2023 WORLD PREMIERE GALLERY
Scene 3 - The Developers (a film)
Inside the actual opera, this filmed scene is viewed as audience members travel along the site during the performance. The music/sound is meant to simulate and abstract antiquated recording technologies for playback and/or amplification for the sung text (possibly Victrola players, Sony Walkman, etc.). The film uses a multitude of production & editing techniques (including AI!) to tell the story of these complicated characters, capturing the libretto's wit, reality based ridiculousness, and unresolvable tensions.
Film: Marie Lorenz Libretto: Dana Spiotta Music: Kurt Rohde
Singers: Charlotte Mundy (Developer 1), Kyra Sims (Developer 2)
Scene 5 - Conrad VanWalt, the Ghost of a 19th Century Waste Merchant
On the creek, a path winds along the present and to the future, and now to the past. A ghost emerges: Conrad VanWalt, an 1890 dark soil entrepreneur, is seated atop a lifeguard chair overlooking Newtown Creek. VanWalt sees their own bright future, taking advantage of the emerging industry along the creek, imagining great wealth and influence, but also beyond their “here & now” to a time and place of promise and idealism, all of which they sort of know is impossible.
Film: Marie Lorenz Libretto: Dana Spiotta Music: Kurt Rohde
Singer: Kyra Sims (Conrad VanWalt)
Scene 6 - The Creek Being
Along the creek lives a being who inhabits and evolves with their environment. They were here long before, but perhaps that was a different being altogether... THIS being is here now, or are we in the near future? They embrace their divine, altered, irreversible surroundings, honoring and urging through reverie.
Film: Marie Lorenz Libretto: Dana Spiotta Music: Kurt Rohde
Singer: Charlotte Mundy (The Creek Being) Percussion: Joshua Perry