BOTH EYES OPEN, A Hybrid Opera Theater Production, to Play Zellerbach Playhouse in February

New Performance Traditions will present a new production of Both Eyes Open, an experimental electroacoustic opera by Brooklyn-based composer Max Giteck Duykers and Berkeley-based librettist and playwright Philip Kan Gotanda. This Hybrid opera theater production opens at a time when a new American administration may be beginning a wave of mass deportations. In development for over a decade, Both Eyes Open performances are on February 15 and 16, 2025 at Zellerbach Playhouse. This harrowing tale documents the destruction and suffering wrought by the Japanese American World War II incarceration on U.S. soil. Helmed by director Melissa Weaver and conductor David Milnes, Both Eyes Open features baritone Suchan Kim; soprano Zen Wu; tenor John Kun Park; Eco Ensemble and guest artist Joel Davel on marimba lumina; and the 45+ member UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus under the direction of Wei Cheng.  beo-opera.com

“Both Eyes Open tells a multilayered, emotional story, inspired by true historical events. The score moves from soaring bel canto singing, driving choral textures, contemporary and complex grooves, deep sutra chanting, and haunting electro acoustic sounds; all in service of this heartbreaking love story which moves seamlessly through different time periods, fantasy, dream, and memory. The psychological landscape is painted through sonic accumulation, building to the tense and wondrous climax.”  -Max Giteck Duykers (composer}

“Both Eyes Open recasts the incarceration of Japanese Americans to show us disturbing truths about America then and America now. In this exciting, experimental opera we mash up the lyrical with the raucous; an ambitious aesthetic with vaudevillian low brow humor. We hope you enjoy the ride: a fresh, new work that reframes the WWII Incarceration of Japanese Americans to resonate with the timely issues of anti-Asian and anti-immigrant hatred.” -Philip Kan Gotanda (librettist and playwright)

Both Eyes Open is supported by the UC Berkeley Japanese American Studies Advisory Committee, a Mellon Project Grant from the Division of Arts & Humanities Dean's Office, Cal Performances, UC Berkeley Department of Music, UC Berkeley Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, Townsend Center for the Humanities, the California Civil Liberties Program, and through the generous support of Jerome and Thao Dodson. 

Photo: Albert Levine

Creative Team 

Max Giteck Duykers (Composer)

Max Giteck Duykers is a composer whose work is dedicated to unusual beauty, unique forms, and collaborative projects.  He frequently incorporates technology in performance in a manner which gives the performers room for individual expression. A veteran of multidisciplinary performance, Duykers is also interested in reworking developmental processes for artists to find their collective "sweet spot" and produce work which is personal, confronting, and starkly beautiful.

An album of his music featuring Ensemble Ipse, was released on New World Records in May 2019, with producer Judith Sherman. Of the album, Kathodik.it writes “[Duykers is] an absolutely original voice within the varied horizon of contemporary music.” Duykers was also recently commissioned by the National Parks Service, New Music USA and the Jerome Foundation to create a chamber opera for tenor, soprano, baritone, electro-acoustic percussionist (performing the Marimba Lumina) and mixed ensemble with the Paul Dresher Ensemble.  Featuring a libretto by acclaimed playwright and filmmaker Philip Kan Gotanda, the piece is a comment on the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.  The piece has been workshopped across the U.S. over the past several years, and was premiered in June 2022 at the Presidio Theatre in San Francisco.  The piece has also been generously supported by New York State Council on the Arts, The Brooklyn Arts Council, California Humanities, and the JA Community Foundation.

His numerous other commissions and premieres include the Avian Orchestra, The Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra, the Oakland Youth Orchestra, the Seattle Chamber Players, Third Angle New Music, The BEO String Quartet, The Glass Farm Ensemble, PUBLIQuartet, Anti-Social Music, The Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, and numerous individual performers.  Duykers' Glass Blue Cleft was recently released by the Escher String Quartet on Bridge Records. Of the piece, Three Village Patch writes "[Glass Blue Cleft] is a piece for lovers of the string quartet, those amazed by how fiery and how dulcet these four-stringed instruments can range in expression."  This and other pieces have been featured at music festivals throughout the U.S. and abroad, including the Seattle Chamber Players' Icebreaker IV, curated by The New Yorker's Alex Ross. 

