Upcoming
Events
Here are events in the works, dates, times and venues TBA. We are a performance organization, but also an educational one. Our interdisciplinary events include: lectures, academic paper readings, discussions and talk-backs, receptions and mixers==all in addition to our regularly scheduled performances. We encourage your participation (most events are either free or nominally charged). See you there!
Environmental Harmonies
an OperAvant, Inc. original series and a community project
Environmental Harmonies is a unique performance series conceived by OperAvant, Inc., which engages the topic of civilization/technology [i.e. the non-natural world] vs. nature: how do we now, in a period of environmental turmoil wherein the negligent and selfish activities of much of the so-called 'civilized' human race--such activity of which has enlisted technology in the service of laying waste to the natural resources and beauty of our planet--successfully reciprocate the sustaining nourishment our planet has given freely to us? How do we learn to consistently give back? What else is there still to learn? The lingering irony is that "civilization" has bred a host of uncivilized behaviors which have negatively impacted the natural world and its non-human denizens.
There is general agreement among sane persons that "giving back' what we have stolen from or heedlessly corrupted in our habitat is of imminent concern if Life is to be sustained in a healthy manner. We must of course heed the warning reports of scientists who speak of global imminent catastrophes, many of which have come to pass. However, all questions and answers do not necessarily lie within the current protocols of ongoing discursive abstraction engaged by focus groups and think tanks. Each citizen/denizen must be alerted to direct, mindful conservational action they can take to contribute to Earth's healing--sometimes its just a simple, graceful action which improves a situation. Art, particularly informed performative art that is available to and apprehensible by community, can arouse and secure awareness toward consistent, ethically impactful action.
Environmental Harmonies (TM) makes the attempt to harmoniously combine the civilized practice of performance with the natural world that knows nothing of it. In an non-imposing, non-challenging manner, EH engages a performative artifact [music composition/dramatic text] with a specific natural environment while remaining respectful of that natural environment's needs and parameters.
LA VOIX HUMAINE redux:
"CUT THE CORD"
A Postmodern Feminist Fantasia on Poulenc-Cocteau's LA VOIX HUMAINE was OperAvant's first deconstructionist production back in 1998. As Cashour's academic and field research uncovered, very few, if any, opera companies at the time were staging deconstructions. "Updatings", which are NOT deconstructionist, were all-the-rage in European RegieTheater, and hadn't yet made their way en masse across the pond, where Peter Sellars Mozart Trilogy still held the crown among a smattering of productions that changed the time, place, and all sorts of other factors present in the original libretto, in an effort to make opera "relevant". This directorial tactic is now so commonplace such that is it rare to see a repertory opera given a traditional staging as dictated by the libretto.
"A Postmodern Feminist Fantasia..." was produced at WINGS THEATRE, NYC when our company was named AMOUR Productions. The production was Artistic Director Tamara Cashour's masters thesis at NYU and featured 11 new characters, a new French translation by Cashour as well as an entire play constructed around the opera, and original music by Cashour. Cashour also sang the lead role of Elle in the original deconstruction.
OperAvant now plans second deconstructionist incarnation, in light of 21st-century advances in communications technologies. Our new production is dramaturgically and critically informed by the writings of Bernard Stiegler, French philosopher and critical theorist of digital technologies in the modern age, whom Cashour has studied in-depth.
It's time to 'cut the cord'!
