Beth Morrison Project to Kick Off PROTOTYPE 2014: OPERA/THEATRE/NOW, Jan 8, 2014

Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) and HERE have announced programming for the second annual PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now festival, running January 8-18, 2014, in New York City. The 2014 iteration of this two-week festival, curated by "contemporary mini music drama impresarios" (New York magazine) Kristin Marting (of HERE), Beth Morrison (of BMP), and Kim Whitener (of HERE), follows up the inaugural season's smash critical success -- which included multiple sold-out shows from the twenty-nine performances of five ground-breaking presentations -- with further evidence "that there's life in the old opera yet." (WQXR Operavore)

"The rise of small-scale, more experimental presentations of opera is hugely exciting," declared NPR's Deceptive Cadence blog, and PROTOTYPE's second festival delivers a fresh round of visionary chamber-sized music-theatre and opera-theatre works by pioneering artists from NYC and around the world. The 2014 Festival features five presentations from notable rising stars: a BMP and HERE co-production world premiere of vibrant composer Kamala Sankaram and acclaimed playwright/librettist Susan Yankowitz's new opera-theatre work, Thumbprint; the New York premiere of Gregory Spears and Kathryn Walat's chamber opera Paul's Case; the New York premiere of composer Jonathan Berger and librettist/playwright Dan O'Brien's double one-act operas,Visitations: Theotokia and The War Reporter; a work-in-progress concert of Angel's Bone, a one-act chamber opera with music by Shanghai-born, New York-based composer Du Yun and libretto by filmmaker and librettist Royce Vavrek, presented in partnership with Trinity Wall Street; and an international presentation to be announced at a later date.

The Festival presentations take place at HERE, Baruch Performing Arts Center, Roulette, andTrinity Church, along with forums on twenty-first century opera, to coincide with the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) and International Society for the Performing Arts (ISPA) conferences, and the Opera America New Works Forum.

Watch this space for more information, samples, and Festival extras: http://prototypefestival.org.

THE PROGRAMS

C O - P R O D U C T I O N W O R L D P R E M I E R E

THUMBPRINT

Thumbprint, the 90-minute contemporary opera-theatre work by Kamala Sankaram and Susan Yankowitz, is inspired by the experiences and human rights crusade of the young illiterate Pakistani peasant Mukhtar Mai, the first female victim of gang rape to bring her male attackers to justice in Pakistan. In lieu of a financial settlement, Mai requested the construction of a series of schools- an attempt to educate the young so they might never know the humiliation of signing their name with only a thumbprint. The libretto stems originally from a series of interviews with Mai herself, and poetically explores the deep family ties and tribal traditions that led up to an astonishing act of courage. The score is a dynamic collision of Hindustani and European opera influences. The production will feature a cast of six singers and a musical ensemble of six, featuring flute, violin and viola, upright bass, piano/harmonium, and percussion (drums and tabla), performing material tinged with both classical Western and Eastern vocal styles. Thumbprint started as a song-cycle commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects for the 2009 21c Liederabend at Galapagos Art Space, was further developed for the 2011 iteration at The Kitchen, and will now receive its final development and world premiere in a co-production by BMP and HERE, conducted by Steven Osgood.

As a composer, Kamala Sankaram's music has been performed as part of American Opera Projects "Opera Grows in Brooklyn" series, at HERE, the Stone, the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, the Santa Fe New Music Festival, and the Lucerne Festival, among others. As a resident artist at HERE, Kamala created Miranda, a steampunk murder mystery opera called "enjoyable, utterly original opera" (New York Post) and "among the very best theater achievements of 2012" (NYTheater.com). She was the 2011 Con Edison/Exploring the Metropolis Composer-in-Residence at the Brooklyn Youth Chorus Academy and the 2012 Composer-in-Residence at the Eugene O'Neil Theater. She is the recent recipient of a 2013 Jonathan Larson Award.

