The Kitka trio performs a new folk opera, “Iron Shoes,” in Berkeley.
The women of Kitka, the Bay Area’s celebrated all-female vocal ensemble, have traveled to the far reaches of the globe to collect songs fading from human memory. They’ve ventured into remote villages in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia, wandered in the lonely Ukrainian shadows of Chernobyl, and sought out elderly matriarchs in the Bulgarian countryside, searching out centuries-old tunes that sound tantalizingly unearthly to most American ears.
But the new folk opera “Iron Shoes” takes Kitka into a dark and mysterious realm unlike any they’ve encountered. It’s a Kafkaesque land where princesses marry pigs, girls lose limbs and maidens are cursed to wander far and wide in uncomfortable footwear. Yes, they’re plunging into the fantastical and psychological fraught world of fairy tales — and there’s not a shiny Disney product in sight.
“Iron Shoes” isn’t the group’s first theatrical experience. Kitka memorably served as the Greek chorus in American Conservatory Theater’s 1998 production of “Hecuba” with Olympia Dukakis. But “Iron Shoes” is by far the ensemble’s most ambitious undertaking yet.
Drawn from Russian and Romanian folklore, “Iron Shoes” is at Berkeley’s Shotgun Players through April 29, featuring music by Janet Kutulas, a three-decade member of Kitka.
Growing up, Kutulas returned again and again to her family’s vividly illustrated books of Eastern European fairy tales, and was, she says, “fascinated by these stories of young women wearing iron shoes.”
“Who would even imagine these bizarre punishments?” she says. “Fairy tales are so magical and strange, and they’re told in this matter-of-fact way. There’s no room for questions. I’d think, ‘I wouldn’t put those iron shoes on!’ But they dutifully put on their iron shoes.”
“Iron Shoes” weaves together three tales that inflict baroque punishments on blameless young women, including “Finist the Falcon” and “The Armless Maiden” from Russia, and Romania’s “The Enchanted Pig,” a story that also inspired an opera by English composer Jonathan Dove.
Developed partly through Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor program, with residency support from ACT, “Iron Shoes” features a 15-member cast of singers and actors, with direction and choreography by Erika Chong Shuch, whose previous Shotgun projects include directing Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice” and Jenny Schwartz’s “God’s Ear.”
From the opening lines introducing two evil sisters and one good sister (“Couldn’t they be two cautious optimists?” queries the estimable Beth Wilmurt as a narrator who finds herself increasingly embedded in the stories she’s telling), “Iron Shoes” questions the women’s dire predicaments. With a wry, sympathetic and often hilarious take on the tales, award-winning playwright and librettist Michelle Carter deftly balances a multifaceted approach that tangles contemporary attitudes with the surreal source material.
“It’s tricky engaging with these stories,” Carter says. “We tend to think our lives are more fulfilling and bigger, and we know more than those characters do. You don’t want to condescend and pity them. You don’t want to celebrate our own politics, either, to impose a 2018 Berkeley self-actualizing plot on them.”
The production gives Kitka’s singers the opportunity to move, to step into character outside the music. But it’s the music that elevates the production to the enchantingly uncanny, as the vivid palette of vocal techniques seems to flow directly out of the fairy tales. For Kutulas, the extended harmonies and ornaments of traditional Eastern European vocals are “almost like Industrial Light & Magic special effects.”
“Why did people back in those days want to come up with these dissonant chords that hang in the air, or yips or screams that take place during otherwise consonant music?” she says. “Those little elements seem so magical to me. But there’s so much talent in Kitka. It’s been fun to have Kitkets get to be evil sisters, a king or a falcon’s voice.”