Music | Theater

Chelsea (formerly Bradley^[1]) Manning has many identities: adrift adolescent, emboldened whistleblower, traitor to her country. In this penetrating multimedia oratorio, Brooklyn-based composer Ted Hearne and director Daniel Fish dive into the media hysteria responsible for the many faces of the Army private who infamously leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks^[2].

An ever-shifting chorus of silent witnesses looms as four singers housed in a visual and sonic installation descend into the digital mire. With computer-processed voices, they inhabit a fever-dream assemblage of Twitter feeds, cable news reports, chat transcripts, court testimony, and declassified military video, shining a light on the massive information machine in which Manning, and our nation, has become ensnared.