Los Angeles State Historic Park
World Premiere by The Industry
Los Angeles, California
February 29-March 15, 2020

Directors: Cannupa Hanska Luger and Yuval Sharon
Music: Du Yun and Raven Chacon
Libretto: Douglas Kearney and Aja Couchois Duncan

https://theindustryla.org/sweet-land-opera/

The latest piece from LA’s The Industry, Sweet Land brings together composers Raven Chacon and Du Yun, librettists Aja Couchois Duncan and Douglas Kearney, and co-directors Cannupa Hanska Luger and Yuval Sharon. Together, they spin separate but interconnected narratives that re-imagine the founding of America and westward expansion in order to make visible the violence and erasure of American history.

Sweet Land weaves together several narratives simultaneously, opening with the arrival of a settler-colonial civilization—titled the “Arrivals”—in the home of an indigenous civilization, known as the “Hosts.” From here, the audience diverges into two distinct paths: a feast and a train. The feast imagines the first meeting of the "Host" community and "Arrival" community. The train imagines the “Arrivals” embarking on an uncompromising westward expansion, and its violent effect on people, land, and animals. As the story unfolds, the audience is guided through the physical space of the park; as it progresses, past scenes are left behind and erased, emulating the erasure of dissent against dominant historical narratives. As the audience revisits past scenes, they find them replaced with narratives that are whitewashed, heavily biased, and bear little resemblance to the truthful events on which they are based.

Central to the project is the diversity of its voices. Composer Raven Chacon is from the Navajo Nation and advocates for indigenous composers and musicians; he is a recent recipient of the Berlin Prize. Du Yun is a Chinese immigrant whose recent work is rooted in a lack of understanding and empathy around immigration. Her opera Angel’s Bone, which explores human trafficking, won the Pulitzer Prize for music. 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 installation artist of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian, and Norwegian descent.

Photography by Casey Kringlen.