryars, to mention but two. Operas and mu-
sic theater pieces by Glass/Wilson, Adams/Sellars, Reich/Korot, Anderson, 
Andriessen/Greenaway and Bryars all offer some of the coordinates that 
enable me to map Sweet Land: to contextualize it and interpret it.

1 The quotation appeared on The Industry’s twitter account (@industryopera), February 
8, 2018, https://twitter.com/industryopera/status/961641708369854464.



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“The company that created Invisible Cities and Hopscotch, now brings 
you a grotesque historical pageant that disrupts the dominant narrative of 
American identity”: this is the announcement on The Industry’s website.2 
Sweet Land, The Industry’s latest operatic spectacle, was world-premiered 
on March 1, 2020, in Los Angeles State Historic Park. However, the perfor-
mances were soon halted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The cast and crew 
gathered on March 15 to film the show in an attempt to save it from prema-
ture disappearance, and the two videos documenting the piece have since 
been streamed on demand.3 In the course of the original performance the 
audience was divided into two groups so that each group could only see one 
part of the show. Members of each of the two audience groups were expect-
ed to finish the story on their own as the experience of being excluded from 
the other group was an important part of the concept. 

I believe that this concept of exclusion was clear to all of those who were 
lucky enough to attend the live performance. For the rest of us, experienc-
ing Sweet Land only through the video, the division is not apparent, though 
it becomes clearer after reading the program booklet. “Sweet Land … is 
conceived as an opera that erases itself: as the audience processes through 
the LA State Historic Park, the space behind you disappears, in a musical 
and visual experience revealing the mechanism of historic erasure. The au-
dience is split on diverging tracks through a park to experience contrasting 
stories of America and its founding.”4

The two halves of the audience never actually saw the same show. Conse-
quently, there are now two stream-on-demand videos designed to mimic the 
live experience of seeing two sides of the same story. While reading about 
the divided audiences, I decided to follow the initial concept of the creative 
team in their account of the live performance in Los Angeles State Historic 
Park, and consequently for the purposes of this text I have focused mainly 
on the first online video. The other side of the story remains to be explored.

To clarify the distinction between the two performance tracks, and the 
two subsequently made videos, I should list their contents. The work is 
in five parts. The first is named “Contact” (music by Raven Chacon and 
Du Yun, libretto by Douglas Kearney), and here the audience has not yet 

2 “Sweet Land,” The Industry, accessed September 30, 2020, https://theindustryla.org/
sweet-land-opera/.

3 “Sweet Land: A New Opera by The Industry,” Vimeo, March 17, 2020, http://stream.sweet-
landopera.com/. The videos were edited by Geoff Boothby and produced by Comotion.

4 Lindsey Schoenholtz, “Meet the Voices of Sweet Land”, The Industry (blog), December 
2, 2019, https://theindustryla.org/meet-the-voices-of-sweet-land/.

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been divided. After “Contact,” the first audience group is assigned to “Feast 
1” (music by Du Yun, libretto by Aja Couchois Duncan) and the second 
group to “Train 1” (music by Raven Chacon, libretto by Douglas Kearney). 
The two groups reconnect at “The Crossroads” (music by both Yun and 
Chacon, and improvisations by Carmina Escobar, Micaela Tobin and Sha-
ron Chohi Kim). After that the audience is divided again for “Feast 2” (mu-
sic by Chacon, libretto by Kearney) and “Train 2” (music by Yun, libretto 
by Duncan), and at the end they all go back to the starting point for the 
final scene “Echoes & Expulsions” (music by Chacon and Yun, libretto by 
Duncan and Kearney).

