The Song Poet An Opera Made In Minnesota

BY BUER CARLIE

This March, the Minnesota Opera, in collaboration with Theater Mu, brought the world premiere of The Song Poet to its newly opened Luminary Arts Center in the North Loop of Minneapolis. Reception has been incredibly positive, and it is easy to see why. The almost entirely Asian cast defies the operatic norm, the libretto and music are both written by women (Kao Kalia Yang and Jocelyn Hagen respectively), the music is unique for the genre, the staging includes stunning interpretive dance vignettes, and the writing never lets the heavy nature of the content get in the way of the beauty and whimsy of the storytelling. In short: it’s a breath of fresh air.

The Song Poet follows the journey of librettist Kao Kalia Yang’s father, Bee (Museop Kim), from his boyhood through the joys and difficulties that bring him to an exhausted adulthood. As the title suggests, Bee considers himself a “song poet” and everywhere that he goes: from the beautiful green hills of war-torn Laos to a Thai refugee camp to a new life in Minnesota and back to Laos, a literal chorus follows him. Sometimes this chorus is dressed as mountains or clouds and sometimes they are machines, but always they give voice to the song Bee finds in his every surrounding.

The Luminary Arts Center is a small venue, and, in many ways, it is the perfect venue for this kind of show. The stone and brick of the exposed wall behind the stage accentuates the green cut outs of Laotian mountains, which look like they were pulled directly from the pages of a children’s book. Set design (Mina Kinukawa) is minimal and effective. The Minnesota home the Yang family moves into is barely the suggestion of a house: a neat square of beams topped with a triangle, the suggestion of a door and a window carved out by three more beams inside the overall square. Only once the girls are grown up do the sets begin to fill out with colorful iMac G3s and fully set banquet tables.

This is an emotionally fraught story. Bee’s father dies when he is two, his friend dies when Bee is still just a boy, and Bee has to navigate difficulties familiar to many refugees: realizing it is unsafe to stay in his