Mario Telò:

Maybe we can just talk about your general thoughts and your general impressions of seeing this performance of …(Iphigenia).

At Howard University, the only historically Black university in the United States with a Classics department, campus leaders decided in 2021 to eliminate that department after a three-year review of its academic programs. The response was vehement and swift, with students, faculty, and alumni condemning the decision as a case of administrative overreach. The philosopher Cornel West described the divestment from the Classics curriculum as a ‘spiritual catastrophe’ for the institution. Few missed the irony that Toni Morrison, one of Howard's most celebrated alumni, studied with Frank Snowden, Jr., a renowned professor of Classics, and received a ‘minor’ in that field as an undergraduate; or that the central inspiration for Morrison's Beloved was a fugitive slave woman named Margaret Garner who became known as ‘the modern Medea’ for having decided (in 1856, in flight from her master's agents) that it was better to kill her children than see them returned to enslavement in the American South. Others would point to the long tradition of transformational Black thinkers who admit to having been inspired by the classics, including Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is difficult to watch …(Iphigenia) and not think of abolition. To bear witness to Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding's opera is to experience the collision of classical and jazz idiom, the interruption of violent cycles, the emergence of liberation. Yet as much as …(Iphigenia) is a story of abolition, it is also a story about the staying powers of sacrifice and myth. Winds that turn the wheel of oppression are the same blessed winds that propel ships out to sea. Furthermore, the interruption of inexhaustible, parodic virgin sacrifice is framed by the bodily toil that results from rejecting that cycle. We might easily observe …(Iphigenia) as a retelling that moves myth forward, into the future. The last Iphigenia, of the Open Tense (performed by esperanza spalding), ultimately refuses her seemingly inevitable fate, retching out the words that might otherwise temporarily satisfy the whims of the bloodthirsty men around her. …(Iphigenia), however, is a piece ‘at war with itself’. Perhaps in this way more than any other, it is able to communicate the tenseless timelessness of the Black radical tradition. The cyclicity of oppressive violence is the same cyclicity that dissolves artifice, the same cyclicity that produces solidarity as a substrate.

‘Music is mass and it builds things’, esperanza spalding said she dreamt one night as she struggled with the libretto for …(Iphigenia), the phrase forming the turning point for the work. The oneiric formulation extends the material nature of music, granting sonic vibrations architectural abilities. This paradox approaches a paradoxical aim at the heart of Frank Gehry's building practice: to imbue solid matter with motion. His free-form sculptural designs, instanced most famously in the spectacular designs for the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, have granted him global auteur status. However, the set design for …(Iphigenia) offered and continues to offer him an attractive state of unknowing, one in which emerges the possibility of non-directed constructive form.

Early in the first act of Shorter and spalding's …(Iphigenia) the carousing band of Argive soldiers cum frat boys dumps the body of a deer stage left, close to the audience. A spotlight is trained onto the carcass, and there it remains: as the bodies of Iphigenias pile up alongside it through Act I; as the Iphigenias are revivified and we enter a new conceptual plane in Act II; as the mythic plot reconvenes in Act III; and during the curtain call, when the cast, musicians, and crew come onto the stage to take their bows. At one point, I half expected the ensemble to smile wide and extend their arms towards the rigid body of the deer, inviting audience applause for their fellow performer, still, even now, fixed motionless under a spotlight.

Like Euripides’ play, Iphigenia at Aulis, the Shorter-spalding opera is open-ended and unresolved—partly because, again like the Euripidean version, it is multi-authored and somewhat incomplete. Euripides’ play, in the form(s) in which we possess it, presents at least three different endings, none of which is likely to come from Euripides’ own pen; other authors certainly contributed to various sections of the final scene. Euripides himself also had a musical collaborator, Cephisophon, who presumably continued to work on finishing and rehearsing the play after Euripides himself died, up to its first production. The Shorter-spalding opera, …(Iphigenia), likewise is the result of collaboration—often at a distance, and over several years—between musicians, writers, and designers (as Morales describes in her Introduction to this issue). At least six different authors altogether are identified in the program notes as contributing to the libretto, including the three poets whose lyrics were sung in Act II: Ganavya Doraiswamy, Joy Harjo, and Safiya Sinclair, respectively South Asian, Native American, and Jamaican. As for the opera's ending—the most notoriously uncertain aspect of this myth ever since archaic Greek times—esperanza spalding states in her notes on the opera that the process of creating an ending has been one of constant adjustment, wholesale rewriting, and improvisation, and that even through the rehearsals the singers themselves onstage, as well as the instrumental jazz trio, were still trying out new things, right up to and including perhaps the performance that we saw. (I attended the Berkeley performance on February 12, 2022.) The opera is, we may say, unfinished.