As in the previous operas by The Industry, Sweet Land is site-specific. For 
example, the opera for headphones, Invisible Cities, was performed at Los 
Angeles Union Station, which is freighted with symbolic meaning in rela-
tion to the treatment of minorities by Californian society.5 This is because 
the site originally housed Chinatown, part of which was torn down in order 
to make way for the station. The urban planning historian David Sloane 
talks about this urban intervention in an Artbound documentary about 
the making of Invisible Cities. He says that “it was an act of white dictation, 
of power within the city and it is the symbol of the way that California had 
struggled with racial minorities, particularly Asian minorities, for decades. 
In all those ways Union Station is a very complicated social space as well as 
a spectacularly beautiful built space.”6

Similarly, the Los Angeles State Historic Park, also in a Chinatown 
neighborhood, takes center stage in Sweet Land, since it too has a complex 
history related to immigrants—it used to be one of the busiest immigra-
tion stations for newcomers arriving to the city from the East. “In the Sweet 
Land program booklet and pre-show literature, much is made of the fact 
that LA State Historic Park where this performance takes place sits roughly 
where the Native American Tongva village Yaang-na and its cornfield once 
lay—an area replete with memories (many tragic) close to Downtown and 
the original pueblo.”7 So the universal—yet at the same time specifically 
North American—story of “Hosts” and “Arrivals” in Sweet Land finds its 

5 The Industry’s Invisible Cities is the subject of Megan Steigerwald Ille’s article “The 
Operatic Ear: Mediating Aurality” on this very same issue of Sound Stage Screen (pp. 119–
143, https://doi.org/10.13130/sss14186).

6 “Invisible Cities”, Artbound documentary, KCET, accessed October 2, 2020, 06:44–
07:15, https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/episodes/invisible-cities.

7 Gordon Williams, “The Industry 2020 Review: Sweet Land,” OperaWire, March 12, 2020, 
https://operawire.com/the-industry-2020-review-sweet-land/.

https://doi.org/10.13130/sss14186
https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/episodes/invisible-cities
https://operawire.com/the-industry-2020-review-sweet-land/


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ideal partnership in this piece of land and in the historical layers of mean-
ings it holds together. The opera is staged in a series of temporary struc-
tures designed by Tanya Orellana and Carlo Maghirang, all sitting lightly 
on the soil of the park, and easily removed. Two of them are of a circular 
shape, and we have an impressive bird’s eye view of them at the beginning 
of the video.

Duality is one of the keywords for an understanding of this opera. 
There are two librettists (Kearney and Duncan), two directors (Sharon and 
Cannupa Hanska Luger, who is also costume designer), and two composers 
(Yun and Chacon). But there is more to Sweet Land than demonstrating 
how these several pairs work towards the same goal. The most important 
dimension of duality for the authors of this project concerns exclusion from 
the pair, and a resulting imbalance between the two sides. The focus is on 
how one feels and functions when not being “inside” and/or when one is 
not in a position of power. The authors, in other words, want to project their 
dialogue as a means of learning about each other’s experience. 

In the trailer for Sweet Land Sharon announces the company’s turn to-
wards the topic of Americanness: “The Industry has often taken the au-
dience on diverging paths and telling different narratives simultaneously. 
Sweet Land is the first time that we are using that tactic to talk about Ameri-
can history … This opera is all about a reckoning with our American identi-
ty. That we really look at the myths around who we are and try to dismantle 
that”.8 In Sweet Land the question of what it means to be American is posed 
openly. However, it appears to me that several of The Industry’s earlier pieces 
are equally about American myths and identity, even if that precise question 
is not brought up so directly. It is hard to imagine Hopscotch, an opera for 
twenty-four cars, set anywhere other than the United States, and particu-
larly Los Angeles. Automobility, the use of automobiles as the major means 
of transportation, and the role of cars in daily life are all tightly connected 
to experiencing a Los Angeles—and more broadly an American—culture.9 
Another opera, War of the Worlds, based on the 1938 radio drama created by 
Orson Welles, also raises particular questions germane to US culture, and 
especially the “country’s troubled relationship with truth.”10 Those operas 

8 Yuval Sharon in “Sweet Land Trailer,” YouTube video hosted on The Industry home page, 
accessed August 29, 2020, 00:22–00:33, 02:15–02:24, https://theindustryla.org/sweet-land-
opera/.

