ARCTIC EXPLORATIONS by Michael Dellaira (2022)
Directed by Kira Simring
with The Harlem Chamber Players
Conducted by Clara Longstreth
featuring Nuka Alice, Erin Brittain, David Gordon, Nicole Haslett and Colin Levin
Theater at St. Jean
150 E. 76th St. New York City
Arctic Explorations is a folk opera, is a story about the human desire to explore the unknown. Based on American explorer Elisha Kent Kane's 1856 bestseller and on period documents, including the love letters between Kane and the medium Maggie Fox, the opera is inspired by 19th-century popular song, hymns, sea shanties and Inuit drum-dances, and scored for full chorus, five soloists and an ensemble of clarinet, guitar, banjo, violin, viola, double bass and percussion.
New York City's New Amsterdam Singers and Nancy Manocherian's The Cell Theater have together commissioned Michael Dellaira to create Arctic Explorations, the story of 19th century explorer, Elisha Kent Kane, and his curious romance with Maggie Fox, the noted spiritualist and medium. Complete opposites in almost every respect – he, a navy surgeon and scientist from a prominent family; she, an uneducated farm-girl who many considered a huckster – they were each American celebrities who entertained crowds with tales of mysterious places and phenomena: glaciers, polar bears and the Inuit communities, or the world of the hereafter, and how to communicate with the dead.
Arctic Explorations, then, is about our never-ending desire to discover what lies beyond, to know where we came from and where we are going. Explorers, all of us, our success often comes at a cost, and nowhere can this cost be measured more than in the Arctic: over 300 billion tons of ice from the Humboldt glacier melted on a single day this past June.
The Inuit, who have lived there for centuries, are seeing their land disappear. But it was their ancestors who came to Kane’s aid when his ship was trapped in the ice for two years; he and his crew survived, not because they brought with them the technology of the modern world, although they had done that, but because of the ingeniousness and generosity of the Inuit, whose own beliefs and practices were shaped by the most hostile place on earth.
Based on Kane's 1856 huge bestseller, Arctic Explorations, as well as period documents, private letters, and with assistance from the Greenland Cultural Center and the Inuit Circumpolar Council, this is a folk-opera in one act, for four soloists and chorus, and instrumental sextet of clarinet, guitar, banjo, accordion, violin and double bass.
