The Fifth Avenue Hotel is pleased to present an evening of conversation and performance coinciding with The Metropolitan Opera’s production of Ainadamar and following Marcel Dzama’s recent contribution to the 2023 Performa Biennial, To live on the Moon (For Lorca), which includes a film component that will be screened at the event.
Both highlighting and celebrating the dichotomy between two revered institutions dedicated to the art of performance, this program pairs the classical and the conceptual—uptown and downtown—to explore how the legacy of legendary poet-playwright Federico García Lorca continues to inspire artists across disciplines and has resulted in two distinct outcomes.
The evening will feature a conversation between artist Marcel Dzama, RoseLee Goldberg (Founding Director and Chief Curator, Performa), and David Henry Hwang (Grammy and Tony Award-winning librettist of Ainadamar.) Afterward, guests will enjoy a special performance from Ainadamar by principal cast members Angel Blue (Grammy Award-winning soprano) and Daniela Mack (world-renowned mezzo-soprano.) A reception will follow the performance.
This program is open to guests of The Fifth Avenue Hotel and is otherwise by invitation.
Capacity is limited and reservations are required. Please write to experiences@thefifthavenuehotel.com for more information and to inquire about attendance.
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Angel Blue has emerged in recent seasons as one of the most influential sopranos before the public today, celebrated worldwide for her honeyed soprano and affecting deliveries of many of the most beloved roles in the operatic repertory. In 2019, Blue opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2019-20 season as Bess in a new production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, for which she earned a Grammy Award in the Best Opera Recording category. She reprised this role at the Met in Autumn 2021, which immediately followed her triumphant role debut as Destiny/Loneliness/Greta in the Met’s historic 2021-22 season opener Fire Shut Up In My Bones, for which she received her second Grammy Award. Blue is the recipient of the Met’s prestigious Beverly Sills Award—the first Black artist to receive this honor—and she was the 2022 Richard Tucker Foundation Awardee. She has been praised for performances in nearly every major opera house in the world, including Teatro alla Scala, Covent Garden, the Vienna State Opera, Semperoper Dresden, San Francisco Opera, Seattle Opera, Theater an der Wien, Oper Frankfurt, and San Diego Opera. For more information, click here.
Since rising to prominence in the late 1990s, Marcel Dzama has developed an immediately recognizable visual language that investigates human action and motivation, as well as the blurred relationship between the real and the subconscious. Drawing equally from folk vernacular as from art historical and contemporary influences, Dzama’s work visualizes a universe of childhood fantasies and otherworldly fairy tales. In 2016, the artist created the costume and stage design for New York City Ballet’s The Most Incredible Thing, a performance based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale of the same title. Coinciding with the performance, Dzama also created an installation in the Promenade of the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center as part of the New York City Ballet Art Series, titled The tension around which history is built. In November 2023, Dzama presented To live on the Moon (For Lorca), a film and performance commissioned for the Performa Biennial, presented at Abrons Art Center, Henry Street Playhouse, New York Dzama has exhibited widely at notable institutions domestically and abroad. Work by the artist is held in museum collections worldwide, including the Dallas Museum of Art; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Dzama is represented by David Zwirner, where he has presented sixteen solo exhibitions since 2000. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. For more information, click here.
A world-renowned art historian, critic, and curator, RoseLee Goldberg is the Founding Director and Chief Curator of Performa. Launched in 2004 to create a highly visible public platform for contemporary art and performance, Performa has changed public and academic perceptions of performance art with its exciting citywide biennial, groundbreaking commissions, publications, and original arts broadcasting platform. Performa has inspired the establishment of performance departments in cultural institutions around the world. Goldberg’s many publications include her pioneering book Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, first published in 1979 and now translated in fourteen languages; and Performance Now: Live Art for the 21st Century (2018). Formerly the Director of the Royal College of Art Gallery, London and Curator of The Kitchen in New York City, Goldberg has organized performance series at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. Her many accolades include a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Government, Yoko Ono’s Courage Award for the Arts, the Agnes Gund Curatorial Award, and the title of Honorary Adviser to the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan. For more information, click here.
David Henry Hwang is a playwright, screenwriter, television writer, and librettist, whose stage works includes the plays M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, Chinglish, Golden Child, The Dance and the Railroad, and FOB, as well as the Broadway musicals Aida, Flower Drum Song and Disney’s Tarzan. Called America’s most-produced living opera librettist by Opera News, he has written fourteen libretti, including five works with composer Philip Glass. He is a 2006 Grammy Award winner for Ainadamar, with music by Osvaldo Golijov, as well as Alice In Wonderland with Unsuk Chin; The Fly with Howard Shore; two works with Bright Sheng (The Silver River and Dream of the Red Chamber); and four with Huang Ruo (An American Soldier, The Rift, The Monkey King, and M. Butterfly). Hwang was a Spotlight Playwright at Signature Theatre, which produced a season of his plays, and M. Butterfly was revived on Broadway in 2017, directed by Julie Taymor. Hwang is a Trustee of the American Theatre Wing, where he served as Chair from 2016-21. He also sits on the Council of the Dramatists Guild and is a Professor of Theatre at Columbia University School of the Arts. Mr. Hwang is a Tony Award winner and three-time nominee, a Grammy Award winner who has been twice nominated, a three-time OBIE Award winner, and a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Recent honors include his 2022 induction onto the Lucille Lortel Playwrights Sidewalk, his 2021 election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his 2018 induction into the Theater Hall of Fame. For more information, click here.
Mezzo-Soprano Daniela Mack leads the vanguard of a new generation of opera singers, infusing her artistry with a mix of intensity, adventurousness, and effortless charisma. Mack has made several important debuts including: The Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera House, and the Teatro Real in Madrid. She has also appeared at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Santa Fe Opera, Washington National Opera, Seattle Opera, English National Opera, Deutsche Oper Berlin, and the Verbier Festival. She created roles in the world premieres of Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell’s Elizabeth Cree (title role) at Opera Philadelphia and in David T. Little and Royce Vavrek’s JFK (Jacqueline Kennedy) at Fort Worth Opera, with subsequent performances at the Opéra de Montréal. Mack is also a distinguished concert singer and has appeared with the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony, Hong Kong Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Symphony, BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande; last season, she made her Carnegie Hall debut with the English Concert. Born in Buenos Aires, Mack studied at Louisiana State University and was a finalist in the 2013 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition. She is also an alumna of the famed Adler Fellowship Program at San Francisco Opera. For more information, click here.
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Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov’s Grammy Award–winning first opera dramatizes the life and work of poet-playwright Federico García Lorca, who was assassinated by Fascist forces at the start of the Spanish Civil War for his socialist politics and homosexuality. His story emerges through the memories of Catalan actress Margarita Xirgu, Lorca’s muse—sopranos Angel Blue and Gabriella Reyes—who reminisces to her student Nuria, portrayed by soprano Elena Villalón. Lorca himself makes a dreamlike appearance, sung as a trouser role by mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack, and flamenco singer Alfredo Tejada completes the principal cast as the Falangist politician Ramón Ruiz Alonso, who arranged Lorca’s execution. Combining features of both an opera and a passion, Ainadamar, conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya in his Met debut, crackles with the energy and rhythms of flamenco and rumba, as well as the violent backdrop of civil war, all of which springs forth on the Met stage in a vivid company-debut production by Brazilian director and choreographer Deborah Colker, renowned for her work with Cirque du Soleil. For more information, click here.
