In early July 2022 I did a tryout workshop back home in Iceland with a couple of friends who are classical singers. One of those singers, María Sól Silfurgól was interested in exploring the technique further and came to me with a request. She, along with a pianist and a trumpet player, were going to perform at an art festival in Iceland later in the summer. They were doing what they called a “mini opera”, performing 25 minutes of music from John Adams’s Nixon in China. María, under my guidance, wanted to approach the staging in the spirit of Chekhov’s technique. I agreed to this collaboration because I saw this as another opportunity to experience Chekhov in praxis and to gain further training in being a deliverer of the technique. I was also very happy to hear that Chekhov's technique is appealing to more singers than just myself.
María’s exhibition, the mini opera, was a very different portrayal of the opera from the full production it was originally meant to be. By borrowing specific parts from the opera and by portraying the American wife, based on Pat Nixon, the first lady of the United States from 1964 –1974 and other women. María wanted to pose questions about understanding modern industrialized and materialistic communities, the American dream and the individualist vision of the world.
I laid the ground of our work sessions by guiding us through a small informal meditation, focusing on the breath, paying attention to where it is going rather than trying to control it. This was to evoke the feeling of ease, the primary condition of a performance. We then tried out exercises 1 and 2 with the purpose of experiencing freedoom.
Me and María read the lyrics of Pat Nixon’s aria and discussed the meaning that hid behind the words.
“I don't daydream
and don't look back,
in this world
you can't count on luck.
I think what is to be
will be in spite of us,
I treat each day like Christmas.
Never have I cared for trivialities. Good Lord!
Trivial things are not for me…”1
I then had María speak the text while walking around the space. We wanted to portray the traditional conservative idea of a wife and to bring to light the ridiculousness of the expectations put on women. The idea that women are expected to be their husband’s caretakers no matter what, they are expected to stand by their husbands through thick and thin, to take care of their home, to take care of their world and not to have dreams of their own. We suddenly had an idea to make the text which speaks the values of a woman, paradoxical and inconsistent. We chose radiation to be the main quality of María's character. María would speak the words loud and clear while at the same time, radiating her character’s real thoughts, that she didn’t quite believe her own words, that she was saying them as an attempt to convince herself. The sarcasm of the text suddenly was very clear. I wanted the true meaning behind those sarcastic words to be delivered through María’s radiation. To train the sense of radiation, I had María do exercise number 6 both in and out of context of the aria.
As the text goes on, the heroine has given up on the idea that these values are of a true meaning to her. To define the inconsistency, we had her apply nail polish on her toenails while saying “Trivial things are not for me”. To my great pleasure, the audience responded to this moment with laughter.
For a more focused performance we aimed to have a clear contrast of principles between the beginning and the end. We had the bigger picture in mind throughout the whole process in the spirit of Chekhov's feeling of entirety. We wanted that at the end of the performance, the audience could, without great effort, answer the question: What has changed in the end of the piece from the beginning? What actually happened in these 25 minutes of the performance, what is different in the world of this piece from the beginning. In the beginning we have the typical ordinary citizen, the wife that plays by society’s rules without second guessing and looking back. In the end, the heroine exits the stage and by that, rejects her world and its rules and values.
On the performance day, it was very important to me that all of us, including the instrumentalists, would go through a warmup together of Chekhov's exercises so we would all unite in terms of energy and focus. The trumpet player had missed his bus and had to take a later one. He came running in the hall a few minutes late and incredibly stressed. He came running to the stage just when we were starting the warmup. I began with taking them through the exercise of the feeling of ease to set the primary condition of a performance. I then led them through expansion to encourage confidence, molding to evoke them to feel in power and then floating, at last to give them a sense of calmness. The trumpet player was extremely happy with the warmup because he was able to reset his mind and shake off the stress that he had brought in the room with him from missing the bus. The group was now ready to perform.