Yaz Lancaster's PAPER TIGER Premieres This Week

PAPER TIGER, a 12-minute digital opera composed by Black transdisciplinary artist Yaz Lancaster, performed by vocalists Eliza Bagg and Miss Grit and pianist Mary Prescott, with a film directed by Sean Pecknold, premieres on the Opera Philadelphia Channel on Friday, May 19.

PAPER TIGER is the latest in a series of world premiere digital commissions released by Opera Philadelphia beginning in 2021 by composers Tyshawn Sorey, Courtney Bryan, Angélica Negrón, Caroline Shaw, and Rene Orth. The series has garnered critical acclaim for embracing a New Medium with a spirit of experimentation.

Yaz Lancaster (they/them), a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and poet, whose debut audiovisual album AmethYst "is already a strong contender for favorite album of the year" (I CARE IF YOU LISTEN), creates music that often reckons with specific influences ranging from politics of liberation and identity to natural phenomena and poetics. Their work navigates practices aligned with relational aesthetics; fragments and collage; and alternative subcultures (DIY, digital spaces, etc.). In PAPER TIGER, Yaz reflects on nearly a decade of their identity as a queer person of color. In the opening song Visions, they recount feelings of being unseen and undesired during a time where marginalized genders had little representation, and Blackness was seen as less desirable. The titular song Paper Tiger explores the multitudes and complexities of gender expansiveness- the music throughout the work straddles several genre lines including hip/trip hop, contemporary classical, and hyperpop. The final song Metalloid celebrates the joy to be had in "trans-ness" and gender nonconformity- in the ability to continually create oneself: "I can be anyone / I can be anything."

Sean Pecknold (he/him) is a music video and film director from Seattle, based in Los Angeles. His body of work includes award-winning films and animations for Fleet Foxes, John Legend, Netflix, Dreamworks, Dirty Projectors, Google, Sony, Lyft, Headspace, the New York Times, and the BBC. He is currently working on his first feature-length film.

He approached PAPER TIGER as an emotional journey through a day in the life of a fictional character, performed by lead dancer Megan Doheny (she/her). "Inspired by the theme of visibility in Yaz's beautiful composition, I made a film about the struggle for acceptance and wanting to be seen in a world crowded with conformity," Pecknold said. "Using a range of expressive dances, emotions and abstract sets, we chart a frustrating, repetitive, confusing, euphoric, twisting path towards finding the strength to be oneself during a day in the life of our lead character."