There’s no punch line.

It really happened — in Hudson Square. 

Mosheh, a videOpera about the life of Moses, was developed by composer Yoav Gal during a residency at HERE Arts in Hudson Square and rehearsed in space made available to HERE Arts by Trinity Real Estate.

Mosheh focuses on the key moments of Moses’ life, told through arias sung by the women in his life: Miriam, his sister; Yocheved, his mother; Zipporah, his wife; and Bitia, the Pharaoh’s daughter who raised him. The Voice of God, which narrates the peice, is played by both Trinity Choir member Wesley Chinn and his sister Hai-Ting Chinn. 

In Mosheh, the post-minimalist libretto is integrated with video projections that help tell the story, and place it in a modern, gritty, Brooklyn context. When Bitia brings Moses into the Pharoah's palace for the first time, Gal uses images of a woman and a small boy walking through the graffiti-covered columns underneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to evoke the enormity of the palace columns and the scale of Bitia’s actions.

“It’s an iconic story, reenacted in the reality we live in,” Chinn explained.

The Voice of God was written for two singers — a mezzo-soprano and a countertenor — so the voice would sound gender ambiguous.

“In a sense, my sister and I have been singing together all our lives,” Chinn said. “For the show, we were inside a black obelisk with holes cut in it for our mouths. It was lit up from the inside, so we couldn’t see each other at all, which could have made singing together difficult. It was good that we’ve sung together so much.”

Mosheh “gets to the really difficult things God does in the Old Testament,” Chinn said. Moses’ struggles with God in Mosheh reflect the universal struggle with how to be religious in a challenging world.

“I’d never spent any time in Hudson Square before this,” Chinn noted, “and it was really gratifying to see the greater connection of Trinity to the community, to see the Trinity plaque on the building where we rehearsed. To experience that was really fun.”