The Hunt

Creating The Hunt

Tim Munro spoke with composer Kate Soper and director Ashley Kelly Tata about The Hunt, exploring their creative process, interdisciplinary art-making, writing a work that is uncommonly relevant, and avoiding making “Sex and the City meets Margaret Atwood.” These are edited excerpts from their conversations.

Tracing beginnings

Kate Soper: The beginnings of a project are usually clear to me. There is the time before the idea. Then there is a moment, some kind of stumbling onto something. And after that, the idea is always present—always in the back of my mind.

When I was in Paris for a conference in 2017 I visited these amazing tapestries—the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries—in the Cluny Museum. They were mesmerizing, these giant woven works which took up an entire room. The experience really stayed with me.

The next summer, I had three or four days open and wanted to write something. I thought of the tapestries, and wrote a story about a unicorn hunt from the point of view of the “Lady.” I made fake diary entries about this weird gig she had: to catch the unicorn, an animal that was only tamed in the presence of “pure maidens.”

Nothing to stop you

Soper: The three-dimensional work of music-theatre comes naturally to me. It’s what I daydream about. This theatrical awareness has really shaped how I think about being a composer. It’s been a part of my work since I can remember.

There are things I can’t get to the bottom of with music alone, so then text comes in, and then my performer persona sometimes gets into the music somehow.

I didn’t study singing until my late twenties, and I never formally studied writing. I often feel like I’m not quite measuring up to where I want to be as a performer, as a composer, or as a writer separately, but in combining all three elements, I feel I’ve managed to say something meaningful, something I’m proud of.

I do feel like I’m sort of an…amateur? Or an autodidact? But I think it’s common for artists to have a realization at some point in their careers: that actually there’s nothing stopping you from doing whatever you want.

Corporeal experience

Ashley Kelly Tata: I have always been interested in theatricalizing music—or musicalizing theater—in taking the artistic elements and putting them on the same plane, rather than prioritizing the text, say.

The performers are often musicians in a work that is asking them to execute an action in time and space, similar to what an actor would do. They can be exquisite musicians, but are not always trained in acting. There is something about this kind of work that is very different from conventional work with a linear narrative structure. During the process we explore how the different elements of production interact with each other, physically. That informs the shape of the work.

Putting all of the elements on a more equal playing field changes the experience for an audience. The performers stop relying so much on a kind of read-across-the-page, left-to-right, right/wrong, brain-centered mode of “getting it.” They start to perceive the message in their body more—it’s a much more corporeal experience.

Ukulele opera

Soper: After I wrote the original story, based on the legend of the virgin and the unicorn, the pandemic happened. And I started making YouTube videos to stay sane. One series drew on elements from the short story I’d written about the virgin-for-hire trying to catch the unicorn, and each video in the series was bookended by three-part madrigals.

My dear friend and frequent collaborator, soprano Brett Umlauf, saw the videos, and asked if she could sing the madrigals. I said, “Well, you know, if you have a couple of friends, I can make it into a twenty-minute song cycle.” So Brett brought together two of her friends to perform a short cycle. One happened to also play violin, and Brett herself had been learning ukulele. And the rest is history!

The “pandemic-ness” felt weirdly relevant. I would walk the empty Smith College campus, into my empty building, and teach over zoom, then buy a loaf of bread and go home. I felt like a medieval monk. And then I’m writing this, like, “ukulele opera” set in ambiguously medieval times.

I sang and performed a lot of the material as I worked on it. Recording vocal demos for my own works is very helpful—it has become part of my process, helping me to shape the whole thing. And it is efficient to hear things before you make someone else learn it.

I wrote the ukulele parts on the ukulele. I get very excited about teaching myself something or learning something new. At Smith College, they have a bunch of ukuleles you can rent out of the library. So that part of the process was really just like, “Oh, this chord seems fun.” It’s the only time that I have learned how to play an instrument in order to compose for it.

What…is it?

Tata: We have been trained in a very siloed way. I think that’s changing a little bit—a lot of institutions are experimenting with that in education. There’s more of an understanding of interdisciplinarity among my students.

And most of my artist colleagues seem to be hyphenated makers. My feeling is that there is no other way to make work. It’s the Gesamtkunstwerk, but you don’t have to have appropriate a German word for this thing that is just how some people naturally express whatever their medium is.

