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.
Special immersive theater event BARDO precedes Black Lodge on opening night only!
Artist Conversation Jan 12th immediately following the 5pm performance.
Opera commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects and the Allen R. and Judy Brick Freedman Venture Fund for Opera.
Film commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects, Opera Philadelphia, the Allen R. and Judy Brick Freedman Venture Fund for Opera, David & Kiki Gindler, Charlotte Isaacs, and Thomas H. Platz with additional support provided by the Howard Gilman Foundation.
Developed by Beth Morrison Projects, California Institute for the Arts, HERE Arts Center, and REDCAT. Additional production support provided by David & Kiki Gindler, Charlotte Isaacs, and Thomas H. Platz. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Photo credit: Matthew Soltesz
Tickets on sale now for Members and November 1st for General Audiences.
David T. Little (Composer)
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.
Anne Waldman (Librettist)
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 (Screenwriter & Director)
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.