9 See Cotten Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America 
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008).

10 Jessica Gelt “War of the Worlds to Invade Disney Hall and the Streets of Downtown 

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also look at the American myth in one way or another. But just why it is 
important for North Americans to “really look at the myths around who we 
are and try to dismantle that” at this particular moment is the truly interest-
ing question, and it needs to be answered in light of the political, pandemic, 
ecological, and other crises, as well as the racial, class, gender, and other 
inequalities still present in contemporary American society.

“Central to the project is the diversity of its voices”, emphasizes Sharon. 
And indeed, the spectrum of various cultural heritages that various artists 
bring to this piece is impressive. “Composer Raven Chacon is from the Nava-
jo Nation and advocates for indigenous composers and musicians … Du Yun 
is a Chinese immigrant whose recent work is rooted in a lack of understand-
ing and empathy around immigration. … Librettist Aja Couchois Duncan is 
a mixed-race Ojibwe writer with a focus on social justice. Douglas Kearney is 
a poet whose writing, in the words of BOMB magazine, ‘pulls history apart, 
recombining it to reveal an alternative less whitewashed by enfranchised 
power.’ Co-director Cannupa Hanksa Luger is a multi-disciplinary instal-
lation artist of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian, and Norwegian 
descent.”11 All those “other voices” give off intriguing creative reflections that 
make the whole piece glitter with variegated color and light.

For me, the question is what, if anything, holds the whole operatic tis-
sue of such diverse creative voices together, and prevents the whole struc-
ture from falling apart? The answer that first comes to mind after watch-
ing the video is the role of stereotypes. The story, despite its non-linear 
structure, is quite stereotypical. There are Hosts and there are Arrivals. 
The Arrivals arrive and start to trouble the Hosts. This is confirmed mu-
sically when one of the main Arrivals starts to sing with his countertenor 
voice. So the Arrivals represent authority, order, and constructed tradi-
tion. Hosts on the other hand, are actually “the others” for Arrivals. And 
the music of the Hosts is accordingly exotic–often modal, full of various 
“non-operatic” vocal peculiarities, and seasoned with the unpredictable, 
the experimental, and the unfathomable. A workable synthesis, a real co-
habitation between two sides—operatic (conventional) and non-operatic 
(experimental, exotic)—is somehow not truly achieved for most of the 
opera. Thus, the fragmented musical structure and the various musical 

L.A.” Los Angeles Times, November 8, 2017, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-
et-cm-la-phil-war-worlds-20171108-story.html.

11 “Sweet Land,” Yuval Sharon’s personal website, accessed September 15, 2020, https://
www.yuvalsharon.com/#/sweet-land/.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-la-phil-war-worlds-20171108-story.html
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languages and references add more to the cacophony of voices than to 
their synergy. The circumstance of the forced marriage between the Ar-
rival Jimmy Gin (Scott Belluz, countertenor) and the Host girl Makwa 
(Kelci Hahn, soprano) becomes “the screen” through which stereotypes 
of power in terms of gender and race are projected. The marriage scene 
is particularly rich with such references as efforts are being made to re-
use stereotypes while trying to make them grotesque. It is a mechanism 
that remains stuck in the process, so that the stereotypes, rigid as they 
are, overshadow the intention to question them. The naturalistic acting 
of the operatic characters in “Feast 1” and “Feast 2” represents another 
stereotype. The characters assume postures and gestures of a “realistic” 
type, but realism in opera is a complicated issue, as singing invariably 
deconstructs the realism. With exaggerated naturalistic acting and con-
ventional operatic singing, what happens in Feasts is probably even more 
grotesque than the authors wanted it to be.

