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The Met Cloisters were alive with the sound of music on a frigid January afternoon. Six nuns in white surrounded a seventh dressed in black, and all were singing. The scene was beautifully formal but it also felt organic, as if the women had been there for centuries.<\/p>\n
Watching a rehearsal of Magos Herrera and Paola Prestini\u2019s opera \u201cPrimero Sue\u00f1o,\u201d which the Metropolitan Museum of Art is presenting tomorrow through Sunday<\/a>, Ronda Kasl, a curator of Latin American art at the Met and a consultant on the project, could not contain a smile. \u201cThis is so exciting,\u201d she murmured as chants bounced around the limestone walls that keep the world at bay.<\/p>\n Based on a mystical poem<\/a> from 1692 by Sor Juana In\u00e9s de la Cruz<\/a>, the 17th-century nun and proto-feminist polymath, \u201cPrimero Sue\u00f1o\u201d (\u201cFirst Dream\u201d) was conceived as a processional opera that would take over the Cloisters as it meandered from room to room, audience in tow.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe poem is about a soul journey,\u201d the director Louisa Proske said. \u201cSo we thought, \u2018What if we translated that soul journey into a physical journey at the Cloisters spaces?\u2019 Each room has a new possibility of how the audience relates to the performers.\u201d In some rooms, Proske said, people sit together on benches, while in others they are free to roam around the singers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After Proske, a founder of the innovative Heartbeat Opera<\/a> company, directed Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein\u2019s \u201cThe Mother of Us All\u201d<\/a> at the Metropolitan Museum in 2020, the Met invited her to stage another piece in a museum space. She had her eye on the Cloisters, so when the New York composer Prestini mentioned that she\u2019d been working on a Sor Juana project with Herrera, Proske knew she had found what she was looking for.<\/p>\n Sor Juana spent most of her time in a convent in Mexico City \u2014 then the capital of the sprawling colony territory of New Spain \u2014 and was a prolific writer in several genres. But unlike other contemporary Sor Juana depictions, such as the Mar\u00eda Luisa Bemberg film \u201cI, the Worst of All\u201d (1990) or Ballet Hisp\u00e1nico\u2019s \u201cSor Juana,\u201d<\/a> (2023), \u201cPrimero Sue\u00f1o\u201d does not concern itself with biographical details.<\/p>\n Rather, the opera sets to music her words, taken from a poem she wrote later in life. Herrera, a Mexico City-born singer and songwriter<\/a>, had given a Sor Juana book as a birthday gift to Prestini, with whom the poem immediately resonated. \u201cThe piece really takes this kind of identity of Mexico \u2014 the Indigenous reality, the Black slaves \u2014 and the Spanish influence, and mixes it in,\u201d Prestini said. \u201cYou get a very Baroque style, a lot of influence of Greek \u2014 all she was reading at the time \u2014 but then you also get these amazing Aztec symbols, you have a kind of different iconography.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cPrimero Sue\u00f1o\u201d was the work that Sor Juana \u201cwanted to put out in the world,\u201d she added. \u201cThis piece, in a way, symbolizes her pursuit of knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n And unlike much of Sor Juana\u2019s output, it was not a commission from a royal or an aristocrat. \u201cThis is a poem that she wrote because she wanted to write it,\u201d Herrera said. \u201cSo in a way it was her most honest, truthful thing to say. My process has been to understand that everything that we\u2019re going to see in the performance happens because of Juana\u2019s mind.\u201d<\/p>\n Herrera described creating \u201cPrimero Sue\u00f1o\u201d with Prestini as \u201cknitting, a process where she gives me a thread, her personality, her line, and then I put my line over that, and then I send it back.\u201d Just as the score mixes the devotional with almost rootsy strands<\/a>, Herrera\u2019s Sor Juana, the nun in black, sings in an earthy mezzo that complements the heavenly harmonies of the six nuns in white, performed by the German vocal ensemble Sjaella<\/a>. <\/strong>(Celso Duarte on harps and hand percussion and Luca Tarantino on theorbo and Spanish guitar provide the accompaniment.)<\/p>\n Sor Juana\u2019s presence is also embedded in important design elements. The members of Sjaella wear what look like nuns\u2019 robes but are actually flowing, pleated pants with intricate patterns. On a research trip to Mexico City with the creative team, the designer Andrea Lauer took photos of Sor Juana\u2019s signature, drawn in her blood, from her \u201cBook of Professions.\u201d She then created a digital collage that she printed onto the pleats.<\/p>\n That detail is not immediately discernible to the naked eye, unlike the large, attention-catching disks the performers wear around their necks, and which Lauer also designed. These artifacts of \u201cwearable technology\u201d represent the \u201cescudos de monjas\u201d or nuns\u2019 badges<\/a> worn centuries ago to answer a double constraint: Nuns were forbidden to wear jewelry and they had to signal their devotion, so in New Spain they started wearing what were basically elaborately designed and ornamented artworks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThey\u2019re over the heart so it\u2019s a very meaningful placement on the body, and they depict religious scenes so they are, in a way, externalizing what the nun might be meditating on all her life \u2014 usually it\u2019s something having to do with the Virgin Mary,\u201d Proske said.<\/p>\n In the opera, too, these ornaments double as ways to deliver information and illuminate, sometimes literally.<\/p>\n \u201cWe realized we could totally reinvent what these escudos are,\u201d Proske said. \u201cThey could become speakers, amplifiers, projection sources. Some of them have little projectors in them, so in the spaces where it\u2019s hard to fit large projectors the nuns are projecting the text themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEach of them is different,\u201d she added, \u201cand each has a sort of the secret of that sister.\u201d<\/p>\n Those high-tech escudos carry into the 21st century a concept their predecessors illustrated: the transmission of knowledge and artistry. Cloistered life may look punitive and repressive to modern sensibilities, but for many women like Sor Juana, it represented an opportunity to nurture intellect without having to serve men.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was the place they could study, this was the place they could live quite free lives,\u201d Prestini said. \u201cThey were staging plays, they were musical. It was a way to be yourself, to not just do what society told you \u2014 to be able to actually be free.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n