I took a public art walking tour around Denver recently. The stuff is everywhere. I only saw a tiny fraction of the 350-plus pieces that the City of Denver has sponsored thanks to a special fund that allocates one percent of the cost of all public construction projects to art. And I’m now on an active lookout for more such encounters as I make my way around town.

The city has some iconic pieces, such as Lawrence Argent’s famous “I See What You Mean” (aka “The Blue Bear”), pictured here in butt view, that peers through the glass of the Convention Center, and the fiberglass and steel “Dancers” by Jonathan Borofsky, which can be seen grooving to a recorded soundtrack outside the Denver Performing Arts Center Complex.

What’s most interesting to me, though, are the pieces that go beyond the standard public art terrain of monolithic sculptures and WPA murals. On the two-hour walking tour I took with Denver Public Art Administrator Rudi Cerri, there were quite a few examples of pieces that go beyond the usual fare, helping to redefine the definition of what public art is and should be.

The city has commissioned several playful pieces from the sound artist Jim Green. These include “Soundwalk”, a series of recorded sounds like a dog barking and gurgling water installed under the ventilation grates of a sidewalk in downtown Denver, and the “Laughing Escalator,” which is what it’s called, and can be found in the Colorado Convention Center. These “humanized machines” catch the passerby unawares. They also make us pay attention to things we don’t normally pay attention to in our surroundings.

Some of the non-visual art offerings are performance-based and every bit as fleeting, which is strange to wrap your head around as most people tend to associate public art with permanence. I was intrigued to hear about Patrick Marold’s “Virga,” a light sculpture for which the City of Denver commissioned composer Morton Waller to write a 13-minute work for bagpipe ensemble built on a non-conventional scale. I went online to watch footage of the performance on Vimeo. Wish I could have been there in person.

Cerri is interested in continuing to explore more unconventional forms of public art, including live performances. I am looking forward to seeing what transpires on that front.

Of course, this opening up of the definition of “public art” begs many questions. One of the things that I’m intrigued by is what differentiates this “public art” from the “public art” created by the graffiti artist who paints a beautiful mural on the underside of a bridge, or the musician who performs a set in an urban park. It’s all public and it’s all art. The main difference is that one form is sanctioned and paid for — and the other isn’t.

PS I paid a visit to the Western Arts Federation (WESTAF) yesterday — a think tank based in Denver that fosters a bunch of interesting arts-related research studies, creates development programs for artists and builds software solutions for cultural institutions.  One of the cool projects they’re working on is The Public Art Archive, a repository for public art collections around the country. The Archive can be found online here.

 

 

On Saturday at the Vail International Dance Festival, I had the bizarre experience of watching a dance performance from two different perspectives at the same time.

Before the eyes of around 2,500 people packed into the Ford Amphitheatre and the lawn behind it, the celebrity urban dancer, Lil Buck, was performing one of his intricate Jookin pieces with the members of his dance crew.

The mostly white audience was going crazy for the lithe African-American performers as they glided on pointe in their sneakers across the floor like ballerinas and pretzeled their bodies like the tiny Asian contortionists that populate Cirque du Soleil shows around the world. The crowd whooped and cheered the dancers’ moves and seemed to find the whole spectacle extremely entertaining.

Balanced against this wildly ecstatic reaction was a completely contrasting view of what was taking place on stage. As I watched, my friend, Erika Randall (a smart and sassy choreographer, dancer and University of Colorado at Boulder professor)  was whispering her interpretation of Lil Buck and his crew’s performance in my left ear.

Erika explained that the appropriation of the moves (and music) of classical ballet by Lil Buck was a way of undercutting traditionally white culture, “like a modern day Minstrel show,” she said. And far from coming across as clever party tricks, the bodily contortions, especially the dislocated arm socket moves of one of the dancers, conveyed powerful images reminiscent of lynching.

I was forced to look again.

To Erika, the piece was far from circus-like entertainment. It was political satire, made all the more pungent by the fact that the meaning of the dance was lost on probably 99% of the audience, including myself until Erika shared her thoughts.