Duykers is a founder and co-director of Ensemble Ipse, a contemporary music performance group based in NYC. Ipse's mission is to find common threads in works whose stylistic profiles appear, on the surface, as divergent. We present recent music that transcends aesthetic categorization and strive to create a forum for composers and sound artists on the edges of the mainstream of contemporary music, as well as those who have been traditionally underrepresented, including women, LGBTQIA+, and BIPOC. Since forming in 2016, Ipse has premiered 42 works, 14 of them commissions, performed works from numerous calls for scores for emerging composers from around the world, received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Brooklyn Arts Council, New Music USA, the Queens Council on the Arts, NET/TEN, and the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, as well as numerous donations from its large donor network.

Duykers has also been commissioned to compose music for over 35 theatrical, dance, film, and multimedia projects in the New York City area.  With the theater group Prototype he was an artist-in-residence at HERE Arts Center in 2002-2004, and in 2000-2001 he worked for Philip Glass' The Looking Glass Studios and Dunvagen Music Publishers, where he did studio recording, Pro-Tools post-production, music sequencing, music copying and music editing for the Philip Glass Ensemble, film scoring projects, and operatic works.  He received a BM from Oberlin Conservatory where he studied composition with Randy Coleman, and has recently completed his Ph.D. at Stony Brook University where he studied with Sheila Silver.  At Stony Brook he was also honored with the 2012 Ackerman Award for Excellence in Music. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Rebecca and sons Quinlan and Liev. 

Philip Kan Gotanda, (Librettist) 

Over the last four decades, librettist Philip Kan Gotanda has specialized in investigating the Japanese American family writing a cycle of works in theater, film, song and opera that chronicle Japanese America from the early 1900s to the present. Mr. Gotanda holds a law degree from UC Law San Francisco And studied pottery in Mashiko, Japan with the late Hiroshi Seto. Mr. Gotanda is a respected independent filmmaker. His 3 films: Life Tastes Good, Drinking Tea, The Kiss, all have been official entries at the Sundance Film Festival. Mr. Gotanda adapted his play, The Wash, into a feature film, directed by Michael Toshiyuki Uno. The Wash is one of the first films about the Asian American family to have a theatrical release. A CD of Mr. Gotanda performing his original songs in a 1980 concert with violinist DH Hwang is now available at Yokohama, Ca. Records. Mr. Gotanda wrote the oratorio for the Kent Nagano piece, Manzanar: An American Story, an orchestral work about the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. Mr. Gotanda is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is an inaugural recipient of the Dramatists Guild Foundation's 2021 Playwrights Legacy Initiative, a two-year award acknowledging Mr. Gotanda's body of work in American Theater. Mr. Gotanda is a recent inductee into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Mr. Gotanda is a professor with the Department of Theater Dance and Performance Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He resides at the Gotanda Art Plant in the Hills with his wife, Alameda Arts Commission And novelist, Diane Takei Gotanda and their coton de tulear, Cosimo.  

Melissa Weaver (Director)

Director Melissa Weaver has directed the collaborative creation of more than forty original music theater works. As General Director of First Look Sonoma, with partner, tenor John Duykers, Missy is currently developing text for Heart of the Great Divide with composer Philip Aaberg. Weaver was a founding member of Bay Area's George Coates Performance Works, the Paul Dresher Ensemble and of Main Stage West, where she recently directed Stef Smith's Swallow and S. Massicotte's Mary's Wedding. She directed and designed original operatic works for the Paul Dresher Ensemble, Long Beach Opera, and West Edge Opera. She directed Rinde Eckert's The Gardening of Thomas D., Virko Baley's Holodomor. Red Earth Hunger at Kiev Opera and the Gerald Lynch Theater; and directed Kurt Rohde's Bitter Harvest, a farmer's oratorio with Kent Nagano and the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. Weaver collaborated with Amanda Moody on Serial Murderess, on Caliban Dreams, and on D'Arc, woman on fire, with music by Jay Cloidt. With music by Miguel Frasconi, she wrote and directed Trespass Knot and Hand to Mouth, also with Both Eyes Open “visual alchemist Matthew E. Jones. Weaver was an artist-in-residence at CalArts from 2000-05, directing 5 original pastiche operas.  

