Program

Program

Bituing Marikit (1926)

Nicanor Abelardo, composer

Micaela Tobin & Rhea Salta-Amador, voice Naila Aquino Lapus, piano & organ

BAKUNAWA: Opera of the Seven Moons (2020)

Prologue Moon Aria Communiy Palayain Love Letters

Micaela Tobin, composer

APOLAKI: Opera of the Scorched Earth (2023)

THE WALK APOLAKI

Micaela Tobin, composer

Micaela Tobin, voice & electronics Naila Aquino Lapus, piano & organ Adam Starkopf, percussion

The Frame

During what I consider the spiritual climax of Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 classic Pulp Fiction, the character Jules Winnfield, after experiencing what he could only describe as ‘divine intervention’, explains to his partner, Vincent, that he is giving up the life of a hitman. When Vincent asks what he’ll do instead, Jules replies, “I'm going to walk the Earth.”

Vincent: What'chou mean, "walk the Earth"?

Jules: You know, like Caine in Kung Fu: walk from place to place, meet people, get into adventures.

Vincent: And how long do you intend to walk the earth?

Jules: Until God puts me where he wants me to be.

Vincent: And what if he don't do that?

Jules: If it takes forever, then I'll walk forever.

Walking is a spiritual practice incorporated into nearly every religious tradition. Many pilgrimages have a geographic end point, a shrine, temple, or other holy place where pilgrims finally arrive. If, however, reaching a particular destination is the only goal, the journey becomes tourism.

So, what turns the act of travel into a pilgrimage, and why is it most often articulated through walking? The aboriginal walkabout, El Camino de Santiago, Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, even 40 years of wandering the wilderness, all externalize in motion the internal search for greater meaning or understanding of ourselves, the world around us, and our place within it.

Micaela says the voice is a map home, singing to our past and future ancestors. I think for many artists our creativity becomes a way of living a pilgrim like experience. Pilgrimage and the arts are both a spiritual practice, a form of reorientation and healing.

Richard Niebuhr says: “Pilgrims are persons in motion passing through territories not their own—seeking something we might call completion…clarity…a goal to which only the spirit’s compass points the way.”

The process of walking through unfamiliar lands, geographic or internal, connects us with the vastness of the earth, converts loneliness to solitude, and helps point us towards our place in the world.

In my teens (I was probably 14 or 15 years old) I had the opportunity to visit Mecca, the traditional pilgrimage site for Muslims around the world. I didn’t grow up with Islam’s daily ritual practices and so when I arrived at the Great Mosque with a few experienced family members and a professional guide, they told me to follow the person in front of me and do what they did. To be honest, most of that experience is an overwhelming blur, but I do distinctly remember the walking. The tradition is to circumambulate the Kaaba seven times, each time coming closer and closer to the center. I remember how the energy built with each concentric circle until I was at the frenzied middle of a crushing mass of bodies more akin to a moshpit than the meditative prayer I’d previously witnessed in mosques. The focus of this wild energy was al-Ḥajaru al-Aswad, the Black Stone, said to have fallen from Heaven as a guide for Adam and Eve to build an altar, and which each pilgrim gently touched or kissed at the end of their circling.

Two things struck me when I finally approached the stone, first was how smooth and worn the stone had become, concave and shining like polished obsidian, from centuries of hands. The second revelation came to me like a bolt of lightning: that every generation of my family, for over 1,000 years, has come to this place, walked this path, and touched this rock.

That moment helped me realize the act of pilgrimage is a way of connecting with another vastness I had previously been aware of, an ancestral lineage stretching both far into the past, but also towards the future. That flash of understanding I experienced wasn’t the end of the pilgrimage, it was the beginning, and I had to find other ways to continue that journey, as a way to renew my connection with this ancient history.

Pilgrimage isn’t just an internal reconciliation of understanding and acceptance, it is active and embodied, played out in the world by walking the earth in real time, but also through song, ritual, dance, and prayer.

Tonight’s performance features segments of two operas based in Micaela’s ancestral Filipino background. The first is Bakunawa, which Micaela calls a sonic bridge to her ancestors and their ancestral homeland. Bakunawa is a story full of love, loss, and longing, shaped deeply by and for her family. The second is Apolaki, which finds the God of sun and war displaced from his home, a stranger in a strange land.

