My first US premiere production with Miguel (curator, Centro de Experimentación del Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires) was Pablo Ortiz's Gallos y huesos (Roosters and Bones) with video projections by acclaimed Argentine visual artist Eduardo Stupía. The house was packed, the singers sparkled, and the Argentine musicians - conducted by Americas Society's Music Director Sebastián Zubieta - were stellar. The images were, in a word, disturbing. Ortiz's tango-like melodies contrasted sharply with Stupía's violent imagery. In 2015, we produced Hercules in Matto Grosso (composer: Esteban Insinger; librettist: Pola Oloixarac; set design: Luna Paiva; director: Clara Cullen) at Dixon Place. It was a nuts & bolts production: everything was created from the ground up, from the set pieces (assembled in Red Hook, Brooklyn) to the DIY nature of white neon lights and strobe to the tattered, gothic costumes and creepy makeup. Our cast dinner was at Congee Village, a Lower East Side mainstay that encourages huge tables and family dining. I left 2 days later on my own tour of China, performing in the chamber orchestra for an opera by Mojiao Wang, a Manhattan School of Music grad now based in London.
In 2016, Miguel took on the role of director, writer, and actor in his original work Inteligencia Artificial, which explored the interaction of technology with human consciousness. Starring renowned Argentine actor Ignacio Llobera and Miguel himself, this hot take on our vie quotidienne was both insightful and jarring. In 2017, we returned to Dixon Place to collaborate with Miguel once again, this time on the US premiere production of Kamchatka featuring Ensemble Almaviva (France). My friend and longtime colleague Iván Solano played clarinet in the ensemble - we met in Paris in 2007 when I was studying abroad at the Sorbonne, so it was charming to encounter eachother in such a context! In my final collaboration with him at Americas Society, we presented the New York premiere of Claude Vivier's Kopernikus at Issue Project Room (Brooklyn) featuring ICE and Meridionalis, conducted by Sebastían. The production sold out both nights and was reviewed in The New York Times.
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