Eve Gigliotti Will Headline a Workshop Of UNTITLED (INSPIRED BY FILM STILLS) With FERUS Festival

Mezzo-Soprano Eve Gigliotti stars in a reading of Untitled (inspired by Film Stills), a series of four operatic monodramas exploring the stages of transformation and identity in a woman's life. National Sawdust Projects is producing the new chamber opera and will host the workshop performance on Friday, January 17th at 2:00pm EST. Inspired by iconic photographs from Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), the piece is a study of four women, each confronting a critical choice that determines the course of their lives. The audience participates in this transformative journey into scenes of lust, creation, empowerment, and destruction. The full production is set to premiere in New York in 2021 and tour to The Kennedy Center and San Diego Opera in 2022.

The performance on Friday will feature new music by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Reid and composer and National Sawdust Co-Founder & Artistic Director Paola Prestini, as well as lyrics by librettist Royce Vavrek. The afternoon, directed by R.B. Schlather, also features excerpts by Nico Muhly and Missy Mazzoli, followed by a conversation with the collaborators, offering insight into the process of creating this new chamber opera work.

Celebrated mezzo-soprano Eve Gigliotti, whose voice has been described as "powerful and agile," (New York Times), is an "incisive actress" (Opera News) who has been the driving force behind the project from the beginning. She initiated the original concept, and in addition to acting as the creative producer for the piece, she is also the solo vocalist.

Gigiotti expressed her inspiration behind the piece: "I want to continue telling stories that are relevant, personal, and from a point of view that doesn't always get a platform. These monodramas grew from the seed of my original concept, which started a free form response to another work (Untitled Film Stills #12, #48, #60, #39 of the Cindy Sherman series). It started as my words, ideas and impressions on a sheet of paper scribbled on the back of each image... We've dreamed up a moment, a scene in a life, an actress in performance, as we all are in our lives to an extent. The audience as voyeur witnesses this moment from four different dramatic and musical points of view."

Full creative team and information for the National Sawdust performance are available at https://nationalsawdust.org/event/untitled-film-stills

"The Ferus Festival, National Sawdust's weeklong plunge into experimental storytelling, ricochets between individual and collective experiences." -New Yorker