EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL

Created by Geoff Sobelle / Directed by Lee Sunday Evans / Original Songs by Elvis Perkins

HOME is a large-scale performance work that explores and explodes the relationship between “House” and “Home.” A visual physical spectacle, HOME combines dance, illusion, live music, home-spun engineering, and an inventive use of audience interaction to compose a work that asks, where is home? If it is not a place, what is home? In the face of entropy, we struggle to build infra- structure, family, community, art. We fail, and we try again.

BRISBANE FESTIVAL

Created by Geoff Sobelle / Directed by Lee Sunday Evans / Original Songs by Elvis Perkins

​HOME is a large-scale performance work that explores and explodes the relationship between “House” and “Home.” A visual physical spectacle, HOME combines dance, illusion, live music, home-spun engineering, and an inventive use of audience interaction to compose a work that asks, where is home? If it is not a place, what is home? In the face of entropy, we struggle to build infra- structure, family, community, art. We fail, and we try again.

BAM HARVEY THEATER

Music by Ted Hearne | Libretto by Saul Williams | Directed by Patricia McGregor | Designed by Sanford Biggers

Part meditation, part confrontation, PLACE examines the complex consequences of a rupture in the place we call home. Boundaries crossed within a young family mirror the fault lines that are exposed when the desire for expansion by some causes displacement for others. Where will the impulse to claim our space lead us next; what is left to colonize and at what cost?

LA OPERA

Music and Libretto by David T Little | Music Direction by Alan Pierson | Directed by Ashley Tata | Featuring David Adam Moore

Soldier Songs is an evening-length multimedia event that combines elements of theater, opera, rock-infused concert music, and film footage by Bill Morrison to explore the perceptions versus the realities of the Soldier, the exploration of loss and exploitation of innocence, and the difficulty of expressing the truth of war.

HONG KONG NEW VISION ARTS FESTIVAL

Composed by Du Yun | Libretto by Royce Vavrek | Directed by Michael Joseph McQuilken | Conducted by Daniela Candillari

The 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner Angel’s Bone follows the plight of two fallen angels whose nostalgia for earthly delights finds them far from heaven. They are found battered and bruised by a man and his wife, known only as Mr. and Mrs. X.E., who have longed for a better life than their modest middle-class status. Mr. and Mrs. X.E. bring the angels into their home and set out to nurse them back to health: they bathe them, wash the dirt from their nails…then lock them in the root cellar and decide that this is their chance to be wealthy and legendary.

LA OPERA

Composed by Ellen Reid | Libretto by Roxie Perkins | Directed by James Darrah | Conducted by Julian Wachner

Locked away in a sterile room, a sickly child Bibi and her doting mother Lumee are each other’s sole protectors from the unknown. When a mysterious illness lurking outside their door leaves Bibi unable to walk, her youthful curiosity begins to simmer and a seductive external existence can no longer be ignored. p r i s m, by Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins, is a haunting, kaleidoscopic new work of opera-theatre that traverses the elasticity of memory after trauma. Composer Ellen Reid’s music erupts with color, using choral and orchestral manipulation to deliver an eerily distinct sonic world.

LA MAMA, PROTOTYPE FESTIVAL

Composed by Ellen Reid | Libretto by Roxie Perkins | Directed by James Darrah | Conducted by Julian Wachner

Locked away in a sterile room, a sickly child Bibi and her doting mother Lumee are each other’s sole protectors from the unknown. When a mysterious illness lurking outside their door leaves Bibi unable to walk, her youthful curiosity begins to simmer and a seductive external existence can no longer be ignored. p r i s m, by Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins, is a haunting, kaleidoscopic new work of opera-theatre that traverses the elasticity of memory after trauma. Composer Ellen Reid’s music erupts with color, using choral and orchestral manipulation to deliver an eerily distinct sonic world.

HERE Arts Center, PROTOTYPE Festival

Writer, Composer, & Performer Joseph Keckler

Joseph Keckler and an intimate musical ensemble lead the audience through a series of vignettes, each like a stop on a late-night train-- from Paris to Hamburg, Michigan to Times Square and the symbolic space of The Crossroads, a place of danger and possibility. The text dances between comedy, commentary and communion, while the score features smoky pop songs, propulsive invocations, and leaps into the operatic.