 

It’s quite common these days for orchestras to perform concerts in collaboration with indie rock performers. Classical music organizations consider these kinds of events to be a great way to bring in a younger crowd. For the rock musicians, performing with a symphony creates a certain caché.

It occurred to me not for the first time over the weekend while attending a Colorado Music Festival concert at the warm-sounding Chautauqua Auditorium in Boulder that featured the singer-songwriter Joshua Radin, that these endeavors, though laudable, are probably more satisfying for the indie musician(s) involved than for the orchestral musicians. I’ve had the same feeling at previous events organized along similar lines, for example at a San Francisco Symphony concert a while back in which Rufus Wainwright performed his settings of Shakespeare sonnets at the piano, accompanied by the “house band.”

Radin, an attractive guy in his early 40s with a sweet, soulful voice and a gentle way of strumming a guitar, played a selection of his songs backed up by the orchestra. Some were more interesting than others. I loved the musician’s lyrical “Lullaby for Will” but was less enamored of a nurdling song about one night stands.

While Radin chatted with the audience about his life and artistic inspiration and played his music, the orchestra looked utterly bored. The basic issue was that the instrumentalists were underused. Trundling their way through unchallenging arrangements behind an indie rocker wasn’t inspiring to these top of the line musicians. It was the same thing at the San Francisco concert mentioned above.

I spoke with a member of the violin section the following evening — I was coincidentally at a dinner party with her. She verified my impression, adding that she had tried her best to look engaged but that it was hard work. She also said that a concert the orchestra had performed recently featuring arrangements of Radiohead songs was much more satisfying for her and her fellow musicians. I can believe it: Not only is Radiohead’s material much more musically complex than Radin’s sincere-simple songs, but the orchestra also got to play Brahms that night.

I’m not saying that orchestras shouldn’t continue to explore interesting collaborations with artists from contrasting walks of musical life. I’m just advocating for more fertile, ballsy music, intriguingly arranged to give the musicians something to chew on. Otherwise, what you end up with is essentially open mike night with a very expensive backup band.

PS It would be remiss of me not to mention the excellent “classically-trained garage band” Time for Three, who also performed with the Colorado Music Festival orchestra on Saturday evening. I couldn’t get enough of this group’s virtuosic sound and  dynamic energy. When the trio played, the members of the orchestra emerged from their lethargy and the audience went wild. I wish that the trio had performed a little more, and Radin — who appeared at Chautauqua as a “special guest” at Time for Three’s behest — a little less. The balance would have been more satisfying.

My attempt to get to grips with the cultural scene of a whole new city is scattershot to say the least. I had delusions of being methodical about it before I came to Denver, but that notion has gone completely out of the window since my attention is — happily — being pulled in many different directions. I’ve decided instead to simply follow my nose.

Here are three things I did this weekend which I want to talk about briefly.

The first is the two and a half hour cycling tour of downtown Denver that I undertook on Sunday morning. I’ve been missing my bike (which is still in transit with all my other stuff from San Francisco. Grrrr.) So getting the lay of the land on two wheels over the weekend turned out to be both a relief and a joyful experience, even though the weather was cold and rainy for the first time since I arrived in town two weeks ago. The tour was led by a knowledgeable young schoolteacher named Jim. The operator was Bikealope. Besides Jim and myself, there was just one other 30-something couple from Chicago on the ride. We covered just under 10 miles and a lot of the city’s history and central geography. I loved learning about the founding of the city during the Gold Rush years and its roots as two different towns which eventually fused into one. Some of the city’s arts institutions were represented on our journey — The Denver Art Museum and Museum, Molly Brown House, and Museum of Contemporary Art. But the tour was more weighted towards sports fans. We visited three out of  four of Denver’s pro sports arenas and lingered at each one for quite a while. This certainly put perspective on things for me as an arts person. A lot needs to be done to connect this region’s passion for sports with the wealth of its arts scene.

