Opera Premiere Sells Out at Pao Arts Center
Boston, MA – Audiences packed the Pao Arts Center theater last month for the sold out world premiere of Emily Koh’s surrealist experimental opera, HER | alive.un.dead, produced by Guerilla Opera and Pao Arts Center. Three out of the four performances sold out throughout the weekend, marking a demonstrated hunger for more new and AAPI stories in opera.
Guerilla Opera first started working with Emily Koh in 2018, developing the show through a series of workshops. When looking for a venue to premiere the show, Guerilla Opera Artistic Director Aliana de la Guardia reached out to Pao Arts Center as a potential partner.
“It’s not often to get a new opera written about and from the perspective of or that is bilingual in a language that is not euro-centric...Unlike the most common depictions of Asian peoples in opera (the problematic Madama Butterfly, Turandot, or The Mikado to name only a few), Emily’s story offers audiences an opportunity to see contemporary versions of themselves in the art created with their life experience at the forefront. That is the importance of this collaboration with Pao Arts Center.”
The show was the first opera to be staged at Pao Arts Center and featured an otherworldly multi-media set. As Christopher Hodges remarked in his review of the work, “Marie Yokoyama’s lighting design animated the amorphous ‘white box’ set from an indistinct setting that implied a hospital’s delivery room or the celestial In-Between into an enveloping embodiment of the cascade of emotions that the characters (and audience) experienced.”
The powerful imagery, music, and performances drew audience members into the storyline:
“I found it very moving, very touching, very authentic. I loved the music! The musicians were fabulous, the musicality and the voices were inspiring, moving, touching. So, I feel different after the show than before the show. It really reminded me of the centrality of family and how we try so hard.”
During the panel conversations with fellow opera performers and theater professionals, speakers discussed the power of the show’s themes related to family, reconciliation, and the balance between tragedy and comedy. Another thread that permeated the conversation was the lack of more complex Asian stories and characters in the majority of opera productions. The timing of the premiere of HER | alive.un.dead, a show starring an Asian cast, written and composed by an Asian librettist, featuring a majority Asian design and production team, during AAPI Heritage Month felt especially significant.
“It was just really meaningful to be sitting here, in this community, witnessing this piece, in this space – the Pao Arts Center, in Chinatown, during this month, where we are celebrating not only our heritage, but our present and our future.”
Pao Arts Center is so proud to have partnered with Guerilla Opera to bring this new work to the public.
Photo Credit: Pao Arts Center Staff
The commissioning of Emily Koh for HER | alive.un.dead: a media opera received funding from OPERA America’s Opera Grants for Female Composers program, supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation.
This opera is supported in part by a Grants for Arts Projects Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Live Arts Boston Grant award from The Boston Foundation and their partners at the Barr Foundation and Dunamis., a grant from Eastman’s Institute for Music Leadership’s funds from the Paul R. Judy Center for Innovation and Research, and an award from the New Music USA Creator Development Fund.
This world-premiere opera was developed in partnership with the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum and the Dorothy and Charles Mosesian Center for the Arts.