David Milnes, (Conductor)

David Milnes serves as Music Director of the Eco Ensemble, Berkeley’s internationally recognized professional new music ensemble in residence, as well as the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. In his early years, he studied piano, organ, clarinet, cello and voice, and briefly entertained a career as a jazz pianist, appearing with Chuck Mangione, Gene Krupa, Billy Taylor and John Pizzarelli. After studying with Charles Rosen, Otto-Werner Müller, Herbert Blomstedt, Erich Leinsdorf and Leonard Bernstein, Milnes won the prestigious Exxon Conductor position with the San Francisco Symphony at age 27, where he appeared frequently on the New and Unusual Music Series. He also served as Music Director of the highly acclaimed San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra which he led on its first European tour. He became a Professor at UC Berkeley in 1996 and currently serves as Chair of the Department of Music. A dedicated proponent of new music, Milnes has led many performances with Earplay, the Empyrean Ensemble, Composers Inc., and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. As Music Director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players he commissioned and premiered new works from around the world from such composers as Phillipe Leroux, Liza Lim, Edmund Campion, Shulamit Ran, Zhou Long, Kui Dong, Earl Kim, Jorge Liderman and Cindy Cox. With the ECO Ensemble he has conducted works by Pierre Boulez, Giorgi Ligeti, Jonathan Harvey, Beat Furrer, Harrison Birtwistle, Franck Bedrossian, Andrew Imbrie and Ivan Fedele. He has made recordings of music by John Anthony Lennon, James Newton, Edmund Campion, Jorge Liderman and Pablo Ortiz.

Suchan Kim (Baritone)

Suchan Kim is a native of Busan, South Korea, recently sang the role of Enrico in Opera in Williamsburg’s production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. He has performed as a resident in San Francisco Opera’s Merola Opera Program as well as with The Metropolitan Opera Education, The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Opera Philadelphia, The Atlanta Opera, Carnegie Hall, Mannes Opera, Dallas Opera’s The Hart Institute for Women Conductors, Opera Grand Rapids, Sarasota Opera, The Phoenicia International Festival of The Voice, Opera in Williamsburg, Tacoma Opera, First Look Sonoma, Paul Dresher Ensemble, Presidio Theater, Bare Opera, Opera Vezimra, New Rochelle Opera, Teatro Grattacielo, New Amsterdam Opera, Decameron Opera Coalition, Light Opera of New Jersey, Loft Opera, Opera Ithaca, Barn Opera, Teatro Lirico D’Europa, The Palmetto Opera, Amore Opera, Sinfonietta of Riverdale, The New York Concert Opera, New York Grand Opera, New York Lyric Opera, Jamestown Concert Association, Fairfield County Chorale, Lyric Chamber Music Society of New York, Sign & Sing, NYU IMPACT Conference, MidAmerica Productions, National Theater of Korea, Seoul Arts Center and several opera companies in South Korea.

His role credits include Don Giovanni and Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Count and Figaro in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, Guglielmo in Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte, Papageno in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Hoël in Meyerbeer’s Dinorah, Enrico in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Belcore in Donizetti’s L’Elisir D’amore, Marcello and Schaunard in Puccini’s La Bohéme, Ford in Verdi’s Falstaff, Alfonso in Donizetti’s La Favorita, Silvio in Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci, David in Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz, Roberto in Verdi’s I vespri siciliani, Marullo in Verdi’s Rigoletto, Giorgio Germont and Barone Douphol in Verdi’s La Traviata, Tarquinius in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, Dandini in Rossini’s La Cenerentola, Germano in Rossini’s La Scala di Seta, Tobia Mill in Rossini’s La cambiale di matrimonio, Yamadori and Bonzo in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Escamillo and Dancaïre in Bizet’s Carmen, Le Marquis de la Force and Jailer in Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, Hermann and Schlemil in Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, Salieri in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mozart and Salieri, Paquiro in Granados' Goyescas, Fiorello and L’Ufficiale in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Le chat and L’horlage comtoise in Ravel’s L’Enfant et Les Sortilèges, Simeon from Debussy’s L’Enfant Prodigue, Payador from Piazzolla’s María de Buenos Aires, Father in Kamala Sankaram’s Thumbprint, Bass in Ricky Ian Gordon’s The Tibetan Book of the Dead, King Solomon in Dina Pruzhansky's Hebrew opera 'Shulamit’, Jinzo Matsumoto in Max Giteck Duykers and Philip Kan Gotanda’s Both Eyes Open, Lum May in Gregory Youtz and Zhang Er’s Tacoma Method. The Critic in John Gilbert’s multimedia opera ‘Rotation’, Strange Man in Faye Chiao’s ‘Island of the Moon’ and Leonitis in 5th Grader of St. David’s School and Thomas Cabaniss’ ‘A Hero’s Journey’.

He was an Eastern District Winner in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 2011 and he received the Opera Award from Mannes Opera in 2013. Mr. Kim holds a Bachelor of Music from Korea National University of Arts and a Master’s Degree and a Professional Studies Diploma from Mannes College, the New School for Music. He studies with Arthur Levy.

