Kate Soper's HERE BE SIRENS Begins Tonight at Dixon Place

Dixon Place and Morningside Opera's production of Kate Soper's critically acclaimed HERE BE SIRENS returns to Dixon Place (161A Chrystie Street, in New York's Lower East Side), and begins performances tonight, September 5th at 7:30 PM. After a sold-out engagement in January of this year, HERE BE SIRENS will play four performances only -- September 5th, September 6th, September 12th and 13th at 7:30 PM. OBIE Award-winner Rick Burkhardt directs this dramatic composition by award-winning composer Kate Soper. Tickets for HERE BE SIRENS are $20 in advance, $25 at the door and $15 for students and seniors. Advance tickets are available online at http://dixonplace.org/performances/here-be-sirens, by calling (212) 219-0736 or in-person at Dixon Place.

HERE BE SIRENS blends music, screwball comedy, and Aristotelian tragedy to present the mythological sirens as real beings trying to croon their way off the island. Praised by the New York Times as "brainy, baffling, and consistently astounding" and by the New Yorker as "erudite, hilarious and furiously inventive," this new music-theatre work uses ancient and modern sources, psychoanalysis, melodrama, and music to tell the story from the perspective of the Sirens themselves. Time Out New York said "HERE BE SIRENS is a brilliantly quirky new theatrical piece: part play, part chamber opera and all scholarly beguilement".

Kate Soper is a composer, performer and writer. Her music has been described as "epic" (WQXR) and "exquisitely quirky," (NY Times), and as a performer she has been praised as a "dazzling vocalist" (New Yorker) and likened to "Lucille Ball reinterpreted by Linda Blair" (Pitchfork Magazine). She has received awards and commissions from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of Arts and Letters, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the American Composers Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, and others. Kate is a co-director of Wet Ink, a New York-based new music ensemble dedicated to seeking out and promoting innovative music across aesthetic categories.

Director Rick Burkhardt is the recipient of an Obie (Three Pianos) and was listed as an "Off-Off Broadway Innovator to Watch" by Time Out New York (2011).

HERE BE SIRENS features GELSEY BELL, BRETT UMLAUF, and MS. SOPER.

Annie Holt, Artistic Director of Morningside Opera says: "I am thrilled to bring Kate Soper's ground-breaking Here Be Sirens back to NYC. As we developed the piece last year, it became apparent what a very exciting and interesting theater piece it is, as well as being musically excellent. I see a strong trend developing among younger artists and audiences to blend music and theater performance together in new ways; I think work like Here Be Sirens advances and expands our notion of what the genre of opera is or can be."

Now entering its seventh season, Morningside Opera has been praised for its "bold imagination and musical diligence" by the New York Times. Morningside Opera's mission is to challenge the boundaries and conventions of the genre, and to spark dialogue about opera between new and traditional audiences. The company's previous production, ¡Figaro! (90210), was hailed as "blasphemous, brilliant... uproariously funny" by The New York Times, and "as timely as it is sexy" by the New York Post. Morningside Opera is committed to inventive, accessible productions of operas, new, old, and somewhere in between. Unique among small opera companies in the region, Morningside Opera has a strong scholarly focus, curating educational programs and workshops that feature leading scholars and practitioners.