Breathing Free

Join Yale Alumni College for a virtual night out at the Heartbeat Opera. We’ll be hosted by Yale School of Drama lecturer, Ethan Heard ’07, ’13 MFA, and Co-Artistic Director Louisa Proske (YSD '12)for a private pre-performance reception and an extraordinary production called Breathing Free. Ethan Heard is the Founding Co-Artistic Director of the Heartbeat Opera Company, and the Director of Breathing Free, a curated song cycle featuring 9 interconnected music videos with excerpts from Beethoven's Fidelio, Negro spirituals, and works by Harry T. Burleigh, Florence Price, Langston Hughes, Anthony Davis, and Thulani Davis which together manifest a dream of justice, equity... and breathing free.

The performance will be followed by a panel discussion called Decolonizing Opera. In the wake of Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th-century opera rose to masterful heights with its dramaturgy of justice, freedom, and truth, while ignoring the Euro-American genocide and enslavement of over 12 million African people. How did opera participate by looking away? And what would decolonizing opera look like? Panelists include:

• Moderator: Davóne Tines, Bass-Baritone and Founding Member of American Modern Opera Company
• Sue Dixon, General Director, Portland Opera
• Derrell Acon, Vocalist, Breathing Free, Director of Engagement and Equity, Long Beach Opera
• Alexa Smith, Chief of Staff and Assistant Vice President for Special Initiatives, Manhattan School of Music

MISSION

From the drama at the core of each work, Heartbeat Opera grows vivid theatrical worlds through revelatory adaptations, radical rearrangements, and ingenious design. Through an inquisitive collaborative process with a diverse community of artists, we break down traditional barriers to reimagine opera for artists and audiences of the twenty-first century.

WORK

In its first six seasons, Heartbeat has presented twelve fully-realized productions, often featuring new chamber arrangements and English translations. Heartbeat adaptations, which can be seen as world premieres of classics, speak to the moment, here and now. Fidelio featured a primarily-Black cast and more than 100 incarcerated singers from six prison choirs. Carmen was set on the U.S./Mexico border and featured accordion, electric guitar, and saxophone. This spring, Heartbeat took Lady M, its adaptation of Verdi’s Macbeth, online and sold out 32 Virtual Soirées, reaching 740 households across 5 continents. Heartbeat has taken its productions to the Kennedy Center, BAM, and Chamber Music North West in Portland, Oregon. It staged the first-ever opera performance on The High Line and has mounted its immensely popular, interdisciplinary Halloween Drag Extravaganza each year since its founding, in iconic venues such as National Sawdust and Roulette.

Heartbeat has been hailed across the national and international press, including in three features in The New York Times, in stories on CNN and the BBC, and in an ALL ARTS/WNET documentary: “Bracing—icy vodka shots of opera instead of ladles of cream sauce” (New York Times), “elegant and boisterous” (New Yorker), “fascinating and gorgeous” (Observer), “ingenious” (Wall Street Journal), “gripping and entertaining” (Opernwelt), "a flat out triumph" (Opera News).

Heartbeat has collaborated with organizations such as Atlas DIY and A BroaderWay to bring opera education to young people in NYC. It is represented by the world-class artist agency Opus 3 Artists.