Here’s An Opera About A Very Unusual Topic
It’s not every day you hear about an anti-opera opera about a bad shroom trip. But vocalist, actor, writer, performance artist and storyteller-of-all-trades Joseph Keckler pictured) is going where few classically trained opera singers have gone before, prying the sometimes stale medium from its traditional roots and plunking it into the contemporary WiFi connected landscape.
“I Am An Opera” began as an eight minute aria, which combined the grandiose formality of the medium with a storyline that one might casually recount to his buddies over brunch. In the anti-operatic opera, Keckler recalls eating too many mushrooms and experiencing a night of horrifying, though humorous in retrospect, hallucinations. There is schizophrenic skipping between present and memory, reality and hallucination, high and low art, resulting in a transcendent in-betweenness that brings Keckler into a performance category all his own.
