Houston Grand Opera Commisions NEW ARRIVALS With Libretto from Catherine Filloux and Score from John Glover
Houston Grand Opera today announced a new commission, New Arrivals. Based on the real life story of Houstonian Yani Rose Keo, who escaped certain death by the guerilla group, Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the libretto is by renowned playwright, Catherine Filloux and score is by American composer, John Glover.
In 1975, Pol Pot, head of the Khmer Rouge, took over Cambodia sealing it off from the rest of the world. Renaming it The Democratic Republic of Kampuchea he began eliminating the “bourgeois elements” – people with an education, doctors, engineers, teachers, and anyone who wore glasses. City inhabitants were sent to the countryside for re-education and more than 2 million people starved to death or were executed.
Yani Rose Keo, the wife of a high-ranking official, volunteered to help refugees who fled the fighting, before fleeing the country herself, with her four children and the clothes she was wearing.
New Arrivals reflects on Yani Rose Keo’s flight out of Cambodia–first to France and eventually to Houston, where she continues to work with refugees through her not-for-profit agency The Alliance for Multi-cultural Community.
In all the years Yani Keo has cared for others, she had no news of the family she left behind in Cambodia. She later discovered they had all been killed. Yet she seems too busy for anger. “You only have one life to live,” she says, “Why do you need to hate each other?”
Performances: June 16 – 23. (1st performance is part of World Refugee Day.)
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