BLACK LODGE and BARDO

At Carolina Performing Arts we encourage transformation, both personal and artistic. BLACK LODGE and BARDO are explorations of both personal metamorphosis and evolving possibilities for opera, from something you observe into something you experience from the inside out. Blending music, theater, horror films, and installation, the creators challenge conventional ideas about what opera can be and invite audiences to step into a different world.

For months, Carolina Performing Arts has worked alongside the creative team to cast local performers to bring that world to life. Some step into existing roles within BARDO; others create entirely new moments conceived specifically for Memorial Hall. Planned for the heart of the Halloween season, BLACK LODGE and BARDO are exciting additions to the decades-long tradition of celebrating the spooky season in a big way in Chapel Hill. The result of all of this is an experience that could only happen here, grown out of the culture, talent, and imagination of our community.

BLACK LODGE

Music by David T. Little
Libretto by Anne Waldman
Story, Screenplay, and Film/Stage Direction by Michael Joseph McQuilken
Starring Timur and the Dime Museum with the Isaura String Quartet
Creative Producer: Beth Morrison
Produced by Beth Morrison Projects

Tour Direction: Sandra Powers
Lighting Designer: Maruti Evans
Sound Design and Engineer: Garth MacAleavey
Costume Design: Sandra Powers
Stage Manager: Maria V. Oliveira
Director of Production: Roderick Murray
Tour Associate Producer: Cori Matos Aguilera
BARDO Assistant Director & Choreographer: Sindy Butz
Tracks Editing and Mixing: Andrew McKenna Lee, Still Sound Music
Lighting Consultant: Matt Steinberg
Assistant Lighting Designer: Matt Lazarus

The Man (film): Timur
The Woman (film): Jennifer Harrison Newman
Timur and the Dime Museum: Timur (vocalist), Milo Talwani (keyboard), Andrew Lessman (drums/vocals), Matthew Setzer (guitar/vocals), and Hannah Rose Dexter (bass)
Isaura String Quartet: Betsy Rettig (cello), Emily Call (violin), Laila Zakzook (viola), and Mads Falcone (violin)

BLACK LODGE Film

Composed by David T. Little
Libretto by Anne Waldman
Story, Screenplay, and Film/Stage Direction: Michael Joseph McQuilken
Executive Producers: Beth Morrison, Thurston Moore
Producers: Jecca Barry, Brian Freeland, Robert Phillip Smith
Additional Producers: Judy & Allen Freedman, Kiki & David Gindler, Charlotte Isaacs, Thomas H. Platz
Art Director: Sandra Powers
Scenic Designer: Maruti Evans
Costume Designer: Sindy Butz

Starring Timur and Jennifer Harrison Newman
Featuring Timur and the Dime Museum: Timur (vocalist), Daniel Corral (keyboard), Andrew Lessman (drums/vocals), Matthew Setzer (guitar/vocals), and David Tranchina (bass)
Isaura String Quartet: Emily Call (violin), Mads Falcone (violin), Betsy Rettig (cello), Nadia Sirota (viola, audio), and Rita Andrade (viola, film)

Support

Opera commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects and the Allen R. and Judy Brick Freedman Venture Fund for Opera.

Film commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects, Opera Philadelphia, the Allen R. and Judy Brick Freedman Venture Fund for Opera, David & Kiki Gindler, Charlotte Isaacs, and Thomas H. Platz, with additional support provided by the Howard Gilman Foundation.

Developed by Beth Morrison Projects, California Institute for the Arts, HERE Arts Center, and REDCAT.

Libretto incorporates text by William S. Burroughs. Texts by William S. Burroughs used by kind permission of James Grauerholz, William S. Burroughs Estate. Text for “My Childhood” used with the kind permission of David Lynch.

Presented by arrangement with Hendon Music, Inc., a Boosey & Hawkes company, publisher and copyright owner.

Artists who also worked on BARDO are noted beside their roles.

David T. Little

Composer, BLACK LODGE and BARDO

A natural musical storyteller with “a knack for overturning musical conventions” (The New York Times), composer David T. Little is known for stage, concert, and screen works permeated with the power of the unexpected. Little probes the deep corners of human psychology, invoking political, historical, spiritual, and social themes as pathways for exploring the human condition. His broad catalog speaks to the mix of light and dark that we experience in life, unafraid to invoke the mythical, bewitching, disturbing, surreal, or comedic. He has drawn acclaim for operas including Dog Days, JFK, and the comedy Vinkensport, or The Finch Opera (all with libretto by Royce Vavrek), as well as his GRAMMY®-nominated opera Soldier Songs.

