Lighting Designer

Dolores is an opera that floats between the real and the imagined, memory and nightmare. Composer Nicolás Lell Benavides and librettist Marella Martin Koch stitch history into something fragile and feverish. There are sacred chants, electric guitar pulsations, bossa nova hallucinations.

Labor icon Dolores Huerta helped build a union out of dust and righteous anger. She walked the fields, held the line, made the calls. With César Chávez and Larry Itliong, she shaped a movement that reached the ears of presidents but never lost sight of the people bent over the vines. The work didn’t stop. It never does. That’s the cost of believing another world is possible.

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Dolores

National Hispanic Cultural Center

Taking its inspiration from two viral incidents around cultural appropriation and food [Chef Tyler Akin’s how-to video for Bon Appetit, “PSA: This is How You Should Be Eating Pho,” and Dan Pashman of The Sporkful’s suggestion that you could improve bibimbap using a bundt pan], Dustin Chinn says he “followed the rabbit hole” and wrote “a triptych about the ownership and authorship of food following the journey of Vietnamese noodle soup.” This biting comedy spans centuries, continents, and cultures in its three-part vignette structure. Beginning in 1880s Hanoi, the capital city of French Indochina, where a Vietnamese cook finds herself in the kitchen of aristocratic French settlers. Then in 1999, a century later, in Vietnam, where American diners get their first taste of the local cuisine. Then finally, in present-day, gentrifying Brooklyn, where the simmering argument around culture, ownership, and authenticity comes to a roaring boil.

Lighting Designer

Michael Oesch

Events

Past events

Oct 26 - Nov 2, 2025

Dolores · Opera Southwest

Nov 4 - Dec 1, 2022

Colonialism is Terrible, But Pho is Delicious · Aurora Theatre Company

About

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