Opera Cycle · Multimedia · 2024–2030
A constellation of multimedia works — three theatrical pieces at different scales, a short film with Kevin Jerome Everson, and recordings, texts, and constructed documents seeded online — in which the retelling of American history becomes a site of rupture, distortion, and risk.
§ 1 · The work
In Volume 1: Steam, an actor-activist has been commissioned to stage Harlem Renaissance author Arna Bontemps’ novel Black Thunder, but his confidence in the project erodes and he begins to consider sabotage. The work fuses chamber opera, film, and critical re-staging of historical events — scored for a compact ensemble moving between structured improvisation, composed music, spoken text, and projected cinematic material. Scenes of contemporary political spectacle, protest and tear gas, and cinematic re-stagings of the novel create a deliberately unsettled, hybrid form.
In Volume 2: Smoke, set in 1968 after the republishing of Black Thunder, an impostor assumes Arna Bontemps’ identity. Simultaneously appearing as both fraud and prophet, the impostor is arrested in Hollywood attempting to sell the film rights to Black Thunder. The arrest leads to an unsettling confrontation in which it becomes clear this charade has already been going on for decades, and may not end soon.
Across its forms, these works do not reconstruct history — they corrode it. Scenes repeat, fracture, and misfire. Images are rehearsed until they betray themselves. What emerges is not a stable account of American history, but a field of competing performances, where memory is under pressure and every attempt at representation risks becoming another form of violence.
Production photography · Steam · © Kevin Jerome Everson
Mayor victory speech · Steam, Volume I
© Kevin Jerome Everson
Period film shoot · © Kevin Jerome Everson
Upcoming premiere
Volume 1: Steam · June 2026
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble · Starring Omari Tau · Musical direction: Matilda Hofman
Collaborators
Adjacent works