Lighting Designer

AMOC* opens our milestone Run AMOC* Festival with the New York premiere of The Comet / Poppea. This production fuses Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea (1642) with W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story The Comet (1920). Directed by Yuval Sharon, it explores power, survival, and race through the lens of cosmic disaster. George Lewis’s evocative new score—a 2025 Pulitzer finalist—links these narratives in a visionary operatic landscape. The stellar cast features AMOC* members Davóne Tines and Anthony Roth Costanzo. Tony Award-winner and Lincoln Center Artist-in-Residence (2022–24) Mimi Lien’s rotating set merges ancient Rome with comet-ravaged New York, creating an apocalyptic, immersive experience.

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“The Comet / Poppea” – Run AMOC* Festival at Lincoln Center

Lincoln Center

Five artists escape the city to a remote farm, seeking a creative retreat and the inspiration of nature. They paint, write, farm, and some even fall in love, but extreme weather upends their plans, altering their lives forever. The Seasons is set in a near future in which the seasons seem to be out of order. Co-conceived by celebrated playwright Sarah Ruhl and countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, this innovative work creates a new narrative from Vivaldi arias, ensembles, and excerpts from The Four Seasons, all woven together with dance by choreographer Pam Tanowitz. Directed by Zack Winokur with music direction by Stephen Stubbs, the piece uses timeless music to find new ways we can draw connections between our emotions and the weather.

The Seasons

Emerson Paramount Center

After years of anticipation, a truly unmissable event arrives as the electrifying Lise Davidsen tackles one of the ultimate roles for dramatic soprano: the Irish princess Isolde in Wagner’s transcendent meditation on love and death. Heroic tenor Michael Spyres stars opposite Davidsen as the love-drunk Tristan. The momentous occasion also marks the advent of a new, Met-debut staging by Yuval Sharon—hailed by The New York Times as “the most visionary opera director of his generation” and the first American to direct an opera at the famed Wagner festival in Bayreuth—as well as Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s first time leading Tristan und Isolde at the Met. Mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova reprises her signature portrayal of Brangäne, alongside bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny, who sings Kurwenal after celebrated Met appearances in Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer and Ring cycle. Bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green makes an important role debut as King Marke.

Tristan und Isolde

HARAWI realizes Olivier Messiaen’s deeply affecting, hour-long song cycle for voice and piano in new physical and dramatic dimensions, featuring soprano Julia Bullock, pianist Conor Hanick, choreographer/dancers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, with direction by Zack Winokur. Moving from duet to quartet, this production breaks open Messiaen’s cycle, connects movement to music, and grapples with the intensity of love and loss.

Harawi California Tour

 University of California, Santa Barbara

Cal Performances

The Walls Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

The Comet / Poppea brings together seemingly disparate worlds connected by stories of cultural transformation. The work juxtaposes Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea), an Italian opera from 1643 unfolding among the social divisions of ancient Rome; and the world premiere of The Comet, based on the 1924 science-fiction short story by sociologist and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Set in 1920s New York City, “The Comet” depicts a Black man and white woman as the only survivors after a comet hits Earth.

The Comet / Poppea

Museum of Contemporary Art

Taylor Mac, the MacArthur Fellow, Kennedy Prize winner, and Pulitzer Prize finalist, visits with with the West Coast premiere of Bark of Millions, an epic four-hour “parade trance extravaganza.”  Bark of Millions is a rock opera meditation on queerness featuring 54 original songs (one song per year since the Stonewall uprising) inspired by queer antecedents throughout world history and performed by a diverse cast of 13 ensemble members and a band of 11 musicians. As in his legendary retelling of American history, 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Mac, his cast, and longtime collaborators Matt Ray (music) and Machine Dazzle (costumes) use music, dance, and drag spectacle to subvert and deconstruct conventional narratives, and joyfully, transgressively celebrate queerness in all its forms. “Taylor Mac uses his many talents to get us to listen, think and feel. The effect is heartening, vital and liberating” (The London Times).

Taylor Mac & Matt Ray’s Bark of Millions

University of California, Berkeley

AMOC*’s production of HARAWI realizes Olivier Messiaen’s deeply affecting, hour-long song cycle for voice and piano in new physical and dramatic dimensions, featuring soprano Julia Bullock, pianist Conor Hanick, choreographer/dancers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, with direction by Zack Winokur. Moving from duet to quartet, this production breaks open Messiaen’s cycle, connects movement to music, and grapples with the intensity of love and loss.