On Friday night, I took myself off to Bluebird, a gorgeous ex-Vaudeville theatre in downtown Denver, to experience Dessa, who is fast becoming one of my favorite singers. The Minneapolis rapper, singer and spoken word poet has a rich, earthen voice and a soft-spoken presence on stage which belies the power of her poetry. The show at Bluebird brought together a mixture of soulful R&B-spiced ballads and more hard-hitting hip-hop songs. Dessa’s band was tight but I wished that the vocalist  had taken more ownership of her superstar front woman role and not shared the stage so eagerly and equally with her keyboard/backup singer. The combination of voices and energies between the two women didn’t quite work for me, and the harmonies quickly became repetitive, though the impulse to duet shows generosity and works OK if used sparingly.

Sunday evening presented a very different kind of musical experience. One of my colleagues, Monika Vischer, who heads up CPR’s classical music station, invited me to hear the Denver University Lamont School of Music‘s Fourth Annual Carillon Summer recital series. The concert, which was attended by roughly a hundred people dotted on the Denver University Campus lawns and stadium bleachers, was performed by Lee Cobb, who presently serves as the carillonneur at a church in Clearwater, Florida. Cobb’s repertoire ranged from Italian art songs of the 17th and 18th centuries to Jerome Kern’s “All The Things You Are” to a piece by the 20th century composer Kozaburo Hirai.  I’d never been to a carillon concert before. It reminded me somewhat of the sound bath that I had in a yurt in Joshua Tree Park a couple of years ago. The main difference, however, was that whereas the Joshua Tree experience was contained between walls, causing the bells to vibrate in a very intense way through the body, the open air carillon concert was a gentler physical experience. The vibrations still caused my blood cells to fizz, but my ears were not so strongly overwhelmed. I think it would be fun to experience this music as part of a larger whole, perhaps as an element of the musical lineup of a gospel choir or indie rock band.

Denver is a fabulous place to be on a warm summer night.

I spent quite a bit of time over the weekend exploring the Underground Music Showcase in Denver. What impresses me about this annual music festival, which takes place in the slightly grungy bordering on trendy Baker neighborhood in downtown Denver, is the eclecticism of the offerings. As I wandered around from bar to outdoor stage to street corner to cafe along South Broadway, I heard at least five different musical styles, from transvestite rock involving backing singers dressed in pleather bikinis and pizza slices to skiffle-laced country ballads performed by guys in rhinestone-studded shirts and cowboy boots.

The experience made me yearn for the early days of South By Southwest, when a ticket didn’t cost hundreds of dollars and when you could stumble across all kinds of unusual new bands without having to elbow your way through thick crowds reeking of barbecue and cheap beer. Well, the beer at UMS was still cheap, but the crowds were beautifully manageable.

 

Since arriving in Denver, I’ve been mulling over ideas, both serious and silly, for Colorado Public Radio’s multimedia arts coverage. There’s been plenty of sober brainstorming in the office with Post-It notes, but some of the most interesting ideas have come from tipsy mind-meandering after-hours with friends.

After rum-laced drinks at a Cuban restaurant in the museum district the other night, my friends Becca and Luke and I had a discussion about whether a series of crafty “How To”  guides might lend themselves to the seemingly-unsuitable medium of the radio.

Becca, a young lawyer with peripatetic passions and a penchant for all things public radio, surprised and delighted me by emailing over her version of one of the ideas we came up with – “How To Make A Papier-Mâché Mask” — yesterday. She obligingly gave permission for me to post her step-by-step instructions online. Here goes:

How to Make a Papier-Mâché Mask in 15 Easy Steps

Step One:  Ask yourself why you want to make a papier-mâché mask.  It is imperative that you do not skip this step, unless you want a mask that reveals more than it hides.

 Step Two:  Visualize your mask.  Most experts agree this is the hardest step.  You must decide between a mask that is fierce, regal, otherworldly, haggard, searing, luminous, glaring, hollow-mouthed, stretched, elliptical, or some combination of these.

