Newly Formed Opera/Theatre Company Opera Cabal Holding First Annual Festival: Collusions

Newly formed opera/theatre company Opera Cabal, is holding their first annual festival, Collusions: Chicago (2007), where they will offer a weekend of experimental performance art, guaranteed to make the most jaded of esoteric art appreciators crack a smirk. The festival, to be held at the Zhou B. Art Center (www.zbcenter.org) in Chicago on April 5, 6 & 7 will bring together composers, performers, and artists from Chicago, New York, San Diego, and Sydney, Australia, to create three days of boundary-renouncing pieces from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first.

Opera Cabal is lead by Artistic Director Majel Connery, Music Director Nicholas DeMaison, and Creative Director Lisa Marks. DeMaison explains, “We specialize in bringing together writers, artists, and musicians to create collaborative artistic wackiness. Opera Cabal chose Chicago for this first festival to attempt to bridge the gap between Chicago’s thriving theatre and new music scenes. And what better location in which to build such a bridge than the abandoned warehouse cum art gallery that is the Zhou B. Art Center? ” The program will include DeMaison’s new chamber opera; stage-drama and chamber opera coalesce in a schizophrenic fit of mystical visions, while the Found Film + Feldman Project offers Morton Feldman’s rarely performed For Christian Wolff paired with a film comprised of “found footage” being collected with an open call for entries. Lamia, by Canadian playwright Jonathan Eliot, ventures a new genre of radio-theatre, “Prairie Home Companion” gone mad, in which a lost king searches futilely for the sister he cannot see…but can hear.

Other highlights include: Vinko Globokar’s body percussion piece, “?Corporel,” a textural and timbral piece for chamber ensemble and soprano Linden Christ that explores the boundary between poetry and music by Kirsten Broberg (www.kirstenbroberg.info), Australian performer Kathleen Gallagher (www.kathleengallagher.net) and her renditions of Michael Finnissy’s virtuosic Sikangnuqa, Kurt Schwitter’s nonsensical Ursonate, and original set design by dancer and performance artist, Joseph Ravens (www.josephravens.com). Chicago’s own Ensemble Dal Niente, a new music group that is bringing today's most revolutionary, ambitious and virtuosic music to the forefront, acts as ensemble in residence.

Opening and enveloping the whole affair is Cahoots and Collectives a collaborative art show curated by designer, Lisa Marks (www.lisamarks.com). The show, also with an open call for entries, aims to look at similar concepts as the musical performances and explore how different types of artists will interpret them. The work, in the spirit of Opera Cabal, will span from music, to art, to design and represent artists from students to established innovators of their industries.