Join members of the Iphigenia Creative Team - composer Wayne Shorter, librettist & performer esperanza spalding, and scenic designer Frank Gehry - along with QnA host soprano Renée Fleming, event host soprano Karen Slack, and special guests to celebrate the upcoming world premiere in November 2021! Your support of this virtual fundraising event, through your tax-deductible ticket purchase and donations, will help activate vital community engagement and access initiatives for underserved communities, young audiences, and educators all across the Iphigenia tour.
This special evening of words and music features an exclusive Question and Answer session with the Creative Team, hosted by renowned soprano Renée Fleming. Your questions will be shared LIVE with the team during the event. Additionally, a unique performance by esperanza spalding and pianist Leo Genovese will be aired from Clement's Place, Rutgers University Institute of Jazz, as well as a sneak peek at the upcoming Iphigenia documentary!
Please give what you can, and help us bring audiences of all backgrounds and resources to experience this once-in-a-generation operatic collaboration. We stand in gratitude and look forward to being with you.
About the opera
IPHIGENIA ... We've been told we're not making opera in the normal way. Well, that’s always been our intention.
For more than four hundred years, operas have been written and performed around the world, but there’s been a common thread in the majority of these works: women suffer. Often at the hands of men who seek to control them. But what if women commanded the narrative?
Iphigenia is an opera debased on the myths by Euripides, with music by legendary 11-time Grammy Award-winning saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter and a libretto by bassist, composer, and vocalist esperanza spalding, the first jazz musician to be awarded the Grammy for Best New Artist. Their subversive and daring interrogation of the tale of the sacrificial daughter of Greece represents Wayne's first foray into the classical form, and the culmination of a lifelong dream of his to compose an opera since he was a 19 year-old music student.
Iphigenia is not an adaptation of the Greek myth as much as it is an intervention into myth-making itself. Led by award-winning director Lileana Blain-Cruz, and abetted by luminary architect and scenic designer Frank Gehry, the entire creative process has led us to understand how stories have been traditionally told, and how we must disrupt existing systems and create our own alternative structures and stories.
Real Magic is artist-led development.
Artists need the right conditions to do their best work. To meet this need, esperanza and Iphigenia executive creative producer Jeff Tang founded an independent company, Real Magic, to bring the opera to life. Working in partnership with producer Cath Brittan and with Mara Isaacs of Octopus Theatricals, along with our co-commissioning partners, our goal has been to develop Iphigenia in an environment of radical experimentation and open collaboration, free from commercial expectations. Over the past two years we've done just that, working and rehearsing out of college classrooms, guest houses, black box theaters, and even Frank Gehry's kitchen. And now, we're ready to bring it to the world.
