Approximately 25 interdisciplinary shows and also Furry Opera
HI! Welcome to Thrilled to Announce, an operatic newsletter. We share cool classical music events in the NYC area and silly thoughts on the opera industry.
Lots going on in the next few weeks in the great city of New York!
Hildegard // Bernard 11/15 @ 7:30 - A multi-disciplinary performance about two 12th century composer monks.
Sputterbox release party 11/18 - Contemporary trio Sputterbox is releasing their first studio EP! Come out and celebrate!
The Passion of Miss De Marco, Unemployed Stenographer opens 11/21 - An “interdisciplinary theater work incorporating opera, musical theatre, and oratorio” about a lesbian bank robber in NYC in the 1930s. (Their website is cool and has lots of interesting info and historical research)
When I had a voice 11/23 @ 4pm - Viola da gamba quartet Parthenia premieres a new piece for da gamba and soprano. Stay after the show for a reading session - bring your viola da gamba! How many times can I write viola da gamba!
The F*ggots and their Friends Between Revolutionaries opens 12/2 - based on the “gay manifesto written as a fable” by Larry Mitchell, this piece is an interdisciplinary theater work (we have a lot of those on the docket this week lol) incorporating “theater, dance, and song from baroque to Broadway and beyond”. Side note, the piece does not censor the F slur, I did that for this newsletter. I didn’t really know what to do but I felt anxious about NOT censoring the word. If you disagree with me and think I should keep the title of the piece intact as the creators intended, lmk!
Blackbox Ensemble - Scenes from the Post-Diaspora 12/5 @ 7:30 - a U.S. premiere of “a multimedia work for ensemble and pipa player exploring global identity and the conditions of belonging and non-belonging.”
RED ALERT: someone wrote an amazing article about furries doing opera.
HowlAria is a collective that performs selections of canonical operatic works in fursuits, mostly at furry conventions. For the first time they seem to be holding auditions for their next performance. Here are some clips from a recent production:
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I’ve been aware of this group for a while now, ever since one of the most famous operatic furries and furry opera company FOUNDER Chester the Geroo complimented a meme I made years ago. This was the meme:
Anyway, this article was a thoughtful, Freudian, curious look into the similarities between the furry community and the opera community. I loved this paragraph especially:
Instead of trying to refute the idea of opera being strange and its own subculture, radicalize it: opera has always been its own specific subculture and probably always will be. It isn’t mass media. It will never be that popular and maybe it never has been. And that’s a good thing. The furry fandom of the present and the opera queens of the past show people (especially those already regarded as beyond society’s norms) need worlds different from our own to project themselves into, and the fact that furries- who skew much younger than operagoers do as a broad demographic- are getting into opera through this angle shows how young audiences connect with this notion.
Beautiful writing, and if you know TTA you know we are all about niching down, eschewing generalization in favor of hyperspecificity. I loved how earnest and curious this piece was - it’s so easy to go for the laughs when talking about furries (and, tbh, when talking about opera). I appreciated the approach. One of the best operatic articles I’ve read in I don’t know how long!!
OK BYE XOXOXX THE TTA LADIES