Beth Morrison Projects Reveals 2024-25 Season Lineup

Beth Morrison Projects has announced its 19th season, featuring a World premiere, two West Coast premieres, an NYC premiere and the third cycle of their acclaimed NEXT GEN program, along with the 2025 PROTOTYPE: OPERA | THEATRE | NOW Festival in partnership with HERE.

On October 19, BMP, in partnership with CAP UCLA will present the West Coast premiere of Black Lodge, composed by David T. Little with libretto by Anne Waldman and film/stage direction by Michael VQ, with Timur and the Dime Museum performing live alongside the film at the United Theater on Broadway in Los Angeles. Said The New York Times of the work at its world premiere: “drawing on David Lynch, William S. Burroughs and Stanley Kubrick, [Black Lodge] is a fast-cut horror-movie nightmare of ominous fluorescent-lit clinics, severed digits, screams in the desert, guns and hypodermic needles.” The recording of Black Lodge received a GRAMMY® Award nomination in 2024 for Best Opera Recording. To open the evening, BMP will present a pre-show immersive experience created and directed by Sandra Powers, where the audience will be invited to step into the haunted world of BARDO, a liminal space between life and death where lost souls linger, awaiting passage to the next realm. It will be the Halloween event of the season in Los Angeles.

On November 23 and 24, BMP will present Cycle 3, Round 1 of their acclaimed BMP: NEXT GEN program at National Sawdust in Brooklyn. The composer competition program for contemporary vocal works will feature performances of pieces by ten selected first round semifinalists, before two finalists are selected for 30-minute vocal-theatre works to be performed in the 2025-2026 season, followed by the selection of one of them for a full evening length work. 

January 9-19, BMP and HERE will present the 2025 lineup of their acclaimed PROTOTYPE: OPERA | THEATRE | NOW Festival, which will include the New York premiere of Black Lodge, as well as world premiere of Eat the Document, an alternative opera by John Glover, Kelley Rourke and Kristin Marting based on the novel by Dana Spiotta, and two more New York premieres: IN A GROVE, by Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann, 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.

February 19 – 23, 2025, BMP and the LA Opera will present the West Coast premiere of Adoration at REDCAT in Los Angeles composed by Mary Kouyoumdjian with libretto by Royce Vavrek. The story of Adoration was adapted from Atom Egoyan’s film of the same name, about an orphaned high school student who appropriates details from a historical terrorist attack as an event perpetrated by his parents. The World Premiere was hailed by OperaWire as “shockingly timely” and “extremely captivating,” while the Wall Street Journal praised the piece for “reflecting the dreamy process of exploration.”

May 22-25, 2025, Paola Prestini and Brenda Shaughnessy's expansive, multi-modal opera Sensorium Ex will have its world premiere presented by Omaha's Common Senses Festival in a co-production by VisionIntoArt and Beth Morrison Projects, directed by Jerron Herman and Jay Scheib. Operating at the intersection of AI, disability, and the arts, Sensorium Ex explores the fundamental question of what it means to have voice, and the nature of voice beyond language. The libretto, by poet Brenda Shaughnessy, tells a dystopian tale centered on a scientist/mother and her a nonverbal, nonambulatory child with multiple disabilities, as they resist a villainous corporate entity's attempts to harvest their human data in order to create a AI that will eventually replace people.

Said BMP President and Creative Producer Beth Morrison: “This season continues our commitment to telling the stories of our time, as well as cultivating the next generation of creative voices. Black Lodgeand Adoration are two complex stories that delve into the human psyche, and the mythologies we create around ourselves, while NEXT GEN has grown into one of the most powerful pipelines of talent in the performing arts. Sensorium Ex is a ground breaking project that will integrate the worlds of opera and the disability community in beautiful harmony. ”

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