Little’s recent work Black Lodge was nominated for the 2024 GRAMMY® Award for Best Opera Recording and is the recipient of a Music Theater Now international prize. Black Lodge, a metal-infused opera with a libretto by poet Anne Waldman, was premiered by Beth Morrison Projects at Opera Philadelphia, with a soundtrack released by Cantaloupe Music. It has since received its European premiere at the O. Festival in Rotterdam, its West Coast premiere in October 2024 as part of an experiential Halloween event presented by CAP UCLA, and its New York premiere as part of the 2025 Prototype Festival. In November 2025, it traveled to Sweden for performances at Malmö Opera and Folkoperan.

In September 2024, Little unveiled his opera What Belongs to You, based on the celebrated novel by Garth Greenwell. Developed for GRAMMY®-winning tenor Karim Sulayman and Alarm Will Sound and directed by Mark Morris, it went on to receive the 2025 Music Critics Association of North America Best New Opera Award. It arrived on the heels of another major work, the searching theatrical choral work SIN-EATER, premiered in Philadelphia by The Crossing and Bergamot Quartet in fall 2023, conducted by Donald Nally. Based on the ancient practice of paying the poor to ritualistically “eat” the sins of the rich—allowing the privileged to move on to the next life cleansed of their guilty deeds—SIN-EATER was praised by The Wall Street Journal for its “shattering impact.”

Little is at work on a commission from the Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater New Works Program, as well as several other new stage, film, and concert projects. He has been commissioned by the world’s most prestigious institutions and performers, including the Kennedy Center, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, New World Symphony, London Sinfonietta, The Crossing, Kronos Quartet, and Beth Morrison Projects. His music has been presented by Carnegie Hall, Venice Biennale, Holland Festival, LA Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Opéra de Montréal, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the LA Philharmonic. Little’s recorded catalog includes over 20 commercial releases on labels such as New Amsterdam Records, Pentatone, Sono Luminus, Bright Shiny Things, and Cantaloupe Music.

Little is the founding artistic director and former drummer of the amplified chamber ensemble Newspeak, which explores the relationship of music and politics while confronting head-on the boundaries between the classical and rock traditions. The ensemble has released four commercial recordings, with a fifth on the way. Little received a 2023 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and is a recipient of the Copland House Residency Award. His music is published by Boosey & Hawkes. Learn more at davidtlittle.com.

Anne Waldman

Librettist

Poet, professor, performer, librettist, and cultural activist Anne Waldman is the author of over 60 volumes of poetry, poetics, and anthologies, including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press), which won the PEN Center Literary Prize, and Trickster Feminism (Penguin). Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics program at Naropa University. She was the keynote speaker for the Bob Dylan and the Beats Conference in Tulsa and a keynote speaker for the Jaipur Festival in India.

Waldman is also the author of Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House Press) and Rues du Mondes (Apic Press, Algeria, 2024), translated into French by Pierre Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte, and her poetry volume Mesopotopia is published by Penguin. Her vinyl SCAIMACHY, produced by Fast Speaking Music, was released to critical acclaim; Patti Smith called it “exquisitely potent, a psychic shield for our time.” She was a longtime friend of William S. Burroughs, an inspiring writer and figure for the opera Black Lodge. Outrider, a documentary with and about Waldman, was produced by Sarah Riggs and Martin Scorsese. “Waldman is one of the most important and irreducible living American poets” (Chicago Poetry Foundation). Learn more at annewaldman.org.

Michael Joseph McQuilken

Story, Screenplay, and Film/Stage Director

Michael Joseph McQuilken works professionally across a variety of fields: as a director of film, opera, theater, and new media; as a screenwriter, librettist, and playwright; and as a producer and composer of music for film, theater, and his solo project, The Few Moments. Notable collaborations include live film and video design for Drake, Cardi B, Nelly, Migos, The Weeknd, and many others; direction and co-creation of the opera Angel’s Bone (2016 Pulitzer Prize); and creation and direction of music videos with The Flaming Lips, Lupita Nyong’o, Amanda Palmer, Andrew McMahon, Daniil Trifonov, and many others.

