Everything For Dawn
Premiere screening: Saturday, October 1, 2022, at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City.
Everything for Dawn will be broadcast and streamed on AllArts.org starting on Friday, October 7, 2022, at 10 pm. Watch the opera as it unfolds over 5 weeks in October and November.
ALL ARTS, the New York Emmy-winning multimedia streaming platform dedicated to the arts, will present the world premiere of Experiments in Opera’s made-for-TV opera Everything for Dawn this fall. Everything for Dawn will premiere Fridays at 10 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. ET from October 7 – November 4 on ALL ARTS, the free ALL ARTS app, and AllArts.org/EverythingForDawn.
Sneak Peak of Episode 8: Into a White Box
In celebration of our 10th Anniversary, Experiments in Opera will premiere Everything for Dawn, an epic new video opera series featuring ten 15-minute episodes, each written by a different librettist/composer combo. A web streaming series of daring ambition, Everything for Dawn, is the epitome of what Experiments in Opera stands for—fun, intimate storytelling with a strong feeling of an artistic community at work.
The team of writers in the EiO Writers’ Room who collaborated on the libretto for Everything for Dawn includes Jason Cady, Adrienne Danrich, Lauren D’Errico, Krista Knight, Jerry Lieblich, and Jerome A. Parker.
The ten composers who will each be writing a 20-minute episode of the full opera are Clarice Assad, Jason Cady, Melissa Dunphy, Miguel Frasconi, Paul Kerekes, Phil Kline, Pauline Kim, Aaron Siegel, Kamala Sankaram, and Matthew Welch.
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ABOUT THE OPERA
Everything for Dawn is an original coming-of-age story spanning the 1990s. Dawn is a teenager dealing with the impact of her father’s suicide. Her tragedy becomes public when his paintings become celebrated as “outsider art.” With each episode written by a different librettist/composer pairing, the opera examines how we seek solace in a broken world, community intersectionality, and the rationale for making art.
Everything for Dawn was designed from the beginning as a work that would accommodate multiple voices and aesthetic styles. PART ONE of the opera (episodes 1 – 3 set in 1997) takes place in a suburban Detroit home, where a college-aged daughter (Dawn) and her mother discover a box of paintings by Mac, their father/husband, who has recently committed suicide. They are conflicted about what to do with the paintings but eventually give a local curator permission to show them in her gallery. PART TWO of the opera (episodes 4 – 7 set in 1995) takes place a few years earlier in the mental health facility that the father had been in before his suicide. In the facility, he discovers painting through an art therapy class, which helps him deal with his depression and PTSD from the Vietnam War. PART THREE of the opera (episodes 8 – 10 set in 2001) picks up after the end of Part One when the art world hails the father as a star of outsider art. Throughout the work, the main themes of family ties, mental illness, and the art world are teased out and reconstituted as the opera culminates in an ensemble scene in a New York art gallery with most of the cast together to contemplate the legacy of a complicated man.
Everything for Dawn will feature a cast of 8 singers and an orchestra of 5 instrumentalists, including the New York City ensemble Bearthoven. This 10-part video series will premiere in Spring 2022.
Experiments in Opera’s Writers’ Room project is made possible by an OPERA America Innovation Grant, supported by the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.