Opera Projects
Umbra (2023-)
Creator/Composer: Elliot MenardDirector/Co-Creator: Héctor Alvarez
Umbra is an opera-theater work on the journey through grief’s inner mythic landscape.
Part autobiography, part myth, Umbra entwines two parallel narratives: the composer’s after the suicide of a close friend and Orpheus’ after emerging from the Underworld without Eurydice.
Umbra is written for mezzo-soprano, SSAA vocal ensemble, cello, flute, and electronics.
Run time: 80 minutes
Sulpicia Songs (2025-)
Creator/Composer: Elliot MenardDirector/Designer: Rosie Tabachnick
Sulpicia Songs is a solo opera-theater fever dream for voice, electronics, and keyboard.
Caught between an ancient and future self in the endless process of “coming of age,” performer-composer Elliot Menard looks to the 20 BCE poems of Sulpicia (the only ancient Roman female poet whose work survives) to explore her own 2026 CE growing pains and power struggles in love, work, and family. The music blends experimental opera with confessional pop, weaving Sulpicia’s Latin elegies (voice and electronics) together with Elliot’s songs (voice and keyboard) through personal stories. Projections by director-designer Rosie Tabachnick are both supertitles (text & translation) and glimpses into the inner worlds of each song.
Run time: 60 minutes
Performance
Here be Sirens by Kate Soper
Presenter: California Institute of the Arts, Roy O. Disney Concert HallDirector: Héctor Alvarez
Music Director: Daniel Newman-Lessler
Here be Sirens is an opera for three sopranos and prepared grand piano.
Set on a Mediterranean island in the pre-archaic Greek past and the post-apocalyptic U.S. future, the opera follows three Sirens (Polyxo, Peitho, and Phaino) caught in a purgatorial state, destined to lure sailors to their deaths for eternity. Desperate to break the cycle, Polyxo tries to determine how the Sirens came to be.
Role: Polyxo
Dada Din Din by Jacqueline Bobak et al.
Presenter: California Institute of the Arts, Wild BeastDirectors: Jacqui Bobak, Micaela Tobin, Carmina Escobar.
Dada Din-Din is a devised opera-theater piece inspired by the women artists of the Dada movement: Emmy Hennings, Mina Loy, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Hannah Höch, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Florine Stettheimer, Sayako Kishimoto, and others. Through Dada performance practices and compositional techniques, Dada Din Din explores womanhood, reproductive rights, sexual freedom, anti-capitalism, utopia, memory, war, and ritual.
Role: Mina Loy