PROTOTYPE Announces 2025 Festival Beginning This January

PROTOTYPE: Opera | Theatre | Now has announced the lineup for 2025, set to resume January 9-19, 2025. This will mark the final season co-produced by HERE and co-curated by Kristin Marting, who founded the Festival together with Beth Morrison and Kim Whitener, and who is also the outgoing Founding Artistic Director of HERE.

The 2025 festival season will include the world premiere of Eat the Document, an alternative opera by John Glover, Kelley Rourke and Kristin Marting based on the novel by Dana Spiotta, along with three New York premieres: Black Lodge, a work by David T. Little and Anne Waldman that is part film screening and part industrial rock opera concert and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording in 2023, IN A GROVE, Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann's perspective-shifting musical adaptation of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short story, and Positive Vibration Nation, a time-traveling exploration of Miami’s cultural singularity by Sol Ruiz. The festival also features ART BATH - an immersive performance salon that fosters artistic community.

Tickets for the 2025 festival will go on sale October 1st for members, and October 15th for general public.

EAT THE DOCUMENT

*World Premiere January 9th 2025 @ HERE Mainstage

A HERE Production
Composer: John Glover
Librettist: Kelley Rourke
Music Director: Mila Henry
Director: Kristin Marting

In the heyday of the seventies underground, Bobby DeSoto and Mary Whittaker – passionate, idealistic, and in love – design a series of radical protests against the Vietnam War. When one action goes wrong, the course of their lives is forever changed. The two must erase their past, forge new identities, and never see one another again.

Now it is the 1990s. Mary lives in the suburbs with her fifteen-year-old son, Jason, who spends hours immersed in the music of his mother’s generation. She has no idea where Bobby is, whether he is alive or dead. A few towns away, an aging hippie calling himself Nash presides over an anarchist bookstore, drawing the disaffected youth of the next generation into a shifting series of “groups” and “collectives.” Miranda, alone among the kids who frequent the bookstore, takes Nash seriously.

Shifting between the protests in the 1970s and the consequences of those choices in the 1990s, Eat the Document is an alternative opera that explores the connection between the two eras—their language, technology, music, and activism.

Eat The Document is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. We are also grateful for support from Nancy & Jim Barton, Joan Desens and Simon Carr-Ellison, Robert Ellis, Gene Kaufman & Terry Eder-Kaufman, Ann D. McChord, Thomas Simpson, and Faith E. Gay & Francesca Zambello. Eat The Document received developmental support from American Opera Projects, Baryshnikov Arts Center, The Center for Fiction, Joe’s Pub and HERE.

BLACK LODGE

*NY Premiere January 11th 2025 @Village East by Angelika

 Composer: David T. Little
Librettist: Anne Waldman
Director & Screenwriter:  Michael Joseph McQuilken

Drawing on the complicated mythologies of the surrealist writer William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Black Lodge uses dance, industrial rock, classical string quartet, and opera to take viewers through a Lynchian psychological escape room. In November 2023, Black Lodge was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording. 

Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her.

Opera commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects and the Allen R. and Judy Brick Freedman  Venture Fund for Opera. Film commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects, Opera Philadelphia, the Allen R. and Judy Brick Freedman Venture Fund for Opera, David & Kiki Gindler, Charlotte Isaacs, and Thomas H. Platz with additional support provided by the Howard Gilman Foundation.

Developed by Beth Morrison Projects, California Institute for the Arts, HERE Arts Center, and REDCAT. Additional production support provided by David & Kiki Gindler, Charlotte Isaacs, and Thomas H. Platz. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

IN A GROVE 

*NY Premiere January 16th 2025 @ La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, Ellen Stewart Theatre 

Composer: Christopher Cerrone
Librettist: Stephanie Fleischmann
Music Director: Andrew Cyr
Director: Mary Birnbaum

Inspired by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s classic story, IN A GROVE is a haunting meditation on the impossibility of truth and the subjectivity of memory and perception. Set in a ghost forest in the aftermath of a wildfire in the Pacific Northwest, this searing adaptation plunges the listener progressively deeper into the ever more fallible regions of the human heart, interrogating how we see, hear, remember and believe.

Commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera with additional support from Raulee Marcus and Stephen Block, Pittsburgh Opera, Metropolis Ensemble, and Allen and Judy Brick Freedman.

POSITIVE VIBRATION NATION

*NY Premiere January 10th @ HERE’s Dorothy B. Williams Theatre

Composer & Librettist: Sol Ruiz

Journey from the year 3050 back to the present with the ambassadors of the New Miami Sound, and explore the origins of their Miami-licious swagger and unified superpowers in the Positive Vibration Nation.  

Positive Vibration Nation is a rock guaguanco opera created by Sol Ruiz. Blending live performance with integrated technology, the new work fuses sound, visual art, costume, and music with Caribbean influences to investigate contemporary issues, explore Miami’s cultural singularity, and convey a positive message to audiences.  

