Gallup (Na’nízhoozhí)

Gallup (Na’nízhoozhí) is a fifteen-minute music-film, directed by Blackhorse Lowe and featuring the poetry of Jake Skeets. The film had its digital premiere, hosted by Los Angeles Opera, on May 28, 2021. It is a portrait of the city of Gallup, NM (known as Na’nízhoozhí in the Navajo language) viewed through the eyes of two supernatural beings – a Mist Being and a Star Being – who emerge from the desert, float into the city, bear witness to Gallup’s human activity, and melt back into the earth at nightfall.

Jake Skeets’s poetry is full of fugitive portraits of queer love, and in the case of his first collection, Eyes Bottle Dark With a Mouthful of Flowers, these portraits are contained within a broader portrait of the city of Gallup, where Jake grew up.

I was struck, when I read the book, by the way that in Gallup, love between men seems almost indistinguishable from violence between men. Love and violence are two incarnations of the same impulse. And I think Jake’s book is in part about the difference between love and violence – a difference that is hard to see and even harder to choose.

Our director, Blackhorse Lowe, came up with Na’nízhoozhí’s storyline, which strikes me as a beautiful embodiment of the perspective from which Jake’s poetry is spoken. The two “beings,” the Mist Being and the Star Being, are both human and more-than-human, and they observe the pandemic-ravaged Gallup with curiosity and sympathy. The Mist Being seems very lonely, an outsider, until he (or she – these Beings are surely beyond gender) finds the Star Being. It’s only when the two Beings have found each other that Jake’s poetry is sung; until that point, the singing is wordless.

Na’nízhoozhí is performed by members of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC): Anthony Roth Costanzo and Davóne Tines as the two Beings, and an instrumental ensemble consisting of Emi Ferguson (flutes), Miranda Cuckson (violin), Coleman Itzkoff (cello), Jonny Allen (percussion), and Conor Hanick (piano), conducted by Matthew Aucoin.