When they first put their minds together a couple of years ago, Jessica Grindstaff and her creative partners on Port(al)—a sprawling, ambitious, innovative new collaborative production with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus that premiered this week at the Brooklyn Navy Yard—faced the kind of problem that certain artists always seem to relish. How could they do the impossible, and do it within some fairly precise constraints?
The task at hand: to inhabit, animate, investigate, and otherwise bring back to life the 35,000-square-foot Agger Fish Building, the only still-unrenovated structure in the Brooklyn Navy Yard (“There are holes in the walls that birds are flying in and out of,” Grindstaff says before a full-dress run-through earlier this week), and to tell a new story about not just a building, but also a port, a city, a country at war, a way of life.
While the kaleidoscopic team working alongside Grindstaff includes co-composer Paola Prestini (co-founder and artistic director of National Sawdust), co-composer and co-librettist Jad Abumrad (creator of the podcasts Radiolab and Dolly Parton’s America), and co-choreographer Ogemdi Ude, the beating heart of Port(al) is the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, whose 44 members range in age from 12 to 18, led by founder and artistic director Dianne Berkun Menaker.
While the building—its size and scale, its history, its symbolism and 80-foot ceilings and epiphanies and imperfections—is undoubtedly a character in the show, “the grounding element of the whole work are the kids and who they are inside—not just singers,” says Grindstaff, the production’s director and a co-librettist (and the co-founder of Phantom Limb Company).
Interspersed with, and sometimes woven into, the chorus’s songs, which reflect on the oft-overlooked past of the Agger Fish Building and Navy Yard, are audio collages from historian Howard Zinn, activist Clarence L. Irving, Sr. (who worked as a riveter in the area), among others. We also hear Eugenia Farrar sing the first song with a human voice ever broadcast over radio (from aboard a battleship docked in the Navy Yard), all gathered and created by Abumrad.
Taken as a whole, the collage tells a multifaceted story of a multivalent, essential space, albeit one with perhaps some questionable karma. Even before these oral histories, Port(al) actually begins outside the hulking building, with the audience learning about the area’s flora and fauna and its habitation by the Lenape tribe centuries ago, as well as discovering that they’re also literally standing atop a road of bones (many of them remnants of the thousands of bodies dumped overboard prison ships anchored in adjacent Wallabout Bay).
Later in the piece, as the audience is ushered into a decadent cabaret space carved out of the Agger Fish Building, another amazing and largely untold tale is teased, revealed, and spun. “Cynthia Hopkins is this incredible theater-maker and performer who has been in retirement for about a decade,” Grindstaff says. “She’s playing this character, Rusty Brown, whose life is such an amazing, amazing story.”
During the war, the Brooklyn Navy Yard was one of the first places where women were allowed to work the same jobs as men, right alongside them—and the woman who became known as Rusty Brown got a job welding in the Navy Yard. “Then, when the war was done, all of the women were fired; they gave all the remaining jobs to the men in the military who were returning,” Grindstaff says. “But she realized that if she started dressing as a boy, she could continue to work as a welder, which is what she wanted to do. So, she started cross-dressing as a practicality—and then, as her life went on, she became, what she called ‘the first drag king of Coney Island.’”
But, as Grindstaff mentioned earlier, this isn’t simply a telling of old tales. “Port(al) is a kind of tapestry, and the kids are the connecting threads through the whole thing,” she says. “I didn’t want to just use them as vessels—I wanted their voices and their stories and what mattered to them to be present.” And so, betwixt and between singing songs from the libretto, we hear recordings of them “singing fragments of their favorite songs, talking about things that worry them, things that they wish that they could do, telling us what it’s like to be bombarded by the news cycle and social media.”
As the work unfolds, the audience moves through the space—gently prompted and guided by docents—along with the chorus (wearing dresses and other clothing by designer Gary Graham), which plays and dances and moves in ways both controlled and seemingly uncontrolled, sometimes weaving in and out and through the crowd in what Rachel Katwan, Port(al)’s creative producer, calls “an ambulatory opera.” There are massive, 80-foot-tall projections (overseen by video and projection designers S. Katy Tucker and Kylee Loera), and the audience stands, sits, walks, and sits again, adding a kind of kinetic dynamism to the way a person experiences a chorus. At times, the young singers use the building itself as a kind of instrument, beating on its girders, walls, and floors with hammers and iron rods.
While Grindstaff claims that “we’ve done very, very little with the space,” what they have done is striking. “Since the design is so minimal, it has to be quite perfect,” she continues. “I think it’s created the perfect kind of primed canvas for these stories to really jump out from. By refining and framing the space in very simple ways, it gives the audience a clarified lens into what can feel like a heavy history—and through that lens, you can start to see patterns that connect past, present, and future. Hopefully, the audience can start to see themselves in the kaleidoscope of it all.”
