About this project
Under the Volcano, a program of writing master classes held each January since 2003 in the legendary village of Tepoztlán, Mexico, and VisionIntoArt, a US-based production non profit that commissions and performs new music and multimedia, plan to offer a pilot opera lab for libretto writers and composers in Tepoztlán from January 5-16th. The goal is to generate innovative, non-traditional opera scenes that will build exciting new repertoire for performers in both countries. Compositions will be encouraged in both English and Spanish, and participants from around the world are encouraged to apply.
Faculty for the lab will be drawn from the US (Donna Di Novelli, Paola Prestini, Bruce Steinberg), Canada (Royce Vavrek) and Mexico ( Magda Bogin, Mario Bellatin, Ana Lara, Felipe Perez Santiago and Erika Harrsch).
Funding of $6,000 is sought to defray the total cost of bringing faculty and technicians to Mexico and to pay Mexican opera singers and musicians who will improvise and perform work generated in the Lab, as well as to hire a local logistics coordinator and a musical/stage director. Individual participants will pay a fee of $1195 to cover personal expenses of room and board, ground transport within Mexico and tuition.
Building on Under the Volcano’s reputation for hosting intimate, exhilarating workshops for serious writers, the UTV Opera Lab, run jointly with VIA, will bring together a small community of US & Mexican writers and composers, sound technicians and musicians to create opera narratives, draft libretti, draft scores, public performances and recorded demos. The concept is to form two parallel workshops, one team-taught by writers and the other by composers. Writers Magda Bogin (novelist, poet & translator, as well as founder/director of Under the Volcano), Donna di Novelli (librettist, playwright and director), Royce Vavrek (multi-disciplinary narrative artist and librettist) and Mario Bellatin (novelist and fabulist) will anchor the first; musicians Paola Prestini (composer, director and co-founder of VisionIntoArt), and Ana Lara (composer, radio producer and founder/director of the Festival Internacional de Música y Escena in Mexico City), will run the second. The two workshops will cross-pollinate, with both faculty and 12-20 enrolled participants brainstorming and then producing 5-minute scenes from individual opera projects that can serve as the springboard for further project development and funding. Participants will be cross-generational and from various levels of experience. The project will be co-directed by Magda Bogin and Paola Prestini.
The ten-day session, like Under the Volcano’s literary master classes, will feature morning workshops, afternoon time to work on individual & collaborative projects and, beginning on Day 3, an intensive process in which musicians will be on tap to work on the projects as they develop. The session will culminate with showcases in Tepoztlán and neighboring Cuernavaca, both places with audiences eager for cultural events. All performances as well as the workshop process will be professionally recorded.
PROMOTION: How we plan to do it!
All the faculty have extensive mailing lists to which the project will be broadcast. We will blog, and will advertise through the American Music Center and the American Music Forum. VisionIntoArt will advertise this to their constituents, and the following institutions will recruit students: New York University, The Public Theater, and the Juilliard School. Additional outreach will take place via Facebook, Twitter and other social media, as well as through the academic institutions, orchestras, theaters, writing programs and other organizations through which we are involved, in both the US and Mexico. We will also spread the word among potential writer participants through organizations such as the Writers Room, Poets and Writers, Poets House, AWP (Associated Writing Programs), and various libraries such as the Schomberg Library in NYC, the Folger in Washington, DC, the NYPL Fellows, PEN American Center, British PEN, Canadian PEN, Mexican PEN, Cities of Asylum project, and more.
Want to hear some music now to whet your appetite?
http://www.myspace.com/paolaaurora
http://www.analara.net/
Want to see the Body Maps poster and video?
http://www.youtube.com/watch...
http://www.amazon.com/Paola-Prestini-Body-Maps/dp/B001CW7MNI
Cocinar Mexicano rewards (as seen on O Magazine, Epicurious, and Gourmet Magazine)
http://www.cocinarmexicano.com
Gran Hotel de Tepoztlán: Posada del Tepozteco
http://www.posadadeltepozteco.com.mx/
More about Tepoztlán:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tepoztlán
NOTE: the way Kickstarter works for shipping addresses--at the end date of the project (December 1) all Backers will receive an individual message asking for your shipping address. All gifts will ship ASAP.
Project location: NY, NY, Tepoztlán, Mexico
Special thanks to Jill Steinberg, photographer, for photos used in the film.
FAQ
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Funding Successful
This project successfully raised its funding goal on December 1, 2010.
Pledge $100 or more Pledge $100 or more
DVD of the Lab Showcase plus your name listed on the liner, and 1 VisionIntoArt CD + a VisionIntoArt/Under the Volcano T-Shirt (American Apparel)
Pledge $250 or more Pledge $250 or more
All of the above, 1 Body Maps poster by the Mexican artist Erika Harrsch, and your name on the liner and listing on the concert program as one of our angels
Pledge $500 or more Pledge $500 or more
All of the above plus autographed copies of Magda Bogin’s novel Natalya, God's Messenger and CD’s by composers Paola Prestini and Ana Lara.
Pledge $750 or more Pledge $750 or more
All of the above plus tickets to the VisionIntoArt Kitchen Opera festival in April, in NYC or a hand-carved mask from Tepoztlán.
