About
Premieres September 16-17, 2022
Commissioned and produced by The Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College, and co-commissioned by Stanford Live at Stanford University
KiWi Productions, Consulting Producer
The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist is a collaboration between librettist Vievee Francis, visual artist Enrico Riley, and composer Jonathan Berger, directed by Niegel Smith. It will be an evening-length (c. 70-minute) opera-theatre work for soprano, saxophone, piano trio, percussion, and electronics, accompanied by Riley’s hauntingly powerful images. A chorus of “singing witnesses” will be drawn from every community where the piece is presented. The Ritual of Breath… responds to the murder of Eric Garner and, through his martyrdom, confronts wanton lynching and killing of people of color at the hands of the police.
Calling upon elements gleaned from a variety of musical sources and genres, Jonathan Berger is setting the piece on a deeply moving set of poems in seven movements by Vievee Francis. The libretto frames Garner’s tragic death from multiple perspectives – from a mother’s loss of her son to reckoning with senseless violence inflicted upon people of color. The Ritual of Breath… takes the form of a community ritual, responding to each place where it is presented. Employing an enveloping soundscape and immersive projection design, it calls the audience into a meditative space to breathe together, and through this shared breath and mindfulness, pulls them into active participation and consideration.
Artist Bios
Vievee Francis, Librettist
Poet Vievee Francis, is author of Forest Primeval (2017) winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Horse in the Dark (2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize among others. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2010 and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She was the recipient of the 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the 2010 Kresge Artist Fellowship. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is currently Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
Enrico Riley, Artist
Enrico Riley is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Visual Arts, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize in painting and a Jacobus Family Fellowship through Dartmouth College. Exhibitions include the American Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, VA. The Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia, The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City, Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH, The Museum for the National Center of Afro-American Arts in Roxbury, MA, Academia di Belle Arti di Roma, Rome, Italy, Rhode Island School of Design. Riley is Professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH
Jonathan Berger, Composer
Thrice commissioned by The National Endowment for the Arts, Berger has also received major commissions from The Mellon and Rockefeller Foundations, Chamber Music America, and numerous chamber music societies and ensembles. Recent commissions include My Lai (commissioned by The National Endowment, the Gerbode Foundation, and Harris Theatre for the Kronos Quartet, Rinde Eckert and Van Anh Vo), Tango alla Zingarese (commissioned by the 92nd Street Y), and Swallow (commissioned by the St. Lawrence String Quartet). Rime Sparse for soprano and piano trio was commissioned by the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society and premiered in New York and Chicago by soprano Julia Bullock, and members of Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society. Berger’s recordings are on Harmonia Mundi’s Eloquentia label, Naxos, Sony, Neuma, and Cantaur. A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow and the 2016 Elliot Carter Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, Berger is the Denning Family Provostial Professor in Music at Stanford University.
Niegel Smith, Director
Not My Monster (The Flea), Syncing Ink (The Alley, The Flea), A 24 Decade History of Popular Music… (Pomegranate Arts, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Melbourne Festival, et al. – Kennedy Prize & Pulitzer Prize finalist), Take Care (The Flea), Hir (Magic Theatre, Mixed Blood and Playwrights Horizons), Dream State of Affairs (The Invisible Dog), Marisol (Luna Stage), The Perils of Obedience (Abrons Arts Center), Seed (Classical Theatre of Harlem and Hip Hop Theatre Festival), Neighbors (The Public Theater), Limbs: A Pageant (HERE Arts Center), Rainy Days and Mondays (FringeNYC), Maud – The Madness (Phoenix Theatre Ensemble), We Declare You A Terrorist (Summer Play Festival). His participatory walks and performances have been produced by Abrons Arts Center, American Realness, Dartmouth College, Elastic City, Jack, The New Museum, Prelude Festival, PS 122, the Van Alen Institute and Visual AIDS. A Bessie Award winning director, he is the Artistic Director of The Flea Theater in lower Manhattan; board member of A.R.T./New York; and ringleader of Willing Participant – an artistic activist organization that whips up urgent poetic responses to crazy shit that happens.