Patrick Eakin Young on Triptych

I have long been interested in reverse engineering as a model for a creative process: to take a work, a text, or an art form, reduce it to its component parts, analyze how it functions, and then attempt to build a new work, text, or art form that accomplishes the same thing, but does not duplicate the original.

Triptych was created through such a process. At its root, it is the deconstruction of a single opera—Giacomo Puccini’s Il Trittico­­—but it is also an attempt on many levels to disassemble, analyze, and reconstruct opera itself.

This piece was created in a very short amount of time, over a series of workshops, through a process that involved experimentation and improvisation, in collaboration with the composers and the librettists. It is a method that is modelled on dance and contemporary theatre companies, and one that has at its centre a willingness to embrace uncertainty.

Broken down to its most basic level, Puccini’s Il Trittico can be described as three short operas: a tragedy, a comedy, and a piece about nuns. Our Triptych is the same. But in the process of devising new works from this foundation, we have travelled through feminist theory and performance art, 19th century American architecture, language lessons from the 1950s, reimagined liturgies, cut-and-paste big band recordings, memory, the internet, and the loneliness of modern life.

In this piece we use found texts, old recordings, historical documents and imagined narratives as our subject matter, libretto, and sometimes score. This questioning of form and confusion of authorship is reflected in the set design by visual artist Gavin Turk. Gavin’s work deals with issues of authenticity and identity, and the “myth” of the artist. He is known for his trompe l’oeil painted bronzes of everyday objects and appropriations of other artists’ motifs. Playing with his own interest in fakes and replicas, he has set this performance within a “fake” Gavin Turk exhibition, filled with replicas of his own work.

Deconstructing, analyzing, copying, reimagining—these are not only methods of plagiarism, but creative tools as well. Opera itself was born out of an attempt by renaissance humanists to replicate Greek tragedy. Their reconstructions created an entirely new art form. If we apply the same process to opera now, who knows what kind of fascinating results will arise? Like a styrofoam cup disguised as a bronze disguised as a styrofoam cup, let’s reconstruct the reconstruction and see what we get.