Looking over its edge, I spotted a dusty Jeep parked on a lower level with the words LIONS SUCK traced on the windshield. The production was pay-what-you-like, and those of us in the audience reached the performance space by walking up a ramp. The sight of cars parked beneath moldering Renaissance-style plasterwork and traces of long-gone balconies has long proved irresistible to Detroit ruin photographers, but no one before Sharon had ever staged a live performance among them. Sharon’s production took place in what was once the Michigan Building Theater, a former Detroit movie palace that closed in 1976 infamously, when architects determined that demolishing the theater would make an adjoining office building structurally unsound, the interior was gutted and transformed into a multilevel garage. Last September, as cultural organizations began their fall seasons in a state of crisis, unsure if audiences would venture from their homes in the midst of a pandemic, Yuval Sharon, the artistic director of the Michigan Opera Theater, decided to mount a show called “Bliss.” A restaging of a marathon piece by the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, “Bliss” requires its performers to replay the final three minutes of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” without pause for 12 hours.
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