The Brooklyn Rail

Composer and vocalist Paul Pinto’s new operatic monodrama, MANO A MANO, opens on a bit of dazzling wordplay: a history of Western writers, rulers, and kings, from Homer to King Arthur and beyond. As he races through the litany of names and we struggle to keep up, he absolves us at the end, “Don’t worry about trying to remember that.” As he says later, all those words and names were just table-setting, things we’ll never hear about again. There will be more of this “fog” of memory to come.

The ninety minute performance is broken into thirteen songs in four different sections: Prologue, Part One, Interlude, and Part Two. Each of the songs uses a different form and wildly different techniques, from traditional songcraft, improvised freakouts, to experimental sound meditations (the Pauline Oliveros meditation “hands… my hands”). The story, ostensibly, is a newly created meeting, and contest, between Beowulf and Sir Gawain, a reconciling of Old and Middle English myth. Throw in some dragons and we’re cooking.

There are doubles throughout the performance and the production (directed by Kristin Marting). The band includes two saxophones and two percussionists (one on drum set), placed at the four corners of the performance area. There is live and pre-recorded sound; the high and low of the vocal register; and of course, our two protagonists, Sir Gawain and Beowulf. Mano a mano as it were.

Pinto inhabits a variety of characters, including creating human/animal hybrids that stalk the stage. He in effect creates his own doubles, shifting his voice in the same phrase, a technique he uses in several instances, most vividly in the “On Boxing” interlude. Here Pinto boxes with his own shadow self, relaying his story of training at a boxing gym, liking the coach there despite the efforts of the coach to be unlikable, all while dodging and weaving. He uses low-pitched, guttural asides throughout the story, filling in the empty space in his phrases, a spectacular effect.

The shadow self becomes the theme of the performance, the artist investigating the history of masculinity and reclaiming it for our contemporary times, beautifully displaying his own hirsute self in the process (there were a few yelps at my performance when Pinto takes off his shirt). In our current age of the manosphere, incels, paleo-diets, and protein-rich foods, we have all too many noxious versions of what is considered masculine. Pinto attempts to reclaim masculinity, shedding the odious parts but keeping that which is necessary and vital: courage, valor, strength, openness, and also expressing the feminine that reside in us (as when he sings as the She-Dragon in “I Guess I Lasted Longer Than Expected”).

Marting’s direction deserves particular praise. The ability to conjure worlds using the very limited means that she employs is consistently astounding. A hair trimmer hangs from the ceiling, creating a buzz that becomes audible early in the performance. A single fog machine sitting under a large screen blaring the words “The Fog” was humorous and effective. The large round table at which part of the audience sits has obvious Arthurian relevance and becomes a stage for the battles to come. As Pinto stated in a recent interview, Marting became a valued collaborator in the development of the work and in essence the unseen double to the onstage performer.

There were several stand out musical moments throughout: the hyper verbal wordplay of the opening (very Robert Ashley-esque), the Prince/D’Angelo/R&B stylings of the “Scribe” song, where Pinto bounces back and forth between Gawain and Beowulf in a sing-off, and the stop-start wailing of the instrumental interlude “The Fog.” A drone recitative is a recurring motif, a Celtic-tinged foundation that is particularly effective and very bard-like. These moments are a better vehicle for Pinto’s voice and lead away from the parts that appear as pastiche.

We reach our frenzied high point in the “animist jam” of “In Which Elderly Sir Gawain and the She-Dragon are Beheaded…” Pinto, shirtless, vocalizes as the goat watching the fight. This is performance at its most feral, a percussive, wordless, display of vocal firepower, bouncing and pacing around the circular stage, a visceral showing of pagan energy. The harmonic sequence climbs ever upward, a cathartic moment for the audience.

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2016), a dragon’s mist creates a fog of forgetting in a post-King Arthur England. An elderly Sir Gawain rides through a ravaged landscape, forgetting the massacres precipitated by Arthur on Saxon villages. The twist of the story is that Gawain was really sent to protect the aged dragon Querig, for the populace to remain docile without continued fighting between the Britons and the Saxons. In our current era, we see repeated attempts to put inconvenient parts of our history away, to bury the problems of slavery, colonialism, genocides, and more. Like Ishiguro, Pinto is able to use these stories to re-evaluate them, and to show how we can still find meaning in these ancient words.