operaSHOP II January 2012
PERFORMANCES:
Friday, January 27
@ High Concept Laboratories
&
Saturday, January 28
@ Fulton Recital Hall, University of Chicago
ABOUT:
In January 2012 we turned the spotlight on two exceptional young Princeton University composers, Elliot Cole and Caroline Shaw. Under the guidance of Opera Cabal, the duo has embarked on an intense collaborative residency that wil culminate in an evening of duelling operas. Cole appeared as Spotlight Artist at the 2011 Lucerne Festival, where he and his collaborators presented the hip hop string quartet, Fisherman and His Wife, and songs based on Grimm's Fairy Tales. Shaw performs at a furious pace across the Eastern seaboard with the highly-acclaimed ACME string quartet and vocal ensembe, Roomful of Teeth.
COLLABORATORS:
operaSHOP September 2011
PERFORMANCES:
Friday, September 30 & Saturday, October 1
@ High Concept Laboratories (Chicago)
ABOUT:
For the launch of our first operaSHOP, Opera Cabal invited video designer, producer, composer and all-around technical whiz Alexander Overington to work with virtuoso cellist and singer, Teddy Rankin-Parker. Overington and Rankin-Parker first established a reputation when they toured as the opening act for Grammy Award-winning ensemble, eighth blackbird. Both artists, recent graduates of Oberlin Conservatory, have been recognized for their incredible musical prowess. The differing interests and talents of these two artists is a confrontation of operatic proportions. Opera is the meeting of two complementary but completely different art forms: Overington and Rankin-Parker come together like worlds colliding to a spectacular soundtrack.
Check out the operaSHOP 2011 trailer video
COLLABORATORS:
Alexander Overington
Teddy Rankin-Parker
Amy Stebbins (dramaturg)
VESALII ICONES by Peter Maxwell Davies (1969)
PERFORMANCES:
September 2009
@ High Concept Laboratories (Chicago)
+
May 2010
@ University of Chicago
ABOUT:
"[this production] was, to me, absolutely of our time — which is, to me, the highest achievement for any contemporary work."
- Matthew Jesse Jackson, co-founder of the Open Practice Committee and Assistant Professor of Art History and the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago
Peter Maxwell Davies' Vesalii icones grows out of the seemingly random juxtaposition of two unrelated sets of images. The first set, De fabrica corporis humani, is a series of fourteen engravings that constituted an anatomical revolution in 1543. The pathos-laden nudes in De fabrica are iconic not only for their instructive value but because they comport themselves so hauntingly—ignoring the fact of their own putrefaction, the figures appear to be dancing. The inspiration for Vesalii icones came from Davies’ decision to superimpose Vesalius' images onto the fourteen Stations of the Cross. Originally for a single dancer, our version is for three.
COLLABORATORS:
David J. Levin
Movement Pants Dance
Jonathan Dummar, Joffrey Ballet
Sam Goodman
University of Chicago Music Department
University of Chicago Germanic Studies Department
USW by Lewis Nielson, 2009
PERFORMANCES:
August 2009
@ High Concept Laboratories (Chicago)
+
February 2010
@ Oberlin College (Ohio), The Fine Arts Building (Chicago) & Galapagos Art Space (Brooklyn, NY)
ABOUT:
Commissioned by Opera Cabal in 2008, USW is a one-act, multi-media chamber opera based on the life, social conditions and writing of the Polish/German socialist Rosa Luxemburg. The score & text, assembled Lewis Nielson (Chair of Composition, Oberlin Conservatory), consists of fragmentary passages in multiple languages from works by Luxemburg, prominent socialists in the 19th century (including Marx, Engels and Jaures), and poets from around the turn of the 20th century (including Trakl, Freiligrath and F. Scott Fitzgerald). Emmy Award-winning soap opera director, Habib Azar, and video artist Alexander Overington weave together a stage action that is at times complimentary to and at times alienated from Nielson's austerely beautiful score. With Majel Connery as the voiceless Rosa.
COLLABORATORS:
URSULARIA
PERFORMANCES:
April 2007 & October 2007
@ Zhou B Art Center (Chicago)
+
December 2008
@ AV-aerie (Chicago)
ABOUT:
The story of St. Ursula attracted our attention principally because of the plot's extremes—11, 000 virgins on an anti-marital crusade set sail in a giant ark only to confront a gruesome death (some accounts say by decapitation) at the hands of those warring creeps of the pre-Christian age, the Huns. The malfunction of Ursula's mission is so catastrophic as to be risible. It seemed important to us, given these extremes, that an opera about St. Ursula inhabit both the comic and high tragic registers simultaneously. Like the title, meant to evoke a multiplicity of personalities (a different Ursula for each story), Ursularia lives uneasily between versions and between genres. Sandwiched between spoken-dramatic and sung-operatic scenes, Ursula must navigate both: an earthly (spoken) world built around absurd premises and arbitrary rules and, on the other hand, a mystical but equally idiosyncratic and delusional (musical) world of her own.
COLLABORATORS:
