‘Funding’ a Mesmerizing Mix of Imagery, People

The Eclectic Orange Festival has, over the last two years, found a small corner in which operatic revolution can brew by presenting Mikel Rouse’s two short operas, “Dennis Cleveland” and “Failing Kansas.” The first is opera as television talk show; the second a meditation on Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” Both are provocative studies in the intersection of alienation and mass culture, musically as well dramatically. They are song operas, in which techniques of pop song, Minimalism, traditional aria and experimental music merge.

Sunday at the Orange County Art Museum comes the next step with the premiere screening of Rouse’s video opera, “Funding.” Alienation is again the subject, this time in the lives of five New Yorkers who did not participate in the economic miracle of the late ‘90s.

The images of them are often mundane. A dancer wraps her foot. Stock prices flash. A woman rides the subway. A man has a lonely drink in a bar. The Coney Island Ferris wheel turns. There are hints that they all came to New York to find something that they didn’t find and are now thankful just to be surviving. All see through the emptiness that surrounds them. Some are angry, some show quieter angst, all are lonely. They are relatives of the existential characters from the beat literature of the ‘50s, the existential characters from New Wave cinema of the ‘60s, the existential characters from Robert Ashley’s operas of the ‘70s and ‘80s, compelling as ever.

As Kerouac did through his prose, as Godard has done through his visual technique, as Ashley has done through his sung poetry, Rouse finds a musical style that makes these shadowy figures mesmerizing. They don’t sing to us but talk over catchy musical lines.

Each section begins simply and becomes enthrallingly complex, with contrapuntal layers of rhythm building to reflect multiple layers of personalities.

Everything in Rouse is about overlay. There are four “cycles” in which Rouse’s voice is overdubbed into chorus, singing songs that present the larger themes of “Funding.” New York is shown in a flux of layered imagery. Cool, liquid images flash by and meld as if downtown were some sort of oceanic world, while Rouse sings of losing neighbors and behaviors in haunting repeated melodic figures that lap like waves across this strange yet familiar landscape.

There are semi-straightforward vignettes of some characters, but each is revealed differently. We never see, for instance, the Frenchman; he talks of his lover, a dancer, and we watch her. Nothing is ever quite explained or needs to be, since these five don’t quite know why they feel as they do. But they all know that funding, the economic machine that drove New York through its recent boom, is the ominous shadow over their lives.

There is much in “Funding,” particularly the interaction between video and music--Rouse directed and edited the film himself--that seems new. And there is much that doesn’t. These are people that we recognize, fragile, maybe damaged, whose survival in a pernicious environment is inspiring. If they can make it, so can we.

And Rouse’s music, the overlapping rhythmic patterns in strings and winds and electronic keyboards are pure sonic encouragement, lifting us all to a higher plane.

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“Funding” will be shown Sunday and Oct. 14, 21, and 28, 2 p.m., Orange County Museum of Art, Lyon Auditorium, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Museum admission: $5 ($4 students/seniors). (949) 759-1122. A DVD of it is available at https://www.mikelrouse.com.