Opera Hispánica to Present The New York Staged Premiere Of KLARA

Opera Hispánica will present the New York staged premiere of KLARA, a chamber opera in four haikus, on Friday, February 28, 2025 at 7:30pm at National Sawdust in Brooklyn. General admission tickets are $40 and can be purchased now. Students may purchase discounted tickets in advance with the code STUDENTSATNS.

Presented by Opera Hispánica, the premier opera company in the US focused exclusively in the Hispanic perspective, and in collaboration with National Sawdust, Divaria Productions, CUNY City Tech and New York City Opera, and with partial support from the Spanish government through Acción Cultural Española, and from OPERA America's NYC Opera Grants: Support for Small-Budget Companies made possible with the generous support of the Howard Gilman Foundation, this production will be directed by acclaimed Broadway director and choreographer Richard Stafford. With lyrics and music written by internationally renowned Spanish composer and conductor Pedro Halffter, KLARA will immerse the audience in an immediate and current reflection on the development of artificial intelligence and what it means to be human. These performances, part of National Sawdust's banner 10th anniversary season, will feature soprano Ashley Galvani Bell as Klara, dancers Laura Henning, Jordana Rosenberg, and Amanda LaMotte, with pianist Silvia Santinelli and Pedro Halffter himself at the piano. Immediately following the performance, there will be a panel discussion exploring the impact of artificial intelligence on our society, featuring the composer and celebrated professor Panos Mavromatis (NYU); Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Ludovic Righetti (NYU); and religious leader Swami Sarvapriyananda, who regularly speaks around the world on the relationship between artificial intelligence and consciousness.

KLARA, which had only had its world premiere in 2023, has already been performed at Harvard University and throughout Spain, including at Teatro Perez Galdós in Gran Canaria, Teatro Escorial, Ponferrada's Museo de Energia, and Madrid's Universidad de Complutense, among others.

KLARA furthers the National Sawdust's crucial support of new experimental, contemporary opera works-with recent presentations of Paola Prestini and Royce Vavrek's Silent Light, Sokio's Paraíso, Niloufar Nourbakhsh's We, The Innumerable, and JOJO ABOT and Esperanza Spalding's A GOD OF HER OWN MAKING, and through partnerships including Beth Morrison Projects, Aix en Provence, and others-and discourse that expands the operatic canon.

View the trailer at:

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