Robert Ashley’s Celestial Excursions delves into mostly unexplored or ignored territory—the concerns, behavior, and speech patterns of old people. Through their broken thoughts, disconnected timelines, and anxieties, Ashley portrays them with wisdom, sensitivity, charm, humor, and beauty. The libretto intermingles reminiscence, regret, love, nightmare, old sayings, and songs on the radio into an opera that proceeds with relentless speed and precision in ensemble singing.

Scored for five voices and pre-recorded electronic orchestra, Celestial Excursions features five members of the “new band,” the group of singers who have been reviving Ashley’s operas since 2016 and who are continuing the work and traditions of the original Ashley “band.”

Celestial Excursions is co-produced by Roulette Intermedium and Performing Artservices.

The fear is that we won’t go gently or abruptly into that good night. We will hang on in the endurance trials of old age, forever rehearsing in the early morning twilight, fortified by a few hours of faulty sleep, the plot or why there is no plot, the explanations, the why, the lists, the old grievances never to be settled now, the stories never told or passed on, the interruptions, the terrifying proportions, everything larger than it is known to be, distorted in the mirror, and again and again.

Old people are special because they have no future. The future is what to eat for breakfast or where did I leave my shoes. Everything else is in the past. So, sometimes old people break the rules. Especially the rules of conversation and being together. They laugh a lot. I mean real full laughter. They break the rules, because, for one reason or another (illness, anger, damage, whatever), the rules no longer apply for them. They are alone. Sometimes they are sad. Sometimes they are desperate. Mostly they are brave. Mostly they have given up on the promises of religion, life after death, immortality. Mostly they are concerned with dignity. Living with dignity. And, like all of us, eventually dying with dignity. 

But they are still obliged, as human beings, to make sounds. They are obliged to speak – whether or not anyone is listening.

Robert Ashley, 2003

Singers
GELSEY BELL
KAYLEIGH BUTCHER
MARIO DIAZ-MORESCO
BRIAN MC CORKLE
PAUL PINTO

Music Director and Sound Design
TOM HAMILTON

Stage Design and Lighting
DAVID MOODEY

Producer
MIMI JOHNSON

Created by ROBERT ASHLEY

Robert Ashley (1930–2014) is known for his work defining a truly “American” form of opera. In Ann Arbor in the 1960s, Ashley organized the ONCE Festival and directed the legendary ONCE Group, with whom he developed his first operas. Throughout the 1970s, he directed the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College and toured with the Sonic Arts Union. He produced and directed Music with Roots in the Aether, the 14-hour television opera/documentary about the work and ideas of seven American composers. His opera for television, Perfect Lives, is widely considered the precursor of “music-television.” Stage versions of Perfect Lives, Atalanta (Acts of God), Improvement (Don Leaves Linda), Foreign Experiences, eL/Aficionado and the tetralogy Now Eleanor’s Idea toured throughout the US and Canada, Europe, and Asia during the 1980s and 90s. Dust, followed by Celestial Excursions and The Old Man Lives in Concrete followed, from 1999–2012. He finished his last two operas (Crash and Quicksand) in 2013. They were presented posthumously: Crash was part of the 2014 Whitney Biennial; and the Kitchen presented Quicksand early in 2016.  robertashley.org