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Entry updated 3 May 2024. Tagged: Music, Theatre.
US experimental theatrical and musical company formed in New York in 2004 by writer and stage director Kara Feely, and musician and composer Travis Just. They have produced a number of unconventional operas and performance pieces, including the "Utopian Space-Opera" You Are Under Our Space Control (album 2019; multimedia theatrical premiere 2020). The bare bones of the story – humans leaving a depleted earth to attempt to start a new society on other planets – are conventional, but the music and text are anything but. Lyrics taking in quotations from Sun Ra's poetry, the Russian Cosmists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and quotes from astronauts, are set against a twitchy electronic soundtrack derived from John Cage's indeterminate piano composition Music of Changes (1951). The focus is on the challenges of creating a utopian society, and the role of the artist within it. [CWa]
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