 Step Three:  Do not tell about what you have seen.  This is the moment of greatest temptation in the entire mask-making process.  The bridge from visualization to realization is woven from thin reeds slung in casual loops around the stalks of young trees.  It is liable to go down in a moderately strong wind.  The people who see your face every day believe they know what it looks like.

 Step Four:  Assemble your materials.  You will need (1) one large bucket or basin, preferably in a pale white or blue; (2) cool water; (3) flour or other starch; (4) paper strips; (5) Vaseline; (6) a flat surface on which to lie; (7) a pillow in case the surface on which you are lying is hard; (8) a friend or neighbor to place the strips over your eyes once you have closed them and to read to you an editorial from Sunday’s paper or turn on the radio while the mask hardens; and (9) one thick bolt of afternoon.  You may also want to have some snacks on hand.

 Step Five:  Make your mask.

 Step Six:  Decorate your mask with leaves, shells, feathers, coins that went out of circulation in the 1980s, ribbons, magazine clippings, nail polish, rust, and twine.

 Steps Seven through Ten:  Look at your mask.  Note the various things wrong with it.  Decide if you would like to start over.  It may help to put the mask in a closet or other out-of-the-way place while you make this decision.

 Step Eleven:  Hum “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” while you unload the dishwasher.

 Step Twelve:  Try your mask on in front of a mirror.  Turn your head slightly to one side, keeping your chin down.  Observe yourself from the corner of your eye.  Imagine you are a stranger, seeing yourself at a party for the first time.  Dig your fingers into your hair and raise a mane around your mask, then pull back sharply.  Turn your head to the other side.  Sigh.

 Step Thirteen:  Fix a snack.  I would recommend something with cottage cheese.

 Step Fourteen:  Take your mask out on the balcony where it is sunny.  Watch the shadows of clouds as they move across the face of your mask.  Listen to the city shake out its long legs and fold them into the grass.

 Step Fifteen:  Start over.

Alex Schweder describes the “The Hotel Rehearsal,” an art installation he created for Denver’s Biennial of the Americas, as “the only hotel that travels vertically and horizontally at the same time.”

That a hotel should travel in any direction gives pause for thought. That this one not only travels across two dimensions but also has to be inflated like an air mattress to function, makes it one of the most fantastical pieces of architectural whimsy that I’ve yet encountered.

Last night, I had the pleasure of obtaining a tour of the Hotel from Schweder, a genial-lanky East coast architect dressed in hipster black who’s currently in the middle of a PhD program at Queen’s College, Cambridge.

I won’t forget the experience in a hurry.

The Hotel is made mostly out of transparent and white plastic and is about the size of a broom cupboard. It sits atop a white minivan, which was parked last night in a lot in downtown Denver on Welton Street.

Schweder opened up the back of the van, pulled a black zipper, and after taking off our shoes, we climbed up into the hotel “lobby”. The lobby turned out to be a tiny but perfectly-formed bathroom complete with a working toilet and shower. Then the architect unzipped another zipper and we entered the main space of the hotel room. Surrounding us was a lounge complete with inflatable couch, shag-pile rug, magazines and a glamorous view of the parking lot below.

At the flip of a switch, the hydraulic system in the van underneath the hotel whirred into motion and we ascended some feet higher into the heavens. The parking lot and people in it suddenly shrank and more of the city came into view.

Schweder took a seat on the lounger and pulled a soft drink from a compartment on a plastic wall. He explained that new developments, like hotels, are taking over more parking lots and other generally “disliked” spaces in the city. As such, the Hotel Rehearsal  provides a prototype for — or, rehearses — the “hotelification” of urban space in Denver. (“Hotelification” is my word, not the artist’s; I’m struggling to find a way to describe what this ingenious, theatrical work is about.)

