A Real Magic production (esperanza spalding & Jeff Tang)
In association with Octopus Theatricals & Cath Brittan
… (Iphigenia) a new opera
created by Wayne Shorter & esperanza spalding
Director: Lileana Blain-Cruz
Conductor: Clark Rundell
Set Design: Frank Gehry
Featuring members of the Wayne Shorter Quartet
Executive Creative Producer: Jeff Tang
Producer: Cath Brittan
Tour Producer: Mara Isaacs / Octopus Theatricals
Commissioned by
Cal Performances at the University of California (Berkeley, CA)
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Wash DC)
The Broad Stage (Santa Monica, CA)
ArtsEmerson (Boston, MA)
MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA)
Carolina Performing Arts (Chapell Hill, NC)
Executive Creative Producer
… (Iphigenia) is a new operatic collaboration between two of the most visionary and daring musical voices of our time: 11-time Grammy Award-winning composer and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and 4-time Grammy Award-winning bassist, composer, and vocalist esperanza spalding. Scenic design is by the architect Frank Gehry, a luminary creative force of his generation, for a production directed by award-winning theater and opera director Lileana Blain-Cruz.
The goddess Artemis is furious. She stops the wind from blowing and the Greek army’s sails hang suddenly limp at the moment of departure. They were headed to Troy to finish a war that never made sense - something about a woman named Helen, but that’s another story. Artemis will rage the winds and set the sails if King Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia, and so the story begins. Shorter and spalding’s 90 minute, 3-act retelling bends time, taking us from ancient days to the modern era using the Euripedian myth to interrogate and subvert the misogynistic and militaristic narratives that have been imposed upon female characters in our most canonical stories.
Classical and jazz forms collide and collaborate in a full orchestral score that features Shorter’s venerated trio at the center, and spalding’s distinctive voice – as both scribe and singer - at the heart. Improvisation becomes a living metaphor for choice as vocalists and instrumentalists disrupt compositional hierarchies inherent in the operatic form, striving for moments of spontaneous creation led by conductor Clark Rundell. The piece combines Shorter’s groundbreaking method of symphonic improvisation with spalding’s vibrant libretto, deeply poetic and then suddenly radical, in its appeal to the present moment.
… (Iphigenia) stares down the history of opera and makes some demands on its future: no more tragic women singing through suicide and going mad in perfect pitch. Shorter and spalding’s … (Iphigenia), unlike its forebears, is not an adaptation of the Greek myth as much as it is an intervention into myth-making itself, and an intervention into opera as we know it.