THE OLD MAN AND THE SEATHE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

Composer Paola Prestini has cultivated a uniquely expansive and humanistic musical voice, through pieces that transcend genre and works that give a voice to those whom society has silenced. Prestini has been named one of the Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music by the Washington Post and one of the top 100 Composers in the World by National Public Radio. As Co-Found of National Sawdust, she has collaborated with luminaries such as Robin Coste Lewis, Nick Cave, David Byrne, Philop Glass, and Renée Fleming, and her works have been performed throughout the world's leading institutions.

Royce Vavrek (Librettist) has been called “the indie Hofmannsthal” (The New Yorker), a “Metastasio of the downtown opera scene” (The Washington Post), and “an exemplary creator of operatic prose” (The New York Times). His notable work includes JFK (Fort Worth Opera/American Lyric Theater/Opéra de Montréal) and Dog Days(Peak Performances @ Montclair/Beth Morrison Projects/Fort Worth Opera/LA Opera/Prototype Festival/Theatre Bielefeld/Staatstheater Schwerin) with David T. Little; “27” (Opera Theatre of Saint Louis/Pittsburgh Opera/MasterVoices) with Ricky Ian Gordon; Breaking the Waves (Opera Philadelphia/PROTOTYPE Festival) Song from the Uproar (Beth Morrison Projects/The Kitchen/LA Opera/Milwuakee Opera Theater/Chautauqua Opera) with Missy Mazzoli; Angel’s Bone (Prototype Festival) with Du Yun; O Columbia (HGOco) with Gregory Spears; and The Hubble Cantata(Bay Chamber Concerts/VisionIntoArt/BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn!/Beth Morrison Projects) with Paola Prestini. Upcoming projects include Midwestern Gothic with Joshua Schmidt for Signature Theatre, Virginia; The House Without a Christmas Tree with Ricky Ian Gordon for Houston Grand Opera; Stoned Prince with Hannah Lash for American Opera Projects and the Virginia Arts Festival; and Proving Up with Missy Mazzoli, an adaptation of Karen Russell’s short story for Washington National Opera, Opera Omaha and The Miller Theatre. Royce is Co-Artistic Director with soprano Lauren Worsham of the opera-theater company The Coterie, and an alumnus of Concordia University (Montreal), the Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program at NYU, and American Lyric Theater’s Composer Librettist Development Program.

Headshot by Ricardo Beas.

Karmina Šilec brought freshness into the world choir movement, which was awarded with the most prestigious Robert Edler Prize more: Karmina Šilec has brought freshness and originality to the world of vocal music, opening new spaces of expression, persuasiveness, intensity of experience, and communication. With “Choregie - vocal theatre” and its innovative interventions, she has opened wider artistic spaces and set trends towards complex multi - media events – productions performed on stages of festivals worldwide and broadcasted by the EBU and Eurovision. As conductor she has projects with various ensembles: the Carmina Slovenica choir, the Radio Slovenia Symphony Orchestra, the Slovenian National Opera and Ballet Maribor, the Slovenian National Project Choir, the ¡Kebataola! ensemble, the Orchestra Chorus Instrumentalis, and many ensembles worldwide. With this concept of vocal theatre the ensemble performed on stages worldwide – from Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space, St. Petersburg Philharmonic Hall to the Teresa Carreño Theatre in Caracas, and from Hong Kong Cultural Centre, San Francisco Symphony Hall to Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. Her ensemble Carmina Slovenica has been invited to art events of the high estesteem such as the World Music Days (organized by the ISCM), Ruhrtriennale, Festival d'Automne á Paris, Moscow Easter Festival, Dresdner Musikfestspiele, Ruhrtriennale, Melbourne Festival, the European Symposium on Choral Music (organized by the IFCM), Steirischer Herbst, Holland festival, America Cantat, etc. Karmina Šilec has received more than 20 of the highest and different special awards on international competitions, among them award by the ITI – International Theatre Institute "Music Theatre Now" in the category Music beyond opera and the International Robert Edler Prize for Choral Music for her contribution to the world choir movement. She gives lectures lectures at many universities and symposiums around the world and is regularly a guest conductor, jury member and member of artistic committee sat festivals and competitions. Karmina Šilec is the artistic director of Choregie – New Music Theatre, the international project Attacca, the Choregie aka Choregie festival for new music theatre. There are few artistic teams in Slovenia as widely recognized in the international arena as can undoubtedly be said for Karmina Šilec’s outstanding ensembles Carmina Slovenica and ¡Kebataola!, together with the movements she created.

“A stalwart contributor to the contemporary opera scene” (Opera Ithaca), Mila Henry has collaborated extensively with Beth Morrison Projects, HERE and PROTOTYPE. She has provided music direction for rock musicals, hybrid performance pieces and folk operas, and as a pianist, has performed at the Library of Congress (OPERA America), The Apollo and Dutch National Opera (Opera Philadelphia), and LA Opera (BMP). She can be heard on Voices of Women (Affetto Records) and Love & Trouble (Roven Records), and with the band Opera Cowgirls. In July 2019, she began her new role as Artistic Director of American Opera Projects.

