Barzakh and art as resistance

Just after noon on November 6th, 2024, I beeped myself into the Ghent opera house and trudged up a flight of stairs with my head lowered, trying to hide my red eyes and puffy face.

The previous day’s piano dress rehearsal had gone very well. Later, we’d had a farewell dinner for Amandine, our rehearsal pianist whose role in the production ended that day. It’s an unusually friendly group of colleagues here, and our conversation over frites and fragrant Belgian beers had ranged from the project to our personal lives to politics—specifically what was at stake in that day’s US election. (I’m the only American here, but no one could avoid thinking about it.)

I put myself to bed early, woke in the middle of the night, and checked the results. Frantic anxiety came first, then numb shock. Eventually, when it seemed the unthinkable had become the inevitable, grief closed over me like a silent black wave.

I wept alone in my chilly apartment as the sun rose over Ghent: for the planet; for those who have been tricked into hate and those who inhabit it willingly; for those all over the world who have already suffered and died as a result of our ruthlessly capitalist, racist, misogynistic political culture; for everyone who will in the future; for the Harris campaign that did what it could to push back against the brazen distortion of reality and sick revenge fantasies favored by the other side, and lost.

Finally I forced myself to shower, eat, and go to work, unsure how I would get through the day. On the agenda: a meeting to discuss staging notes after the piano dress, then a Sitzprobe.

As I walked into the room, someone asked me how I was. My lips tensed as I tried to suppress feeling, but it was no use, and tears came again. There was sympathy and chagrin all around, plus a cold dose of European dissociation (which shouldn’t have been welcome in that moment, but bizarrely was): hey, it’s not just you, fascism is back everywhere! More colleagues arrived—people from Belgium, Germany, South Africa, Iran, Thailand, the Czech Republic. I tucked myself into a corner and tried to breathe deeply as the meeting began.

The opera, Barzakh, is a new work by composer Osama Abdulrasol, librettist/director Thomas Bellinck, and a number of people (names mostly withheld for legal reasons) who are currently incarcerated in the Belgian prison system. The documentary-style piece draws directly on these people’s words and experiences. The aim of the project isn’t to evaluate guilt or innocence, nor to dismiss the suffering of those who have been victimized by crime, but to examine without judgment the daily lives of incarcerated people and the effects of prison on them and their loved ones. It’s not a plot-driven jailbreak fantasy, like Fidelio or the Shawshank Redemption. Barzakh feels loose, real, unscripted, open-ended; I find it confronting, at times funny, often deeply sad, and full of spiky reactions to systemic failures. In my opinion, it mostly avoids the traps of preachiness and sentimentality, instead shining a light on the complex humanity of those society would prefer to forget—which is its own powerful political statement.

The staging meeting was calm, respectful, detail-oriented. By the end of the hour, my heart rate was down. I buzzed through a few vocal warmups in a dressing room, still feeling shaky but able to sing. I love a Sitzprobe—the first full rehearsal with the orchestra, which usually takes place after staging is complete and the opera is more or less on its feet. It allows singers to put aside stage concerns for a while, experiment with singing into and over the orchestral texture, focus on musical details, seek resonance and expressivity with the full palette of sound available, and find a balance of rhythmic discipline and freedom with the conductor. Although I was still overcome with sadness and distress from time to time, I could lean into the supremely confident leadership of conductor Zoe Zeniodi, whose work was a soothing gift. At the end of the day, just before I left the theater, I got another gift: Thomas the director passed on positive feedback from a woman called Sandra, one of the writers, who had watched the previous day’s piano dress.

—

I’d heard a lot about Sandra already. One of my big solo numbers in the piece, “Même sans langue,” is a setting of her story and material. It’s a cross between an aria and an edgy burlesque pop act, and Sandra’s vibrant personality jumps out from the music and words, defiant and joyful. (If you can’t come to a performance but would like to read her own account of her participation in the project, an interview is published here.) The number has been staged as a fantastical dream sequence: I sing and shimmy on a box in rainbow lamé bellbottoms and a sparkly bodysuit, haloed in smoke and light effects, showered with streamers, feeling more like Beyoncé than I probably ever will again.

