A bejeweled doe hides in the forest to protect itself. One day, the doe sees a drowning man who calls out for help. At great risk, the doe saves him. He promises not to reveal the animal’s whereabouts but — enticed by a bounty from the king — he betrays the doe, and a brutal fate is suggested.
The story of “The Nine Jewelled Deer,” a new opera that premiered last Sunday at the cultural center Luma Arles, in a co-production with the Aix-en-Provence Festival, is based on an ancient Jataka fable of India, exploring the Buddha’s incarnations in both human and animal forms.
It has had a decidedly modern rebirth. That tale piqued the interest of half a dozen luminaries in the literary, visual and performing arts, including the author Lauren Groff, the painter Julie Mehretu and the director Peter Sellars, inspiring them to join forces to produce a nonlinear, highly metaphorical adaptation. Their version explores acts of betrayal and exploitation — of the earth, and especially of women. In some cases, its creators said in interviews, it is based on their own experiences and the experiences of women they know.
Sellars, known for his avant-garde and socially engaged opera and theater productions, is the sole man among the core creative team. At the heart of the production is Ganavya Doraiswamy, a New York-born musician and performer who blends improvisational jazz with Indian storytelling traditions. Sivan Eldar composed the score and serves as musical director.
Groff, the three-time National Book Award finalist and best-selling author, wrote the libretto with Doraiswamy and served as a kind of amanuensis, not just to the writing but to the people involved. Co-starring onstage with Doraiswamy is Aruna Sairam, a renowned ambassador of Indian vocal tradition, particularly South Indian Carnatic music, known for its devotional qualities. Mehretu, who had worked with Sellars on several operas as well — also based on ancient Buddhist stories, she said — contributed her characteristically abstract paintings that form the foundation of the production design.
The opera will be restaged at the opera festival in Aix, roughly 50 miles away, on July 13, 14 and 16.
But the opera doesn’t end with the story of the doe. The second part of “The Nine Jewelled Deer” is largely set in a domestic space where Sairam plays a figure based on Doraiswamy’s grandmother, the South Indian musician Seetha Doraiswamy (1926-2013), who hosted a “kitchen orchestra” of amateur musicians and tended to troubled souls through music, particularly women who have been hurt by men.
“The world can hurt you,” Doraiswamy said in an interview, speaking quietly to protect her voice between rehearsals. “How can we choose love in that?”
It’s about “how one can meet the world after exploitation — the kindness, the mercy,” Groff added.
Doraiswamy called the tale of the doe a “Rorschach test,” noting various interpretations even within her family. (In her father’s telling “the deer stares at the king until the king is ashamed.”) “The truth changes to the capacity of the heart, and to the needs of the heart,” she said.
Mehretu, born in Ethiopia and based in New York, saw in a parable about the desire for a deer’s gems a parallel with “extractive destructive forces,” such as colonialism.
Sellars, for his part, underscored the sociopolitical message, writing in the program, “Drowning is a vivid image in our world today, where the cold floodwaters of cruelty, indifference, and greed are rising, followed by emotional floods of despair, disempowerment, helplessness, entrapment, and fear.” However, a series of conversations with the creative team over 72 hours as they prepared for the first public performance suggested that Sellars’s direction made space for the talents assembled, expanding the opera to bring their individual and collective experiences to the forefront of an ancient tale. Indeed, he said, “It’s all about the women.”
Doraiswamy said, “The goal from the start was an opera that felt intimate” — one that was “smaller, more focused, real,” rather than an operatic “spectacle.”
She, Eldar and Groff shared their own stories, including the sexual predation of women by teachers and fellow artists. Doraiswamy ultimately published an essay, written largely in 2021 while on a residency with Groff and Eldar, in which she cataloged situations that women in her world had faced, including a teacher “who molests his students and collaborators alike”; being invited to participate in a panel on gender-based abuse in classrooms alongside a professor who had abused a classmate; and being hit by a musician “who tried to punch his wife, but found my face instead as she hid behind me.”
Of such exploitation Doraiswamy wrote, “Silence is its midwife.”
The opera drew from many such stories, translated in the production into what Doraiswamy called a “grammar of care,” where hugs happen onstage.
As musicians, Doraiswamy and Eldar found a lot of common interests during the women’s residency, and when Doraiswamy mentioned that she had been working with Sellars, “Sivan’s face just completely lit up,” Groff recalled.
In short order, the core group formed to work on what would become “The Nine Jewelled Deer.” Eldar and Groff described the process as they walked along the Rhone early one morning to beat last week’s heat wave, competing as to who remembered which detail best and interrupting each other in good humor.
Eldar, Israeli-born and based in Paris, considered the project a personal education in discovering musical traditions, including Carnatic music and specifically Abhang, “which is the pilgrimage tradition that Ganavya comes from,” she recalled. Eldar found linguistic commonalities between Hebrew and Tamil, one of the many “beautiful parallels that I could enter through.”
Groff, who was working on her own books, and Doraiswamy, who had a busy tour schedule, wrote the libretto, sending it back and forth over roughly two years. The process was a welcome departure for Groff, whose working style as a book author is isolated. (She has also contributed to The New York Times.)
Groff estimated that they worked through more than a half dozen versions, which evolved through many workshops and left space for improvisation, musical and otherwise. Sellars had worked with Sairam, the South Indian vocalist, who made contributions of her own.
The first notes are played in the dark: a barely-there violin, slow and breathy like a muffled cry. The musicians come and go from the stage. The audio engineer is onstage too, and functions as a musician. Doraiswamy speaks directly to the audience several times. Her voice, both spoken and sung, is fragile, even when full of feeling.
Mehretu was among the last to join the creative team, but her paintings are key to the resonance of an otherwise spare production. Her work is “emotionally vibrating at such deep levels,” Sellars said, “you’re getting a time-based experience of painting.”
The set design centers artwork that she made for her recent exhibition in Sydney, adapted as enormous fabric scrims She worked with the lighting designer, James F. Ingalls, to create complex shifts in color and tone. (Sellars compared the effect to watching the light through a church window move across a Titian over the course of a day.) The paintings dance between opacity and translucence as singers and musicians exit and enter the “scenes” framed by her creations.
Mehretu’s abstract mark-making evokes many things at once: trees, jewels, veins, weapons, scars, the shapes that the wind weaves on water, the tiniest parts of the universe of which we are made and which connect us all.
As Doraiswamy prepared to take the stage before the first performance, she said, “The fact that this piece exists is proof that, with enough tenderness and commitment, we can find our way back home.”
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