Location
Spend a musical afternoon with Amelia Earhart, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott and a remarkable Girl Scout named Alicia
Our partners in The VOTER Girl Project, the Girl Scouts of North East Ohio, reached out to us with an opportunity for members of the League of Women Voters to see two new short operas in English on Jan. 31 and Feb.1 at the Gartner Auditorium of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Providing the musical talent is the Baldwin Wallace Conservatory.
LWV Kent President Sherry will join a post performance panel on Feb. 1, including the composer Kamala Sankaram, to talk about civic awareness and women in the public sphere. We have a special ticket price for Leaguers, family and friends of $5 per ticket with the promo code SCOUTS (see the link below).
"A. E. Reverie," a 15-minute chamber opera (composed by Kamala Sankaram with the libretto by Jerre Dye), is paired with "Rise," a 30-minute chamber opera (composed by Sankaram with the libretto by A. M. Homes) commissioned by Washington National Opera as part of a collection of operas titled "Written in Stone" to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Center in 2021. The Midwest premiere of these two operas also features the world premiere of a new chamber orchestration commissioned for this Baldwin Wallace Conservatory Opera production.
"A. E. Reverie" is set in 1929, a year after Amelia Earhart, also known as the "First Lady of Aviation," completed her trans-Atlantic flight. After Earhart's triumphant landing and empowering amphitheater lecture, her words attributing the gender disparity in aviation to gender-based education practices without regard to individual aptitudes inspires a young woman to realize the American dream of freedom and to reach new heights herself.
"Rise" pays tribute to the little-known Portrait Monument in Washington, D.C. Completed in 1921, the monument depicts three key players in the women's suffragist movement — Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony — together with a fourth, uncarved face, as a sign that the feminist struggle was far from over at the time. Indeed, it was only in 1997 that the statue itself was restored to its place in the U.S. Capitol's rotunda, after being consigned to the building's crypt for the preceding 75 years.
In this magical-realist take, Alicia Hernández, a Girl Scout, becomes lost while on a Capitol tour and encounters a powerful female politician, a friendly Capitol Police officer and the ghost of American sculptor Adelaide Johnson. Through a witty conversation and revelatory interactions between the young Hernández and the opera's all-female, time-traveling cast of characters, "Rise" gives voice to some of the many women and girls who find their stories missing from history.
- Jan. 31 & Feb. 1 @ 3:00 PM (matinees) at the Gartner Auditorium, Cleveland Museum of Art
- Includes talk-back after the performance with cast & composer
- Tickets: $5 each, discount code SCOUTS
- Register here
Interested in carpooling for the Feb. 1 performance? Email us at lwvkent [at] gmail.com by Jan. 22!