After we got up from the couch, Schweder flipped a switch and the lounger we had been sitting on folded in on itself and turned over to reveal a bed. The artist’s bedsheets were still crumpled on top of it. “I slept here last night,” Schweder told me. “And did you shower here too?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, as he pulled up a set of white drapes to demonstrate how the Hotel converts fully from daytime to nighttime attire.

I didn’t get to spend the night in the Hotel Rehearsal, though I would very much like to. The installation is going to remain in Denver until September 2 so there’s time to see if I can wangle a sleepover there. Not that the prospect is easy or affordable. I gather that the Biennial folks are a little reticent about letting people spend the night in the Hotel for security reasons. But it can be done, as long as potential overnighters are prepared to pay something in the region of $20,000-$40,000 for the experience. The insurance fees run high. I wonder if the cost includes room service?

 

 

I am taking a slow, four-day roadtrip with my friend Zach Warren to Denver to start my new life with Colorado Public Radio, where I’ll be launching and leading the organization’s brand new arts bureau.

While en route, I want to briefly mention a quite lovely Americana band that I stumbled across at The Fire Creek Coffee Company and music venue in Flagstaff Arizona last night. (I’m in Santa Fe, New Mexico as I write.) The photo to the left was taken by Zach, who’s slightly obsessed with the Hipstamatic app on his iPhone.

The band, Blue Eyed Tomorrow, consists of Ky Brown (guitar, harmonica, banjo, vocals), Robert Tusso (bass, vocals) and Angela Horvath (fiddle, guitar, vocals). For last night’s show, BET had a special guest with them on stage who played a mean slide guitar. I wish I had thought to find out his name.

It seemed like BET had never performed the country, folk and folk rock songs with their guest before. The atmosphere seemed a little strained on stage, as the band and their guest worked to synchronize with each other. The musicians all looked very serious up there on stage and mostly engaged with each other rather than with the audience.

Yet I loved the music they played. It was full of pathos and beautiful solos. Both Brown and Horvath have mesmerizing voices. As the set span on, the musicians seemed to relax a little. The set was over way too soon. I hope I manage to catch up with this band again at some point in the future. I wonder if they ever perform in Colorado?

Besides working on my book, packing up my apartment, and cleaning my oven in preparation for the off to Colorado Thursday next, I’ve managed to squeeze in a few Bay Area cultural adventures over the past few days.
California Shakespeare Theater’s production of Romeo & Juliet at the Bruns Amphitheater is like a small megaphone: Minimalist in scale with only seven actors performing multiple roles on the wooden slats of an otherwise bare stage, director Shana Cooper’s take on the classic love tragedy enables the language, passion and violence of the drama to blaze forth uncluttered and pure. Bare bones productions of Shakespeare play can be a dicey prospect. Without brilliant acting and blocking, they can easily come across as theatrically lacking; theatergoers are all too inclined to look at a small cast and empty stage and figure that these staging decisions are less to do with aesthetics than strapped finances. But in this case, thanks to an energetic ensemble cast and judicious textual editing, Cooper brings us a Romeo & Juliet that feels intense, personal and youthful.
The Richard Diebenkorn exhibition at the De Young Museum is the perfect thing for someone like me who’s in transition to see. The exhibition focuses on the “middle period” of the American artist’s life –- the years he spent living in Berkeley, California from 1953-1966 after which time he moved to Los Angeles. Not only did Diebenkorn range around geographically, reacting to the light and energy of his surroundings in his work, but he also made major aesethetic transitions as he changed locales . His early career was spent working in abstract expressionism. In Berkeley, he gravitated towards creating more representative art. When he got to LA, his work became more abstract once again. As I wondered around the De Young’s exhibition, I marveled at the way in which the painter builds colors on a canvas. Colors are not simply red, pink, blue or green in a Diebenkorn work, but every inch vibrates with dozens of different hues within the same color category. The energy of the palette belies the stillness and intimacy of the figures that populate many of the artist’s paintings as well as the clearly delineated geometrical spaces that commonly divide up the canvases. Motion and stasis are in direct competition with one another and this is what makes the act of beholding a Diebenkorn painting so thrilling. Seeing these works up close made me even more excited about my own big transition later this week.
Finally, I should mention that monologist Josh Kornbluth’s Sea of Reeds is opening later this week produced by the Shotgun Players at Ashby Stage. The management kindly let me check out a preview performance over the weekend as I won’t be here when the play actually opens. In return I agreed not to review the show, in which the monologist attempts to bring together two disparate interests in his life – oboe playing and Judaism. Being an oboe playing Jew myself, I have long had a vested interest in Kornbluth’s project and was in fact involved as a consultant during the process. As such, I wouldn’t be able to review the show anyway, regardless of whether I could see it on or after opening. So I won’t offer up any opinion about it, except to say that the making of oboe reeds and the parting of the Red Sea are quite challenging concepts to unite and spin out into 90 minutes of live performance and I look forward to reading what Bay Area audiences and critics make of it.