Susan Yankowitz is a playwright, novelist, librettist and occasional screenwriter. Among her best-known plays are Night Sky (produced off-Broadway and internationally); Phaedra in Delirium (produced at CSCand WPP, NY; winner, QRL poetic play competition); Terminal and 1969TERMINAL1996, collaborations with Joseph Chaikin's Open Theatre (Drama Desk Award); A Knife in the Heart (Sledgehammer Theatre 2002); and Foreign Bodies (finalist, O'Neill Conference 2008.) Cheri, with music by Michael Dellaira, was a finalist for the 2006 Richard Rodgers Award and excerpts were performed by artists from Portland Opera and Tacoma Opera as part of OPERA America's New Works Sampler. She wrote the libretto for Slain in the Spirit, a gospel-and-blues opera with music by Taj Mahal, and book/lyrics for True Romances, music by Elmer Bernstein Silent Witness, her novel, was published by Knopf and her teleplay about Sylvia Plath aired on PBS and won her a WGA nomination for best-written documentary of the season. Her long monologue about Mukhtar Mai is in continual production in the U.S. and internationally, as part of Seven. Her work has been translated into ten languages and is widely published and anthologized.

PRESENTATIONS:

PAUL'S CASE

Paul's Case is a two-act evening-length chamber opera for seven singers lasting approximately 85 minutes, based on the eponymous short story by Willa Cather. In this New York premiere of the enthusiastically received Urban Arias (Washington, DC) production, the opera chronicles the dissolution of a high school "dandy" living in sooty turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh. Paul, who spends his free time working as an usher at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Hall, eventually runs away to revel in the luxury of New York City's Waldorf Astoria hotel. The musical ensemble of nine features clarinets (doubling as hand bells and train whistle), harp, piano, and string quintet. The vocal lines, both pastoral and mechanistic, suggest the world of nature, luxury, and art that Paul loves and the gilded-age machinery that will eventually destroy him.

Gregory Spears (composer/co-librettist) writes instrumental and vocal music that blends together stylistic aspects of romanticism, minimalism, and early music. His music has been performed by Houston Grand Opera (HGOco), the American Composers Orchestra, American Opera Projects, Center City Opera Theater, NOW Ensemble, Present Music, So Percussion, the Sebastian Chamber Players, and Eighth Blackbird. Spears was recently commissioned by poet Tracy K. Smith to write two new songs for the 2011 Rolex Arts Weekend at the New York Public Library and by the JACK Quartet to write a piece based on his experience as composer-in-residence at the Buttonwood Psychiatric Unit in New Jersey. Other commissions have come from OPERA America, Seraphic Fire Vocal Ensemble, countertenor Ryland Angel, choreographer Christopher Williams, and the New York Youth Symphony. New Amsterdam Records released his early music-inspired chamber Requiem in 2011. Current projects include a new collaborative dance-opera (Wolf-in-Skins) with choreographer Christopher Williams and an evening-length opera based on Thomas Mallon's novel Fellow Travelers written in collaboration with playwright Greg Pierce and director Kevin Newbury. He lives in Brooklyn.

Kathryn Walat (co-librettist) is a playwright. Her recent play Creation - about music, obsession, and the artistic process - premiered The Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena, and was developed at the O'Neill Theatre Center/National Playwrights Conference. Her play Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen was produced at the Women's Project, and published in Dramatics magazine and in New Playwrights: Best Plays of 2007. Other works include This Is Not Antigone (New Georges' Germ Project), On the Road: Anthology Project (Actors Theatre of Louisville), Bleeding Kansas (Hangar Theatre; Francesca Primus Citation), Know Dog (Salvage Vanguard Theater), and Johnny Hong Kong (Perishable Theater). She has received commissions from MCC Theater (also Playwrights Coalition member), New Georges (also Affiliated Playwright), Yale Repertory Theatre, and La Jolla Playhouse. Her work has been developed at The Public Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, Playwrights Horizons, Ars Nova, Voice & Visions, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, The Lark, The Orchard Project, and Sundance Theatre Lab; and published by Playscripts and Samuel French. Walat is a professor at Savannah College of Art and Design, and a recent Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She received her BA from Brown University, and MFA from the Yale School of Drama.

VISITATIONS: THEOTOKIA AND THE WAR REPORTER

Visitations is the New York premiere of an evening-length program of two one-act chamber operas by composer Jonathan Berger and librettist Dan O'Brien: The War Reporter and Theotokia. Theotokia takes the audience inside the consciousness of a man who, beset by hallucinatory voices, is taunted and seduced by the mother of god. Illuminating the experience of one possessed by ritualistic and religious hallucinatory delusions, the work portrays the inner struggle of mental illness in a rich musical, dramatic, and philosophical counterpoint. The War Reporter depicts the true story of Pulitzer Prize-winning combat journalist Paul Watson, as he seeks to rid himself of the haunting voice of an American soldier whose corpse he photographed in the streets of Mogadishu in 1993. Librettist Dan O'Brien's interviews with Watson are the primary source for the work. Written for the medieval quartet New York Polyphony, Visitations also stars soprano Mellissa Hughes. Visitations premiered to critical and audience acclaim in April 2013 at Stanford Live in a Beth Morrison Projects production.

