Production Design & Scenic Design
Scenic Design
EARTH EARS​
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Music by Pauline Oliveros
Directed by James Darrah
Music Director Christopher Rountree
Angel's Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro
Produced by Long Beach Opera, 2024
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On December 15, 2024, our audience embarked on a transformative journey with us as we launched our year-long celebration of revolutionary composer, Pauline Oliveros. This exclusive daytime event offered an intimate introduction to her bold, ritualistic works, centered around Earth Ears: A Sonic Ritual—a meditative, interactive text score that invited performers and audience members to engage in a profound act of communal Deep Listening. This special one-time-only performance was a uniquely immersive experience that set the stage for an exploration of sound, listening, and daring new ideas.
For the performance inside, the room was decorated with shredded paper (Prairie T. Trivuth will be designer for all the Oliveros productions), and instrumentalists scattered about the room and among the audience interacted in rigorous ways indicated by the score but also with just enough freedom that anything could happen.
— LA Times
For the inaugural show, Long Beach Opera staged a one-time only daytime performance of Oliveros’ Earth Ears: A Sonic Ritual, centered on the composer’s philosophy of deep listening. Artistic Director and Chief Creative Officer of Long Beach Opera, James Darrah, tells PAPER of the performance: “Earth Ears was an opera but also a ritual, an experience and a group incantation that marked a new beginning. As the sun set over the ocean, all collectively were equal participants and shepherds of Oliveros’ sound world and witness to the magic her works can conjure.”
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Scenic Design by Prairie T. Trivuth
Costume Design by Chrisi Karvonides
Lighting Design by Kaitlin Trimble​
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Photographs: Jason Altaan, Prairie T. Trivuth