McQuilken is also known for writing, co-composing, and directing his genre-reinventing trans-media creation The Infinite Hotel (Prototype NYC, 2019), which is being developed into a feature film entitled Parallelogram. He wrote the screenplay for, directed, and edited the opera feature film Black Lodge, presented by Opera Philadelphia.

Sandra Powers

Art & Tour Director, BLACK LODGE / Creator & Director, BARDO

Three-time Emmy® and Annie Award–nominated Peruvian-American editor, director, and writer Sandra Bambarén Powers is currently a lead editor at Disney Animation. A graduate of the MFA Film Directing program at California Institute of the Arts with a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, Powers has contributed her creative expertise to iconic animated series such as Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, Nickelodeon’s Legend of Korra, and Disney’s Elena of Avalor.

Photo by Frazer Harrison

Her short film Still Life After Death premiered at the Sharjah Film Festival in 2021 and is now streaming on Amazon Prime. Her debut short, Autumn, was distributed by Ouat Media and screened at many prominent festivals, including Festival Images Contre Nature (France), Wimbledon Shorts Film Festival (England), and EXiS Film Festival (South Korea). In 2023, Powers art directed the GRAMMY®-nominated opera film Black Lodge for Opera Philadelphia and made her stage directorial debut with The Great Soviet Bucket, produced by Beth Morrison Projects and funded by the National Performance Network for Miami Light Project. She also conceived and directed BARDO, an immersive theatrical experience the LA Times hailed as “full of wonder,” produced by Beth Morrison Projects with CAP UCLA. Showcasing her distinctive vision across mediums, she has also directed over fifteen music videos for bands including GRAMMY®-nominated DeVotchKa and Timur and the Dime Museum.

Timur Bekbosunov

Vocalist; The Man (film)

GRAMMY®-nominated Qazaq-American singer Timur, “the extravagantly transgressive tenor, dangerous and seductive” (LA Times), has made solo appearances with LA Philharmonic, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Opera Philadelphia, Czech National Theater, Magdeburg Theater, Comédie de Genève, PROTOTYPE, Santa Cecilia Academy, Müpa Budapest, and The Industry LA, among others. He has premiered over forty operatic and chamber works by composers including David Lang, Gerald Barry, Michael Gordon, Silvano Bussotti, Ellen Reid, David T. Little, Thomas Adès, Louis Andriessen, Anne LeBaron, Peter Eötvös, Jiří Trtík, and Tobias Picker.

His theatrical band Timur and the Dime Museum, “a post-punk screaming opera” (NPR), has been featured on America’s Got Talent, at the REDCAT Gala with Jack Black, and at PROTOTYPE. Produced by longtime collaborator Beth Morrison Projects, the band premiered Collapse (REDCAT, Operadagen Rotterdam, BAM’s Next Wave Festival 2015); the industrial metal opera film Black Lodge (Opera Philadelphia, CAP UCLA); and the dark satire The Great Soviet Bucket (Miami Light Project), directed by Sandra Powers. He is currently developing new opera projects with composers Ellis Ludwig-Leone, Mary Kouyoumdjian, and Juhi Bansal. Timur is a creator of Klaus from Space (eXoplanet Festival, O. Festival Rotterdam, Klanggg Festival Switzerland) and Silent Steppe Cantata, a music collaboration between Qazaqstan and the United States.

His voice is featured on the soundtracks of Paramount’s Ruby Sparks, Nickelodeon’s Santiago of the Seas, and Hulu’s The Great, and he has appeared as a soloist on recordings released by Cantaloupe, Naxos, Milan Records, Nonesuch, Deutsche Grammophon, and ANTI-. Timur is also active as a film producer, including the 2019 Sundance winner Clemency (Alfre Woodard), Color Out of Space (Nicolas Cage), and Measure of Revenge (Bella Thorne).

Special thanks from Timur to Kristy and Randy Pitchford, Peter Van Steemburg, Kiki and David Gindler, Chris Nichols, CalArts School of Music, and USC School of Music.