But like so many who find themselves in diaspora, Apolaki doesn't land in an empty wasteland, but one already populated by a people with their own history and connection to the place. He is confronted with the difficult question of how one can make a home and claim a land that has been stolen from others who are also dispossessed. Is a spiritual home enough? Can one truly substitute a home of water, trees, and soil for a home within oneself? These are questions without easy answers, and so he walks the earth. This pilgrimage is a seeking, but perhaps he also walks because it’s a way to preserve the ancestral history and bring it into the future, keep the fires burning, and make a declaration of our inextricable ties to our history, our future, and the earth itself.

Dr. Lauren Actress writes, “Does the pilgrim’s journey ever end? Perhaps not as long as we traverse this earthly plane.”

May this evening’s performance help us move further down that path.

Program

Program

Bituing Marikit (1926)	Nicanor Abelardo
Micaela Tobin & Rhea Salta-Amador, voice Naila Aquino Lapus, piano & organ
BAKUNAWA: Opera of the Seven Moons (2020)	Micaela Tobin
Prologue Moon Aria Communiy Palayain Love Letters
APOLAKI: Opera of the Scorched Earth (2023)	Micaela Tobin
THE WALK APOLAKI
Micaela Tobin, voice & electronics Naila Aquino Lapus, piano & organ Adam Starkopf, percussion

The Frame

During what I consider the spiritual climax of Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 classic Pulp Fiction, the character Jules Winnfield, after experiencing what he could only describe as ‘divine intervention’, explains to his partner, Vincent, that he is giving up the life of a hitman. When Vincent asks what he’ll do instead, Jules replies, “I'm going to walk the Earth.”

Vincent: What'chou mean, "walk the Earth"?

Jules: You know, like Caine in Kung Fu: walk from place to place, meet people, get into adventures.

Vincent: And how long do you intend to walk the earth?

Jules: Until God puts me where he wants me to be.

Vincent: And what if he don't do that?

Jules: If it takes forever, then I'll walk forever.

Walking is a spiritual practice incorporated into nearly every religious tradition. Many pilgrimages have a geographic end point, a shrine, temple, or other holy place where pilgrims finally arrive. If, however, reaching a particular destination is the only goal, the journey becomes tourism.

So, what turns the act of travel into a pilgrimage, and why is it most often articulated through walking? The aboriginal walkabout, El Camino de Santiago, Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, even 40 years of wandering the wilderness, all externalize in motion the internal search for greater meaning or understanding of ourselves, the world around us, and our place within it.

Micaela says the voice is a map home, singing to our past and future ancestors. I think for many artists our creativity becomes a way of living a pilgrim like experience. Pilgrimage and the arts are both a spiritual practice, a form of reorientation and healing.

Richard Niebuhr says: “Pilgrims are persons in motion passing through territories not their own—seeking something we might call completion…clarity…a goal to which only the spirit’s compass points the way.”

The process of walking through unfamiliar lands, geographic or internal, connects us with the vastness of the earth, converts loneliness to solitude, and helps point us towards our place in the world.

In my teens (I was probably 14 or 15 years old) I had the opportunity to visit Mecca, the traditional pilgrimage site for Muslims around the world. I didn’t grow up with Islam’s daily ritual practices and so when I arrived at the Great Mosque with a few experienced family members and a professional guide, they told me to follow the person in front of me and do what they did. To be honest, most of that experience is an overwhelming blur, but I do distinctly remember the walking. The tradition is to circumambulate the Kaaba seven times, each time coming closer and closer to the center. I remember how the energy built with each concentric circle until I was at the frenzied middle of a crushing mass of bodies more akin to a moshpit than the meditative prayer I’d previously witnessed in mosques. The focus of this wild energy was al-Ḥajaru al-Aswad, the Black Stone, said to have fallen from Heaven as a guide for Adam and Eve to build an altar, and which each pilgrim gently touched or kissed at the end of their circling.

Two things struck me when I finally approached the stone, first was how smooth and worn the stone had become, concave and shining like polished obsidian, from centuries of hands. The second revelation came to me like a bolt of lightning: that every generation of my family, for over 1,000 years, has come to this place, walked this path, and touched this rock.

