Part film screening. Part industrial rock opera concert. Part immersive theater experience.

Black Lodge

STILE Downtown Los Angeles by Kasa

Performance of Self is an immersive piece by Jodie Landau which uses chamber music and dance to weave its way through songs and stories about queerness, gender, sexuality, [online] dating, choice, consent, attraction, desire, expectations, conforming to someone’s needs vs. self-preservation, language and communication, dance, drag, costume, and the performance of self.

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Performance Of Self

National Sawdust

The Great Soviet Bucket is a dark musical comedy that follows Timur, a dutiful Soviet citizen, and his unhinged “Mother Russia” puppet, Comrade Bucket. Like a true believer, Timur patiently tolerates the complexities of the USSR, knowing that a better future is almost here. His local commander, Comrade Bucket, a puppet named after an enameled Soviet bucket, encourages him to embrace the collective ways of living. But when the Soviet Union empire begins to crumble, so too does Timur’s Soviet identity. In The Great Soviet Bucket, Kazakh-American opera singer Timur (backed by a cadre of brilliant musician-performers) uses the Soviet songs of his childhood to ask pressing questions about the intertwined forces of identity, politics, and history.

The Great Soviet Bucket

Miami Theater Center

Based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea is an opera by Paola Prestini, Royce Vavrek and Karmina Šilec that presents a dual track of storytelling by combining the Hemingway text with original portraits of quotidian life to create a look at aging, legacy, and our relationship to oceans. The work includes longtime collaborators/muses of Prestini’s including Jeffrey Zeigler as the featured cellist. The cast includes a choir, and brings to life the seminal characters: Santiago, Manolin, and the wife, recast as La Virgen del Cobre, a goddess in Santería, the Afro-Caribbean faith, who was found floating on a wooden board off the coast of eastern Cuba in 1628. Themes of baseball, ecology, religion, and economy paint a conflict between progress and tradition, craft passion and exploitation, ultimately shedding contemporary perspectives on this timeless tale.

The Old Man and the Sea

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Book of Mountains and Seas is a work of vocal-theater for 12 singers, two percussionists, and puppeteers. It is inspired by the ancient Chinese compilation of early myths of the same title, which was first transcribed in 4th century B.C. Over the years, these mythological stories have become part of Chinese written and oral history, shifted and reshaped to match contemporary times. Book of Mountains and Seas is a 21st-century adaptation through the lens of our modern-day relationship with the natural world. The creation stories conjure a sense of respect and awe for the environment, and the water stories challenge us to be good stewards of the natural resources we have been given.

Book Of Mountains And Seas

The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage

Emerson Paramount Center

Chicago Opera Theater

Stanford University

An adaptation of Atom Egoyan’s film of the same name, Adoration follows Simon, an orphaned high school student. As part of a dramatic writing exercise, Simon’s teacher encourages him to appropriate details from a historical terrorist attack as an event perpetrated by his parents. When his story goes viral, Simon uses the hysteria within his community and on the internet to highlight the challenges of intolerance and racism in our society. The fictional and actual circumstances of the loss of Simon’s family are revealed in fragments, only fitting together with the final revelation that the prejudices of Simon’s maternal grandfather led to his parents’ deaths.

Adoration

The Sheen Center for Thought & Culture

Between 1910 and 1940, many Chinese immigrants flowed through the immigration station on Angel Island inside San Francisco Bay, facing mass discrimination under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, with few exceptions. With music by acclaimed Chinese-American composer Huang Ruo, Angel Island revisits this chapter of American history with a poignant multimedia experience scored for voices and a string quartet that blurs the boundaries of opera, theater, dance, and music. Huang Ruo, along with director Matthew Ozawa, weaves a powerful requiem from the century-old poetry engraved on the detention center’s walls by some of the hundreds of thousands of incarcerated Chinese immigrants. Angel Island arrives amid an ongoing epidemic of brutal violence and rampant discrimination against immigrants, asylum-seekers, and Asians across the diaspora. This production is a stirring plea for care and empathy as well as a visceral, clear-eyed tribute to the rebellion and resilience of those who passed through and perished at Angel Island.

Angel Island

Brooklyn Academy of Music

BMP is delighted to announce the ten selected semi-finalists for the third cycle of BMP: Next Gen, our flagship program for early career composers.

Bmp: Next Gen3

Walt Disney Concert Hall

Sensorium Ex is an ambitious new opera by librettist Brenda Shaughnessy and acclaimed composer Paola Prestini, co-directed by Jerron Herman and Jay Scheib, that synthesizes artificial intelligence, disability, and the arts in a groundbreaking and innovative artistic work.

Beth Morrison Projects

23 - 24 Nov, 2024

Bmp: Next Gen3

19 - 23 Feb, 2025

Adoration

22 - 25 May, 2025

Sensorium Ex

Oct 19, 2024

Black Lodge

15 - 16 Mar, 2024

Performance Of Self

Beth Morrison Projects