Jennifer Harrison Newman

The Woman (film)

New York– and New Haven–based theater artist Jennifer Harrison Newman works extensively with artists across disciplines, pushing the boundaries of dance, opera, and theater. Recent site-specific and theatrical work includes numerous Broadway and regional dance and theatrical productions, including The Lion King and The Radio City Rockettes. As associate director/movement director: Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) (BAM Next Wave Festival, international tour); Place (BAM Next Wave Festival, LA Opera); Three Women (Ojai Playwrights Conference). Choreography and performance: Gallathea (SCSU); Once on This Island (SCSU); The Code (ACT Young Conservatory); Angel’s Bone (New Visions Festival Hong Kong, Beijing Music Festival); Land of Broken Dreams (Park Avenue Armory); AFROFEMONONOMY (PSNY); when you walk through fire, hold your breath (Little Island NY); Black Lodge (Opera Philadelphia, Prototype Festival, LA Opera); topologies (Gibney Dance NY); We Were Everywhere (Princeton University); The Infinite Hotel (Prototype Festival); within the sand and sea (Chale Wote Festival, Accra, Ghana); The Geneva Project (JACK, BAAD!, Yale University, International Festival of Arts & Ideas, Central Station Festival Seoul, Korea); If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Motherfucker and The Children (Yale School of Drama); Seneca Village – A Living Memory (Bard Graduate Center for Material Culture’s Focus Festival: Ritual and Capital); la ronde (International Festival of Arts & Ideas); Bread of Heaven (LABA Live); Bulrusher (New Georges); David Rousseve/Reality (company member); Lula Washington Contemporary Dance Theater (company member).

Newman has been an artist in residence at MIT, The Juilliard School, Princeton University, Yale University, Central Connecticut State University, The Field, Mabou Mines, Baryshnikov Arts Center, 651 Arts, and Sisters Academy Inkost, and has led workshops across the United States, Sweden, South Africa, China, and Mexico. Currently the Associate Artistic Director of Yale Schwarzman Center, she serves as a general management consultant to theater company Compagnia de’ Colombari and sits on the board of advisors of Performance Space 21, The New Haven Ballet, Creative and Independent Producers Alliance (CIPA), and The David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. She received her BA from UCLA and her MFA from Yale School of Drama.

Timur and the Dime Museum

Milo Talwani, Keyboard
Milo Talwani is a composer and filmmaker from Los Angeles. She stars in, scored, and sound designed Henry Hanson’s feature film Dog Movie. Talwani wrote and directed the short film The Beach Boys, and her video work in collaboration with Ryat Yezbick, The Innocence of Unknowing, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Henry Hanson’s Puppygirl, which she stars in and co-wrote, is in post-production. She was previously a member of the curatorial team for the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier section and has taught game design and virtual reality production at Arizona State University’s Narrative and Emerging Media graduate program.

Hannah Rose Dexter, Bass
Hannah Rose Dexter plays the bass and always has. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, she traverses the United States and Europe performing jazz, blues, swing, original, and folkloric American music. Her unique style of electric and upright bass playing imbues each note with joy and gratitude. She has grown her voice in film scores and recordings, and poured 20 years of studying all things low end into her debut solo album, The View From Normal, a hybrid of styles displaying her dynamic perspective on life through the untapped potential of the bass guitar. Her second album, Presents The True Joys of Life, is an old-school jump blues romp dissecting the good and bad of human memory. She can routinely be heard playing jazz, swing, jump blues, math rock, Greek rebetika, and her own original odd-meter explorations in the finer theaters, jazz clubs, dance halls, amusement parks, circuses, and cocktail lounges of greater Los Angeles.

Andrew Lessman, Drums
Andrew Lessman’s life with the drums began at age 12 after moving from Chicago to San Diego and starting a punk rock band with the very first kids he met. After a year playing DIY shows and exploring the fertile hardcore scene, he started branching into jazz. His teacher Duncan Moore helped him along this journey, and he began sitting in and gigging with older musicians, playing with a college big band, and making music with like-minded friends such as Jared Mattson (Mattson 2) and Aakaash Israni (Dawn of Midi). At 16, a chance encounter with Wadada Leo Smith at a UCSD jazz camp opened Lessman’s imagination to new and mysterious possibilities for musical creativity, and he moved to Los Angeles to study composition and improvisation with Smith at California Institute of the Arts. There, woodwind multi-instrumentalist Vinny Golia tapped him to play in his Sextet, with whom he recorded two albums and a large-ensemble concert DVD. Lessman has stayed in LA, and over the ensuing two decades has freelanced with a revolving door of indie artists, touring the US many times over as well as Europe and Asia. In recent years, he has quietly turned his back on the “working musician” lifestyle, focusing on original music: sporadically self-releasing with his band TEETHERS, which plays a trippy mix of shoegaze and modern jazz, and with LABMEAT, a duo with his wife. He curates Music Mondays, a weekly jazz and improvised music series at the High Low in Los Angeles, where he also slings cocktails.

