WAYNE SHORTER & ESPERANZA SPALDING’S …(Iphigenia)
Saturday, February 12, 2022, 8pm
Zellerbach Hall
an opera created by Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding
Wayne Shorter, Composer
esperanza spalding, Librettist
Lileana Blain-Cruz, Director
Clark Rundell, Conductor
A Real Magic production (esperanza spalding & Jeff Tang)
In association with Octopus Theatricals & Cath Brittan
…(Iphigenia) is commissioned by Cal Performances at the University of California, Berkeley, CA; The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, DC; The Broad Stage, Santa Monica, CA; ArtsEmerson, Boston, MA; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; and Carolina Performing Arts, Chapel Hill, NC.
This performance is made possible, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts and an Anonymous Patron Sponsor
The run time for this performance is approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes, with no intermission.
From the Executive and Artistic Director
It gives me special pleasure to welcome you to tonight’s sold-out West Coast premiere of WAYNE SHORTER & ESPERANZA SPALDING’S …(Iphigenia), a Cal Performances co-commission that reimagines what opera can be and asks us to reexamine the stories we have inherited and the choices we make as a society. Shorter has written the music and spalding is the librettist and appears in the title role in this radical new take on Euripides’ ancient Greek play Iphigenia in Aulis. Together, their powerhouse creative team is headed by acclaimed director Lileana Blain-Cruz and iconic architect and designer Frank Gehry. I couldn’t be more pleased that you could join us this evening for what promises to be a memorable musical and theatrical experience.
While we at Cal Performances like to think of each of our programs as unique and remarkable, next week offers another season highlight when co-producers and stars Alicia Hall Moran (mezzo-soprano) and Jason Moran (piano) arrive on campus for the West Coast premiere of their brilliant Two Wings: The Music of Black America in Migration (Feb 17, Zellerbach Hall), a series of “gripping portraits of a vast social upheaval” (Chicago Tribune) that explores the Great Migration of six million Black Americans from the rural South to northern cities, the West, and beyond. This ambitious production (a Cal Performances Illuminations “Place and Displacement’ presentation) features a star-studded roster of guest performers, writers, and thinkers, headed by composer/conductor (and 2021 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music) Tania León, narrator Donna Jean Murch (author of Living for the City), and the Imani Winds chamber ensemble (to name just a few!). Together, these exceptional artists trace the Morans’ family histories through the music that accompanied their brave antecedents throughout the 20th century, from Harlem Renaissance-era jazz, gospel hymns, and Broadway show tunes, to classical and chamber music and the artists’ own compositions.
February marks the time each year when Cal Performances’ programming shifts into high gear. From now through the beginning of May, the remainder of our 2021–22 season is packed with ambitious and adventurous programming. You won’t want to miss…
- sensational dance performances like Memphis Jookin’: The Show, featuring Lil Buck (Feb 25–26); The Joffrey Ballet (Mar 4–6); and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (Mar 29 – Apr 3)
- the West Coast premiere (Mar 12) of Place, Ted Hearne and Saul Williams’ bold meditation on the topographies of gentrification and displacement, another Illuminations “Place and Displacement” event
- the renowned English Baroque Soloists with conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner in a transfixing program of works by Mozart and Haydn (Apr 10)
- the peerless London Symphony Orchestra (Mar 20), appearing under the direction of superstar conductor Sir Simon Rattle in a program of orchestral masterworks
- pianist extraordinaire Mitsuko Uchida playing and directing Mozart with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra (Mar 27)
- our 2021–22 artist-in-residence Angélique Kidjo in her brand new music-theater piece Yemandja (a highly anticipated Cal Performances co-commission and Illuminations event, Apr 23).
Fasten your seatbelts; we have all of this—plus much more—in store for you!
We’re very proud of our new and updated winter brochure and know that a few minutes spent reviewing our schedule—in print or online—will reveal a wealth of options for your calendar; now is the perfect time to guarantee that you have the best seats for all the events you plan to attend.
I know you join us in looking forward to what lies ahead, to coming together once again to encounter the life-changing experiences that only the live performing arts deliver. We can’t wait to share it all with you during the coming months.
Jeremy Geffen
Executive and Artistic Director, Cal Performances
It gives me special pleasure to welcome you to tonight’s sold-out West Coast premiere of WAYNE SHORTER & ESPERANZA SPALDING’S …(Iphigenia), a Cal Performances co-commission that reimagines what opera can be and asks us to reexamine the stories we have inherited and the choices we make as a society. Shorter has written the music and spalding is the librettist and appears in the title role in this radical new take on Euripides’ ancient Greek play Iphigenia in Aulis. Together, their powerhouse creative team is headed by acclaimed director Lileana Blain-Cruz and iconic architect and designer Frank Gehry. I couldn’t be more pleased that you could join us this evening for what promises to be a memorable musical and theatrical experience.