Dorian Šilec Petek is a theatre artist working in the fields of direction and scenography. His work centers around the critique of late capitalism and its manifestations in society. Dorian's theatre is interested in recontextualising history, where his projects delve into the legacy of our understanding of structures of power, emotional disorders, narratives of adulthood, and solitude. His upcoming theatre works are centered around understanding of a more-than-human world.

He has directed theatre performances at the Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana, the Ljubljana City Theatre, the Prešeren Theatre Kranj, and the Maribor Puppet Theatre. He has worked as a scenographer and artistic collaborator for projects at Z-Space in San Francisco, SNG Drama Ljubljana, Slovenian National Opera Ljubljana, Basel Opera, Ljubljana City Theatre, Glej Theatre, Prešeren Theatre Kranj, Celje Theatre, Carmina Slovenica, International festival New music theatre Choregie and the Watermill Center in New York.

His work has been presented at Triennale di Milano (IT), FLARE-Festival of Radical Theatre (UK), Istropolitana Theatre Festival (SK), International theatre festival Borštnikovo srečanje (SI), Operadagen Rotterdam (NL), Music Theatre Now, and Watermill Centre, New York (USA). Dorian was a six-time participant in Robert Wilson's International Summer Program at the Watermill Centre, worked in residency at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Ground Floor, and collaborated with artists like Árpád Schilling, Silvio Purcarete, among others.

The Threnos (For the Throat) project on which he collaborated as a scenographer was awarded the international Music Theatre Now Award in 2021. He is often engaged in writing texts on theatre for national and international professional publications.

Jeffrey Zeigler has been the cellist of the Kronos Quartet since 2005. Over the years he has recorded for Nonesuch Records, Deutsche Gramophone, Blue Note, Tzadik and the Smithsonian Folkways labels. Since 2001 Zeigler has performed frequently with the interdisciplinary multimedia group VisionIntoArt. In collaboration with VIA, Mr. Zeigler has been involved in creating new video with filmmaker Davide Faggiano for Michael Gordon’s powerful work for solo cello, Industry. He has also worked as a soloist with Norah Jones, and has appeared on film scores by Jeffrey Zeigler holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the Eastman School of Music where he was a student of Stephen Doane, and a Master of Music degree from the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University where he served as the Teaching Assistant for Paul Katz. He then continued his studies at Indiana University under Janos Starker. Mr. Zeigler has also studied at the Britten-Pears School in Aldeburgh, England where he was a pupil of William Pleeth and Zara Nelsova.

Sidra Bell was commissioned as the first Black female choreographer to make works forNew York City Ballet (NYCB) in the fall of 2020 (Pixelation in a Wave-Fall Digital Season) and 2021 (Suspended Animation-Fall Fashion Gala/Innovators & Icons Program). The 2021 stage work for NYCB Suspended Animation was nominated for a 2022 Bessie New York Dance & Performance Award (Outstanding Choreographer). It was performed at The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC for New York City Ballet’s engagement in May 2022. Recent features of her historical work at NYCB include Essence Magazine, NY1, News12, Playbill and Amsterdam News. She has also been featured in press outlets like Town & Country, Cero Magazine, Meet the Dance Company Theater Development Fund, Good Company Cleveland W

Sidra Bell Dance New York (SBDNY, Inc.) her boutique nonprofit dance troupe celebrated its 20th anniversary in December 2022 with a retrospective evening of seminal company works at New YorkCity’s Gibney Dance Center entitledIN | REP. Bell has been a cultural ambassador for contemporary dance in Bulgaria (America for Bulgaria) and Turkey (the U.S Embassy). She is a celebrated and sought after dance educator and her methodology has been featured in Dance Magazine, Pointe Magazine, and Dance Teacher Magazine. She is currently a Master Lecturer at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University where she has also been an artist in residence. She has also held Adjunct Professor positions at Ball State University in Indiana, Georgian Court University in New Jersey, Marymount Manhattan College, LINES B.F.A. Program at Dominican University and Barnard College. She has a B.A. in History from Yale University (named a Yale Scholar) and an MFA in Choreography from Purchase College Conservatory of Dance. Yale has invited her back for a featured Master’s Talk hosted by Silliman College.

She has won several awards, notably a 1st Prize for Choreography at the Solo-Tanz Theater Festival in Stuttgart, Germany in 2011 for her work Grief Point and a 2015 National Dance Project Production Award from the New England Foundation for the Arts. February 3 was named SIDRA BELL DAY by Mayor Thomas Roach in the City of White Plains, NY. In 2012, she was commissioned as the choreographer for the feature film TEST set in San Francisco during the height of the AIDS crisis in 1985. TEST was awarded two grand jury prizes from Outfest. More recently she has acted as a movement advisor for acclaimed Slovenian director and composer Karmina Sîlec on several pieces for vocal theater/opera including 2015’s FAUVEL, 2020’s THRENOS (Slovenia) and 2023’s BABA (San Francisco).