‘You Us We All’ by Shara Worden, Andrew Ondrejczak & BOX at Holland Festival 2014 Amsterdam. Photo courtesy the artists.
The more I think about this opera, the more wonderful it seems as an artwork, and the more amazing that we had the opportunity to experience it. The commissioning European entities, the Brooklyn Academy of Music–and Carolina Performing Arts.
The music is haunting me, and the images remain vivid. Despite being a kind of Vanitas painting set in zany motion, it was so alive.
From my review published on cvnc.org:
I found You Us We All mesmerizing and almost unbearably moving, with its hard truths laid so gently down before us. Its inclusive view of humanity, its deft activation of abstraction, its wordplay, its mature use of computer imaging, its implacable insistence on bodily reality, its equalizing of the intellectual and the sensual, its great beauty of sound, and its pink balloons of love combined to make this experimental opera a catharsis, and a wonder and a delight.
The Five Points Star 