Matthew Setzer, Guitar
Matthew Setzer is a Los Angeles–based musician. A CalArts graduate in Experimental Sound Practices, he studied with Morton Subotnick and Ulrich Krieger. A live member of seminal industrial band Skinny Puppy, he also performs with ohGr and toured for 11 years with LA goth band London After Midnight. Setzer is co-creator of Indradevi, a Southeast Asian–influenced world music project featuring electronics, guitars, synths, Khmer singing, Cambodian rappers, and Indonesian gamelan. As a founding member of punk vaudeville opera project Timur and the Dime Museum, he has performed on America’s Got Talent and at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Operadagen Festival (now the O. Festival) in Rotterdam, and Miami Light Project, among others. In partnership with Beth Morrison Projects, Timur and the Dime Museum premiered Black Lodge in fall 2022 with Opera Philadelphia; the work was heralded by The New York Times, LA Times, The New Yorker, Thurston Moore, and Philip Glass, and was nominated for a GRAMMY® in 2024. His current projects are Anonymous NOR, with fellow live Skinny Puppy member Dustin Schultz, and the solo project above_the_red, both of which make heavy use of modular synths with overtone throat singing. His other passions include flying small airplanes, vintage VWs, ancient Greek and Roman coins, and traveling—and, let’s not forget, a good glass of old-world Haut-Médoc from Bordeaux.

Isaura String Quartet

The Isaura String Quartet is a GRAMMY® Award–nominated ensemble based in Los Angeles. Described as “venturesome” and “edgy” by the LA Times, the quartet pushes boundaries while staying true to its mission of promoting contemporary chamber music through live performance, workshops, and collaborative projects with composers and interdisciplinary artists. Founded in 2013, ISQ’s practice is centered on music, community, and developing systems to support and examine the spaces in which its members work. The quartet has commissioned 35 new works, prioritizing new pieces in its programming with a focus on workshopping and supporting the work of emerging composers. The Isaura String Quartet is Betsy Rettig (she/her), Emily Call (she/her), Laila Zakzook (she/her), and Mads Falcone (they/them).

Production Team

Maruti Evans, Lighting Designer
Maruti Evans’s credits include Real Enemies, Epiphany, Else Where, and LIEDERABEND (BAM); Witness Uganda, Alice vs Wonderland, and Mouth Wide Open (ART); Big Apple Circus (2015 and 2016); Cool Hand Luke, Deliverance, and Café Society Swing (59E59); Much Ado About Nothing (ART and McCarter Theatre); Master and Margarita (SummerScape); An Oresteia (Classic Stage Company); Crowns (Goodman Theatre); Ballad of Emmett Till and Owl Answers and the Dutchman (Penumbra Theatre); Le Nozze di Figaro, Ofero, and Turn of the Screw (L.I.O.); and Sweeney Todd (V.O.C.). He received the 2013 Drama Desk Award for his designs of Tiny Dynamite and Pilo Family Circus, and Drama Desk nominations for Deliverance, In the Heat of the Night, Slaughterhouse 5, and Blindness.

Garth MacAleavey, Sound Design and Engineer
Garth MacAleavey is a lifelong music enthusiast and super fan. A multi-instrumentalist composer turned sound engineer and designer, he is always searching for new ways to use music, technology, acoustics, and spatialization to enhance the experience of both the audience and the performer. Recent credits: Magnificent Bird/Fellow Travelers (Gabriel Kahane); Illinoise (Sufjan Stevens/Justin Peck); Song of Songs (David Lang); The Old Man and the Sea (Paola Prestini); Black Lodge, Soldier Songs, and Dog Days (David T. Little); p r i s m (Ellen Reid); The Let Go (Nick Cave); and Spatial…no problem (Lee “Scratch” Perry/Mouse on Mars). Learn more at garthmacaleavey.com.

