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Today, the innovative and ambitious LA-based opera company The Industry shares the album release of Sweet Land, finally making widely available the seismic and sensational music from the winner of the 2021 Music Critics Association Of North America’s (MCANA) Best New Opera Award. With an anti-colonialist libretto that The New Yorker described as “chaotic, conflicted, implacably honest,” Sweet Land confronts America’s foundational myth and sets a new standard for opera as a source of unsparing and uncompromising sociopolitical commentary.
Using science fiction abstraction and often disquieting and cacophonous musical compositions, Sweet Land grasps at the unknowably dark truth behind settler colonialism and westward expansion. It’s a powerful, affecting experience — listen to Sweet Land here: https://found.ee/Knlzq
One of the biggest strengths behind Sweet Land is the diverse group of collaborators who brought it to life. These include composer Du Yun, a Chinese immigrant whose opera Angel’s Bone, which explores human trafficking, won a Pulitzer Prize for music; Raven Chacon, a composer and artist from the Navajo Nation who advocates for indigenous composers and musicians; librettist Douglas Kearney, a poet whose writing “pulls history apart, recombining it to reveal an alternative less whitewashed by enfranchised power” (BOMB); Aja Couchois Duncan, a mixed-race Ojibwe writer with a focus on social justice; Cannupa Hanksa Luger, a multidisciplinary installation artist of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian, and Norwegian descent who was raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota; and Yuval Sharon, a 2017 MacArthur Fellow whose recent works include Hopscotch, Invisible Cities, War of the Worlds, and Meredith Monk’s ATLAS.
The initial run of Sweet Land, which took place from February 29 to March 8 in 2020 at Los Angeles State Historic Park, was the subject of praise from The LA Times, The New York Times, and The New Yorker upon its debut. Joshua Barone of the New York Times called it “A head-spinning abstraction of colonialism and whitewashed mythology.” See more praise below.
As part of California PBS station KCET’s Emmy® award-winning arts and culture series ARTBOUND, the creation and performance of Sweet Land will be discussed in a new documentary directed by Jonathan Stein entitled “Sweet Land: The Making Of A Myth.” The episode airs on Wednesday, October 27 at 9pm PST.
Praise For Sweet Land and The Industry
“Sweet Land astonishes...Prepare for subject matter that is anything but sweet. Prepare for the world we live in, the place we inhabit and the progress we hope for it to lose a significant amount of its sugar content. If you love Thanksgiving, prepare to no longer know what that even means.”
— Mark Swed, LA Times
“A gut punch...Chaotic, conflicted, implacably honest, it unfurled a narrative that dismantled its own ideological underpinnings and exposed its own lies.”
— Alex Ross, The New Yorker
“A head-spinning abstraction of colonialism and whitewashed mythology.”
— Joshua Barone, The New York Times
“Mesmerizing.”
— Heidi Waleson, Wall Street Journal
"Once again Yuval Sharon and The Industry have expanded the borders of what an opera can be and told a story that is in desperate need of telling."
— Jim Farber, San Francisco Classical Voice
"A bewildering and ghostly new opera. Sweet Land is a parable of, and fantasia on, Manifest Destiny, performed outdoors at a richly suggestive site. The ending is a miniature masterpiece." — Zachary Woolfe, New York Times
"An astonishing presentation that unfolds like a chillingly beautiful fever dream across several unusual settings spread out in Chinatown’s L.A. State Historic Park.Sweet Land lingers in the memory with its utterly entrancing music."
— Falling James, LA Weekly
“The leading edge of operatic innovation.”
— Jeffrey Marlow, Wired Magazine
“The coolest opera company in the world.”
— Brian Lauritzen, KUSC
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