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The Kitchen

New York

Raúl de Nieves

The Fool

Feb 09, 2017

Feb 11, 2017

The Kitchen presents Raúl De Nieves and Colin Self’s The Fool. Constructed as a chamber opera scored in four acts for chorus and string ensemble, The Fool is an allegorical journey drawing an ante-narrative around time, beauty, communion and mortality.

The Fool explores the story of the trickster, an archetypal character who breaks rules and disobeys convention as a means to educate, liberate and construct positive social change. In accordance with their artistic and cultural behavior, the trickster figure exhibits gender and form variability, comedically violating principles of social and natural order. Starring Colin Self as the Old Woman, Raúl De Nieves as The Fool and the Dog, Alexandra Drewchin as the Child, and Mehron Abdollmohammadi as the Mother. The production is organized by Matthew Lyons.

The Fool shifts the semantics of “opera” into a meditation on the dynamic and revelatory construction of collective practice. Through their collaboration, Colin and Raúl have become aware of their shared ability to engage affect as a tool for creating action and raising consciousness through the orchestration of voice, sound and bodies. They both dedicate their work toward unseen possibilities and translate unseen, abstract social possibilities into composition. As queer, gender non-conforming individuals, they have developed pop modalities to create discourse around these interests, bridging communities to explore consciousness studies, liturgical ceremonies, and queer theory with sound, image, and language. Ultimately, their trans-disciplinary practices exhibit the power of expanding possibility, beauty, and subversion to engender an empowering and transformative change in the viewer.