Ravinia 2021 - Issue 3

MAGGIE HALL “ MY LIFE IN OPERA has been very nonstandard,” admits bass-baritone Davóne Tines in attempting to de- scribe a unique and groundbreaking career. In his credits, there are leading roles in world premieres such as Mat- thew Aucoin’s Crossing , John Adams’s Girls of the Golden West , and Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up In My Bones , as well as collaborations with director Peter Sellars, and then there’s a series of pioneering works-in-progress that Tines himself is helping bring into being. “It’s been a balance between things I’m asked to do and things I have a direct collaborative hand in. All of my work tends to be on some sort of spec- trum between ‘gig’ and self-directed creation. Some projects, it’s really great to be part of the creative process, premiere it, and let it live in the world. Other things I become more attached to or more ingrained in the process or creation of, and I stay with those pieces longer. Because I have a close cohort of colleagues, we really believe in doing something and going back and doing it again. But you can only do that with so many things. I’m kind of in the process of that with four different shows or creations. Those are relationships that will last over years.” The Black Clown , a musical theater piece which Tines says took seven years to create, premiered in 2018 but “we’re talking about what its life is into the future for anywhere from five to ten years. And that’s just one proj- ect.” Based on a poem by Langston Hughes, Tines says he was “blown away” because “Hughes so succinctly tells the story of a Black man identi- fying his oppression in the role of a clown by saying I have to dress myself and present myself a certain way. That’s how I survive, that’s how I exist. But contextualizing that through 300 years of—I won’t even say Black American history, I’ll just say Amer- ican history —and then reaching the resolve of, I am so much more than all of the permutations I have to exist as. I am, in fact, my own independent being, and I will take that costume off. “Hughes was able to crystal- lize what I feel and what so many marginalized people feel, whether they’re Black or of a different sexual identity—we all have some sort of connection to having to morph our- selves. That happens in a specific way with Black people, and it’s engrained an entire history of oppression, degra- dation, and trauma. But I’m going to bear that out and call it out for what it is, for my own survival and sanity. I can actually self-actualize outside of this context.” Were You There is another project Tines has built with opera direc- tor and frequent collaborator Zack Winokur that he describes as “a meditation on racist police brutality.” “I wanted to create a meditative base on something pretty hard for us to engage,” Tines explains. “That turned into a staged music theater piece that premiered at the American Repertory Theater. We’ve done it with a number RAVINIA MAGAZINE • AUGUST 18 – SEPTEMBER 6, 2021 18