Behind “El Gallo: Opera for Actors”

Claudio Valdés Kuri is trying to explain the meaning of the Spanish word gallo. The term directly translates as rooster. “But in Mexico we also use this word to describe the noise teenagers make when they are changing the voice,” the 45-year-old says, his deep, heavily accented voice bursting into comically squeaky titters. “This sound would be the worst thing to happen to a singer during a concert, no? It would cause a lot of problems.”

Performance anxiety is the driving theme of Kuri’s new production, El Gallo: Opera for Actors, which was written in collaboration with British composer Paul Barker, a former expat in Mexico and Kuri’s erstwhile neighbor. “Paul and I talked for many years about working together,” the Mexico City native says over the phone from his home in the city’s Art Deco quarter. “But we only started on this project when he moved back home to London and was very far away!”

Kuri, a prestigious theater director in Latin America, founded his 15-member company, Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes, in 1997. As stage director, he is able to combine his three major passions—art, theater and music—in headstrong productions. El Gallo is an experimental fusion of opera and theater that explores the creative process of a music director and five singers, as they prepare for a music competition. To capture the raw spontaneity of the behind-the-scenes creative process, the piece first asks the audience to watch the “rehearsal” section of the show before moving to the traditional seats of the theater and attending the formal “performance.” But it is all performance.

“What we’re showing to the audience is the complexity of the artistic process,” Kuri explains. “The rehearsal gets more difficult, and the relationships between the actors become strained. There’s tension and jealousy. It finally ends in metaphoric lucha libre—you know, Mexican wrestling—in the imagination of one of the actresses.”

The entire work is also sung in an imagined language devised by Barker. Kuri describes it as a synthesis of various parlances from around the world. “You do not necessarily need to understand the words when these people are sharing their inner feelings,” Kuri says. “You are just feeling the energy, no? This language has logic—it’s not just made-up words. The actors might be saying very personal things. But the audience won’t know.”

Barker will fly into town to conduct this U.S. premiere at the MCA, featuring eight members of Chicago’s MAVerick Ensemble. “This is not traditional opera,” MAVerick’s cofounder and artistic director William Jason Raynovich writes via e-mail. “It’s a modern take on ‘classical’ with theatrical sensibility. While all of the actors are not trained, professional opera singers, their performances are authentic and intimate windows into the soul of a performer onstage. The music is operatic in spirit, but not in technique.”

Performances in Seattle, England, Portugal and Brazil—all of which will feature local musicians—are slated for later this year. Raynovich believes the piece can be understood on a universal level: “El Gallo provides a window into the pain, joy, stress, epiphanies, relief and anger that all people, not only performers, experience in life.” Kuri sees the piece tickling a more specific American fancy—reality television. “I think this play is very suitable for the United States,” he says. “All these themes about auditions and competitions are very near to you.” So, basically, it’s not that far from American Idol, spoken in tongues.

El Gallo: Opera for Actors comes to the MCA Stage Wednesday 27 through May 1.