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| Photo Credit: Kristin Marting |
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EAT THE DOCUMENT
World Premiere January 9th, 10th, 13th, 15th-17th at 7pm | January 11th & 12th at 4pm | 90 min. @ HERE Mainstage
A HERE Production
Composer: John Glover
Librettist: Kelley Rourke
Music Director: Mila Henry
Director: Kristin Marting
Featuring: Paul An, Danielle Buonaiuto, Adrienne Danrich, Amy Justman, Michael Kuhn, Paul Pinto, Tim Russell, Natalie Trumm
In the heyday of the seventies underground, Bobby DeSoto and Mary Whittaker – passionate, idealistic, and in love – design a series of radical protests against the Vietnam War. When one action goes wrong, the course of their lives is forever changed. The two must erase their past, forge new identities, and never see one another again.
Now it is the 1990s. Mary lives in the suburbs with her fifteen-year-old son, Jason, who spends hours immersed in the music of his mother’s generation. She has no idea where Bobby is, whether he is alive or dead. A few towns away, an aging hippie calling himself Nash presides over an anarchist bookstore, drawing the disaffected youth of the next generation into a shifting series of “groups” and “collectives.” Miranda, alone among the kids who frequent the bookstore, takes Nash seriously.
Shifting between the protests in the 1970s and the consequences of those choices in the 1990s, Eat the Document, based on the novel by Dana Spiotta, explores the connection between the two eras—their language, technology, music, and activism.
Eat The Document is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. We are also grateful for support from Nancy & Jim Barton, Joan Desens and Simon Carr-Ellison, Robert Ellis, Gene Kaufman & Terry Eder-Kaufman, Ann D. McChord, Thomas Simpson, and Faith E. Gay & Francesca Zambello. Eat The Document received developmental support from American Opera Projects, Baryshnikov Arts Center, The Center for Fiction, Joe’s Pub and HERE.
Link to ZINE
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| Photo credit: Matthew Soltesz |
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BLACK LODGE
NY Premiere January 11th*, 13th-15th at 8:30pm | January 12th at 5pm | 70 min. @ Village East by Angelika
**The January 11th performance (Opening Night) will feature the exclusive one-night-only immersive performance experience BARDO beginning at 7pm!
Composer: David T. Little Librettist: Anne Waldman Director & Screenwriter: Michael Joseph McQuilken
Featuring: Timur & the Dime Museum
Drawing on the complicated mythologies of the surrealist writer William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Black Lodge uses dance, industrial rock, classical string quartet, and opera to take viewers through a Lynchian psychological escape room. In November 2023, Black Lodge was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording.
Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her.
The New York premiere will also include a pre-show immersive experience titled BARDO - created and directed by Sandra Powers, composed by David T. Little and produced by Beth Morrison Projects. The audience will be invited to step into the haunted world of BARDO, a liminal space between life and death where lost souls linger, awaiting passage to the next realm. In this immersive pre-show experience, you will confront your deepest secrets as you wander dark corridors amidst trapped shadows, tormented souls, and mystifying creatures, all bound to this otherworldly realm, in search of escape.
Opera commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects and the Allen R. and Judy Brick Freedman Venture Fund for Opera. Film commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects, Opera Philadelphia, the Allen R. and Judy Brick Freedman Venture Fund for Opera, David & Kiki Gindler, Charlotte Isaacs, and Thomas H. Platz with additional support provided by the Howard Gilman Foundation.
Developed by Beth Morrison Projects, California Institute for the Arts, HERE Arts Center, and REDCAT. Additional production support provided by David & Kiki Gindler, Charlotte Isaacs, and Thomas H. Platz. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. |
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| Photo credit: Louis Stein |
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IN A GROVE
Co-presented with La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
NY Premiere January 16th-18th at 7pm | January 18th & 19th 2pm | 55 min. @ La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Ellen Stewart Theatre
Composer: Christopher Cerrone
Librettist: Stephanie Fleischmann
Director: Mary Birnbaum
Music Director: Raquel Acevedo Klein
Featuring: Paul Appleby, Mikaela Bennett, Chuanyuan Liu, John Brancy
A silent, expectant, grove. A fatal encounter between a man, a woman, and a thief. Seven testimonies, each offering a clashing perspective on the crime. The shifting viewpoints of Akutagawa’s classic short story lend themselves eloquently to music’s ability to conjure, via repetition and variation, the ways human perception is fallible, imprecise, and subject to interference. Characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, composer Christopher Cerrone’s music balances lushness and austerity, immersive textures and telling details. This dynamic new adaptation melds the dramatic impact and interiority of Cerrone’s unique voice with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann’s charged, poetic text to produce a powerful interrogation into how we see, hear, remember and believe. Commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera with additional support from Raulee Marcus and Stephen Block, Pittsburgh Opera, Metropolis Ensemble, and Allen and Judy Brick Freedman.
| Photo courtesy of Miami Light Project |
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POSITIVE VIBRATION NATION
NY Premiere January 11th at 6pm | January 12th at 2pm & 7pm | January 13th at 9pm | January 14th at 7pm | 60 min. @ HERE’s Dorothy B. Williams Theatre
Composer & Librettist: Sol Ruiz
Journey from the year 3050 back to the present with the ambassadors of the New Miami Sound, and explore the origins of their Miami-licious swagger and unified superpowers in the Positive Vibration Nation.