As an anthropologist, I am no stranger to the importance of myth to both meaning-making and as connective tissue with ancestral forms of knowledge. Claude Levi-Strauss is synonymous with the study of myth in twentieth-century anthropology. Zora Neale Hurston, however, has only recently been reclaimed by the discipline of anthropology, even though she was both a student of Franz Boas—the so-called ‘father’ of American anthropology—and she conducted tireless ethnographic research in the US South and Caribbean for over forty years, focused on what she preferred to call folklore, or lies. Hurston is an important lens through which to interpret …(Iphigenia) because Hurston's corpus catalogues the mythocentrism of African American and African diasporic culture. She created a mind-bendingly prolific body of both fiction and non-fiction work centered on myth and provides an important context for the connections being drawn in this opera between jazz and Greek tragedy: that of sound.

Iphigenia is the archetype of virgin sacrifice, a daughter dispossessed of her voice and body, killed for the gods, the father and the nation. From Euripides to Racine, from Gluck's opera to Cacoyannis's film, across time and media, Iphigenia has embodied the paradox of a voice that emerges as the condition of its annihilation. Hers is a choiceless choice: to consent to her sacrifice with varying degrees of fervor and possible rationales, to submit to an economy the terms of which are set by capricious gods, a reckless king, a pusillanimous father and a masculine military baying for blood. The daughter embraces her death so that the father's reputation remains intact, so that no more lives are lost in vain, so that the army can set sail. Iphigenia's sacrifice is a familiar cultural script regarding the transactional value of girls under patriarchy. Her sacrifice is the price of entry into a ‘hero-industrial complex’ that positions her simultaneously as protagonist and victim, savior and scapegoat.

…(Iphigenia) is built around an obscenity of (a) death, the death(s) of Iphigenia, whose body, at first seemingly alive, then rendered a corpse (several times over), and later appearing as a revenant in humanimal form (human but horned), occupies center stage for the full length of the performance. The scene is all too familiar. It is multiply told and retold in Greek mythology and tragedy through a string of variations, and it recalls a further proliferation of violences done to women in our own time. With each telling, Iphigenia is murdered again and again.

Iphigenia is not one. She is multiple. Central to Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding's opera titled …(Iphigenia) is the layered multiplicity of Iphigenias who are sacrificed/martyred, time and again, for the cause of Grecian nation building. Unlike other stage and filmic renditions of the opera that tell Iphigenia's story once, emphasizing the psychic drama of what it means to give one's blood for the ideological cause of nation building, …(Iphigenia) repeats the story piling up bodies on stage. Dressed in pink, red, white, silver, fur and more (Fig. 4), Iphigenia's body becomes multiple, becomes collective, becomes sisterhood, becomes interspecies.

Speaking by phone to a critic several weeks before the premiere of …(Iphigenia), director Lileana Blain-Cruz announced: ‘esperanza challenges the absurdity of this myth… Men must kill a young woman so they can go to war. Why repeat what does not work? What does it feel like to be a young woman thrust into this absurd story?’ In fact, the Wayne Shorter-esperanza spalding production exaggerates the myth's absurdity, minimizing the pain of Agamemnon and flattening the familial calamity at the heart of Euripides’ play until it becomes a conflict between aggressive men and suffering women. It is easy to judge these toxic male warriors with their Wagnerian helmets and hints of white nationalism. It is also easy for the female members of the audience to identify with Iphigenia, and with the series of Iphigenias whom the warriors put to death. Yet, at our moment, Shorter and spalding's reimagining of a myth about the sacrifice of a virgin to power a fleet invites us to consider our own implication in an urgent calamity, one in which we are both warrior and virgin.

The opera begins with a burst of applause as the conductor enters the pit. He bends, bowing to the audience, then turns, lifts his arms, and the music begins. From here, for the remainder of the performance, we can barely see him (although one of us will turn around in the third act to watch him on the video screens that hang behind us). Or, the opera begins before that with an usher in the audience, asking people what they know of the myth, and warning them that this story will not end well.

The title of Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding's opera—not simply Iphigenia, but rather …(Iphigenia)—invites reflection on its programmatic punctuation: Iphigenia dwells between parentheses, supplemented by an ellipsis.

Helen Morales:

We were blown away by the production of …(Iphigenia) that we saw in Berkeley and have had so many discussions after it since and it's great to be able to talk to you about it, so thank you.

the stage-set for each sacrifice-cycle is disassembled.