Kate Soper's IPSA DIXIT Comes to Long Beach Opera Next Month

 Long Beach Opera will continue its 2024 season with the much-anticipated staged West Coast premiere of trailblazing composer Kate Soper's IPSA DIXIT (“She, herself, said it”), a 90-minute tour-de-force experience that explores the integration of music, drama, and rhetoric, and was a finalist for a 2017 Pulitzer Prize. Called a “philosophy-opera” by The New Yorker, the work blends aspects of monodrama, Greek theater, and screwball comedy in a musical journey that examines the treachery of language and the questionable authenticity of artistic expression. Performances take place June 1, 8 & 9 at the historic Art Theatre cinema in Long Beach. A reception for all follows each performance. 

The brand new production represents a continuation of LBO’s relationship with Soper, having most recently presented the world premiere of her opera The Romance of the Rose in 2023 to rave reviews. Notably, it also marks a role debut for the luminous soprano and frequent Darrah collaborator Anna Schubert, recently voted Best Opera Singer in 2023 San Francisco Classical Voice Awards, and whose LBO credits include The Romance of the Rose and Les enfants terribles. 

James Darrah, LBO’s Artistic Director & Chief Creative Officer, directs– integrating opera, film, text and dance to craft an overlapping and multi-sensory experience. In an 

unprecedented move, Darrah’s new production of IPSA DIXIT will feature star dancers from the iconic Martha Graham Dance Company (marking their second appearance as LBO’s official artistic partner). Soper’s work will for the first time be complemented by original choreography based on unique fragments of Martha Graham’s works, choreographed and devised by the Graham Company artistic director Janet Eilber. 

Guided by LBO Music Director Christopher Rountree and staged with instrumentalists, dancers and film in a transformed former 1924 silent movie theater, the evening also draws unique visual and thematic juxtapositions to Soper’s text by featuring an overlapping screening of Carl Theodor Dreyer's pivotal 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, here manipulated and re-created by filmmaker Adam Larsen. LBO’s production of IPSA DIXIT evokes Soper’s poignant inquiry into how art transforms across contexts and languages at every turn and Darrah says, “The show promises to be an avant-garde layered experience unlike any other we’ve produced—one that furthers our company’s dedication to groundbreaking art that evolves the boundaries and definition of the operatic form.” 

IPSA DIXIT has captivated audiences since it first premiered in New York in December 2016. Composed over six years, and unfolding over the course of ninety minutes, Soper uses the piece to boldly question, "How can music unveil the very essence of being a thinker, a language-wielder, with all the glorious contradictions and limitations language itself brings?" To answer, she weaves her own words with excerpts from luminaries spanning disciplines and eras, from Aristotle to Freud to Lydia Davis. 

Soper said in The New York Times, “I grew up in a thinky house. My dad’s a philosopher; my mom has a Ph.D. in French. So there was a lot of discussion of ideas, which affected me as a musician. I was always really interested in the life of the mind. And then in my music, I’m interested in the limits of that. You can be going as deep into an idea as you can, and then someone breaks into song and your attention is diverted to emotion.” 

After IPSA DIXIT premiered in New York, Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker: “Soper is both brilliant and funny—a combination that is always in short supply ... a twenty-first century masterpiece.” Zachary Woolfe gave it a Critic’s Pick in The New York Times and wrote: “This ambitious, ingenious piece...is a rangy yet elegant rumination on the power of language, artistic control, mortality, influence, integrity and Aristotle...This heady mixture isn’t in the least pretentious or ponderous, but rather sweet, searching and deeply intelligent."

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