Opera Povera at the Schindler House was a program highlighting the work of the experimental opera company with open rehearsals, two performances, and an accompanying display of related dramaturgy featuring the artists, designers, composers and performers with whom Opera Povera has created new works.
Performances included:
Sean Griffin with Aiyun Huang and Chris Warren: Tacoma Narrows Monochord from the Puget Sound (2014) – Percussion, electronics and 2-channel video (Friday only)
Pauline Oliveros: To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation (1970) – Ensemble (Saturday only)
Charles Gaines: Declaration on the Rights of Women from Manifestos 2 arranged by Sean Griffin (2015) – Isaura String Quartet and Partch Ensemble
Juliana Snapper: Double Voiced (2013) – Voice and electronics
George Lewis: Unison (2007) – Isaura String Quartet with David Johnson
Harry Partch: Barstow (1941) – Partch Ensemble
Anne LeBaron: Selected scenes from LSD: The Opera (2015) – Isaura String Quartet, Partch Ensemble, Laura Bohn and Timur Bekbosunov
A dramaturgy display was on view concurrently.
About Opera Povera
Established in 2011 by composer/director Sean Griffin with a grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, Opera Povera is a performance and design consortium comprised of artists, designers, composers and musicians who organized to refashion and invigorate the experience of music drama. Their projects creatively recombine ethnographic, archival and historical research with critical artistic inquiry to pursue a multidimensional dramaturgy composed of concepts, objects, and musics that reach back in time or forward into an imagined future. Recent works have engaged resonances of transiency, exile, surveillance, ancient tunings, altered states, class struggle, improvisation, and competing political cultures.
Through their focus on interdisciplinary collaboration with diverse composers and artists, Opera Povera conceptually harmonizes with the assemblagist aesthetics of their namesake, Arte Povera. This groundbreaking Italian movement’s interest in “poor” materials guides Opera Povera’s process of staging new operatic forms. They focus on materiality, physicality, invented forms and found materials from everyday life, juxtaposed and extended into live performance experiences, installations, and dramatic musical events. Opera Povera’s productions and recordings have been featured at MoMA in New York, REDCAT at the Disney Hall and LACMA in Los Angeles, and EMPAC in Troy, NY.