Positive Vibration Nation is a rock guaguanco opera created by Sol Ruiz. Blending live performance with integrated technology, the new work fuses sound, visual art, costume, and music with Caribbean influences to investigate contemporary issues, explore Miami’s cultural singularity, and convey a positive message to audiences.
PVN is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Miami Light Project, Beth Morrison Projects and NPN. This project is also supported by a National Performance Network (NPN) Artist Engagement Fund, with funding from the Doris Duke Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Full libretto available HERE
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It’s hard to imagine artistic life without this annual January showcase for adventurous opera/music theater.
– The Wall Street Journal
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(New York, NY) - November 1, 2025 - Tickets for PROTOTYPE: Opera | Theatre | Now, Beth Morrison Projects and HERE’s annual festival that will resume on January 9-19, 2025, are on sale now. This will mark the final season co-produced by HERE and co-curated by Kristin Marting, who founded the Festival together with Beth Morrison and Kim Whitener, and who is the Founding Artistic Director Emeritus of HERE.
The 2025 festival season will include the world premiere of Eat the Document, an alternative opera by John Glover, Kelley Rourke and Kristin Marting based on the novel by Dana Spiotta, along with three New York premieres: Black Lodge, a work by David T. Little and Anne Waldman that is part film screening and part industrial rock opera concert and was nominated for a GRAMMY™ Award for Best Opera Recording in 2023 and will include an immersive pre-show experience titled BARDO by Sandra Powers, a co-presentation with La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club of IN A GROVE, Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann's perspective-shifting musical adaptation of Ryu¯nosuke Akutagawa's short story, Positive Vibration Nation, a time-traveling exploration of Miami’s cultural singularity by Sol Ruiz. The festival also features ART BATH - an immersive performance salon that fosters artistic community, performances by GRAMMY™ nominated multi-hyphenate artist Arooj Aftab, as well as Telekinetik - a genre-bending digital Hip-Hopera by Khary Laurent detailing the story of a would-be vigilante and a telepathic shaman, which can be streamed online throughout the festival dates.
Tickets for the 2025 festival are on sale November 1, 2025.
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A WORD FROM THE DIRECTORS
This season, we celebrate another extraordinary group of creatives as they tell the stories of our shared experience, tracing the threads that connect us across eras, cultures, dreams, and memories. We also celebrate the incredible partnership with HERE and our beloved co-founder and co-curator Kristin Marting in her final season with us. Kristin's singular artistic vision will always remain at the heart of PROTOTYPE, and we look forward to sharing another swath of her brilliance with you this January!
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| Photo Credit: Kristin Marting |
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EAT THE DOCUMENT
World Premiere January 9th, 10th, 13th, 15th-17th at 7pm | January 11th & 12th at 4pm | 90 min. @ HERE Mainstage
A HERE Production
Composer: John Glover
Librettist: Kelley Rourke
Music Director: Mila Henry
Director: Kristin Marting
Featuring: Paul An, Danielle Buonaiuto, Adrienne Danrich, Amy Justman, Michael Kuhn, Paul Pinto, Tim Russell, Natalie Trumm
In the heyday of the seventies underground, Bobby DeSoto and Mary Whittaker – passionate, idealistic, and in love – design a series of radical protests against the Vietnam War. When one action goes wrong, the course of their lives is forever changed. The two must erase their past, forge new identities, and never see one another again.
Now it is the 1990s. Mary lives in the suburbs with her fifteen-year-old son, Jason, who spends hours immersed in the music of his mother’s generation. She has no idea where Bobby is, whether he is alive or dead. A few towns away, an aging hippie calling himself Nash presides over an anarchist bookstore, drawing the disaffected youth of the next generation into a shifting series of “groups” and “collectives.” Miranda, alone among the kids who frequent the bookstore, takes Nash seriously.
Shifting between the protests in the 1970s and the consequences of those choices in the 1990s, Eat the Document, based on the novel by Dana Spiotta, explores the connection between the two eras—their language, technology, music, and activism.
Eat The Document is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. We are also grateful for support from Nancy & Jim Barton, Joan Desens and Simon Carr-Ellison, Robert Ellis, Gene Kaufman & Terry Eder-Kaufman, Ann D. McChord, Thomas Simpson, and Faith E. Gay & Francesca Zambello. Eat The Document received developmental support from American Opera Projects, Baryshnikov Arts Center, The Center for Fiction, Joe’s Pub and HERE.