PVN is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Miami Light Project, Beth Morrison Projects and NPN.  This project is also supported by a National Performance Network (NPN) Artist Engagement Fund, with funding from the Doris Duke Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

ART BATH

*January 18th 2025 @ The Blue Building

Co-curated by Mara Driscoll and Liz Yilmaz

ART BATH is an immersive performance salon that fosters artistic community, exploration, and exchange. Hosted at the historic Blue Building on E. 46th St, Art Bath presents an eclectic spectrum of artists in a raw and intimate environment. Part immersive concert and part art party, Art Bath offers fertile ground for forward-thinking artistic creation and experimentation.

ABOUT PROTOTYPE

PROTOTYPE – OPERA | THEATRE | NOW is a co-production of Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, two trailblazers in the creation and presentation of contemporary, multi-disciplinary opera-theatre and music-theatre works. The pioneering festival is the only one of its kind in New York City and is a model now emulated around the country – producing and presenting a wide spectrum of works, from intimate black-box experiences to larger chamber opera productions, valuing artistic, curatorial, and producorial risk-taking.

PROTOTYPE is committed to surprising our audiences and confounding their expectations through content, form, and relevance. The festival gives voice to a diverse group of composers, librettists, performers and musicians across all genres, backgrounds, and cultures. In providing a recurring showcase of visionary opera-theatre and music-theatre pieces, the touring life of the work extends around the world. The festival also presents groundbreaking new works by International Artists and has become a global reference of artistic excellence in the field of opera and music-theatre. https://www.prototypefestival.org/ 

ABOUT Beth Morrison PROJECTS

Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) is one of the foremost creators and producers of new opera-theatre and music theatre, with a fierce commitment to leading the industry into the future, cultivating a new generation of talent, and telling the stories of our time. 

Founded by “contemporary opera mastermind” (LA Times) Beth Morrison, who was honored as one of Musical America’s Artists of the Year/Agents of Change in 2020, BMP has grown into “a driving force behind America’s thriving opera scene” (Financial Times), with Opera News declaring that the company, “more than any other… has helped propel the art form into the twenty-first century.” 

Operating across the US and internationally, with offices in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, BMP’s unique model offers living composers the support, guidance, and freedom to experiment, allowing them to create singularly innovative and impactful projects. Since forming in 2006, the company has commissioned, developed, produced and toured over 50 works in 14 countries around the world, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning chamber operas Angel’s Bone and p r i s m. 

In 2013, BMP co-founded the PROTOTYPE Festival with HERE Arts Center, which has been called “utterly essential” (The New York Times), “indispensable” (The New Yorker), and “one of the world’s top festivals of contemporary opera and theater” (Associated Press). https://www.bethmorrisonprojects.org

ABOUT HERE

Since 1993, HERE has been one of New York’s most prolific producing and presenting organizations, and today stands at the forefront of the city’s presenters of new multi-genre art. HERE’s aesthetic represents the independent, the innovative, and the experimental. HERE supports work that does not fit into a conventional programming agenda. As the ultimate in hybrid forms, music-theatre and opera-theatre commissioning, development, and producing feature prominently in HERE’s programming.

Premieres developed and produced at HERE include Heather Christian's Terce (Prototype 2024), Gelsey Bell's mourning (Prototype 2023), Taylor Mac and Matt Ray’s The Hang (slated originally for the covid cancelled Prototype 2022 but ran for a sold-out six week winter run later that year), Grace Galou and Baba Israel’s Cannabis: A Viper Vaudeville (slated originally for Prototype 2022 and ran for four weeks summer 2022), Kamala Sankaram’s first opera Miranda as well as her more recent critically acclaimed Looking at You, Yoav Gal’s Mosheh, Christina Campanella and Stephanie Fleischman’s Red Fly/Blue Bottle, Corey Dargel’s Removable Parts, Nick Brooke’s Border Towns, Stefan Weisman & David Cote’s The Scarlet Ibis, Paul Pinto’s Thomas Paine in Violence, and Leah Coloff’s ThisTree, among others.

In 2013, HERE joined forces with Beth Morrison Projects to found the PROTOTYPE festival, now acclaimed as “shift[ing] the whole paradigm of what opera is and can be.” In addition, HERE has developed such acclaimed works as Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues; Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique; Young Jean Lee’s Songs of The Dragons Flying To Heaven; Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle’s all wear bowlers; and Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge. HERE has garnered 17 OBIE awards and 2 OBIE grants for artistic achievement, 5 Drama Desk nominations, 4 NY Innovative Theatre Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. HERE was named a Top Ten Off-Off Broadway Theatre by Time Out New York, and The New York Times has called HERE “one of the most unusual arts spaces in New York.”.

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