But labels and categories help sell things. Without the right category how will it be marketed? Sometimes it seems that not knowing what to call it can get in the way of letting people experience and enjoy it. Sure it’s a chamber opera. But there’s a lot of text in it, not the sprechen kind. It’s a musical - but the music is coming out of the new classical music tradition.

Creative conversation

Tata: Anne Bogart is the head of the directing program at Columbia University School of the Arts. I was putting music in all this stuff that I was doing at Columbia. I would ask my friends to compose things, or make my own scores for things and edit things together for anything that I was staging.

It was clear to Anne that I was very interested in something like opera. Anne recommended that Kate approach me about working on Ipsa Dixit.

Soper: Ipsa is a weird piece—I don’t know if it’s an opera…it’s not really chamber music…it’s a little theatrical. I needed help making it intelligible to an audience.

Tata: An imagined conventional director/writer relationship can be: The libretto is done. The play is done. They hand it to the director, and the director says to the writer, “I’m going to go rehearse this,” and then, “see you at opening!” Or you’re working on pieces that have outlived the writer and you don’t have any conversations. Except in your head. Which I do all the time.

What has been really great about working with living composers is that you can have a conversation with them as the piece is being developed. I try to hear the piece in a lot of different iterations, and then just keep asking questions about it, continuing to create the piece through a dialogue.

For instance, The Hunt’s ending continues to evolve. Right now I’m putting a pin in the ending of some works in development. I often ask that we put a pin in the ending. Let’s see what it’s like when we’re a little bit closer to production. What is the time going to tell us right then? For instance, Roe v. Wade was overturned during our workshop last year. That event absolutely changed an ending that wouldn’t have been appropriate in a post-Roe world.

Hard to ignore

Soper: I’m drawn to very old texts, often because they seem to be trying to say something about our current situation. But The Hunt is relevant to our current situation in a way that I haven’t really written before. I think this happens to many creators—you might have been working in abstraction for years but suddenly feel compelled to write about something going on politically because you can’t stop thinking about it.

I’ve been teaching for the past ten years at Smith College, which is an all-women’s school, constantly interacting with 18-to-21-year-olds, many of whom are queer or trans. They’re just trying to get their degree and go live their lives, but I feel worried about how they’re going to be treated. Worried about how hostile the world is becoming to them.

In other, more abstract pieces, it has been a little easier to focus on the nuanced complexities of the human condition. Those are still important for me and Ash to think about, but it has been hard not be infected with dread as I’m having ideas about The Hunt. A lot of what’s happening in the news is way worse than the dystopian scenario of this opera.

Here we all are

Tata: As the design team has come together it has happened that all the lead designers are female presenting or non/binary. This was not intentional. But it remains so rare and especially in conversation with the material it’s something that people want to point out. These are excellent designers. I’ve worked with all of them in some way or another over the years. And that they’re able to be in the same room together is a thrill. A lot of them didn’t know each other. Which is the other great joy of directing. At our first design meeting at my place, they had no idea what the presentation of this room would be. We had this meeting, and they were all like, “Oh, my gosh! Here we all are!”

Soper: There are three sopranos in The Hunt. I was interested in the idea of having different kinds of expressions of gender. One of the characters is a non-binary character.

“Sex and the City meets Margaret Atwood”

Tata: The Hunt is more like a conventional theater piece, with characters that have motivations and circumstances. That is quite different than the work I’ve done with Kate before. In previous works, I have had to create some of these elements, to think about what the relationship is between the bodies on stage

Soper: It is probably the least abstract thing I’ve made. So in her work as director, Ash is pulling back into more abstraction. Otherwise the opera might be a little bit too like “Sex and the City meets Margaret Atwood.”

What is opera?

Tata: There is something unique about the abstraction of music. In contrast, a lot of mainstream theater can feel very concrete and literal. In “opera” you experiment with what it is to have these two things sort of uneasily fit together.

I was having a conversation with a theatre person who was looking at foraying into opera. And he was like, “I mean, but…why do they sing?” For me, as soon as they start singing, it’s not reality. And that is okay. We create a world that exists on its own and has its own rules. We have the opportunity to create a logic that is as ephemeral as the performance. For some reason, as soon as they sing that makes it okay.

Tim Munro is a Brisbane-based, triple-Grammy-winning musician. He is currently Associate Professor of Music at the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University.

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