Roulette to Present Selections for New George Lewis Opera, 5/22-23

Before the opera premieres at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago this fall, Roulette is pleased to present selections from American composer George Lewis' Afterword: The AACM (As) Opera. Developed in collaboration with director Sean Griffin and media/theater artist Catherine Sullivan, Afterword is the aesthetic extension of Lewis' widely acclaimed book on the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, A Power Stronger Than Itself: the AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008). Born on the South Side of Chicago and turning 50 this year, the AACM has played a major role in American experimental music, and its ardent experimentation and radical collectivist politics are the inspiration behind Lewis' first operatic venture.

The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) will perform the concert excerpts. Singers include Joelle LaMarre, soprano; Gwendolyn Brown, contralto; and Julian Terrell Otis, tenor.

Departing from operatic convention, Afterword favors nonlinear narrative, and models history as assemblage. The Roulette performances will combine pre-structured music, text, and movement in juxtaposition with analogous elements created in real time. The singers, conceived as "mobile avatars," will take on multiple roles to reflect the AACM's many personalities ((Muhal Richards Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, among others).

The opera explores the different historical periods through which the AACM has lived - the Great Migration, the urbanization of American life, decolonization and the civil rights struggle - and the evolving set of relationships this grass-roots organization has forged among culture, politics, race and personal expression. The work also foregrounds the AACM as a creative collective noted for its revolutionary ideas, now part of the legacy of experimental practice, and the diversity of its music making, eschewing any singular style and genre.

FOR LISTINGS:

WHAT: Concert excerpts from George Lewis' opera, Afterword: The AACM (As) Opera

WHEN: Friday & Saturday, May 22 and 23, 2015 at 8 p.m.

WHERE: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn (Entrance at the corner of 3rd Avenue)

TICKETS: $25 Pre-sale (ends at noon on 5/22) / $30 at Doors Members/Students/Seniors: $20 (ends at noon on 5/22) / $25 at Doors; Series Members: $15 (ends at noon on 5/22) / $20 at Doors; FREE for All Access Members / Doors at 7 p.m.

George Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. A 2002 MacArthur Fellow, Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis's work has been presented or commissioned by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonia Orchestra, Ensemble Dal Niente, Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, Talea Ensemble, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Wet Ink, Ensemble Erik Satie, Ensemble Either/Or, 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad, IRCAM, American Composers Orchestra, and many others.

Los Angeles composer and director Sean Griffin is the Director of Opera Povera, an interdisciplinary consortium devoted to the creation and performance of new operatic and interdisciplinary performance and exhibition projects. His performance and musical works are animated by dense rhythmic structuring and improvisation, and range from instrumental works to immersive operas, extended choral techniques, installation, rhythmic games and movement patterns. Griffin's collaborative works have been presented at REDCAT, LACMA, Armand Hammer Museum, June in Buffalo, MATA Festival, Berlin's Volksbühne, and others.

Catherine Sullivan, Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, produces films, performances and theater works wherein the performers are often coping with written texts, stylistic economies, re-enactments of historic performances, gestural and choreographic regimes, and conceptual orthodoxies. Her work has been exhibited at the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Secession (Vienna), Tate Modern (London), and others. She is represented by Metro Pictures, New York, Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels and Galerie Christian Nagel, Antwerp/Berlin.

The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), described by The New York Times as "one of the most accomplished and adventurous groups in new music," features a modular makeup of 35 leading instrumentalists who appear in forces ranging from solos to large ensembles. Since its founding in 2001, ICE has premiered over 500 compositions--the majority of these being new works by emerging composers. In 2014 ICE launched the OpenICE initiative to bring the full scope of ICE's programming and educational activities for free to broader audiences around the world, advancing the music of our time by developing not only innovative new works, but also new strategies for audience engagement.

Afterword is supported by the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, Mellon Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship; the Multi-Arts Production (MAP) Fund in conjunction with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the Edwin H. Case Chair in American Music, Columbia University.

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