Link to ZINE
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| Photo credit: Matthew Soltesz |
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BLACK LODGE
NY Premiere January 11th*, 13th-15th at 8:30pm | January 12th at 5pm | 70 min. @ Village East by Angelika
**The January 11th performance (Opening Night) will feature the exclusive one-night-only immersive performance experience BARDO beginning at 7pm!
Composer: David T. Little Librettist: Anne Waldman Director & Screenwriter: Michael Joseph McQuilken
Featuring: Timur & the Dime Museum
Drawing on the complicated mythologies of the surrealist writer William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Black Lodge uses dance, industrial rock, classical string quartet, and opera to take viewers through a Lynchian psychological escape room. In November 2023, Black Lodge was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording.
Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her.
The New York premiere will also include a pre-show immersive experience titled BARDO - created and directed by Sandra Powers, composed by David T. Little and produced by Beth Morrison Projects. The audience will be invited to step into the haunted world of BARDO, a liminal space between life and death where lost souls linger, awaiting passage to the next realm. In this immersive pre-show experience, you will confront your deepest secrets as you wander dark corridors amidst trapped shadows, tormented souls, and mystifying creatures, all bound to this otherworldly realm, in search of escape.
Opera commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects and the Allen R. and Judy Brick Freedman Venture Fund for Opera. Film commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects, Opera Philadelphia, the Allen R. and Judy Brick Freedman Venture Fund for Opera, David & Kiki Gindler, Charlotte Isaacs, and Thomas H. Platz with additional support provided by the Howard Gilman Foundation.
Developed by Beth Morrison Projects, California Institute for the Arts, HERE Arts Center, and REDCAT. Additional production support provided by David & Kiki Gindler, Charlotte Isaacs, and Thomas H. Platz. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. |
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| Photo credit: Louis Stein |
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IN A GROVE
Co-presented with La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
NY Premiere January 16th-18th at 7pm | January 18th & 19th 2pm | 55 min. @ La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Ellen Stewart Theatre
Composer: Christopher Cerrone
Librettist: Stephanie Fleischmann
Director: Mary Birnbaum
Music Director: Raquel Acevedo Klein
Featuring: Paul Appleby, Mikaela Bennett, Chuanyuan Liu, John Brancy
A silent, expectant, grove. A fatal encounter between a man, a woman, and a thief. Seven testimonies, each offering a clashing perspective on the crime. The shifting viewpoints of Akutagawa’s classic short story lend themselves eloquently to music’s ability to conjure, via repetition and variation, the ways human perception is fallible, imprecise, and subject to interference. Characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, composer Christopher Cerrone’s music balances lushness and austerity, immersive textures and telling details. This dynamic new adaptation melds the dramatic impact and interiority of Cerrone’s unique voice with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann’s charged, poetic text to produce a powerful interrogation into how we see, hear, remember and believe. Commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera with additional support from Raulee Marcus and Stephen Block, Pittsburgh Opera, Metropolis Ensemble, and Allen and Judy Brick Freedman.
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| Photo courtesy of Miami Light Project |
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POSITIVE VIBRATION NATION
NY Premiere January 11th at 6pm | January 12th at 2pm & 7pm | January 13th at 9pm | January 14th at 7pm | 60 min. @ HERE’s Dorothy B. Williams Theatre
Composer & Librettist: Sol Ruiz
Journey from the year 3050 back to the present with the ambassadors of the New Miami Sound, and explore the origins of their Miami-licious swagger and unified superpowers in the Positive Vibration Nation.
Positive Vibration Nation is a rock guaguanco opera created by Sol Ruiz. Blending live performance with integrated technology, the new work fuses sound, visual art, costume, and music with Caribbean influences to investigate contemporary issues, explore Miami’s cultural singularity, and convey a positive message to audiences.
PVN is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Miami Light Project, Beth Morrison Projects and NPN. This project is also supported by a National Performance Network (NPN) Artist Engagement Fund, with funding from the Doris Duke Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Full libretto available HERE
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Photo credit: Shreya Dev Dube
AROOJ AFTAB: NIGHT REIGN
Presented in partnership with Winter Jazz Fest
January 15th - 17th @ 9pm in HERE’s Dorothy B Williams Theater
Transformative may not be an urgent enough word to describe the multi-hyphenate creative Arooj Aftab. Rooted to a constellation of unmappable margins and elegant refusals, she lithely moves against the weight of time and convention, honoring multiple traditions while being owned by none. She eludes categorical capture through an expansive repertoire of study, including the techniques of music production and engineering as well a sprawling vocal practice that moves with cunning intention through and alongside jazz, South Asian classical music, pop, and blues. With and from these living, mercurial forms Aftab labors in design of something that she adoringly refers to as "global soul." She is its erudite scribe and dark chanteuse, successfully convincing audiences all over the world that genres are a lie but she should be believed.
