Sable Elyse Smith’s Opera Inhabits the Storm

Settling into the black-box performance space at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), my skin still slick with New York City’s humidity, I opened the libretto-zine accompanying artist Sable Elyse Smith’s first opera, If you unfolded us (2024). I had visited the space a week prior to soak up Smith’s Weather Report (2024), a sensual video that features a song by the same title from the opera and pays homage to the music video as a vernacular form. Now, the installation housing the video was a set. It would be animated by two singers (Freddie June/Shala Miller and S T A R R Busby) as well as an eight-piece chamber orchestra, whose presence beneath the (temporarily blank) screen recalled the live accompaniment to Golden Age silent films.

The stripped-down set gestured to a more recent past with the inclusion of a platform-mounted CRT television that played cataclysmic weather reports and storm footage on loop. Beneath a disco ball, a second dais served as a clubby foreground to a DJ booth and a fluorescent sign reading ‘wetbar’ – neon being a material that Smith has historically employed for wall-poems that slide between eroticism and violence. The opera, per the libretto, is set in a Black queer bar, but also ‘in an interiority … in the rain … on the phone … in weather’. Wetbar, weather, I thought, primed to welcome language’s slippages.     

Smith has an enduring interest in sound; for example, she commissioned an experimental composition by Jason Moran and Total Freedom for her 2020–22 multimedia publication FEAR TOUCH POLICE. Prior to that, she was already thinking about making an opera, drawn to the art form’s crossdisciplinary capaciousness. Many of Smith’s better-known works – a Ferris wheel constructed from prison visiting-room furniture, scaled-up children’s colouring books depicting penal settings – have grappled with the carceral state. She has repeatedly asserted that ‘prison’ extends to ‘the world’; her work considers interlocking systems of violence and oppression, as well as the kinship, love and desire that persist against and despite them.

In this vein, If you unfolded us centres on MAIN and LOVER, two Black women who, in a sense, both work with sound (one is a 911 operator, the other a DJ) and become romantically involved when they meet after one of LOVER’s sets. Across seven songs, the women flirt, advance and retreat, their tryst culminating in breathy phone sex. They sing together and apart with the kind of presence that dilates time and turns the air’s vibrations palpable (something that finds an echo in Smith’s voluptuous lyrics: ‘Precipitation is high today / Air is thick / I can hold it in my mouth’). MAIN and LOVER’s relationship is less a tidy romantic typology than a vital point of contact: not only with one another, but with a community of Black queer women and nonbinary folks who are occasionally shown onscreen dancing at the club – a site characterized as liberatory by Smith in a 2016 text.

Through her liberal use of ‘sampling’ – a touchstone term in her 2024 MoMA Magazine interview with artist Nikita Gale – Smith deftly knits a sense of collectivity into the protagonists’ singular connection, suggesting that their relationship is built on broader Black and queer legacies. These become her project’s scaffolding: both in its layered, expansive soundscapes, which include vocals stripped from R&B songs, and in the text’s citational nods to figures ranging from writer Toni Morrison to scholar Alexander G. Weheliye, who, in Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology (2023), argues that dismissals of R&B are tangled up with the ‘universal devaluation of BlackFem critical and creative labour’. In its outright rejection of such hierarchies and erasures, with their accompanying racist and sexist underpinnings, If you unfolded us feels like a balm – although, Smith cautions in the libretto, ‘I do not promise to heal anything here.’

Over the course of the opera, a storm mounts with such intensity that it lands a spot in Smith’s dramatis personae as ‘A Storm who isn’t named’. Rain streaks screens and flows through soundscapes. In the spotlight, red landline phone in hand, MAIN fields panicky 911 calls about the downpour, or, in the case of one 16-year-old caller, the stormy weather of a relationship. MAIN’s mother, who has apparent misgivings about her daughter’s sexuality (‘Mother am I strange’ the latter sings), also calls to tell her that she was born during a storm like this one: weather becomes a kind of inheritance. The relentless tempest conjures up the effects of climate change, disproportionately borne by communities of colour. Using a framework from Christina Sharpe’s 2016 book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (previously cited by Smith), the weather can also be understood as a metaphor for pervasive racism in slavery’s aftermath. ‘At stake is not recognizing antiblackness as a total climate,’ writes Sharpe. ‘At stake, too, is not recognizing an insistent Black visualsonic resistance to that imposition of non/being.’

If you unfolded us is one such act of resistance. After the performance, at a roundtable of Smith, Miller, Busby, composer David Dominique and MoMA curator Martha Joseph, there was talk of a future record release. I imagined the embodied, sprawling sounds filling not only my apartment, but the streets, the neighbourhood, the city, the world. ‘I just want to make something I can feel,’ Smith writes in the introduction to her libretto. ‘Something my mom can feel.’ These words take up the entire page.

_{Main image: Sable Elyse Smith, If you unfolded us, 2024, performance still. Courtesy: the artist and Museum of Modern Art, New York; photograph: Jonathan Dorado}