Maria V. Oliveira, Stage Manager
Maria V. Oliveira is a stage manager, performer, and energy healer who has worked in theater for over twelve years and opera for three. Based in Los Angeles, she frequently works with Pacific Opera Project (H.M.S. Pinafore, Pagliacci, Turandot) and has collaborated with Beth Morrison Projects on multiple West Coast premieres (Magdalene, Black Lodge, Adoration). Additional credits include community-engaged theater with Cornerstone Theater Company (36 Yesses, Pedro Play, Wicoun), productions with the CalArts Center for New Performance (Etta and Ella, Scene with Cranes), and, most recently, her first summer with Music Academy of the West (Elizabeth Cree) and Park City Opera (Roméo et Juliette). Oliveira also serves as Production Stage Manager and faculty in the School of Theater at California Institute of the Arts.

Cori Matos Aguilera, Tour Associate Producer, BLACK LODGE and BARDO
Originally from Caracas, Venezuela, and the US South, Cori Matos Aguilera is a Brooklyn-based producer and manager with a passion for live music, theater, and new multidisciplinary works. Recent work includes Beth Morrison Projects (Associate Producer), National Sawdust (Associate Producer), Taylor Mac and Matt Ray’s Bark of Millions (Associate Company Manager, Pomegranate Arts; Delacorte/Sydney Opera House/Berliner Festspiele/Brooklyn Academy of Music/CalArts), and stage management for NYC Pride, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn!, The Public Theater, and Music Hall of Williamsburg. Para mi familia, siempre.

Matt Steinberg, Lighting Consultant
Matt Steinberg (he/him) is a lighting designer, lighting programmer, and software engineer from New York. Recent designs include sorry sorry ok sorry, Meg (Lenfest Center for the Arts), Allerleirauh (Bookworm Theatrics), The Seagull and Napoli Brooklyn (AADA), A History of American Modern Dance (Venetian Arts Society), and Next to Normal and In the Heights (Brown University). Associate lighting design credits include Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Ogresse (Kennedy Center, Paris Philharmonic, SFJazz, Jazz at Lincoln Center, NJPAC), In Our Daughter’s Eyes (PROTOTYPE, LA Opera), Black Lodge (Opera Philadelphia), Angel’s Bone (Beijing Music Festival), and Infinite Hotel (PROTOTYPE). He completed an assistant design residency at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, was a 2018 recipient of ETC’s student sponsorship for Live Design International, and holds a BA in computer science from Brown University. Learn more at MattLSteinberg.com.

Matt Lazarus, Assistant Lighting Designer, BLACK LODGE and BARDO
Matt Lazarus is an artist based in New York City. He’s especially proud of his work on Parched (HERE Arts Center), Heaux Church (Ars Nova), I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire (Watermark Productions, the cell), Tracks (59E59), and SCOUTS (The Players Theatre). He is a founding member of Glad You’re Not Dead, a jingle production house whose only client is a now-defunct Floridian burger restaurant. See more at MattLazarusDesign.com or @LazMattarus.

Creative Team

Creator & Director: Sandra Powers*
Composer: David T. Little*
Choreographer & Assistant Director: Sindy Butz
Creative Producer: Beth Morrison**
Costume Design: Sandra Powers & Sindy Butz
Director of Production: Roderick Murray
Tour Associate Producer: Cori Matos Aguilera*
Assistant Lighting Designer: Matt Lazarus*
Produced by Beth Morrison Projects

*Bio under About the Artists: BLACK LODGE. **Bio under About Beth Morrison Projects.

Cast

Sindy Butz – Snow Dancer
Ryan Pater – King of Bardo
Debrinja K – The Ridiculer
Chris Hodges – Tormented Writer
Rachel Horowitz – Tormented Writer
Anabelle Scarborough – Demigod
Rainey Scarborough – Demigod
Chris Vitiello – Death
Claire Bandino – Bang Bang
Lynne Lambert – Lynchian Burlesque
Heather, Lady of the Grail – Tarot Reader
Phil the Magician – Tormented Magician
Lee Edwards – Nurse
Erim Akpan – Hungry Ghost
Micah Hughes – Hungry Ghost
Zannie Gunn – Hungry Ghost
Kris Pruitt – Hungry Ghost
Alexa Griffin – Tormented Clogger Dancer

Beth Morrison, Creative Producer

A three-time GRAMMY®-nominated producer, Beth Morrison is the President and Creative Producer of Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) and the Artistic and Co-Founding Director of the PROTOTYPE Festival. Hailed as a “contemporary opera mastermind” (LA Times) and “a powerhouse leading the industry to new heights” (WQXR), she founded BMP in 2006 to champion living composers and redefine the future of opera. Under her leadership, BMP has commissioned, developed, produced, and toured over 65 works in 19 countries, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning operas Angel’s Bone and p r i s m. A recipient of the Musical America Award for Artist of the Year/Agent of Change and a Kennedy Center 50NEXT Honoree, Morrison is also a sought-after speaker at major institutions and conferences worldwide. She holds degrees from Boston University, Arizona State University, and Yale University, where she now serves as a Lecturer, and an Honorary Doctorate from Boston Conservatory at Berklee.