Jonathan Berger is the Denning Family Provostial Professor in Music at Stanford University, where he teaches composition, music theory, and cognition at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He was the founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SICA, now the Stanford Arts Institute) and founding director of Yale University's Center for Studies in Music Technology. Berger's "dissonant but supple" (New York Times) compositions integrate science and human experience, i.e. what does a cancer cell or golf swing sound like? And why does a song make us cry? Playfully called "a musician who accidentally became a scientist" by American Public Media's Weekend America, Berger is an active researcher with over 70 publications in a wide range of fields relating to music, science, and technology. Research areas include studies in music cognition, audio restoration, signal processing, and statistical methods for automatic music recognition, classification and transcription. He is a sought-after lecturer, and is frequently quoted as an authority on psychoacoustic phenomena. Since its founding in 2006, Berger has overseen the annual Stanford Symposium on Music and the Brain.

Dan O'Brien's play The Body of an American won the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama and the winner of the L. Arnold Weissberger Award, and premiered at Portland Center Stage in 2012 directed by Bill Rauch. O'Brien's debut poetry collection War Reporter is forthcoming in 2013 from Hanging Loose Press in New York City and CB Editions in London. Off-Broadway and regional productions of O'Brien's plays include The Cherry Sisters Revisited (Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival), The Dear Boy (Second Stage Theatre), The Voyage of the Carcass (SoHo Playhouse; Page 73 Productions), Moving Picture (Williamstown Theatre Festival), Am Lit (Ensemble Studio Theatre), The House in Hydesville (Geva Theatre Center), Key West (Geva), and Lamarck (Perishable Theatre). He has served as a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Sundance Institute Time Warner Fellow, the inaugural Djerassi Fellow in Playwriting at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and twice as the Tennessee Williams Fellow at The University of the South (Sewanee). Originally from New York, O'Brien lives in Los Angeles.

An INTERNATIONAL PRESENTATION will be announced later in the season.

WORK IN PROGRESS

ANGEL'S BONE

Angel's Bone is a one-act chamber opera with music by composer Du Yun and libretto by librettist Royce Vavrek. The work-in-progress tells the tale of captivity, bondage, and eventual liberation of two heavenly angels discovered and imprisoned by a suburban family with a subversive secret. The presentation is a co-production with Trinity Wall Street, conducted by Julian Wachner.

Du Yun, born and raised in Shanghai, China, and currently based in New York City, is an internationally performed composer and musician. Her music exists at an artistic crossroads of chamber music, opera, orchestral, theater, cabaret, storytelling, pop music, visual arts and noise. The New York Times calls her "cutting-edge... to whom the term 'young composer' could hardly do justice." She has received commissions from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Mann Center for the Performing Arts (Philadelphia), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Shanghai Rockbund Art Museum, the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, the Fromm Foundation, Meet the Composer/Commissioning USA, Chamber Music America, Festivals für Neue Musik & aktuelle Kultur (Switzerland), violinist Hillary Hahn, cellist Matt Haimovitz, Festival of New Trumpet, Kaufman Center at the Merkin Hall, 21c Liederabend, Aaron Copland Award, Americas Society, and many more, and her compositions have been presented at over 35 international festivals.

Royce Vavrek is a Canadian filmmaker, librettist, playwright and musical theatre writer known for his collaborations with composers David T. Little, Missy Mazzoli, Du Yun, Matt Marks, Andrew Gerle and Jeff Myers, producers Beth Morrison and Lawrence Edelson, and music director Alan Pierson. His work has been presented at or performed by the Brooklyn Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, New York City Opera, The Kitchen, Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble, Opera America, Signature Theater, Peak Performances @ Montclair, American Lyric Theater and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, among other cultural institutions. Vavrek's filmmaking credits include From Sky and Soil, which was created as part of the Corus Young Filmmakers Initiative for broadcast on the W Network through a prize administered by the Canadian Film and Television Production Association.