One of the more surreal evenings I’ve spent in a good long while happened on Saturday when I went to Central City, CO, an old gold mining town in the Front Range turned gambling hotspot. I was in town to experience opening night of The Central City Opera‘s 2103 season, which includes The Barber of Seville (which I saw), Ned Rorem’s Our Town, and Show Boat (in Denver.)

The Central City Opera is a fascinating institution, not least because its perched in the hills at high altitude, which must be tough on the singers. Built in 1878 by Welsh and Cornish miners, the building houses the country’s fifth oldest opera company. In its glory days at the turn of the last century, it hosted P T Barnum’s Circus and Buffalo Bill. Lillian Gish performed there in the 1930s after the 550-seat house had been restored following years of disrepair.

Judging by this one production I’ve witnessed first hand, the company is doing high-quality work these days: The Central City Opera’s production of The Barber of Seville brims with energy. I particularly love mezzo soprano Jennifer Rivera’s no nonsense Rosina. Instead of cowering in front of the feckless bully Dr Bartolo, she maintains a haughty dignity that’s in stark contrast to the cage-like circumstances in which she’s entrapped. My favorite voice of the production belongs to the tenor David Portillo as the Count. Portillo’s voice glistens at the top and combines lightness and gravity in equal measure. Daniel Belcher’s gives the best acting performance in my opinion. Belcher doesn’t have as much facility in his voice as some baritones I’ve heard in the role. He scratchily sprechgasanged the famous title song of Act 1 — I imagine the fast passages are particularly challenging at altitude. But the performer has an endearing, clown-like energy about him and you can’t help being taken in by his broad smile and charisma. The orchestra played tightly under the baton of conductor John Baril. The piano sounded a little jarring for the recitative passages, however. And the chorus did a wonderful, robust acting and singing job.

What made my time in Central City particularly memorable, however, was the weird incongruity between what was going on at the opera house on Saturday night versus the atmosphere in the rest of the small town. The casinos — the only places in Central City to get an evening meal — were mostly pretty empty. A few people in shorts and t-shirts stared blankly at slot machines or sat at poker tables. (I wish that there were one decent place to get a meal before the show during the Opera season. But this sadly isn’t the case. It’s pizza or chicken nuggets or nothing. The Opera company should work on that.)

Up the hill at the opera house, though, the scene was very different. At around 5pm, there were roughly a hundred people dressed in their finery dancing waltzes to classical string music in the street.

It turned out that I had stumbled upon Central City’s annual debutante coming out parade. Dozens of sweet sixteens dressed in matching peacock blue ball gowns wobbled about on their heels on the street cavorting with their pimply young beaus in white tuxedos. The older generation, equally gussied up, stood about and danced. It wasn’t performance art, but it was certainly a performance. Don’t you love it when a show is more than what happens under a theater’s roof? On Saturday, the  whole of Central City felt like it was part of an unusual, mixed-up rite.

P.S. If my iPhone hadn’t run out of juice, I would have taken pictures. Instead, for the purposes of this blogpost, a similar shot of the cotillion from another year will have to suffice to suggest the pre-performance atmosphere. (You can tell that the image isn’t from 2013 because the  girls are sporting red rather than blue frocks.)

