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Little City Concerts: Waking the Witch
October 19 @ 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Balance Campaign returns to Little City Concerts to open their 2024-2025 season with Waking the Witch.
Waking the Witch is a one-act immersive chamber opera, composed by Ashi Day, for solo countertenor and Pierrot ensemble. The opera explores human vulnerability to absurd beliefs and the danger that ensues when authority figures display black-and-white thinking, fear of those with less power, and susceptibility to conspiracy theories. The audience is placed in the middle of the action as the accused witch, physically surrounded with a single-minded interrogator and animal familiars of questionable reality (played by the treble instruments). Using text derived from both historical witchfinders and modern-day statesmen with eerily similar messaging, listeners are tossed between the wild ride of a spooky story, the frustration of navigating the impossible logic of power mixed with bizarre moral panic, and the dangerous reality that these things did, and in many ways still do, happen.
CREATIVE TEAM
Ashi Day, composer and librettist
Min Sang Kim, countertenor
Lee Cromwell, director
Balance Campaign, Pierrot ensemble
The development of Waking the Witch received funding from OPERA America’s Opera Grants for Women Composers: Discovery Grants program, supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation.
