[ad_1]
At the pinnacle of San Cha’s opera Inebria me, an apparition in white emerged: Esperanza (Kyle Kidd), angelic and blood-smeared, clutching a red rose. Dolores (San Cha, the show’s librettist and composer) gazed at the spirit, her expression a blend of awe and longing, the unraveling newlywed finally alight with something beyond grief. Her encounter with Esperanza sparked a radical, gender-free religious fervor, one of ecstasy and drama, detached from self-flagellation or duty.
Inebria me took Winningstad Theatre to church on September 5 and 6—the three-act opera was one of the Time-Based Art Festival’s most striking works in years. San Cha, a Mexican American artist whose stage name blends the Spanish words san (saint) and sancha (mistress), adapted her 2019 album La Luz de Esperanza into a Spanish-language opera that queers the telenovela genre’s heteronormativity.
At first, the plot seemed deceptively simple: A working-class femme marries a wealthy man, but feels trapped by the role she’s expected to play. But an unexpected encounter frees Dolores from those constraints, awakening her queerness and spiritual agency. Led by a trans and queer cast and crew of color, the opera draws from the melodrama of telenovelas but finds wholly original terrain, inspired by San Cha’s strict Catholic upbringing, queer self-discovery, and experiences in the Bay Area drag scene.
Set in a “haunted hacienda,” Inebria me‘s stage was shrouded in fog and dominated by a black, angled cross. On either side, chiptune pioneer Leeni Ramadan played warped synth while Darian Donovan Thomas bowed a violin, both dressed in nuns’ habits.
The opera opened with Rosa (Carolina Oliveros) praying to the veiled Madre Jutta (Lu Coy), who loomed from a second-level balcony. Kneeling in guilt, she confessed envy for her sister Dolores, whose impending wedding provoked some seriously dark emotions in Rosa and her other sister, Azalea (stefa marin alarcon).
Entering in white taffeta and a trailing veil, Dolores at first exuded bliss. Yet even amid the rapture of her wedding, resignation flickered across her face, conveying a sickly sense that she was now ensnared in her husband-to-be Salvador’s grasp. He appeared as a distorted, disembodied voice—its source left unnamed in the show program—his form reduced to a sinister red outline projected against the stage backdrop. Amid twinkling synth, Madre Jutta sealed the marriage, and Dolores’ sisters looked on bitterly.
After the ceremony, Dolores’ sense of entrapment deepened. Lifting her wedding veil, she prayed to the moon, singing: “Cover me in your cloak… I can’t stand this thirst. Don’t let me dry up.”
Dolores’ sisters dismissed her distress, deeming her hysterical and reinforcing an internalized misogyny embedded in the narrative. But Dolores’ awakening soon arrived in the form of Esperanza, whose spectral presence filled her with rapture. In one of the most absorbing and vulnerable acts I’ve witnessed on stage, Dolores drank from Esperanza’s breast. “Inebria me,” she cried—make me drunk.
Against a chilly wave of arpeggiated electronics and droning violin, Salvador demanded Dolores be chained for her indiscretions. Azalea—secretly in love with Salvador and filled with jealous rage—readily obliged, while Rosa, taking pity on Dolores, helped her escape. Frenzied and delirious, she darted through the audience like a hunted animal.
The opera’s final act saw a tragic yet cathartic climax, perfectly aligned with San Cha’s fascinations with telenovela melodrama and religious mystics like Saint Teresa of Ávila. Dolores shed her corset for a loose white robe in Inebria me’s closing scene, ascending the cross to join Esperanza at its head.
“Feast on me,” she sang, signaling a sensual shift toward liberation.
Can’t get enough TBA 2025? Read our picks for the festival.
[ad_2]
Lindsay Costello
Source link