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The Pow’r Of Life Is Love begins with a staging of Act III, Scene I of Ruth Deyo’s (Garnett’s great-grand aunt) opera, The Diadem of Stars. This is the first public presentation of the music, which reappropriates and deconstructs Ruth’s Egyptomania to create a newly-inflected operatic vignette that centers performers of color. True to its title, The Pow’r Of Life Is Love celebrates the virtuosic talent and longstanding friendship of soprano Breanna Sinclairé, a renowned professional opera singer, and tenor Christopher Paul Craig of the LA Opera. The pair met at San Francisco Conservatory of music, where Sinclairé was the first transwoman to earn a masters in the opera program. Originally conceived as a romantic love scene, Garnett’s staging calls to mind other configurations of love, empowerment, survival, and familial and human connection as the two central figures orbit around each other like planets, singing about their shared mystical visions. The second part of the video is culled from Ruth’s diaries from the 1930s, which chronicle her frustrated artistic ambitions and soothing psychic dispatches received from her spirit lover—reinterpreted here as a portrayal of queer desire—who sings in a chorus of AI-generated voices.
In her freely perverse adaptation of Ruth’s vision, Garnett dispenses with any distinction between artifice and reality and leaves us grappling with the transcendences that art so often sets itself up to accomplish. Other works in the show respond to the archive of Ruth’s life and work through a combination of objects and video.