Creative Works
“Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.”
— Austin Kleon
OPERA
About the company
Living Room Opera
Living Room Opera is a Boston-based company with the goal of demystifying the opera experience by bringing the art form off the big stage and into people's homes. We believe that the complexities of the human condition can be explored through one of music’s liveliest expressions. Though opera has a long lived history, we want to produce relatable stories that speak to a diverse audience made up of different ages, races, income brackets, and life perspectives. We want opera to be for everybody.
About the opera
¡Dime!
Opera in four acts with libretto by Bailey Merlin
¡Dime! tells the story of Hector and Ximena, a long term couple with new roots in the United States, as both characters receive life-altering news. For Ximena, a promotion; for Hector, the death of his father. While both characters strive on paths that suit their ambitions, they are shackled: Ximena by a family that’s only ever wanted her to be a wife and mother, and Hector who was raised to press down his emotions under threat of violence.
Unable to process his grief, Hector lashes out at the one person who has been a supply of stability, which threatens both Ximena’s safety and the destiny of their relationship. Shivering in his father’s shadow, Hector must reckon with the toxic expectation of silent, masculine strength if he can ever hope to be a better man than those who came before him. At the same time, Ximena recognizes the telltale signs of the emotional caretaker she swore she would never be. This opera is a reckoning with trauma, women’s emotional labor, and gender-defining complacency.
ARTSONG
Mestizaje
Mestizaje was composed in an effort to highlight the importance and relevance of race mixtures in the music and cultural identity of South American people. Each of the songs within this cycle contains elements from the Caucasian, African and Indigenous cultures respectively. These specific ethnic groups represent the three races that converged in the South American continent after colonization, and that have provided Latin-American culture with a plethora of elements that have enriched its background. The mixture of cultures and races has also contributed to the emergence of new customs, and ideas. The need for identity as a group that is made up of many different backgrounds has become a primordial discussion among Latinos. People of Latino descent, more specifically Colombians and Venezuelans, often refer to their genetic makeup as “mestizo”, which specifically denotes this mixture of races and it does not have to do with the conflicting and extensively discussed definition of the term. The disparities among authors regarding the definition of the term frequently has to do with the origins of the word itself. The word mestizo was used during the time of colonization in the South American countries by the Spaniards. During this time the habitants of colonized regions would often use the term mestizo in reference to their mixed heritage, more specifically white and indigenous mixture. The use of the term varied from person to person, in that one individual would use the term to denote their Caucasian heritage, thus, enjoying certain privileges and others would use the term to be accepted into a group or community of mixed individuals. Nowadays, the use of the term by most Latin Americans is often self-ascribed and it represents the mixture of different races disregarding which races in particular. This use of the word has to do with the etymological representation of the term mestizo, which derives from the Latin “mixtus” which means mixed. The title of this song cycle is Mestizaje, which derives from the same root, and refers specifically to the process of mixture of cultures and races.