Sandra’s legal situation is different than the other writers’, so she was allowed to attend a rehearsal—but I had no idea I would meet her by chance in a stairwell that Tuesday before the piano dress began. When we were introduced, I was struck momentarily speechless; she smiled, but seemed shy too. I pulled myself together and managed to tell her that I loved singing her song, and I hoped she enjoyed it. Later, when the house lights came up after the run, I scanned the theater. My eyes found Sandra in the first balcony—gesticulating, talking animatedly to the creative team, clearly bristling with opinions.

After the Sitz, Thomas the director shared her reactions with me. He said that she’d never seen an opera before and wasn’t at all sure what to expect. Maybe she would be bored, she thought, or fall asleep. Maybe it would be uncomfortable to watch singers and actors telling her story. Instead, she loved it. The piece felt true to her, real and respectful and full of life. About Même sans langue: she told Thomas that she could see herself in me as I sang her words onstage. I embodied her experience in a way that she liked and approved of.

Any other feedback I might get about this whole process (or in general, in life) seems pretty unimportant if I’ve managed this.

We’re now midway through the run of Barzakh. There are shows through the weekend, and it will be revived next season in Antwerp (and maybe elsewhere—I hope so, because I think it would appeal to a wide audience). It’s a pleasure and a challenge to perform—tiring, invigorating, moving and beautiful. The most positive reactions have come from people who know from first-hand experience what prison is like: incarcerated people who have watched video footage, prison guards who have come to see the show, bureaucrats who have lobbied on the legal side, social workers. It wasn’t just Sandra. A lot of people seem to think that the opera shows something true.

—

I’ve thought about all this in the context of the despairing political feeling at the moment. Lefty social media was a howlingly angry and sad place after the election, understandably. I’ve noticed a shift already: people are mobilizing. There is a focus on political resistance, of course—but also a focus on continuing to create, to strengthen relationships, to listen, to offer space and sanctuary where it’s needed, to platform individual stories, to encourage our common threads of humanity… to find ways of identifying and fighting the bots and the algorithms that are drowning our real lived experiences, the seemingly unstoppable power of weaponized misinformation.

I don’t know if art can change the world—or rather, I don’t know if any music I might make can realistically move the needle of progressive change. I’ve been asking myself heavy questions about this for the last year or two especially, as have almost all artists I know with a social conscience (which is most of us): what use is any of this? How can I have any impact at all when the forces arrayed against us are so powerful? Should I pivot to work that has more direct impact?

The election momentarily sharpened this sense of the stakes being too high, our tools being too weak.

Deep down, I do think storytelling has a place in the struggle. Music can be a direct and emotionally powerful way to tell important stories. It isn’t necessarily frivolous or merely escapist. Barzakh is a project I’m proud of—one that amplifies the voices of people whose stories have a hard time reaching us. Sandra, for example, exists at the intersection of many points of social invisibility: she is an immigrant, a woman, a person of color. Her community has been hamstrung by poverty and systemic failures of bureaucracy. She’s still here, though, and she’s still fighting. She’s given us words to sing and dance to, and she likes how her story is being told at Opera Vlaanderen. This matters to me. I hope it matters to others. I hope this weird art form can move the needle for her and her family, a little or a lot.

I hope that I can continue to find the strength and the outlets (or summon the strength, and make the outlets) to tell stories, to take care of people, to expand my own community and others’, to resist. I hope none of us become desensitized to beauty, and how it might change people’s minds about what’s important.

In those miserable hours of the Wednesday after the election, the only words that could bring me any comfort at all were by Rebecca Solnit. They will give me strength in the years to come, I’m sure of it—in musical work and in the rest of life. We’ll need all the help we can get.

“They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean that we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. … A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones.

“People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it’s sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.”