That moment helped me realize the act of pilgrimage is a way of connecting with another vastness I had previously been aware of, an ancestral lineage stretching both far into the past, but also towards the future. That flash of understanding I experienced wasn’t the end of the pilgrimage, it was the beginning, and I had to find other ways to continue that journey, as a way to renew my connection with this ancient history.

Pilgrimage isn’t just an internal reconciliation of understanding and acceptance, it is active and embodied, played out in the world by walking the earth in real time, but also through song, ritual, dance, and prayer.

Tonight’s performance features segments of two operas based in Micaela’s ancestral Filipino background. The first is Bakunawa, which Micaela calls a sonic bridge to her ancestors and their ancestral homeland. Bakunawa is a story full of love, loss, and longing, shaped deeply by and for her family. The second is Apolaki, which finds the God of sun and war displaced from his home, a stranger in a strange land.

But like so many who find themselves in diaspora, Apolaki doesn't land in an empty wasteland, but one already populated by a people with their own history and connection to the place. He is confronted with the difficult question of how one can make a home and claim a land that has been stolen from others who are also dispossessed. Is a spiritual home enough? Can one truly substitute a home of water, trees, and soil for a home within oneself? These are questions without easy answers, and so he walks the earth. This pilgrimage is a seeking, but perhaps he also walks because it’s a way to preserve the ancestral history and bring it into the future, keep the fires burning, and make a declaration of our inextricable ties to our history, our future, and the earth itself.

Dr. Lauren Actress writes, “Does the pilgrim’s journey ever end? Perhaps not as long as we traverse this earthly plane.”

May this evening’s performance help us move further down that path.

Performers

Micaela Tobin

Micaela Tobin is a soprano, sound artist, and teacher based in Los Angeles, CA who specializes in experimental voice and contemporary opera.

As a sound artist with a background in opera, Micaela integrates voice and electronics within the genres of noise and drone music. Her work incorporates ritualized gesture and amplified object-symbolism and explores her diasporic identity as a first-generation Filipina-American. Micaela’s vocal practice is based in building connections between the physical voice as a means of empowering one’s ‘inner’ voice and challenging colonial stories and systems.

Composing primarily under the moniker "White Boy Scream,” Micaela dissects her operatic and extended vocal techniques through the use of electronics, oscillating between extreme textures of noise, drone, and operatic sound walls. Her most recent full length album, “BAKUNAWA” (Deathbomb Arc) includes elements of sonic ritual, ancient myth, and ancestral memory. Of the album, Steve Smith of The New Yorker Magazine asserts that “opera would do well to pay attention.” The album was ranked #9 Release of 2020 in The Wire Magazine. In May 2021, Micaela premiered the cinematic adaptation of the album through REDCAT, titled “BAKUNAWA: Opera of the Seven Moons.”

As an opera composer, Micaela premiered and earned a five-star review for her first original experimental opera, entitled "Unseal Unseam," at the world’s largest art festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in summer 2016; the work was described as “hypnotic” and “paralyzingly beautiful,” by New Classic LA after its U.S. debut in October 2017. Her most recent opera, “Belarion: A Space Opera” which premiered at the American Legion Center in Pasadena, CA in February 2019, is about the magickal practices of JPL founder Jack Parsons.

As a performer, Micaela played the principal role of Coyote in the critically acclaimed opera, SWEET LAND (dir. Yuval Sharon & Canuppa Luger; Comp. Raven Chacon & Du Yun). She also performed with The Industry in their groundbreaking opera, "Hopscotch, a mobile opera for 24 cars (dir. Yuval Sharon)." She has also toured with hip-hop experimentalists clipping. on their 2017 tour with The Flaming Lips. Micaela also appeared as a principal vocalist in the premiere of Ron Athey and Sean Griffith’s automatic opera, “Gifts the Spirit”; and as a soprano soloist alongside Annette Bening in the play "Medea" at UCLALive.

Micaela is currently a voice teacher on faculty at the California Institute for the Arts and teaches through her private studio, HOWL SPACE, in Los Angeles, CA.

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