Timing changes

Now and then, Fenwick's Rasa is here, there, and everywhere

by Sean Glennon

RASA: A CHAMBER OPERA Book by Lynn Kremer and Shirish Korde. Based on Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee. Composed music by Shirish Korde. Directed by Lynn Kremer. Choreography by Daniel McCusker. Musical directing/conducting by Eric Culver. Assistant direction by Mark Schneider. Costumes by Kurt S. Hultgren. Set and lights by William J. Rynders and Mark Buchanan. With Elizabeth Keusch, Melissa Ciaccia, Elena Araoz, Ryan Kipp, Walter Fogarty, Tara Ahmed, Inma Heredia, Mark Schneider, Rob Connolly, the Da Capo Chamber Players, and Samir Chattarjee. At the Fenwick Theater, College of the Holy Cross, One College Square, Worcester through November 6.

Rasa, the experimental musical drama revived this week at Holy Cross, presents formidable challenges to its audiences, performers, creators, and reviewers alike. Its purposefully convoluted narrative, based on Indian-American writer Bharati Mukherjee's 1989 novel Jasmine, is eclipsed by questions of presentation, narrative form, and, above all, metaphysics.

At it's best, permanence can be a benevolent illusion that lets us live our lives unhindered by our fear of the unknown. At worst, it's a lie that lulls us into complacency and robs us of our motivation for personal transformation.

All but the most naive recognize the good and bad in the myth. We may try to ignore it, but the reality that existence is a state of constant transformation is unavoidable, proven by the very act of getting out of bed.

Linear time is no different -- or not much different: at best, an invention we use to organize, categorize, quantify our lives and experiences; at worst, a force that distracts us from our ability to reinvent who we were as effectively as "permanence" discourages us from reinventing who we are.

We buck time anyway, recreating our former selves daily. We change who we were more readily, and with greater ease, than we could ever change who we are.

Still, we refuse to give up our linear concept of time -- seldom so much as questioning it. We can move through time in one direction and consequently insist on believing it exists only as a straight line. To shake that belief, we'd need proof.

That proof exists -- perhaps not in science or philosophy, but certainly in art. Time has no hold on the work of Shakespeare, Picasso, Mozart, Thomas Pynchon, Nan Goldin, or the Artist (fka Prince). Dead artists' works are reinvented, re-imagined by every audience. Living artists' creations are re-envisioned by both their audiences and the artists themselves. Each new creation is, in part, a hand that reaches back and adjusts or reinvents entirely what came before it.

So when art explores transformation, it does more than simply belie the myths of permanence and time. It explores its own roots. And what it finds is a Jungian cycle of creation and re-creation.

LYNN KREMER and Shirish Korde are acutely aware of the cycle of creation. The collaborators, both Holy Cross faculty members, created the chamber opera Rasa eight years ago and have just finished remaking it for performance in New York and Worcester. That process led them find a new approach, adjusting their concept of what Rasa is, and what it was, to find its essence.

Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine chronicles the life of an Indian woman and the transformations she undergoes as she marries (at age 14), is widowed, and moves to America (to New York, then Iowa). Composer/co-librettist Korde and director/co-librettist Kremer, chose to mirror Mukherjee's novel and present the story in non-linear fashion, moving back and forth through time -- a technique that demonstrates the dual nature of transformation: proactive and retroactive by turns and according to the needs of the transformed.

Rasa reveals new complexities at every turn and on every level. Its protagonist, who goes by four names, is portrayed by three players -- one sings the part, another dances it, the third speaks it -- and, in the opera's opening scene, by a puppet. Its music combines Western and Eastern influences, calling on Vedic chant and European classical music, central Asian Tuva song and jazz, North Indian drum music and avant-garde minimalist composition. That music is provided both by live players -- chamber ensemble, soprano, and choir -- and on tape. The production relies on European and Asian theatrical conventions and combines such disparate elements modern and traditional dance (and here the complexity grows deeper still, as music and dance mesh oddly: a classical Javanese dance is set to a Balinese melody, etc.), a series of projections and Balinese-influenced shadow play.

And although it is based on Jasmine, Rasa calls heavily on the words of Indian novelist and poet Rabindranath Tagore and on the Sanskrit work The Kabir Book by the poet Magha (as translated into English by Robert Bly). Indeed, as Kremer noted in a recent conversation, Rasa, as she and Korde originally conceived it was changed significantly by the introduction of the poetry.

"The first draft of the script was 78 pages long," Kremer said. "We cut that down to 12 pages. And as we did that, the poems became more important and the novel became less important, except that the novel gives us the dramatic narrative."

