Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – In the uncompromising pursuit of authenticity: Eisa Davis’ THE ESSENTIALISN’T and Robert Ashely’s CELESTIAL EXCURSIONS

• By drediman
• September 16, 2025
• No Comments

This past weekend, I was able to sink my teeth into a pair of experimental music theater pieces in pursuit to authentically articulate nuanced aspects of the human experience. As per usual, read on for my thoughts on these fascinating and uncompromising out-of-the-box creations.

THE ESSENTIALISN’T
HERE
Through September 28

Opening up HERE’s fall season is the downtown performance incubator’s world premiere presentation of Eisa Davis’s The Essentialisn’t (RECOMMENDED), an artful theatrical song cycle that asks the probing question whether the act of performing is in its own way an imprisonment for Black entertainers (Davis plainly asks, “Can you be Black and not perform?”). The 80-minute performance art piece — which is mounted in association with The Movement Theatre Company — offers no succinct nor easy answers but instead poetically interrogates the query from various vantage points, at times to contradictory effect. Water plays a central role in the piece, acting as a cleansing and liberating agent, disassociating cultural techniques from the body in order to objectively reflect on the dilemma (at the top of the performance, Davis emerges from a tank full of water and later returns to fully submerge herself in it). Although the show meanders a bit and not all of it may make complete sense, I applaud its uncompromising stance, finding solace in the show’s meditative ritualism and rich symbolism. Theatergoers may recognize Davis from the original cast of Stew’s 2006 musical Passing Strange (as well as being a collaborator on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s concept album The Warriors). As in Stew’s 2006 show, she possesses a rich, calming voice and maintains a generous, wise stage presence. She’s dignity and beauty personified. Backing Davis are “The Sovereigns” — Princess Jacob and Jamella Cross — a pair of cherub-like youths who sing with angelic tone and carry themselves with grace and precocious poise. Throughout, they serve as Davis’s disciples and a sounding board for her searching musings.

CELESTIAL EXCURSIONS
Roulette
Closed

Then over at Roulette in Brooklyn, I caught the final performance of the return of Celestial Excursions (RECOMMENDED), Robert Ashley’s dreamy, playful, and ultimately compassionate avant-garde opera with an unconventional premise — to manifest the state of being old, particularly in terms of the elderly’s speech and thinking patterns, which are often unruly and incoherent. Despite the work’s overarching quirkiness, the piece achieves a hypnotic state through its steady flow of intersecting narratives and by giving the impression of disembodied voices floating aimlessly in the ether. The net effect is a sonic tapestry formed by a seemingly random collection of remembrances, nightmares, regrets, fears, and songs on the radio. As typical of Ashley operas, the rhythmic score — comprised of three acts and performed sans intermissions — exists at the intersection between spoken word and traditional song and is accompanied by a pre-recorded electronic orchestra. For Celestial Excursions — which was first performed at The Kitchen in 2003 — a cast of five is required to activate Ashley’s singular vision (throughout, the performers are seated behind a desk, singing and speaking into their own microphones). Thankfully, the revival was performed with impressive technical prowess and precise cadence by members of the “new brand” — Gelsey Bell, Kayleigh Butcher, Mario Diaz-Moresco, Brian MC Corkle, and Paul Pinto — a group of talented singers who, since 2016, have dedicated themselves to performing Ashely’s works, in the process channeling the rigor and distinctive aesthetic of the composer’s original “band” of collaborators. Although the opera was written more than two decades ago, it remains structurally innovative and thematically bold.