OPERA / DANCE / ELECTRIC GUITAR

In 2020, The Metropolitan Opera’s production of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer opened with the longest dance solo in the company’s history. Alison Clancy performed an eleven minute dance to the opera’s complete overture, as a version of the lead character, Senta. Internationally acclaimed choreographer Carolyn Choa created the dance in close collaboration with Clancy. Contemporary dance collided with classical music to create an evocative, emotional, intense exploration of longing and power, a fitting opening for an epic opera.

Now, this exploration is being continued, with legendary guitarist Gary Lucas playing his own arrangement of the overture, and the choreography adapted to interplay with this new vision of Wagner’s music. The collision of contemporary dance and music with Wagner is an amazing amalgamation of forms and ideas and disparate parts coming together to make a unique, strikingly immediate whole.

Clancy will perform the solo twice, to a recording of the original overture, and to Gary Lucas playing his arrangement live. We will explore the process of creation and adaptation, and what it can be to collide the old with the new to create something wholly original. Following, there will be a talkback and Q&A with Clancy and Lucas, moderated by MIT Head of Dance, Dan Safer.