Zen Wu 吳肇文 (Soprano)

Zen Wu 吳肇文 is a dramatic coloratura soprano from the East Bay. Trained as a vocalist and multi instrumentalist in a wide range of genres, she regularly performs and records as a soloist and guest musician with many groups including the New York Philharmonic, LA Philharmonic, San Diego Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Beth Morrison Projects, Musica Sacra, Cathedral Choir of St. John the Divine, SEM Ensemble, and Ensemble Ipse.

After having been a chorister in the Bay Area’s own Crystal Children’s Choir since the age of 6, Wu began her formal studies in classical voice at UC San Diego, where she was immersed in experimental performance in addition to training in traditional vocal repertoire and technique. Wu sang two seasons with the San Diego Opera before making her professional mainstage debut and moving to New York, where she is currently based as a freelance classical artist specializing in contemporary and sacred music.

John Kun Park  (Tenor) “The Daruma Doll”

A Korean-American Tenor from Los Angeles, CA, John has been described as “a clarion tenor,” “that floats his high notes with ease and emotional fervor. John will begin the 24/25 season with Opera on the James, debuting as Rodolfo in Puccini's La Boheme. He will then join New Performance Traditions for a new composition production of Both Eyes Open by Max Duykers, and return to West Bay Opera as the titular character of Verdi's Otello. John started off his 23/24 season with Opera Grand Rapids reviving Ricky Ian Gordon's The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as the Tenor 1 soloist, then immediately head to Lancaster, PA to join Penn Square Opera for their “Opera Couples Therapy” concert, where he will headline signature pieces and duets from Carmen, Cavalleria Rusticana, and Tosca. He made his company and role debut with Opera Modesto as the iconic Mario Cavaradossi in Puccini's Tosca, and finished the 23/24 season with Mid America Productions at Carnegie Hall as their guest Tenor Soloist for Mozart's Coronation Mass.  John was also a finalist for the Wagner Society of New York's competition and received an encouragement grant.

​After his successful debut as Erik in Wagner's Der Fliegende Holländer, with West Bay Opera, John traveled to Berlin and debuted as Bacchus in Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos with Berlin Opera Academy. He had also debuted as Rick in John Adams’ I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky, with InSeries Opera right before, covering the title role Canio, I Pagliacci, with Opera Tampa in March 2023. John began 2022 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic covering the role of Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio for their collaboration with Deaf West Theatre. Then John joined the Chautauqua Opera’s summer season where he covered the role of Mario Cavaradossi in Puccini’s Tosca, and sang the role of John Adams in Gertrude Stein & Virgil Thompson’s The Mother of us All. The 2021 season began digitally for John, with being placed as a semi-finalist for the Cardiff Singer of the World Competition. He also participated in the Annapolis Opera Vocal Competition, where he was placed as a finalist and received an Encouragement Award. John's postponed contract with Des Moines Metro Opera was fulfilled and spent the summer performing in their summer season where he covered both Adolfo Pirelli and Beadle Bamford in Sondheim's Sweeney Todd.  In October, John joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic to workshop Beethoven's Fidelio in collaboration with Deaf West Theater, and will be returning to workshop the role of Florestan in March 2022. John has performed with various companies and various prestigious young artist programs, debuting roles such as Don Jose Carmen, Faust Faust, Ismaele Nabucco, Siegmund Die Walküre, and performing as a feature soloist with companies such as the LA Philharmonic, Des Moines Metro Opera, Chautauqua Opera, Sarasota Opera, Central City Opera, Pittsburgh Festival Opera, and West Bay Opera.

Joel Davel (Percussionist)

Joel Davel is a percussionist who combines his classical training with intimate knowledge and use of electronic music resources. Davel’s diverse career and influences range from traditional acoustic folk and classical music to the highly experimental.

Davel has been a member of the Paul Dresher Ensemble’s Electro-Acoustic Band since 1999 and also works with Dresher as part of the Dresher-Davel Invented Instrument Duo and Double Duo (a quartet).  Other notable close collaborators include Amy X Neuburg, Jack West, John Duykers, Guillermo Galindo, and most recently as part of Vân-Ánh Võ’s Blood Moon Orchestra. He has composed and performed live for several dNaga dance productions and appeared in theater productions for The California Shakespeare Theater, West Edge Opera, and South Coast Repertory.

As a mentee of electronic music pioneer Don Buchla for over 20 years, he continues the design of electronic music instruments, including continued refinement of the Buchla Marimba Lumina — Davel’s signature instrument. Davel holds a Bachelor of Music from Northern Illinois University and an MFA from Mills College.

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