Art museums generally go two ways with their textile-oriented exhibitions, neither of which are particularly satisfactory.

Either they stage the big, flashy haute couture shows of clothing by A-list fashion designers, or they mount folksy displays of appliqué and macramé created by unheralded craftspeople from downtrodden communities. The former draw huge crowds but are essentially all glitz and no soul, and the latter shine a light on often fascinating “outsider” art but are usually over-earnest and unimaginatively presented.

Contrastingly, The Denver Art Museum’s fabric-focused effort, Spun: Adventures in Textiles, manages to make apparel dance. Literally.

I attended the museum’s monthly late night event on Friday and left feeling utterly inspired by the way in which the institution makes textile art seem exciting and relevant without resorting to the vacuous world of catwalks or the overly-sincere one of patchwork quilts.

A cornerstone of Spun is a show devoted to the work of Nick Cave, an awe-inspiring American artist who works at the intersection of costume, sculpture, performance art and video montage. Cave is most famous for creating a series of massive, colorful “Sound Suits” out of thin strands of stringy fabric which transform the human body into a being that’s part Wookie, part shaman and part toilet brush.

Cave’s work is on display in several rooms in the museum as video installations and a gallery full of his most mind boggling costume creations. On Friday night in front of a packed auditorium, Cave engaged three professional dance companies from Colorado and a number of auditioned community members (including a museum security guard) to perform dances wearing  Sound Suits or interacting with other large-scale fabric props. A live band provided a brazen, heavily improvised soundtrack for the dancers. Videographers weaved in and out of the choreography, creating a version of the event, screened on one of the walls on a large-scale as well as projected via live web-stream on the Internet, that allowed audiences to examine what was going on from several different angles.

It was a euphoric hour and a half that engaged all of the senses – I was sitting in the front row and was able to smell the dancers’ sweat and touch the soft, woolly strands of a horse-like Sound Suit that two dancers wore towards the end of the show.

The Suits are so vibrant, funny and full of life that it’s hard to believe that Cave first started experimenting with the idea in reaction to the violent, racial hatred-inspired beating of Rodney King in 1991. The Suits have evolved since then, becoming more extravagant. But even as the dancers involved in the live presentation burst and shimmied around the stage in an avalanche of carnivalesque color and movement, the primal, crazed energy at times took a sinister and exhausting turn. There is undoubtedly a violent streak in this work, as gorgeous and hilarious as it seems on the surface.

Mark Adamo’s new work currently receiving its world premiere run at The San Francisco Opera, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, is all about excavation. The metaphor of digging runs throughout the musically fecund work both explicitly and implicitly, reminding us in our age so obsessed with shiny surfaces, to look below for meaning.

The story, which seeks to reinstate the controversial and oft-derided Biblical figure of Mary Magdalene as a key player rather than marginal nobody in the life of Jesus, is framed by an archaeological dig.

As a group of archaeologists at the site sing about their desire to discover deeper truths about the Biblical past through finding evidence that supports new truths that lie embedded in the earth, so Adamo’s powerful musical score, coupled by nuanced and moving performances from the cast — the American mezzo soprano Sasha Cooke is particularly mesmerizing in the title role — serve to take us beyond the merely shallow.

If Adamo’s extensive scholarship on Mary Magdalene makes the narrative feel a little bloated and over-mined (scholarly footnotes even appear in the libretto), the composer’s straight-to-the-heart use of language and engulfing musical sonoroties force the listener to become deeply involved in the characters’ stories.

The fact that some of the arias feel like show tunes, complete with soaring melodies and lots of sentiment, easily draws listeners in. But there’s nothing easy or superficial about Adamo’s writing. The use of instrumentation creates constantly surprising timbres and the restless harmonic landscape undercuts the fluidity of the lines to make us understand that there’s more going on in each scene than surface texture.