BLACK LODGE: Live Multimedia Experience

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.

Poet, professor, performer, librettist and cultural activist Anne Waldman is the author of over 60 volumes of poetry, poetics and anthologies including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in The Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press) which won the Pen Center Literary Prize, and Trickster Feminism from Penguin. Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics program at Naropa University. She was the keynote speaker for the Bob Dylan and the Beats Conference in Tulsa and a keynote speaker for the Jaipur Festival in India. Waldman is  also most recently the author of Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House Press) and the recent book from Apic Press in Algeria : Rues du Mondes, 2024, translations into French by Pierre Joris & Nicole Peyrafitte.  Her latest poetry volume MESOPOTOPIA  will be published by Penguin in 2025. Her vinyl SCAIMACHY was produced by Fast Speaking Music to critical acclaim.  Patti Smith has called it: “Exquisitely potent, a psychic shield for our time.” She was a long time friend of William Burroughs, who was  an inspiring  writer/ figure for the opera  Black Lodge,  \OUTRIDER, a documentary with and about  Anne Waldman, produced by Sarah Riggs and Martin Scorcese will premier in 2025. “Waldman is one of the most important and irreducible living American poets.” (Chicago Poetry Foundation. 

Michael Joseph McQuilken (Librettist and Director) works professionally across a variety of fields: as a director of film, opera, theater, and new media; as a screenwriter, librettist, and playwright; and as a producer and composer of music for film, theater, and for his solo project, The Few Moments. Notable collaborations include live film and video design for Drake, Cardi B, Nelly, Migos, The Weeknd, and many others; direction and co-creation of the opera Angel’s Bone (2016 Pulitzer Prize); and creation and direction of music videos with The Flaming Lips, Lupita Nyong’o, Amanda Palmer, Andrew McMahon, Daniil Trifonov, and many others.  Michael is also known for writing, co-composing and directing his genre-reinventing trans-media creation The Infinite Hotel (Prototype NYC, 2019), soon to become a feature film entitled Parallelogram.  Other forthcoming work includes an opera feature film, Black Lodge, soon to be presented by Opera Philadelphia, for which Michael wrote the screenplay, directed, and edited.  

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.