Harawi

Broken Theater is a new work created within the walls of La MaMa that melds live dance-theater, music, and cinematic beauty. Twelve artists meet in a ghost theater where they grapple with love, humiliation, and loss at the cost of each other. When the script has disappeared, when the audience is gone, where are the lines between the part you play and the person you are?

Broken Theater: Benefit Night

Ellen Stewart Theatre

Bobbi Jene Smith’s Broken Theater

Superstar Joyce DiDonato invites us back to the Garden of Eden through this groundbreaking, through-performed, theatrical program that spans four centuries of music exploring our relationship with the natural world. Joined by the award-winning Il Pomo d’Oro orchestra conducted by Zefira Valova, she lends her celebrated voice to questions at the very core of our existence as channeled through composers including Handel, Gluck, Wagner, Mahler, Ives, Copland, and Oscar-winner Rachel Portman (Emma). “With each passing day,” DiDonato shares, “I trust more and more in the perfect balance, astonishing mystery and guiding force of the natural world around us, how much Mother Nature has to teach us. EDEN is an invitation to return to our roots and to explore whether or not we are connecting as profoundly as we can to the pure essence of our being, to create a new EDEN from within and plant seeds of hope for the future.”

Joyce DiDonato, Mezzo-soprano: EDEN

Richardson Auditorium

Superstar Joyce DiDonato invites us back to the Garden of Eden through this groundbreaking, through-performed, theatrical program that spans four centuries of music exploring our relationship with the natural world. Joined by the award-winning Il Pomo d’Oro orchestra conducted by Zefira Valova, she lends her celebrated voice to questions at the very core of our existence as channeled through composers including Handel, Gluck, Wagner, Mahler, Ives, Copland, and Oscar-winner Rachel Portman (Emma). “With each passing day,” DiDonato shares, “I trust more and more in the perfect balance, astonishing mystery and guiding force of the natural world around us, how much Mother Nature has to teach us. EDEN is an invitation to return to our roots and to explore whether or not we are connecting as profoundly as we can to the pure essence of our being, to create a new EDEN from within and plant seeds of hope for the future.” The evening will also feature a guest appearance by the Princeton Girlchoir.

Joyce DiDonato: EDEN

From the expansive musical mind of Joyce DiDonato comes Eden, the renowned mezzo-soprano’s latest project exploring the majesty, might, and mystery of the natural world. As in her well-received Cal Performances program In War & Peace: Harmony Through Music, DiDonato is joined by longtime partners, the early-music ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro. The theatrical, semi-staged concert features music from the 17th to 21st centuries by Handel, Gluck, Cavalli, Wagner, Mahler, Ives, and Copland. Oscar-winning British composer Rachel Portman composes a new work specially for the project, setting a text by American poet Gene Scheer for The First Morning of the World. “Joyce sings and the world is suddenly brighter. She compels us to listen actively, to hear things anew” (Gramophone).

Joyce DiDonato: Eden

Harawi is a deeply affecting hour-long song cycle for soprano and piano written by Olivier Messiaen. In addition to Julia Bullock and Conor Hanick’s performance of this sweeping work, this production breaks open Messiaen’s musical explorations of love and death into a newly physicalized and theatrical dimension.

Libbey Bowl

You could say Vivaldi had a kind of synesthesia when writing The Four Seasons. What does being cold feel and sound like? MacArthur Award-winning playwright and librettist Sarah Ruhl joins Anthony Roth Costanzo to co-conceive a tapestry of Vivaldi’s music, telling an original story about a world in which the seasons are completely out of order. 

Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

Creator and opera revolutionary Davóne Tines brings Langston Hughes’ poem “The Black Clown” to musical life in a vaudevillian rendering of this masterpiece. Fusing gospel, opera, jazz, and spirituals into a searing night of theatrical brilliance, The Black Clown embodies the evolving, divided soul of Black America and animates a Black man’s resilience against a legacy of oppression. The Black Clown has been hailed as “pure poetry” by The Boston Globe, and The New York Times lauds “this rich, seamless production melds the past and present of African-American history into an electrifyingly ambivalent whole.” Tines makes his Opera Philadelphia debut alongside an ensemble of 12 performers in this genre-bending, visually arresting piece, juxtaposing dazzling cathartic performances with Hughes’ enduring work.

Lighting Designer

John Torres

Events

Upcoming events

19 - 21 Dec, 2025

The Seasons · Opera Philadelphia

14 - 17 May, 2026

The Black Clown · Opera Philadelphia

Past events

18 - 21 Jun, 2025

“The Comet / Poppea” – Run AMOC* Festival at Lincoln Center · AMOC / American Modern Opera Company

12 - 16 Mar, 2025

The Seasons · Boston Lyric Opera

About

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