Pledge $1,000 or more Pledge $1,000 or more
All of the above plus a pre-showcase dinner for two with the performers by Cocinar Mexicano in Tepoztlán or to an invite to the reception for the performers at the VIA he Kitchen performance in NYC in April.
Pledge $1,500 or more Pledge $1,500 or more
All of the above plus your choice of either a tamales or salsa cooking class for two with Cocinar Mexicano during the workshop or a trio of Mexican cookbooks mailed to your home.
Pledge $2,500 or more Pledge $2,500 or more
All of the above plus a signed bark painting by one of Mexico’s finest artists.
Pledge $5,000 or more Pledge $5,000 or more
All of the above plus one Opera Lab piece dedicated to yourself or anyone you designate over the course of its development.
Pledge $10,000 or more Pledge $10,000 or more
A weekend in one of the best hotels of Tepoztlán: suite at the Posada del Tepozteco. With welcome basket from Cocinar Mexicano, and all of the above. http://www.posadadeltepozteco.com.mx/
Project By
Connected as Paola Prestini (3526 friends)
PAOLA PRESTINI is a composer, and the director and co-founder of VisionIntoArt, an interdisciplinary production company that has created over 50 multimedia productions worldwide and garnered the title “Best of 2009″ in classical and opera performances by TimeOut NY. VisionIntoArt has been called “always intriguing and frequently beguiling…” by the New York Times, and its partnership with organizations such as Beth Morrison Projects, Opera on Tap, The American Composers Orchestra and Young Audiences has created riveting programs.
Named by NPR as one of the Top 100 composers in the World under 40, her compositions have been deemed “radiant…[and] amorously evocative” by The New York Times, and praised by composers such as Terry Riley, ” music [that] speaks from the heart and inspires…” and by Osvaldo Golijov, “wrenching and tender and luminous and pure and exuberant: always vivid and always generous…” Her 2009 Tzadik release BODY MAPS has been featured on WQXR and Q2 and showcases new music’s great soloists. She has been commissioned and performed by ACME, Ensemble ACJW, Carnegie Hall, ETHEL, the Kronos Quartet, MATA, New York City Opera (VOX), and WNYC and performed by soloists such as Helga Davis, Rinde Eckert, and Hila Plitmann. Her interdisciplinary collaborations with artists Erika Harrsch, Ali Hossaini, Carmen Kordas, and S. Katy Tucker have been lauded by TimeOut NY as “Ingeniously staged concert pieces that gracefully walk the line between opera and performance art.” Her work has been presented worldwide, in venues ranging from Zankel Hall, The Kitchen, The Whitney Museum, Le Poisson Rouge, PS 122, and the Stone in New York, to Etnafest, Milano’s Teatro Manzoni and Sound Res in Italy, and BEMUS in Belgrade, Serbia.
Current projects include ARMENIA at BAM Next Wave festival for the Kronos Quartet; a work for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Music Now series; A DEGREE OF DIFFERENCE, a residency at the Krannert Center; LABYRINTH, a new work for cellist Maya Beiser; OCEANIC VERSES, a folk opera commissioned by Carnegie Hall, expanded to premiere at the Kennedy Center with Julian Wachner and the Washington Chorus; DE DEO, an opera with librettist Donna Di Novelli that inaugurated New York City Opera’s Word First Program; and AN AGING MAGICIAN, a multimedia song cycle with text by Jonathan Safran Foer starring Rinde Eckert and Gabriel Kahane.
Ms. Prestini has been featured in composition residencies throughout the US and abroad: from the Ucross Foundation, Dickinson College, North Carolina School of the Arts, UCLA and Presbyterian University to colleges and residencies in Sicily, and Puglia, in Italy, as well as in Mexico and in Venezuela. Her film collaborations have made the New York Times Critic’s Pick, and have won first prize and made official selection at the Sundance Film Festival and Austin Film Festival, among others. She has directed education programs at VisionIntoArt Young Visionaries (Director), the American Composers Orchestra (Director), and the New York Youth Symphony Making Score (Assoc. Director), and has taught and created curricula for the New York Philharmonic, New York City Opera, and the American Symphony Orchestra League in addition to designing web education projects for Carnegie Hall (The Leon Fleisher Schubert project). She is a founding member of the Very Young Composers program at the New York Philharmonic for which she edited a book and has taught world-wide, from inner city schools in NY, to El Sistema in Venezuela.
Ms. Prestini’s commissions, grants and awards have come from the American Music Center, Meet the Composer, ASCAP, the BMI Fund, NYSCA (two Individual Artist grants), the Trust for Mutual Understanding, Concert Artist Guild, The Cary Trust, and the ASCAP Morton Gould Composers Award. 2011 saw the inauguration of Mexico Canta! a new opera lab she is co-directing through VisionIntoArt with author Magda Bogin in Tepoztlan, Mexico. She received her BM and MM at the Juilliard School and has studied with Samuel Adler, Robert Beaser, and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. She is a Paul and Daisy Soros fellow, and a 2010 Sundance Fellow.
