BLACK LODGE

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.  

Twice Emmy® Award-nominated Peruvian-American director, editor, and writer Sandra Bambarén Powers is currently the lead editor of Disney’s critically acclaimed series “Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.” Sandra has brought her creative expertise to numerous animated shows, including Nickelodeon’s “Legend of Korra” and Disney’s “Elena of Avalor.” As an MFA graduate in Film Directing from the California Institute of the Arts, Sandra seamlessly blends her talents across various mediums. She wrote and directed the short film “Still Life After Death,” premiered at the Sharjah Film Festival in 2021, now available on Amazon Prime. Her first short film “Autumn” was distributed by Ouat Media and screened at the International Festival Images Contre Nature (France), Wimbledon Shorts Film Festival (England) and EXiS Film Festival (South Korea).

Sandra has conceptualized and directed over fifteen music videos, bringing her distinct vision to Grammy®-nominated bands like DeVotchKa and Timur and the Dime Museum. In 2023, she art directed the Grammy®-nominated and critically-acclaimed film opera “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 is the creator and director of the upcoming Horror-themed Immersive show “Bardo” featuring over forty performers, as part of the 2024 premiere of “Black Lodge” with UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance.

Hailing from the sunny shores of Miami, Sandra is a tropi-goth Latina who delights in crafting whimsical, supernatural worlds.