To my surprise, given that the opera seeks to reinvent myths of Amer-
ican history and its people, including their struggles and their powers, 
I find the most striking section to be the one that features animals and 
monsters, including coyotes and immortal, Wiindigo-cursed evil spirit 
with an appetite for human flesh (they come from the folklore of First 
Nations Algonquin tribes). Monsters and animals are also “others,” in 
this case other than human. But unlike the line between Hosts and Ar-
rivals—which is stereotypical and predictable, based as it is on the power 
that comes with colonization—that between animals/monsters and hu-
mans affords the authors more subtle opportunities, especially in the vo-
cal sphere.

“The Crossroads” features two coyotes (Carmina Escobar and Micaela 
Tobin) and a Wiindigo (Sharon Chohi Kim). This part of the opera is rather 
short, lasting less than three minutes in the video. However, the video 
footage has been subject to some montage editing, so that what we see on 
the screen and what we hear at the same time is not synchronized, and the 
line between the singing body and the sung voice becomes blurred. That 
desynchronization is interesting and telling. The most impressive figure is 
Wiindigo, who is depicted as an anthropomorphic creature with long black 
and white fur covering the entirety of its body, and (curiously) with a huge 
mouth and visible teeth at the back of the head (see figure 1). The mouth 
is half opened, and all kinds of screams and choking sounds are assigned 
to it in Sharon Chohi Kim’s vocal improvisations. The desynchronization 
poses all kinds of questions, and works surprisingly well, as (for a short time 



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at least) both musical and visual elements of the opera escape the world of 
realism.

The Wiindigo creature becomes all mouth, all voice. It claims the right to 
have a voice, a right that is usually the exclusive preserve of the human do-
main, since monsters, like animals, are normally not considered to have a 
voice. Wiindigo’s chocking sounds, combined with the howling improvisa-
tions of two singing coyote figures, constitute the deepest, the most “know-
ing” moment in Sweet Land, the moment at which those who normally are 
not allowed to have a voice finally sing. It is the moment when Sweet Land 
manages to escape from stereotypes, not taking the voice for granted and 
asking crucial questions about who owns the voice, both for singing and, 
metaphorically, for being human, and why.

These are the questions that Yuval Sharon places at the heart of Sweet 
Land:

Who is telling America’s story? How can opera participate in an experiential 
“re-write” of that story? What can music and theatrical representation rectify 
that history books or documentaries cannot? And the most important ques-
tion of all: How can the process of creating this work of art reflect the society 
we actually want to create?12 

12 The Industry, “Sweet Land Workshop,” The Industry (blog), May 21, 2019, https://thein-
dustryla.org/sweet-land-workshop/.

Fig. 1 Sharon Chohi Kim as Wiindigo. Still frame from the video trailer of Sweet Land by The Industry.

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I find coyotes and the Wiindigo monster the true heroes of this operatic 
quest for a new relationality. They are removed from stereotypes, realism, 
and conventions. They manage to reach beyond the history books and the 
documentaries; they are activists and poets at the same time. They fight 
metaphorically for their voice, a different voice that can also sing, together. 
They are the brave “others” who can make a difference, at least in this opera.

Jelena Novak is a researcher at CESEM (Center for Study of the Sociology and Aesthetics 
of Music), FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. Her fields of interests are modern and 
contemporary music, recent opera and musical theatre, music and new media, capitalist re-
alism, voice studies in the age of posthuman and feminine identities in music. Exploring 
those fields, she works as a researcher, lecturer, writer, dramaturg, music critic, editor and 
curator focused on bringing together critical theory and contemporary art. She has been a 
founding committee member of the Society for Minimalist Music and a founding member 
of the editorial collective TkH [Walking Theory]. In 2013 she won the Thurnau Award for 
Music-Theatre Studies from the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Her most recent books 
are Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body (2015), Operofilia (2018) and Einstein on the Beach: 
Opera beyond Drama (co-edited with John Richardson, 2019). She is currently preparing 
the co-edited volume (with Kris Dittel) Singing beyond Human. Her latest achievement as a 
dramaturg is: LIMBO, an Opera (Tel Aviv, 2019) and that same year she co-curated (with K. 
Dittel) the exhibition “Post-Opera” at TENT, Rotterdam.


