What is it then between us?

Photo: Stefan Killen

In the fifth stanza of Crossing Brooklyn Ferry—from which Matthew Aucoin’s new American opera takes its name—Walt Whitman asks, “What is it then between us?” First published in 1855, the poem speaks powerfully to the importance of solidarity in a national moment plagued by rivalry and violence.

Last week, we partnered with pinhole photographer Stefan Killen to capture unique, dreamlike portraits of Crossing’s cast and creative team. The deliberately lo-fi process engages the camera obscura phenomenon to create images with a nearly infinite depth of field—all without the use of a proper lens on the camera box. After the photoshoot, we asked each of them to answer Whitman’s prompt—to define, in their own words, what it is then between us, and what that phrase might mean presently in 2017. Their thoughts and portraits are shared below:

In Context: Crossing

Composer Matthew Aucoin makes his BAM debut with Crossing—a chamber opera taking inspiration from Walt Whitman’s Civil War diary, directed by American Repertory Theater artistic director Diane Paulus. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of related articles and videos. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought by posting in the comments below and on social media using #BAMNextWave.

I Am With You: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Illustrated

When Matthew Aucoin's new opera Crossing comes to BAM next Tue, Oct 3, audiences will be treated to a new side of 19th century poet Walt Whitman: alive—on stage—with a booming baritone. Drawing inspiration from the diary Whitman kept while volunteering as a Civil War nurse, Aucoin places America's seminal poet (sung by Rod Gilfry) at the narrative heart of his opera—and draws titular inspiration from one of Whitman's most treasured texts. “The one poem that I couldn’t avoid is Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," notes Aucoin. "[Whitman] is obsessed with this question of what it is that links him to his fellow human beings...He has this insane instinct to speak to the future and say 'I've been there.'"

To celebrate Whitman's Brooklyn homecoming, we partnered with illustrator Nathan Gelgud to visually depict the first three sections of the prescient poem. Peruse the illustrations below before seeing the poet face-to-face when Crossing comes to the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House Oct 3—8.

Notes on Crossing

Composer Matthew Aucoin's Crossing, a new American opera directed by American Repertory Theater's Diane Paulus, comes to BAM on October 3. A note from Aucoin follows.

by Matthew Aucoin

“But for the opera…I could never have written Leaves of Grass,” Walt Whitman reminisced late in life. It’s perhaps surprising that the quintessential American poet, the writer whose signature bard-call is a “barbaric yawp” rather than a refined warble, spent his formative years—before setting off to cross a wild, apparently “formless” poetic frontier—absorbing the bel canto operas of Donizetti, Bellini, Rossini, and the young Verdi. I share Whitman’s opinion that the essence of opera has nothing to do with the stuffy salons and social one-upmanship of the Americans who imported it to New York in the 19th century: opera is a primal union of animal longing, as expressed in sound, and human meaning, as expressed in language. Indeed, Whitman considered opera the pinnacle of human expression, something beyond the powers of language alone. And in his best poems, Whitman operates like an opera composer: he carries the English language into a new musical landscape. Whitman’s “melodies” surge boundlessly, spilling over the side of the page; his exclamations are wild and craggy. His poetry is both the waterfall and the rocks on which the water crashes.

Whitman, Across the Divide

Photo: Gretjen Helene

By Robert Jackson Wood

“Since I have sat where you sit and breathed the air you breathe, I know you will hear me,” sings the poet Walt Whitman at the beginning of Matthew Aucoin’s opera Crossing, at BAM from October 3 to 8. It is, in our time, an almost perversely optimistic sentiment. Yet in the context of Whitman’s exuberant oeuvre, it’s maybe fitting. Whitman was an idealist, whose ebullient verse betrayed a sprawling fantasy of human communion—of bodies and souls merged, of distances overcome—sanctioned by an erotic metaphysics of shared experience. “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” he wrote in “Song of Myself.”