juliana snapper

JULIANA — Ron’s voice is so tender and lovely but there is also something wrong. It’s so moist and fluid… until it scrapes and withdraws like a snail covered in sores. I am his pavement, hardened and consistent but cracking from the slow push of weedy sounds. I’m constantly fishing out his sneak-secret lyricism with my own. Sometimes he makes me a glowing midwife and other times I’m a blind obstetrician yanking on a hemorrhoid crying, “Push!”

RON — During a very serious reconstruction of a notorious trial from the Spanish Inquisition mid-way into The Judas Cradle, I leave the stand and break into some childish fake tap-dancing, while vocally punching out Jean Genet’s closing text from his memoir, Prisoner of Love: “The witness doesn’t merely answer the implicit question ‘how?’ — in order to show the ‘why’ he throws light on the ‘how,’ a light sometimes called artistic… He knows a realistic description won’t mean anything to anyone, … unless he adds some light and shade which only he perceived.”

JULIANA — Ron’s tap shoes don’t have heels—it’s like Grandpa ran away from the rest home for entertainers. I’m trying to get him to tap in time by barking like a seal and banging my staff in polyrhythms that collapse before they can get groovy.

RON — The Judas Cradle opens with a duet that misleads with a rigid formality: we misuse Turandot’s riddle to establish our character and sound. Slowed down, we run the questions of the riddle into the answers, disregarding the punchline. Stance, armor, a commitment to monotony — we’re sincere. It’s the high artifice and bloat of opera that becomes iconoclastic.

JULIANA — I’m panting after a simple climb up six stairs because my ribcage is smashed by whalebone and rope and I’m dragging twenty-two pounds of drapery from Leigh Bowery’s closet. I press my ribs apart and suck my uvula into my sinuses. I never quite catch my breath, but enter the duet Ron has set off with a wolfish howl.

RON — Sincere to a point. How can you quote Puccini, Bellini, and Debussy without throwing in a few cans of Crisco? In the scene “Sextette,” Juliana develops a circular rhythm of moans and purrs with a little help from Mae West, and we begin alternately showboating. I construct a set of grease-filled breasts for myself and, feeling the need once again to deflate the bloat, do a clunky stripper floor-work slide across the room, leaving a fairly perfect snail trail behind.

JULIANA — We composed The Judas Cradle through a series of alchemical processes uncovered during a year of toil in our voice lessons–turned–laboratory, which was sometimes the lap of a baby grand and other times this piss-soaked underground echo chamber. Singing is just a gassy tentacle with no respect for borders like skin. It sneaks in and out of you, makes you remember memories that aren’t yours and want things you never used to want. It shares a crossfire of sordid empathies with interrogation, hysteria, and possession, and also the real possibility of overlap.

RON — It was not the act, but the concept of singing a duet with a highly trained, flawless soprano. My voice, a decrepit tenor with no singing experience, seemed impossible to work with (to me). I found my voice by becoming a ghost of hers, following her voice up and down and into a sound world of invasive resonance. Phonetically memorizing Italian and French arias proved a challenge, but eventually they stuck. The only bit that was not out of my realm was the closing duet, “Autodafe.” In this scene we take up glossolalia, a spastic speaking-in-tongues I received during my Pentecostal childhood. Trying to find a way to interact, we eventually developed a technique to tag-team chaos. Always starting in silent tremors the struggle went beyond psychotic outburst, became a wordless dialogue that not only conjured ecstasy, dementia, and exorcism: these states became innate.
The intent of The Judas Cradle, at least in part, was to take on the role of witnessing. Responding, trying to discern a logic to the horrors of the day, we absorbed photographs and manuals of torture and interrogation. It’s opera that we fetishized, not torture. I deviate and stage a reversal, climbing a ladder to mount the Judas cradle, a medieval structure orchestrated to be a kinder, gentler form of torment. My body becomes almost epileptic as its weight forces the tip of the wooden pyramid into my rectum. No longer the witness, I send my voice into a soft tenor and let an Italian art song whine and crumble out of me: Malinchonia, ninfa gentile…

JULIANA — I’m suspended by my ankles, flailing, struggling to communicate, fighting the dissociative weight of gravity. Oh, I am a flat thing pressing hard on some slime. I press out cadenzas until my voice comes undone. I sing until my diaphragm sags inert, my vocal chords refuse to adduct, my ears ring and my eyelids are peppered with pore-size bruises from hanging too long.