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. 

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: 

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. 

Pao Arts Center is so proud to have partnered with Guerilla Opera to bring this new work to the public. 

In the News:

Broadway World, April 10
Boston Globe, May 1
The Boston Musical Intelligencer, May 11
WGBH Morning Edition, May 12
The Boston Musical Intelligencer Review, May 16
The Arts Fuse Review, May 20

Full Event Details:

HER | alive.un.dead | Friday, May 12 - Sunday, May 14

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.