The scale of Aftab's musical inheritances are on brilliant display in her two most recent albums: the Grammy-nominated "masterclass in space" Love in Exile (Verve, 2023), co-created with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily, and her fourth solo project, the incandescent Night Reign (Verve, 2024). Both are spectacles in skill and Aftab tenderly, expertly holds all of their supple elements like priceless heirlooms. Her seeking, from Sufi poets to iconic jazz vocalists, proved to her that "there was no blueprint for this thing I wanted to do," and it's for her embrace of risk and nonconformity that Aftab earned her position at the vanguard of creative music. Since 2021, she has delivered "rapturous performances" at major venues and international festivals such as the Newport Jazz Festival, Coachella, Roskilde Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, Glastonbury, and twice on NPR's Tiny Desk series; received critical praise from The New York Times, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Time Magazine; and been awarded a Grammy for "Mohabbat" in the Best Global Music Performance category and a Best New Artist nomination for her standout third album, Vulture Prince (Verve/New Amsterdam, 2021), two nominations for Love in Exile, as well as her selection as a 2023 United States Artists Fellow and recipient of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Music.
Before and beyond Aftab's many accolades is the instrument itself, her craveable voice, which she describes as an alchemy of "displacement, reinvention, exile, chaos, feminism and the maddening fabric of love and loss and tragedy in the world." The calm in her vocal delivery is not comfort or consent but a persistent and expectant intensity that sears the text to countless lifetimes in as many lands. Herself the subject of various migrations, Aftab spent her adolescent years in Lahore, Pakistan, a garden-dense city and the birthplace of her music-loving parents. Her viral cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" at age eighteen aided in her passage to study jazz at Berklee College of Music in Boston, while Brooklyn, New York would be her next and most fertile workshop for creation of her "world-building" music. Night Reign is both a vivid reflection of and future for that music held by the trace figurations of the city. There Aftab works with some of the most stunning musicians of our time, raising diverse concentric circles of collaboration that reflect back to her a cosmic level of musical craft and invention.
Aftab enchants with her passionate attention to the everyday and ability to indelibly shape its stratospheric poesis. She dares to express affection from the stage, a profoundly musical achievement that models not only how to do so but why. Emboldened by her fearlessness and exquisite imagination, others gather and play, proving that she's exactly who and where she is meant to be. "For once, I'm not fighting," she says with signature candor. "I've already won."
TELEKINETIK
A digital Hip-Hopera streaming online January 9th-19th
Composer & Librettist: Khary Laurent
Director & Producer: George Cederquist
Costume Designer: Kate Setzer Kamphausen
Director of Photography: Kristina Rodriguez
A would-be vigilante, tortured by a telepathic shaman, learns a difficult lesson about justice versus bloodlust, as told through the “hip-hopera” stylings of the daring composer, Khary Laurent.
Experience Telekinetic by streaming online or watch the film in cinemas by attending Black Lodge at Village East by Angelika.
Telekinetik is made possible in large part due to the generosity of the Jarvis & Constance Doctorow Family Foundation. Additional support for Telekinetik by the Lanie & Ethel Foundation.
Commissioned and produced by Catapult Opera.
Photo credit: Santiago Felipe
ART BATH
January 18th at 8pm @ The Blue Building E. 46th St.
Co-curated by Mara Driscoll and Liz Yilmaz
Featuring performances by Julian Crouch, Leah Hawkins, Saha Gnawa, Annie Rigney
ART BATH is an immersive performance salon that fosters artistic community, exploration, and exchange. Hosted at the historic Blue Building on E. 46th St, Art Bath presents an eclectic spectrum of artists in a raw and intimate environment. Part immersive concert and part art party, Art Bath offers fertile ground for forward-thinking artistic creation and experimentation.
Art Bath transforms the salon experience into a festival-in-an-evening that takes audiences on an immersive ride through many disciplines and textures of art. With an established history of fostering new collaborations and work by world-class creatives, Art Bath draws from an eclectic lineup of opera, music, dance, puppetry, and fine artists to create unique evenings in a reimagined warehouse.
Art Bath PROTOTYPE FESTIVAL will feature star soprano Leah Hawkins in an intimate performance, master puppeteer and designer Julian Crouch in his work Birdheart, choreographer Annie Rigney with thereminist Rob Schwimmer in she was becoming untethered.., sculptor and performance artist Elissavet (Betty) Sfyri in a new work, and a first-time collaboration between contemporary Gnawa collective Saha Gnawa and roller-skating artist Manuela Agudelo Roberts.
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FEATURED JOBS
RENT A PHOTO
