Photo by Casey Kringlen for The Industry
If you were one of the many whose hope of viewing The Industry’s acclaimed new offering Sweet Land were felled by coronavirus, fret not. A version of the show is now available via streaming at The Industry website. It will now cost you just $15 to stream the opera that the LA Times’ own Mark Swed gushed about saying, “Sweet Land made such a huge impression that it has haunted me ever since.” Click here for the streaming version. Our original blog and audio feature are below.
The Arrivals wash up on the shore. They make contact with another civilization who they call the Hosts and from there the story splinters, starting as a procession through the LA State Park, Sweet Land becomes an opera that erases itself. It is done on two different tracks.
The company that created Invisible Cities and Hopscotch, now brings you a historical pageant that disrupts the dominant narrative of American identity.
Sweet Land is born from collaboration, it could not have been done by any one of the contributors alone. As our country could not have been built by any one group of people alone. The collaborators are: co-director Yuval Sharon, Founder and Artistic Director of The Industry and a 2017 MacArthur Fellow, and co-director Cannuupa Hanksa Lugar, a multidisciplinary artist. One Composer is Du Yun, a Chinese immigrant. Her last major opera won a Pulitzer Prize for music. The other composer is Raven Chacon, a recent Berlin Prize awardee, is originally from the Navajo Nation. One librettist is Douglas Kearney, a poet, and the other is Aja Couchois, a mixed-race Ojibwe writer.
Sweet Land is an invitation to reflect on the layered and silenced history of all colonized land. LA State Park has a history of eviction and exploitation of indigenous and immigrant peoples.
The Industry’s “Sunday Sessions” series supplements Sweet Land with free public events that further explore pertinent themes from the opera. They are partnered with The Autry Museum of the America West and IKAR for this programming. To learn more and RSVP, visit theindustryla.org. Sweet Land runs from February 29 through March 15 at LA State Historic Park.
