Custom of the Coast is a study in contrast and cohesion. The opera, composed by Kamala Sankaram with a libretto by Paul Muldoon, follows the difficult stories of two real women separated by two centuries. The first, Anne Bonny, was an 18th-century Irish pirate who escaped execution by reason of pregnancy. The second, Savita Halapannavar, was a dentist born in India and raised in Ireland who died in 2012 due to pregnancy complications after being denied an abortion. The work received its concert premiere at National Sawdust in Brooklyn on 9th February; a staged premiere is set for August on the characters’ home ground as part of Kilkenny Arts Week.
The piece worked between the centuries of the parallel storylines, told in alternating narratives, between the two singers delivering the stories, and between contemporary concert music and dissonant, droning shanties. The challenge of the piece is in its tightly constructed text. The singers at National Sawdust – Anchal Dhir as Savita and Rocky Duval and Anne (both mic’d, as were the instruments, all a bit louder than necessary in the fairly small nightclub; they would have been fine without amplification) – delivered their narratives with clarity of pitch and articulation, alternating in short chapters that sometimes mirrored each other. As sung storytelling, there was a lot to take in (and with only a paragraph synopsis on the website and none in the program). The stories themselves had their twists and turns, they’re not uninteresting, but at the same time weren’t played for what they were worth. This will almost certainly be alleviated somewhat by the staged version this summer, but even still, it was closer to recitation than theatre.
The music ran as a throughline between the storylines and was wonderfully seamless in its negotiation through the taut libretto. A string quartet played in unison, in canons and in drones and would slide into dissonances as an accordion came in with the disjointed jigs that served as interludes. The strings dominated until it was time for another instrumental Irish song, but at times the squeezebox melded quite beautifully into the strings. The uninterrupted score benefited from being handled by the exceptional FLUX Quartet, who (among other things) have performed and recorded Morton Feldman’s string quartets, including more than a half dozen performances of the daunting No. 2. Their deep intuitiveness facilitated smooth shifts through the turns in Sankaram’s fine score.
The composer is, not incidentally, an operatic and carnatic singer who herself plays accordion as well as sitar. Her writing is intelligent and informed. While the score doesn’t lack musical variation, there is a wanting for development, a constraint that seems baked into the structure. About 20 minutes into the hourlong piece, when Dhir and Duval do sing together, it feels like a momentary revelation. Brief duet passages are doled out sparingly until the end, which allows for a dramatic finale as each woman faces her death. It is a small emotive peak in a piece that doesn't leave much space for flourish. The intertwining of voices is, at last, quite beautiful, even if it doesn’t carry the survival through turmoil of their life stories.
The composer has asked us to point out that this event was a workshop performance in preparation for the stage premiere in Ireland