The poems, which were incorporated into the work largely because Korde and Kremer couldn't come up with a singable version of the novel's text, lend definition to the opera. The borrowed elements of the novel and poems act as thematic mirrors, intensifying, concentrating and focusing the opera's prismatic artistic, stylistic, and cultural lights to create a dense singularity that bursts with promise and meaning. Rasa then connects to the viewer with an explosive power that shatters the whole, spreading its various elements across the breadth of perception.

THIS, OF COURSE, makes Rasa as challenging to observe as it is to produce. Indeed, Kremer said, presenting such a work requires faith in both the ability and willingness of the audience to participate in the experience (not actively, but interpretively).

"I believe that the audience is intelligent enough to take all of this in and make sense of it," she said. "There's always layering, but I hope that's engaging rather than confusing.

"To layer for the sake of layering -- that's not the point. I'm layering because this woman's life is complex -- as all of ours are -- and I want to capture that experience of life."

A voice on tape during the opera's first scene quotes the epigraph to Jasmine (taken from James Gleick's Chaos): "The new geometry mirrors a universe that is rough, not rounded, scabrous, not smooth. It is a geometry of the pitted, pocked, and broken up, the twisted, tangled and intertwined." This sets the stage for a series of scenes from a single life -- twisted, tangled, and intertwined.

Scene one incorporates two of the protagonist's four identities, Jasmine -- the woman she becomes after her marriage in India to Prakash, a man whose murder later prompts her move to America -- and Jyoti, the character as a child, represented only as a puppet with vague, undefined features. We next meet her as Jane, her fourth identity, the thoroughly American woman who lives in Sioux City, Iowa and loves a wheelchair-bound banker named Bud. Here we also see the first hint of her third identity, Jase (pronounced jazz), the new emigrant, born of trauma but ultimately free and in love with the spirit of New York City and the twisted path of perpetual transformation.

The opera unfolds in a series of scenes visiting and revisiting moments of transformation: Jyoti, at age seven, is told by a seer that she is destined to be widowed and exiled. Jasmine emerges in the warmth of a loving marriage to Prakash, is traumatized first by her husband's murder and again by a rapist when she arrives in America. Jase is born in the heart of Gotham, her new home, where new freedom, and a new love, Columbia professor Taylor Hayes, help her become a joyful woman embracing her Indian past and American future. Jase disappears after she encounters Prakash's murderer on a New York street and flees to Iowa, where Jane emerges. In deference to Bud, she becomes thoroughly American, leaving her native culture behind to put her latest love at ease. In the end, though, it is Jase, the strongest of her identities that conquers, taking her back to New York and Taylor Hayes.

Rasa presents those moments not as they happen but as they inform one another. Jasmine speaks the theme in juxtaposed lines of dialogue. "We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams," she offers, but only after noting, "My grandmother may have named me Jyoti, but . . . I was already Jane, a fighter and adapter."

Jane, who comes after Jyoti, Jasmine, and Jase, exists in Jyoti as re-imagined by Jasmine. The multiple, seemingly linear, incarnations of a single woman, are manifest each in the other even as the later J's seek to murder the earlier ones. And, in their failure to murder their earlier selves (as witnessed by the character's continuing re-examination and revisitation of the past), they manage simply to redefine their pasts, to reinvent who they were. Jyoti's transformations are defined by Jane, as Jane's are by Jasmine, as Jasmine's are by Jase.

IN THE PROCESS of reviving Rasa for this week's performances (the opera had not been performed since 1991), Kremer and Korde had to reinvent their work, to re-examine what it was in order to discover what it is.

At one level, that meant engaging in the same processes undertaken in the course of any revival. "It took a lot of dusting off the cobwebs and remembering what worked and what didn't work," Kremer said. "There are always things you wish you had done differently and this gave us a chance to see how we could make it better."

It also meant re-approaching the creative process. Since Kremer and Korde, who have collaborated on four works since Rasa (their first teaming), create through process, constructing in rehearsal, they had to rebuild much of the opera's production, absorbing the contributions of the current cast. They also gave costumer Kurt Hultgren and choreographer Daniel McCusker (both of whom worked on the original production) a chance to revisit their work.

The result is a piece that is equal parts the Rasa of 1991 and the Rasa of 1998, each of which, of course, informs the other. And it is the audience's response that finishes the puzzle. Rasa is a truly collaborative work that cannot be defined except by the participating observer.

"When a clay pitcher breaks/you see that the air inside is the same as the air outside," the opera's central poem says. Time, too, flows around the broken frame of permanence, the same on one side of a moment as on the next. And the artistic process works the same way, feeding on itself, breaking mythical boundaries and spurring the constant flow of human transformation. Rasa enlightens us by illustrating that the serpent will always swallow its tail. n

Rasa will be performed October 29 through November 6 at 8 p.m. at Holy Cross's Fenwick Theater. Tickets are $7. Call 793-2496.