"The School for Girls Who Lost Everything in the Fire”

An opera created in collaboration with composer Ryan Suleiman. Performed:

After a fire destroyed their town, orphaned teens Seline, Melanie, and Ginger live with other surviving girls in a makeshift school run by nuns. Every night, they fear that the elusive Barn Man will spirit them away. In this excerpt of a longer work in progress, Seline and Melanie stay up late telling disturbing and exciting stories about what the Barn Man might do to them tonight. The girls are sleepless in anticipation for his arrival. When he does arrive, he and Melanie stare at each other before he walks away, and she wonders in fear if anyone saw what happened, and what this might mean for her fate.

"Moon, Bride, Dogs" / “Bones of Girls”

An opera created in collaboration with composer Ryan Suleiman. Performed:

In this surrealist re-imagining of a moment in “Donkey Skin” by Charles Perrault, the character Idiot Girl (soprano) escapes the clutches of her own abusive father only to find herself in a desolate world inhabited by a hoard of hungry dogs (spoken by pianist and tenor). While the Moon (tenor) comments dispassionately on the events taking place below, Idiot Girl confronts her memory loss while the dogs, starved of both food and knowledge, race in excitement toward this new source of nourishment. However, the young bride is only able to voice her story once the dogs eat her alive, a violent act rendered gentle and self-sacrificial for Idiot Girl as the very tearing apart of her body is what it takes for her to speak her truth.

Read a stunning review of “Moon, Bride, Dogs” in the San Francisco Chronicle HERE.

Read about the collaboration and Davis, CA event info here.