SWANN

The pieces she composes and arranges for her string sextet and voice project: Psychochamber Ensemble, marries the classical music of her Catholic upbringing with post-punk sensibilities.

2017 marked her debut as a film score composer with Dee Rees’ Oscar-nominated “Mudbound”.

Her ‘expressive and varied score’ [Variety] garnered her the World Soundtrack Academy’s 2018 Discovery of the Year Award and has been classified by Indiewire as one of the 25 Best Film Scores of the 21st Century.

The soundtrack for her score to Josephine Decker’s psychological drama ‘SHIRLEY’ was named The Guardian’s Contemporary Album of the month in June 2020.

Freedom is a Constant Struggle, a concert curated and co-produced by the artist and presented by Lincoln Center featured Sea Island Symphony: Red Rice, Cotton and Indigo; an orchestral love letter to her Gullah Geechee roots.

Carl Hancock Rux is an American poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, recording artist, actor, theater director, radio journalist, as well as a frequent collaborator in the fields of film, modern dance, and contemporary art. He is the author of several books including the Village Voice Literary Prize-winning collection of poetry, Pagan Operetta, the novel, Asphalt, and the Obie Award-winning play, Talk. His music has been released internationally on several labels including Sony/550, Thirsty Ear, and Giant Step. Mr. Rux is also co-Artistic Director of Mabou Mines and Associate Artistic Director/Curator In Residence at Harlem Stage. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Doris Duke Award for New Works, the Doris Duke Charitable Fund, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Prize, the Bessie Award and the Alpert Award in the Arts, and a 2019 Global Change Maker award by WeMakeChange.Org. Mr. Rux’s archives are housed at the Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Public Library, the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution as well as the Film and Video/Theater and Dance Library of the California Institute of the Arts.

JJames Blaszko (he/him) has been called “a major young, new directing talent” (The Sunday Mail) that shows “the potential our increasingly multidisciplinary future holds for both theatrical innovation and inclusion” (Howlround.com). His diverse exposure to arts and culture began at an early age as a queer first-generation American raised in a Polish-Pakistani household. Before the pandemic, Blaszko staged Puccini’s Il Trittico in South Korea, the opening ceremony of the Harare International Festival of the Arts in Zimbabwe, and Britten’s Les Illuminations with selections of Debussy and Patti Smith in Maine. He returned to live performance in 2021 by devising and staging Puccini and Verdi Play Ball with Tulsa Opera on their city’s baseball stadium, and reviving Yuval Sharon’s reverse-order La bohème at Boston Lyric Opera in 2022.

This year, James staged Xerxes at Detroit Opera (conducted by Dame Jane Glover), directed/co-produced Swann, a digital opera short by Tamar-kali that honors William Dorsey Swann, the first American on record to pursue legal and political action to defend the LGBTQ community’s right to gather, and made his Lincoln Center directing debut with Freedom is a Constant Struggle in Damrosch Park.