On September 25, under a ruined proscenium, on a parking deck, among ravers, punks, scenesters, and opera-lovers, as champagne for spent performers flowed nearby—grace arrived. Nine singers, four actors, a 15-member orchestra, and a conductor had been looping the same 150-second passage from “Le nozze di Figaro” without pause for 11 hours and 50 minutes, and during the fourth-to-last repetition, I realized, this is how exhausted you’d be after the time depicted in Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera. They squeeze the fictional day’s chaos into about three hours; Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s durational installation “BLISS” expands a brief excerpt of the opera into a 12-hour ritual.
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