LAB 2022

LA-based artist and filmmaker Mariah Garnett and a cohort of close collaborators – Holland Andrews, eddy kwon, Raphael Khouri, Jessika Kenney, Todd Moellenberg, Breanna Sinclairé and Christopher Paul Craig – will workshop material that is part a new body of operatic works responding to diaries and a never-realized score written by her great-great aunt Ruth in Cairo in 1935. The diaries insinuate that the opera was written in collaboration with a spirit, and a picture emerges of an isolated and talented woman artist plagued by fear, trauma and illness, who found a measure of healing through music and spirit communication. Garnett and her collaborators not only resurrect fragments of the original score, but collectively create new works that examine the condition of being an artist operating at the margins today. The project asks of all its participants, “where do you find the spiritual fortitude to continue as an artist in the face of financial precarity, institutional racism, gender bias, multi-level capitalist extraction and the exhaustion that all of this foments?” In response, they attempt a kind of alchemy, weaving together different configurations of love, empowerment, survival, and familial and human connection through music and film. In the rescoring of these works, Garnett delves into questions around legacy and dealing with the impact of colonial violence on place within her own family history.

Berlin-based artist, experiential composer, and librettist Richard Kennedy will workshop a new piece, Zeferina. The work is an interpretive translation of “Chapter 6: The Historical Archeology of the Black Radical Tradition” from the book Black Marxism. It explores the genesis of Black resistance and the roots of Black social liberation movements in the Americas. The presence of Maroon communities in the colonies fostered a world within the new world that often caused revolt. For Zeferina, who led The Hausa Revolts (1808-1835), she was ultimately subdued and her arms taken from her.

New York-based musician H Sinno has been the writer and front-person for Lebanese indie band Mashrouʼ Leila since 2008. Sinno will workshop a new lecture/performance/opera, Westerly Breath, that will premiere in Fall 2023 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, at the Ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur. The work weaves Ancient Egyptian myth, architecture, immigration, autobiography, and the history of speech synthesis to explore the voice as a site of political embodiment.