Overtone Industries Will Present ORIGINAL VISION V: MENAGERIE in April

Join Overtone Industries for the fifth year of Original Vision, an incubator program dedicated to original stories of mythic proportion through the development and presentation of new and innovative opera-theater. Presented as part of OperaFest LA, Original Vision V: Menagerie features works in-development by Murphy Severtson and George Landau-Pincus, Samara Rice and Brian Sonia-Wallace, and O-Lan Jones, with mentorship from Jones and Fahad Siadat.

Original Vision provides development support to opera projects at the very beginnings of their creative journeys, through a workshop period that includes mentorship, feedback, and guidance from directors O-Lan Jones and Fahad Siadat. The program culminates in a fully staged production of an essential excerpt from each piece with costume, lighting, and scenic design. The program and performances provide composers and librettists with a strong foundation for the project and professional work samples to propel the future development of their operas. Original Vision was invented to create space and freedom for original stories of mythic proportion in the opera-development landscape, providing crucial support to early/mid-career composers and librettists.

Original Vision alums have gone on to receive ongoing developmental and production support from OPERA America, American Opera Projects, Chicago Opera Theater, Atlanta Opera, West Edge Opera, Synchromy, and more.

Asked about the genesis of this project, Overtone Artistic Director O-Lan Jones said, "Over the years Fahad and I have honed our abilities to enter the worlds being created by our composer/librettist teams and offer guidance that helps bring their specific visions to life, rather than pull them in an externally driven direction. We're like dream doulahs helping their original visions to be born."

To celebrate the fifth year of Original Vision, "uncategorizable legend" O-Lan Jones - known for her genre-defying compositions and her scene-stealing turns in film and television (and recently named one of Tim Burton's "luminaries" in his documentary Life in the Line) - will workshop an excerpt from her own opera, MINE, alongside the works of emerging composers and librettists.

Music Director Fahad Siadat shared: "Collaboration is a primary value of Overtone Industries and a central aspect of the Original Vision program. This year I wanted to make that explicit by putting one of O-Lan's current works-in-progress through the Original Vision development process alongside our other creative teams.

This has created more of a lateral social environment in the workshops; even though the Overtone team is directing the shows, we are all artists in the trenches, experimenting and creating risk-taking work together."

The performance presents the heartbeats of three new operas, each with their own approach to experimental opera, exploring storytelling through music in different, innovative ways:

CARCINIZE!

Music by Murphy Severtson
Libretto by George Landau-Pincus
Directed by O-Lan Jones

In CARCINIZE!, a famous female pilot (maybe the one you're thinking of-maybe not) crash lands on a desert island. While she adjusts to a new life outside of the prying eyes of the public, she must also contend with the mysterious desires and histories of the island's skittering hivemind of crabs, who refuse to give her solitude. CARCINIZE! is a fantasia on crustacean themes, exploring the illusion of choice on the scale of macrohistory. While a crash is often an ending, here it is the beginning, as the crabs and the pilot become one and many.

TIME IS THE ENEMY

Music by Samara Rice
Libretto by Brian Sonia-Wallace
Co-Directed by O-Lan Jones & Livia Reiner

Everyone's been conscripted into a battle they didn't choose. Time is the Enemy begins in a hospital, where Rob is battling a terminal illness. His estranged wife Clara, an astrophysicist studying time paradoxes, creates a Time Machine with the goal, not of traveling through time, but of ending it. A fool's errand ensues, a psychedelic journey (literally) against the clock that moves between tragedy and screwball surrealism to ask: if the battle is unwinnable, is it therefore meaningless? Or are lost causes the ones most worthy of our devotion?

MINE

Music and libretto by O-Lan Jones
Directed by Livia Reiner