MASS MoCA premieres opera on immigrant experience

[Faye Nazarchuck and Maya Venkatesh]

The artwork by Daniela Rivera that doubles as a stage. (Photo courtesy of Kim Donica.)

Sitting on the floor around a tilted, fresco-tiled stage, a group of Mass MoCA visitors listened to the haunting first notes of what would be an immersive audio-visual experience. Over the course of just 20 minutes, three performers delivered a sweeping operatic libretto in Spanish and English on the immigrant experience, their voices resonating off of the stage and the walls of the third-floor gallery.

The Oct. 10 performance, the premiere of Hacia Cuando: An Opera, was a collaboration between Chilean-American visual artist Daniela Rivera, Argentinian experimental luthier Javier Bustos, and Los Angeles-based composer Jenny Olivia Johnson. By transcending conventional staging and auditory techniques, the project offers a fresh yet timeless interpretation of the immigrant experience.

The opera is a companion piece to Rivera’s visual installation of the same name. The installation, which doubles as a stage, draws on Rivera’s own experience immigrating to the United States from Chile in 2002. The piece consists of a tilted platform with a backdrop unevenly divided into blue and brown, intended to resemble a horizon. Rivera created the slanted blue portion of the backdrop using plaster.

The asymmetry, she said, is meant to capture the immigrant experience. “We all have our own horizon line and our perspective, and in a way, I started thinking about finding home in the fact that I’m carrying that horizon line,” Rivera said during a post-show talk. “I started understanding that the stability of the horizon line for immigration doesn’t make sense because you are hoping to arrive to a home, but you never really do.”

“I started sort of tilting the horizon line constantly as a mode of thinking about displacement and the impossibility of ever arriving in that process of migration,” she added.

The platform itself, made of tiles painted in the fresco technique, pays homage to an art form that has been practiced for centuries. The technique involves applying water-based pigments onto softened limestone, embedding the pigment in the surface as it cures.

According to Rivera, this process also resembles the immigrant experience. “[The limestone] has incorporated all of these other materials,” she said. “So it goes back to its original state, but it has integrated so many different things… That is the comparison to us, in a way. That’s what we do. We integrate. And that is what migration does. It integrates.”

Rivera’s installation is interactive, encouraging visitors to walk without shoes across the platform. “My hope was to kind of lay down history at the floor for people to walk on… and to create a space where we are all participants,” she said.

Though the opera includes a classical string arrangement, its pièce de résistance is a custom harpsichord. Bustos built the instrument just a week prior to the performance, using one of the stage’s fresco tiles to tie together the auditory and visual elements of the work. Bustos explained how the harpsichord interacts with the other elements of the performance to produce a unique sonic experience. “The floor is an instrument,” Bustos said in an interview with the Record. “Then this instrument is connected with the door, and it makes songs to the floor and the wall and the speakers.”

The artists first composed the libretto — the opera’s text — over Zoom as an “exquisite corpse,” a collaborative poetic exercise in which each contributor sees only the last line written. The lyrics focus on the cyclical, ageless nature of migration. “The entire installation, is, at its core, not only about this notion that we as humans or as immigrants migrate, but that we ourselves are informed by those surroundings and we are informing the surroundings at the same time,” Rivera explained.

The human experience is amplified by the performers’ voices, which are recorded and replayed in real time to create an echoing sensation that makes the audience feel as though they are truly immersed in the art. Dressed in plain white jumpsuits, without clear ages and genders, the creators intended the performers to act as stand-ins for humanity as a whole. Rivera explained how she wanted the piece to inspire a sense of universality and connection in audience members. “We’re always everywhere with everybody we love,” Rivera said. “I want to produce that feeling.”

While the performance was a one-off, Rivera’s accompanying visual installation, Hacia Cuando (To When), is available to view at MASS MoCA through June 2027.