HOME (TOUR)

SYDNEY FESTIVAL

Created by Geoff Sobelle / Directed by Lee Sunday Evans / Original Songs by Elvis Perkins

​HOME is a large-scale performance work that explores and explodes the relationship between “House” and “Home.” A visual physical spectacle, HOME combines dance, illusion, live music, home-spun engineering, and an inventive use of audience interaction to compose a work that asks, where is home? If it is not a place, what is home? In the face of entropy, we struggle to build infra- structure, family, community, art. We fail, and we try again.

NATIONAL SAWDUST, BROOKLYN

Music by Michael Lanci and Emma O'Halloran | Music Direction by David Bloom

BMP: Next Generation is a new initiative to discover the next generation of music-theatre and opera-theatre compositional voices. Dynamic young composers Michael Lanci and Emma O’Halloran were chosen, after a showcase of ten composers in March 2018, to write 30-minute vocal works to premiere in spring 2019. Following the performance, one of these two finalists will receive a commission for a full evening-length operatic work to be developed, premiered, and toured by BMP.

HONG KONG ARTS FESTIVAL

Created by Cerise Lim Jacobs | Composed by Zhou Long | Directed by Michael Counts | Conducted by Lan Shui

Madame White Snake, the 2011 Pulitzer prize winning opera, is the story of a deadly white snake demon who gives up her immortal existence to assume human form in the pursuit of the most human of all emotions – love. She holds love dearly for one moment; and then love is lost forever. A powerful metaphor for what it means to be truly human, the myth has become an icon to those who have dared to dream.

HONG KONG ARTS FESTIVAL

Created by Geoff Sobelle / Directed by Lee Sunday Evans / Original Songs by Elvis Perkins

​HOME is a large-scale performance work that explores and explodes the relationship between “House” and “Home.” A visual physical spectacle, HOME combines dance, illusion, live music, home-spun engineering, and an inventive use of audience interaction to compose a work that asks, where is home? If it is not a place, what is home? In the face of entropy, we struggle to build infra- structure, family, community, art. We fail, and we try again.

BERKELEY REP

Created by Geoff Sobelle / Directed by Lee Sunday Evans / Original Songs by Elvis Perkins

HOME is a large-scale performance work that explores and explodes the relationship between “House” and “Home.” A visual physical spectacle, HOME combines dance, illusion, live music, home-spun engineering, and an inventive use of audience interaction to compose a work that asks, where is home? If it is not a place, what is home? In the face of entropy, we struggle to build infra- structure, family, community, art. We fail, and we try again.

AUSTIN OPERA

Music and Libretto by David T Little | Music Direction by Todd Reynolds | Directed by Ashley Tata | Featuring Christopher Burchett

Soldier Songs is an evening-length multimedia event that combines elements of theater, opera, rock-infused concert music, and film footage by Bill Morrison to explore the perceptions versus the realities of the Soldier, the exploration of loss and exploitation of innocence, and the difficulty of expressing the truth of war.

Music RICKY IAN GORDON | Based on the poem by FRANK BIDART | Direction EMMA GRIFFIN | Music Direction LIDIYA YANKOVSKAYA ​

Ellen West is a new chamber opera-theatre work that delves into the story of a bulimic girl named Ellen West, and the attempts by people around her to save Ellen from herself. Told in an unusual multi-dimensional way, Ellen West shows both the emotional roller-coaster and the self-delusion of a woman fighting her own body and mind, battling eating disorders, starvation and obsessive control.  Eventually she returns to the home she shared with her husband, and he and her doctors attempts to save Ellen from herself.

BARD SUMMERSCAPE

Music by Michael Gordon | Libretto by Deborah Artman | Directed by Daniel Fish

In the new opera ACQUANETTA, the spirit of 1940s horror movies is turned inside out in a bravura, one-act deconstruction of the genre that explores how vision relates to identity. Characters include the mad scientist Doctor, the insistent Ape, the reluctant Brainy Woman, the visionary Director and the beautiful Acquanetta, aka Mildred Davenport, an actress who disguised her identity. Acquanetta examines the ways the movie camera manipulates how we see and are seen.