Arts & Entertainment

Review: 'Wakonda's Dream' a Ponca human story

Friday, March 9, 2007

"An extraordinary trial took place in Omaha in 1879, one that had lasting repercussions on the fate of the nation. Years earlier the Ponca tribe had been relocated from its lands near here to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. When land provided by the United States government proved unsuitable for their way of life, the Poncas returned to Nebraska, where they were arrested. In the first instance of American Indians’ standing trial in a United States courtroom, Chief Standing Bear and his people were declared “persons within the meaning of the law” and allowed to reclaim their ancestral home.

The story might be the stuff of a great opera, but it is not the one the composer Anthony Davis tells in “Wakonda’s Dream,” which was given its premiere by Opera Omaha at the Orpheum Theater here on Wednesday night. Had Mr. Davis, who is known for dealing with issues of civil rights in his operas, chosen to adapt the saga of Chief Standing Bear, the results might have echoed “Amistad,” his previous opera, which also centered on a famous trial.

Instead, in “Wakonda’s Dream” Mr. Davis and his librettist, the poet Yusef Komunyakaa, use Standing Bear as a visionary presence and an emblem for the troubled lives and strained relationships of a modern Ponca family. The first act introduces Justin and Delores Labelle and their young son, Jason.

Despite the looming weight of history depicted through the presence of Standing Bear and the Ponca tribe, onstage at all times, “Wakonda’s Dream” emerges as Mr. Davis’s most intimate, human-scaled opera. He retains a penchant for angular lines of exposition, but here they are broken up by lyric passages that sometimes achieve a ravishing beauty, as in a first-act duet by Justin and Delores, set to music of shimmering iridescence."

Get the Story:
Of Coyotes, Men and Tribal Memory (The New York Times 3/9)
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