Presented as part of OperaFest LA, please join Overtone Industries for the fifth year of Original Vision, an incubator program dedicated to original stories of mythic proportion through the development and presentation of new and innovative opera-theater.
Developed with mentorship from Fahad Siadat and O-Lan Jones, these performances feature music direction by Siadat and direction by Jones and Livia Reiner. Performers include Kevin Darnell Allen, Nelle June Anderson, Liz Eldridge, Kion Heidari, Elliot Menard, O-Lan Jones, and Brightwork Newmusic.
CARCINIZE! Music by Murphy Severtson; Libretto by George Landau-Pincus
In CARCINIZE!, a famous female pilot (maybe the one you’re thinking of—maybe not) crash lands on a desert island. While she adjusts to a new life outside of the prying eyes of the public, she must also contend with the mysterious desires and histories of the island’s skittering hivemind of crabs, who refuse to give her solitude. CARCINIZE! is a fantasia on crustacean themes, exploring the illusion of choice on the scale of macrohistory. While a crash is often an ending, here it is the beginning, as the crabs and the pilot become one and many.
TIME IS THE ENEMY Music by Samara Rice; Libretto by Brian Sonia-Wallace
Everyone’s been conscripted into a battle they didn’t choose. Time is the Enemy begins in a hospital, where Rob is battling a terminal illness. His estranged wife Clara, an astrophysicist studying time paradoxes, creates a Time Machine with the goal, not of traveling through time, but of ending it. A fool’s errand ensues, a psychedelic journey (literally) against the clock that moves between tragedy and screwball surrealism to ask: if the battle is unwinnable, is it therefore meaningless? Or are lost causes the ones most worthy of our devotion?
MINE Music and libretto by O-Lan Jones
MINE, a new piece of opera-theater by O-Lan Jones, celebrates the epic day-to-day thoughts and feelings of Imogene, teased out into music, speech, and movement, where old friends, lovers, enemies, worries, and passions take hold. It features Imogene as she lives through various aspects of her life with the help of four performers connected under mounds of netting, ready to appear as lovers, relations, intruders from the horrors of the world, the haranguing Chorus, or as part of a “water ballet” swimming through the froth of debris.