Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making in search of escape. This is the premise of composer David T. Little and poet Anne Waldman’s Black Lodge — a multilayered modern opera that draws on the complex mythologies surrounding artists like William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), David Lynch (Twin Peaks) and more. A journey into Hell and back, Black Lodge fuses industrial metal and punk with classical string quartet and opera to create something wildly vivid and new. With music and lyrics created first, then reverse-engineered by director Michael Joseph McQuilken into an episodic art film with flashes of technicolor body horror, Black Lodge harnesses a bristling energy that wowed a packed house at Opera Philadelphia’s Festival O22 when it premiered last October, in a production by Beth Morrison Projects. The debut merged elements of the film with live performance by Timur and the Dime Museum, prompting the New York Times’ Zachary Woolfe to remark how “…the music embraces Little’s longstanding interest in the grittier side of pop, the dark, pounding industrial ‘nu metal’ style of (I’ll date myself) Slipknot, Korn and System of a Down.”
