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ANIMATED CHAPTERS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 23 16 13 10 5 3 1 27 30 34
Introduction
Crash
An intersection in Boyle Heights
Lucha's Childhood
Lucha's Quinceañera Song
Mariachi Plaza, Boyle Heights
Jameson's Story
Jameson Portrait
The 2nd Street Tunnel, Downtown Los Angeles
The Reunion
A Rehearsal Studio in the Arts District
First Kiss
Hollenbeck Park, East Los Angeles
Angel's Point
Angel's Point, Elysian Park
Love and Fractals
The Floating Nebula
The Corn Fields, Los Angeles State Historic Park, Chinatown
Wedding
City Hall, Downtown Los Angeles
The Next Years
The Phone Call, Part 1
Traversing between the Arts District and Boyle Heights
A Fortune
Chinatown Plaza
Orlando's Story
Orlando's Fairwell
Evergreen Cemetery
Interlude (Car Wash)
AirStream Trailer, Elysian Park
Passengers
The Roadways, Elysian Park
The Experiment
3rd Street and Broadway
Despair
230 Center St, Arts District
The Disappearance
The Red Notebook
Utter darkness
The Other Woman
The Bradbury Building, Downtown Los Angeles
Hades
Bowtie Parcel, Los Angeles River
Breakthrough
Lucha and Orlando in Love
Historic Core, Downtown Los Angeles
Lucha Portrait
Alongside the LA River, Interstate 5
Orlando In Love
Orfeo
The Million Dollar Theater
Orlando Portrait
Libros Schmibros Book Store, Boyle Heights
Farewell From the Roof Tops
Rooftops, Toy Factory Lofts, Biscuit Lofts, Ito Building Tower, Arts District
Old Age Like a Dream
The Phone Call, Part 2
Chavez Ravine, Elysian Park
Finale
The Central Hub

The Phone Call, Part 1

Location: Traversing between the Arts District and Boyle Heights
Lucha: Maria Elena Altany
Music by Marc Lowenstein
Text by Mandy Kahn
Special Thanks to Lewis Pesacov
As the fortune teller predicted, Lucha receives a mysterious phone call from a voice she seems to recognize. One line haunts her: “Time is happening all at once. A thousand streets lead into one great path, and no gate blocks your way.”

Director’s Notes:

“This was one of the central chapters of Hopscotch, and in its unusual form, became a stand-in for the entire project. We get in the car with Lucha, played by Maria Elena Altany. She picks up a blue rotary phone and hears a very mysterious voice; she can’t quite tell what the voice is even trying to say. Then she hears the line,

“A thousand streets lead into one great road, and no gate blocks your way.”

“She doesn’t know what this could mean or how the person on the other end could know so much about her. On this side of the phone call, the scene is very emotional and turbulent, since it brings back all the suffering from the loss of her family – coinciding with a drive through the neighborhood of her childhood.

Long Drives

There is enough road in Los Angeles to pave an eight lane highway all the way to New York City

Soprano Maria Elena Altany speaks about how singing in Hopscotch and for The Industry is different than performing in other operas.

Photograph by Angie Smith for The New Yorker

“Mandy, Marc and I went back and forth several times on what the mysterious riddle would be that would accompany Lucha for the rest of her life. The line about the thousand streets ended up leaping off the page to me when I was reading K.T. Berger’s book Zen Driving; Berger used a quote from the Zen Buddhist monk Mumon which read: ‘The great path has no gates, thousands of roads enter it. When one passes through this gateless gate he walks freely between heaven and earth.’ I instantly knew that would be the basis for the mysterious riddle at the core of this scene and this entire work.

A meeting of the minds–Hopscotch creators gather to conceptualize the architecture of the story

“I was originally hoping that Maria Elena and Suzanna Guzmán in Chapter 35 would sing this piece live to each other in two different cars on two different routes (this chapter was on the Red Route; Suzanna’s chapter was on the Green Route). We even did a technical test to see how that would work with the time delay.

“Although the streaming was amazing, the coordination was (unsurprisingly) a bit of a disaster, especially for a scene that was as tightly written as Marc had in mind. So they each sang instead to a pre-recorded track of the other voice, mixed as if that second voice were far away in the distance. The broadcast at the Central Hub offered a perfect synthesis of their voices in real time.”

– Yuval Sharon