About Beth Morrison Projects

Following its landmark 20th anniversary season, Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) remains a leading creator and producer of new opera and music-theatre, driven by a fierce commitment to telling the stories of our time, cultivating the next generation of artists, and shaping a more inclusive, innovative, and relevant future for the field. Founded in 2006 by “contemporary opera mastermind” (LA Times) Beth Morrison—named one of Musical America’s Artists of the Year/Agents of Change—BMP has become “a driving force behind America’s thriving opera scene” (Financial Times).

With offices in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, BMP operates nationally and internationally, having commissioned, developed, produced, and toured more than 65 works in 19 countries. Its productions include the Pulitzer Prize–winning operas Angel’s Bone (Du Yun/Royce Vavrek) and p r i s m (Ellen Reid/Roxie Perkins), as well as three GRAMMY®-nominated operas for Best Opera Recording: Black Lodge (David T. Little/Anne Waldman, 2024); Adoration (Mary Kouyoumdjian/Royce Vavrek, 2026); and TRADE/Mary Motorhead (Emma O’Halloran/Mark O’Halloran, 2026). BMP’s productions have been presented at leading venues and festivals worldwide.

In June 2026, HILDEGARD, composed by Sarah Kirkland Snider, received the Music Critics Association of North America’s 2026 Award for Best New Opera—another milestone in BMP’s ongoing commitment to ambitious and groundbreaking new work.

Marking two decades of artistic achievement, BMP released the double album BMP: SONGBOOK through Bright Shiny Things in January 2026. Available on CD, vinyl, and digital platforms, the album brings together selections from across BMP’s catalogue of more than 65 commissioned and produced opera and music-theatre works. BMP also published a companion anthology of sheet music and a commemorative 20th Anniversary volume that provides a visual history of BMP’s creative output through the decades.

Central to BMP’s mission is artist development through programs such as BMP: Producer Academy and BMP: NEXTGEN, which support emerging producers, composers, singers, and artists through mentorship, training, commissioning, and professional-development opportunities. BMP is also the driving force behind the annual PROTOTYPE Festival, widely recognized as one of the world’s leading festivals of contemporary opera and theatre. Co-founded in 2013 by BMP and HERE Arts Center, PROTOTYPE is, as of 2026, solely curated and produced by BMP.

Board of Directors
Miles Benickes, Chair
Beth Morrison, President
Susan Feder, Vice Chair
Matthew Rowland, Treasurer
Charlotte Isaacs, Secretary
Astrid Baumgardner
Ralph Dandrea
Eve Gigliotti
Kiki Ramos Gindler
Marian A. Godfrey
William Kennedy
Helen Little
Scott Lord
Helen Mills
Elizabeth Omeltchenko
Frances Pollock
Sandy Pressman
Nancy Sanders
Michael Siegal, M.D., Ph.D.
Mark Wanek

Advisory Board
Linda Brumbach
Renée Fleming
Nathan Gunn
David Howse
Colleen Jennings-Roggensack
Joseph V. Melillo

Alumni Board (*Emeritus)
Matthew Annenberg
Sue Bienkowski*
Sarah Brown
Connie Chen
Tim Cole
Carol Cole
Ralph Dandrea*
Pamela Drexel*
Richard Ellingsen*
Nicholas Firth
Judy Brick Freedman
Fariba Ghaffari
David Gindler*
Gregory Gordon*
Jane A. Gross
Jane Gullong*
Lynn Loacker*
Frederick Peters*
Morris Robinson
Jennifer Rosenfeld
Kamala Sankaram
Gregory Spears
Raymond Steckel
Peggy Sullivan*

BMP Staff
President & Creative Producer: Beth Morrison
Managing Director: Eric Simpson
Director of Production: Roderick Murray
Senior Producer: Kim Whitener
Chief Development Officer: Noel Holloway
Senior Associate Producer: Gabrielle Niederhoffer
Associate Creative Producer: Alexis Peart
Artistic Administrator: Adrian Hernandez
Bookkeeper: Cynthia Bastidas
Development & Management Assistant: Stella Tongour
Marketing & Communications Coordinator: Joyce Nguyen
Special Assistant, Partnerships: Amara Pappas
Special Assistant: Elicia Neo
Press Agent: Kirshbaum Associates
Marketing: Cause Lab NYC

My Black Lodge: A Note from Composer David T. Little

Growing up, I always felt like I saw the world differently. I sensed the dark side of things more readily than others and possessed a certain subterranean melancholy. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that I was drawn to heavy metal—and opera—and to the works of artists like Antonin Artaud, William S. Burroughs, and David Lynch.

