Failing Kansas

Run Time: 90 min

In 1959, a pair of ex-convicts brutally murdered a farm family in Holcomb, Kansas, a story famously told by Truman Capote in his "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood. The facts of the case are well known - but how and why could the killers have acted as they did?

That's the question investigated in Failing Kansas, a seminal multimedia opera conceived, written and directed by Mikel Rouse and directly inspired by Capote's book. Rouse's inquiry into this sensational case led him beyond narrative, into the realms of pure sound - and to the technique of "counterpoetry" that is now central to all of his work. "Counterpoetry" is the use of multiple unpitched voices in strict metric counterpoint. Recorded voices, arranged in Counterpoetry with each other and with Rouse's own live vocals as he performs solo against an abstract film background, form a prism of competing spoken texts. These words, drawn from transcripts of the actual trial, poems by Robert W. Service and Thomas Gray, Pentecostal hymns, and the letters and diaries of the killers themselves, are embedded in a hypnotic matrix of melody and rhythm declared by The Los Angeles Times to be "as memorable as the best pop, but better made."

Themes of ritual, religion and the mystery of fate, all resting uneasily with the hope of redemption, combine not only in Failing Kansas but also in the two other works by this boundary-breaking composer, presented by Luminato together in repertory for the first time ever