LA Times Essential Arts: ‘Sweet Land’ picks apart the myth of America in opera

Yuval Sharon, left, founder of the opera company the Industry, with Cannupa Hanska Luger, at a rehearsal for “Sweet Land.”
Yuval Sharon, left, founder of the opera company the Industry, with Cannupa Hanska Luger. The pair are co-directing “Sweet Land.”
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

February 29, 2020
by Carolina A. Miranda
Visit original LA Times article

Greetings, humans. It’s Carolina A. Miranda, staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, back from gallivanting around bad shopping malls on the East Coast. Herewith, your weekly dose of culture news:

Split narratives

An audience arrives to see an opera and is divided, led to one of two spaces where they see different versions of a similar story. At the end, they come back together, grounded in realities that intersect but remain far apart. That is “Sweet Land,” the new opera from the Industry, the company founded by Yuval Sharon. For this unusual opera, which opens this weekend, Sharon teamed up with a co-director, multidisciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger, along with composers Raven Chacon and Du Yun and librettists Aja Couchois Duncan and Douglas Kearney, to collaboratively imagine a story of “Hosts” and “Arrivals” that echoes U.S. colonial history.

The Times’ Jessica Gelt had the good fortune to hang out with this crew at a recent rehearsal. She writes: “Toss out everything you thought you knew about the land you are currently occupying.”

The Industry’s “Sweet Land”
A scene from the Industry’s new opera “Sweet Land.”
(Casey Kringlen)
[….]