The Newtown Odyssey team is grateful to Newtown Creek Alliance, North Brooklyn Community Boathouse, the Amant Foundation, our volunteers, performers, and production team for making this project possible. We were supported by a Creative Capital Award, The Puffin Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Thanks to everyone for coming to our performances!
An opera for, about, and on Newtown Creek.
The set.
Set on a busy canal in a densely populated city, Newtown Odyssey presents a non-traditional opera heard amid the sounds of surrounding traffic and industry. Performers sing aboard floating stages, while the audience observes from shore and in boats. The set of the opera might seem like a typical day along the urban waterfront; a boat club outing, and water quality testing underway, but as the sun sets, and the audience moves deeper into the creek, stranger realities begin to unfold.
The score.
Typically, what we call “opera” is part of a rapidly changing space where singing and theater intersect as a medium for storytelling. We want to tell our story differently. Newtown Odyssey is about place…and sound, and intensity of meaning, and relationships. For Newtown Odyssey, opera is not a noun; it is a verb. Our opera can be experienced in phases, reshuffling the narrative, giving each audience member an entirely different experience of the work.
The music contains musical theater, a phantom “folksong” crossed with a late renaissance madrigal, a range of improvisation and electronics, and some good old fashioned new music! Some operatic conventions remain, others are abandoned altogether. In the end, the form of this opera is the form of the creek—winding, surprising, calming, confusingly just out of reach.
The libretto.
Dana’s libretto comes out of Newtown Creek itself: learning its history as well as crawling through holes in fences, taking boat rides into active sewer outfalls, and walking along its banks. The story concerns some characters you might meet on the creek: tour boat guides, citizen scientists, a ghost from the 19th Century, some developers with big plans, and, finally, a sort of creek essense. Throughout it all, the canalized, long-polluted, ever-beautiful urban waterway remains the main character.
Dana Spiotta
Dana Spiotta is the author of five novels, most recently Wayward, a New York Times Critics Top Pick of 2021. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, and the John Updike Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches in the Syracuse University Creative Writing Program. Her previous collaboration with Marie Lorenz was about a trip on another industrial waterway, the Erie Canal. Dana’s article about it can be read here and Marie’s version can be seen here.
Kurt Rohde
Musician Kurt Rohde is a viola player, teacher, and composer who is fascinated with the codification of failure in current culture, and is searching for ways to incorporate varying notions of failure and levels of catastrophe into the way he makes work in the pursuit of making something beautiful.
Kurt lives in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land with his husband Tim and dog Hendrix. Kurt plays viola and is Artistic Advisor with the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Artistic Director of the Composers Conference, teaches music composition at UC Davis, and works with emerging musicians helping them find creative paths to practice in their life.
Kurt has received the Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, fellowships from the Radcliffe-Harvard Institute for Advanced Study and Guggenheim Foundation, and awards from American Academy of Arts and Letters, Barlow, Fromm, Hanson, and Koussevitzky Foundations. Kurt has spearheaded two initiatives to help create opportunities for composers: The Kurt Rohde Composers Fund is an ongoing commissioning project supporting composers at different stages of their creative life, and his Farewell Tour Project – PARTS 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6 targets underappreciated creative voices in the new music community by commissioning new works for viola.
Marie Lorenz
New York-based artist Marie Lorenz has been exploring and documenting urban waterfronts for many years. In 2005 she began her Tide Taxi project, taking participants through New York City using only the tide, in boats that she designs and builds. Her artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally from Artists Space and MoMA PS1 in New York City to Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England. She has been awarded many honors including the Harpo Foundation Grant, and the 2008 Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize for the American Academy in Rome. Lorenz is represented by Jack Hanley Gallery, in New York City.