At the Prototype Festival, Opera With Lynchian Strangeness

Even before the announcement of his death on Thursday, the spirit of director David Lynch hovered over the Prototype Festival. For 12 years, this annual showcase of experimental opera and musical theater has been inspired by a Lynchian aesthetic, with works that exploit emotional extremes and blur the boundaries of reality.

But this year’s festival, which took place Sunday at spaces in Manhattan and Brooklyn, included an overt homage to Lynch, with the severed ear and crawling ants that in “Blue Velvet” drew the eye to across a suburban lawn toward a hidden mystery. Here they appeared in David T. Little’s gothic rock opera film “Black Lodge” as part of the hallucinations of a tortured soul.

Not every show at this year’s festival was as darkly surreal as “Black Lodge.” Stylistically, the works included references to hip-hop, the Beach Boys, Urdu ghazals and Cuban psychedelic blues. But what makes Prototype such a generative force in opera is its emphasis on the human voice in all its beauty and strangeness.

Black Lodge

Billed as a gothic industrial rock opera, “Black Lodge” was written for the singular voice of Timur Bekbosunov and his glam-rock band The Dime Museum. The work takes the form of a song cycle tracing the nightmarish journey of a psychotic mind trapped in a liminal state between life and death. The libretto is by poet Anne Waldman, who draws inspiration from writer William S. Burroughs as well as Lynch and others.

In 2022, “Black Lodge” was released as a hallucinatory film directed by Michael Joseph McQuilken, starring Timur, who is subjected to extremely artistic forms of torture involving potter’s clay and knitting needles. At BRIC in Brooklyn, the film was screened in a live-to-screen version with costumed musicians on stage. The presence of these musicians had little dramatic impact – McQuilken’s film is too effective on its own – but their live performance brought out the ferocity of the music. Timur’s voice is a marvel of expressive inflections, from the golden falsetto and velvet disguised as a wolf in sheep’s clothing to the anguished screams and macabre inhalations.

In a grove