While we at Cal Performances like to think of each of our programs as unique and remarkable, next week offers another season highlight when co-producers and stars Alicia Hall Moran (mezzo-soprano) and Jason Moran (piano) arrive on campus for the West Coast premiere of their brilliant Two Wings: The Music of Black America in Migration (Feb 17, Zellerbach Hall), a series of “gripping portraits of a vast social upheaval” (Chicago Tribune) that explores the Great Migration of six million Black Americans from the rural South to northern cities, the West, and beyond. This ambitious production (a Cal Performances Illuminations “Place and Displacement’ presentation) features a star-studded roster of guest performers, writers, and thinkers, headed by composer/conductor (and 2021 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music) Tania León, narrator Donna Jean Murch (author of Living for the City), and the Imani Winds chamber ensemble (to name just a few!). Together, these exceptional artists trace the Morans’ family histories through the music that accompanied their brave antecedents throughout the 20th century, from Harlem Renaissance-era jazz, gospel hymns, and Broadway show tunes, to classical and chamber music and the artists’ own compositions.
February marks the time each year when Cal Performances’ programming shifts into high gear. From now through the beginning of May, the remainder of our 2021–22 season is packed with ambitious and adventurous programming. You won’t want to miss…
- sensational dance performances like Memphis Jookin’: The Show, featuring Lil Buck (Feb 25–26); The Joffrey Ballet (Mar 4–6); and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (Mar 29 – Apr 3)
- the West Coast premiere (Mar 12) of Place, Ted Hearne and Saul Williams’ bold meditation on the topographies of gentrification and displacement, another Illuminations “Place and Displacement” event
- the renowned English Baroque Soloists with conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner in a transfixing program of works by Mozart and Haydn (Apr 10)
- the peerless London Symphony Orchestra (Mar 20), appearing under the direction of superstar conductor Sir Simon Rattle in a program of orchestral masterworks
- pianist extraordinaire Mitsuko Uchida playing and directing Mozart with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra (Mar 27)
- our 2021–22 artist-in-residence Angélique Kidjo in her brand new music-theater piece Yemandja (a highly anticipated Cal Performances co-commission and Illuminations event, Apr 23).
Fasten your seatbelts; we have all of this—plus much more—in store for you!
We’re very proud of our new and updated winter brochure and know that a few minutes spent reviewing our schedule—in print or online—will reveal a wealth of options for your calendar; now is the perfect time to guarantee that you have the best seats for all the events you plan to attend.
I know you join us in looking forward to what lies ahead, to coming together once again to encounter the life-changing experiences that only the live performing arts deliver. We can’t wait to share it all with you during the coming months.
Jeremy Geffen
Executive and Artistic Director, Cal Performances
Synopsis
Life’s Grammar…
You are all what the myth can’t bear.
You are an open tense,
To carry what could come.
—Artemis
(from Act 2, libretto by esperanza spalding)
Iphigenia was born to be sacrificed—or so the myth would have us believe, but what if she contests her fate? What if she says no? What if the winds don’t blow and the sails hang limp in the sea air? What if Helen isn’t her problem at all and instead of bowing to the relentlessness of men blinded by the promise of war, she wakes up and remembers who she is—and says no.
If your memory of the myth is blurry, don’t worry. These men are everywhere still, and this woman, too, this woman who says no—she’s also here, and she might be you. In Act 1 we’re lost between repeats in the cyclical time of trauma. One by one, another Iphigenia is sacrificed at the altar to appease Artemis, supposedly. The army is desperate for wind so they can set sail and wage war, and Artemis could compel the air to move if she felt inclined. The men are drunk, literally, but also drunk on self satisfaction, patriotism, and desire—they are children wielding power and carrying weapons, and they hardly notice the dead women that litter the ground beneath them.
In Act 2, those women, each of them different manifestations of the myth, find each other outside of time—Artemis holds the space and weaves a thread between them. They arrive together in solidarity; they share their struggle, their sadness, strength, fury, and love. They tell their stories so that the one among them who might interrupt the myth and incite all the other stories, all the other possibilities, gathers the strength and tenderness to do so.
Myth is terribly strong and terribly seductive. How often have you suddenly woken up from the one you didn’t know you were playing out, or rather the one that was playing you out? How many times did you have to suffer through it before noticing? In Act 3, we’re back in it. Disoriented, and confused, the new Iphigenia is forced back into the myth and offered the opportunity to let go of the myth and show us all how to make something else. The opera ends in “open tense,” none of us, onstage or off, knows exactly what will happen. The ethic of improvisation takes over—the possibility of an open tense—and the art of listening and responding deeply and at the same time; what other worlds could that code of conduct and compassion create?
—Sunder Ganglani,
Dramaturg
Note from Composer Wayne Shorter
About Cal Performances
By Giovanni Russonello, Nov. 2, 2021, The New York Times
In fall 2018, Esperanza Spalding had just released “12 Little Spells,” a bold foray into using music as a healing practice, and a significant creative leap in her career. She was a newly minted professor at Harvard University, and thriving in the role.
