Notes
Mikel Rouse: Narrative Biography For the last fifteen years, composer and performer Mikel Rouse has been developing a technically and thematically adventurous trilogy of multimedia operas that have played in theatres and festivals around the world. He's putting the finishing touches on the final installment of this series, The End Of Cinematics, in anticipation of it's September 17th premiere at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Rouse's musical and theatrical repertoire has it's roots in the high art-meets-popular culture, mix-and-match aesthetic of the early '80s downtown Manhattan music and art scene from which Rouse emerged. In Dennis Cleveland, his most celebrated work (and the second part of his trilogy), he transformed the landscape of trash-talk TV into opera. Rouse himself played the rabble-rousing host, a character who, it turns out, is not so much holding a volatile show together as falling apart in front of the cameras. This provocative piece of environmental theatre, in which cast members were planted amongst the audience and the audience itself was featured on video monitors, blurred the lines between performance and reality in the same way the "Jenny Jones"/"Jerry Springer" type talk fests confused personal confession with popular entertainment. Dennis Cleveland began it's life with a sold-out run at tiny New York City avant-garde venue the Kitchen, where theatre-goers had to turn to scalpers to nab hard-to-come-by tickets, and returned to Manhattan years later in more full-blown form, for a critically acclaimed engagement at Lincoln Center. Village Voice critic Kyle Gann called it "the most exciting and innovative opera since Einstein on the Beach." Rouse was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, "Michael" became "Mikel" at an early age, when Rouse decided to spell his name the way it sounded - and realized it looked considerably cooler in print like that. He attended both the Kansas City Art Institute and the Conservatory of Music at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, simultaneously fueling his interests in the visual and the musical. He may have acquired some of his theatrical smarts even before then when, as a teenager, he briefly ran away to join a carnival. Relocating to New York City in 1979, Rouse explored African and other World Music and began studying the math-based Joseph Schillinger Method of Composition. Through Carla Bley's New Music Distribution Music Service, which at the time was the avant-garde music community's most effective conduit to forward-thinking consumers, he released albums with his contemporary chamber ensemble, Mikel Rouse Broken Consort. He recorded more overtly rock-oriented material with another combo, Tirez Tirez, through a deal with new wave indie label, IRS. Rouse started working in 1989 on the first piece in his operatic trilogy, Failing Kansas, inspired by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. This piece was performed solo by Rouse and employed multiple, unpitched, prerecorded voices in counterpoint to each other and to Rouse's own vocals, a technique he dubbed counterpoetry that would become central to his work. Failing Kansas, which premiered at the Kitchen in 1994 and continues to be mounted internationally, examined the perception-altering and manipulative power of media as well as Americans' approach to religion and spirituality, themes that re-emerge in both Dennis Cleveland and the forthcoming The End Of Cinematics. While New York City may have been his artistic incubator, it was on the campus of the University of Illinois that Rouse has fully able to put his remarkable imagination to work. As Rouse explains, Krannert director Mike Ross has been fostering the sort of interdisciplinary dialogue that would not have been out of place in Manhattan back in the day, "trying to get artists, teachers, scientists, philosophers to intermingle and realize that their goals are not dissimilar." Which meant tha
