
BARDO + BLACK LODGE (Opening Night)
You’re invited to step into the timeless world of BARDO, a liminal space between life and death where lost souls linger, awaiting passage to the next realm. In this immersive pre-show experience for Black Lodge, you will confront your deepest secrets as you wander through a historic theater amidst hungry ghosts, tormented souls, and mystifying creatures, all bound to this otherworldly realm, in search of escape.
Experience BARDO for one night only on the opening night of Black Lodge. Arrive at 7 pm to experience BARDO before Black Lodge.
Drawing on the complicated mythologies of the surrealist writer William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Black Lodge uses dance, industrial rock, classical string quartet, and opera to take viewers through a Lynchian psychological escape room.
Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her.
Photo Credit: Maria Baranova
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Sandra Powers (Creator, Director)
Three-time Emmy® and Annie Award nominated Peruvian-American editor, director and writer Sandra Bambarén Powers is currently the lead editor of Disney’s critically acclaimed series “Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.” A graduate of the MFA Film Directing program at California Institute of the Arts and BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, Sandra has contributed her creative expertise to iconic animated series such as Nickelodeon’s “Legend of Korra” and Disney’s “Elena of Avalor.” Her short film “Still Life After Death” premiered at the Sharjah Film Festival in 2021 and is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime. Her debut short, “Autumn,” was distributed by Ouat Media and screened at many prominent festivals including Festival Images Contre Nature (France), Wimbledon Shorts Film Festival (England) and EXiS Film Festival (South Korea). In 2023, Sandra art directed the Grammy®-nominated opera film “Black Lodge” for Opera Philadelphia and made her stage directorial debut with “The Great Soviet Bucket,” produced by Beth Morrison Projects and funded by the National Performance Network for Miami Light Project. She also conceived and directed “BARDO,” an immersive theatrical experience hailed by the LA Times as “full of wonder” produced by Beth Morrison Projects with CAP UCLA. Showcasing her distinctive vision across mediums, Sandra has also directed over fifteen music videos for many bands, including Grammy®-nominated DeVotchKa and Timur and the Dime Museum.

David T. Little (Original Music)
A natural musical storyteller with “a knack for overturning musical conventions” (The New York Times), composer David T. Little is known for stage, concert, and screen works permeated with the power of the unexpected. Little’s broad catalog speaks to the mix of light and dark that we experience in life, unafraid to invoke the mythical, bewitching, disturbing, surreal, or comedic.
Little has drawn acclaim for operas including Dog Days, JFK, and the comedy Vinkensport, or The Finch Opera (all with libretto by Royce Vavrek), as well as his GRAMMY®-nominated opera, Soldier Songs. His recent work Black Lodge was nominated for the 2024 GRAMMY® Award for Best Opera Recording and is the recent recipient of a Music Theater Now international prize. Black Lodge, a metal-infused opera with a libretto by poet Anne Waldman, was premiered by Beth Morrison Projects at Opera Philadelphia, with a soundtrack released by Cantaloupe Music. It received its European premiere at the O. Festival in Rotterdam this May and will receive its New York premiere in January as part of the 2025 Prototype Festival.