Black Lodge began with a superficial question about these artists: did they influence each other’s work? But in the 10 years since I first posed that question, it evolved into something much larger, deeper, and more personal. The process of creating Black Lodge became one not just of accepting the darker parts of myself, but of exploring that darkness: traveling through it in hopes that there would be something beautiful, even transcendent, on the other side.

This became frightening at times; I worried I might go too far into these dark places, that like Artaud I might not be able to pull myself out, or that like Burroughs the “ugly spirit” would take hold and something horrible would happen. It seemed that only Lynch had come through his dark engagement unscathed, through spiritual practice—a lesson I marked well.

Both this observation and clues offered by Anne Waldman’s inspired libretto helped me weather my own dark journey: I contemplated the Bardo structure we had agreed to incorporate into the work, and its hungry ghosts who sing in lamentation. I became more careful about what I needed to know. I began to strain to see the elusive beauty that adorned the world’s tattered frame.

Indeed, I was seeking something beautiful in Black Lodge, though deep down I still believed Burroughs’ notion that “you have to live in hell to see heaven.” I now see that I had both written myself into and out of that hell. In going through it, I found a new and healthier way of being I didn’t consciously know I was seeking—a resolution the Man in Michael Joseph McQuilken’s artful screenplay is not granted. It is striking for me to hear now, three years after completing the score, just how much beauty it contains. For all its rock bombast and brooding moods, much of it is soft and still, with floating, plangent melodies that plead for release. “All I want is out of here,” the score concludes; the opera itself mirroring my path in writing it, as I traveled through my own black lodge.

—David T. Little, 2021

A Note from Director Michael Joseph McQuilken

It’s an exceedingly strange task to “movie a score”… one tends to score a movie. But in the case of Black Lodge, the entirety of the music, lyrics, timings, tempi, etc. were finished by the time I was asked to create a film for the work. To make matters even more tricky, the opera is (was?) non-narrative; neither Anne nor David had a story in mind for the piece, but rather a sense of emotional and imagistic significance (that also needed to be accounted for and folded in). So my task was threefold: invent a narrative, shape emotional arcs for the lead character(s), and attach all of it to pre-existing music (emotions) and lyrics (images and ideas). A deeply complex puzzle.

Of course, I was in very regular communication with the other artists, particularly David, who helped tremendously by explaining his primary influences and motivations. The three main inspirational figures that he and Anne circled during the creation of the score and libretto were Antonin Artaud, William S. Burroughs, and David Lynch (there were others too, but these were the tent poles). So we were constantly circling around how to build from their “influence,” as it were.

Eventually, I proposed the notion of a Lynchian world—a surreal, filmic, mid-century world—that exploited and revealed the artifice of theater craft and scenery. Perhaps some Brecht snuck in there, but this was mainly a nod to Artaud’s propensity to tell stories with EVERY mechanism available in the theater, giving equal weight to scenic elements as he would to (often surreal and poetic) text (like, say, a totally non-linear libretto penned by the genius Anne Waldman). And lastly, the “ugly spirit” of William Burroughs, who conveniently lived in a period that motivated a mid-century aesthetic, and who committed and often wrote about a horrible, violent, accidental act that could serve as an emotional and operatic center for a narrative.

Regarding narrative, David and Anne were flirting with structures related to the Bardo as described in Eastern religious texts—a place where a human would face down their earthly attachments—so Burroughs’ complicated past fit well into this frame also, and gave rise to our character of MAN, who spends the opera grappling with a similar offense for which he cannot forgive himself.

It’s difficult to movie a score. But the act of doing so stretched and strengthened my storytelling mind in ways I would never have attempted otherwise, and I’m a better filmmaker for it.

Read: Meet the Lost Souls of BARDO

Listen: Black Lodge