‘The Source’ takes a powerful, jumbled measure of WikiLeaks – San Francisco Chronicle

The repetitive cry goes out, over and over, in smoothly metallic tones garbled by electronic glitches: Illumination, for illumination, we called for illumination.

This snippet of a classified military field report from Iraq one of hundreds of thousands of such files passed along by Chelsea Manning and released to a bewildered public in 2010 by WikiLeaks is the text for one section of The Source, the unnerving and chaotic oratorio by composer Ted Hearne and librettist Mark Doten that opened a six-performance run over the weekend at SF Opera Lab.

It is also a deft encapsulation of the works raison detre.

Haunting, scattershot, seductive and overambitious, The Source represents a desperate attempt to shed some kind of light on the horrors of this chapter in U.S. history not only the venal crime of the Iraqi invasion itself, but the shadowy national security apparatus that was strengthened even further in its aftermath.

Mellissa Hughes sings in Ted Hearnes The Source at SF Opera Lab.

Mellissa Hughes sings in Ted Hearnes The Source at SF...

If the result, witnessed on Saturday, Feb, 25, at the Taube Theatre, delivered only intermittently on that promise, consider the depths of the darkness that the creators were trying to explore. The flashes of brilliance scattered throughout the 75 minutes of The Source like the searing bursts of rocket and artillery fire that crop up repeatedly as reference points are at once revelatory and disorienting.

An omnivorous eclecticism sets the tone for much of the evening. Dotens libretto is built largely around military and diplomatic logs, along with some of the online chat-room communications between Manning and Adrian Lamo, the hacker who eventually turned her over to the authorities. Much of this material is atomized into short fragments that float free of their syntactic moorings.

Hearnes music, scored for seven instrumentalists and a quartet of vocalists, is equally dissociative. There are soothing hymnal chorales and jittery rock grooves, soul ballads and eerie, keening solo vocal lines. Hearne also interjects tiny rapid-fire samples of pop-culture detritus Bobby Darins recording of Mack the Knife, snippets of TV talk shows to further unmoor the listener. You cant resist the beauty and urgency of this material, even as it whiplashes you from one stylistic vein to the next.

Perhaps the scores most inventive aspect is the electronic processing that Hearne overlays on the work of the four superlative singers (Mellissa Hughes, Samia Mounts, Isaiah Robinson and Jonathan Woody) who perform from perches nestled within the audience. Its a variant of the increasingly ubiquitous Auto-Tune, which gives an other-worldly, digital-age patina to the vocal writing; in everything these singers do, you can hear an undercurrent of human foibles struggling to resist the computers sleek soullessness.

Overall, Hearnes investigative methods here (as in his equally freewheeling Katrina Ballads) are not unlike those of a nuclear physicist: He bombards his subject with every kind of musical projectile he can lay his hands on, trying to determine some piece of truth from the angle of the ricochet.

This proves most effective when The Source confronts the war head-on, creating an ensemble portrait of military servicemen as disembodied but still all-too-human enactors of atrocity. A section devoted to Julian Assange, the elusive figure behind WikiLeaks, leaves much of his mystery intact; issues of gender identity (Manning was Bradley Manning when the leaking occurred, only to transition in prison ) are tentatively floated, then abandoned.

For this production, director Daniel Fish and videographer Jim Findlay have provided a visual backdrop, displayed on four large screens surrounding the audience. This is footage of a large range of New Yorkers as they watch leaked video footage of a scene of carnage perpetrated by an American helicopter crew on Baghdadi civilians; their expressions range from stoicism to unease to outright grief.

There is something exquisitely haunting about these reactions, which imply so much more than they state you can tell theres something horrific lurking off-camera, but its not until the final moments of the performance that you discover what it is.

The attack footage, unfortunately, brings with it an infusion of literalism that actually undercuts the power of everything thats come before. To show us the truth at this point everyday Iraqis being mowed down like grass reads like an admission that art is not up to the task.

But the potency of The Source, with all its jump cuts and musical feints, puts the lie to that assertion. There is illumination to be had, all right, even if its of an impressionistic and transitory nature.

Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicles music critic. Email: jkosman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoshuaKosman

The Source: 8 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, March 1-3. $35. Taube Atrium Theater, Veterans Building, 401 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. (415) 864-3330, http://www.sfopera.com

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'The Source' takes a powerful, jumbled measure of WikiLeaks - San Francisco Chronicle