ABOUT THE PRODUCERS & ARTISTIC DIRECTORS

Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) identifies and supports the work of emerging and established composers and their collaborators through the commission, development, and production of their work, taking the form of opera-theatre, music-theatre, and multi-media concert works. Relying on the core values of collaboration, exploration, experimentation, artistry, and excellence, BMP provides a nurturing structure that allows artists to push the boundaries of their art form. Founded in 2006, BMP rapidly developed a reputation for "envisioning new possibilities and finding ways to facilitate their realization" (The New York Times). In 6 years, BMP has commissioned, developed, and produced more than thirty operas and music-theatre pieces that have premiered or been performed in New York, across the country, and around the globe. The Wall Street Journal said, "Ms. Morrison may be immortalized one day as a 21st-century Diaghilev, known for her ability to assemble memorable collaborations among artists." BMP's ability to recognize emerging talent, invest in the vision of living composers and their collaborators, and partner with presenters to bring new work to life has allowed it to become vital in the landscape of new music and opera. The New York Times recently said, "The production of new [opera] works in the city still falls mostly to the tireless Beth Morrison and her Beth Morrison Projects..." BMP is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts, the Department of Cultural Affairs of New York City, Meet the Composer, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the ART NY/ JP Morgan Chase Fund for Small Theaters, The Map Fund, a program of creative Capital supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

BMP is led by Creative Producer Beth Morrison, an opera and theatre producer, singer, and voice teacher with bachelor and master of music degrees and a master of fine arts in theatre management/producing from the Yale School of Drama, as well as many years of experience in the development of new opera and theatre works. She first cultivated her extensive experience in arts administration at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute where she served as administrative director for four years. Beth served a founding tenure as the Producer for the Yale Institute for Music Theatre from 2009-2011, as well as Producer for New York City Opera's VOX:Contemporary American Opera Lab from 2010-2011. Beth is also a founding producer of 21c Liderabend, an much-lauded incubator festival of contemporary art songs. BMP is the realization of Beth's vision, which stems from a deep commitment to nurturing composers and other artists and fostering the development of new opera and other new music-theatre works.

Kristin Marting is Co-Founder and Artistic Director of HERE and a director of hybrid work based in NYC. As Artistic Director of HERE, she cultivates artists and programs all events for two performance spaces for an annual audience of 30,000. Under her leadership, HERE has garnered 16 OBIE awards, 2 OBIE grants for artistic achievement, a 2006 Edwin Booth Award ("for Outstanding Contribution to NY Theatre") from the CUNY Graduate Center, five Drama Desk nominations, two Berrilla Kerr Awards, four NY Innovative Theatre Awards and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. She co-created and co-curates HARP, HERE's Artist Residency Program. She also has constructed 26 works for the stage, including 12 original hybrid works, 8 adaptations of novels and short stories and 6 classic plays. She works in a collaborative, process-driven way to fuse different disciplines into a cohesive whole. She is now developing TRADE PRACTICES, a collaborative live art event that examines the notion of "values. Recent projects include ORPHEUS, a collaborative alt-musical also co-created with David Morris; LUSH VALLEY, a live art participatory performance on citizenship, and James Scruggs's interactive solo work DISPOSABLE MEN. She also directed SOUNDING & DEAD TECH (collaborative hybrid works inspired by Ibsen texts), both of which received MAP Fund awards. She was named Person on the Year by nytheatre.com in 2011 and recently honored with a BAX10 Award.

Kim Whitener is the Producing Director at HERE, co-curating and co-producing all of HERE's activities.? Since early 2007 under her leadership, HERE's programming has grown exponentially, and several major initiatives have launched, including the PROTOTYPE festival and MADE HERE, an online video documentary series about New York performing artists. From 2001 until 2007, Ms. Whitener was an independent producer with her own company, KiWi Productions, working with a diverse range of US artists, both companies and individuals, in the contemporary theater, music-theater, dance-theater, and multi-media worlds to develop and produce new projects, working with co-producers worldwide. Her clients have included The Builders Association, Martha Clarke, Big Dance Theater, and 33 Fainting Spells, among others. Ms. Whitener was consulting producer on Logic of the Birds, artist Shirin Neshat's live performance featuring singer Sussan Deyhim (Lincoln Center Festival, Walker Art Center, Artangel London) in 2001. She also was co-producer of Zero Church, a multi-artist concert/performance event by Suzzy and Maggie Roche, at St. Ann's Warehouse in April 2002. Previously she was Managing Director of the ensemble theater company The Wooster Group, and worked with both the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia and the Boston Music Theatre Project at Suffolk University in Boston.

Pictured: Thumbprint

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