PHILADELPHIA FRINGE FESTIVAL 2019

by ENAensemble

ENAensemble’s 2019 Fringe Festival Show Between features the staging of seven new operas

– six being the episodes that comprise our Serial Opera Project –

and a world premiere by our music director Evan Kassof and the librettist Aleksandar Hut Kono.

Opposite each new opera is a set by Philadelphia-based performers Brother Martin,

The Cheddar Boys, and Lee Mo.  Each night of our show promises to be an ecstatic experience

of music and theatre, bringing together over 30 people to perform and manage the production.

We need YOUR HELP to pay these artists a fair wage for their work, talent, passion, and vision.

We are grateful to already be supported by a generous $10,000 grant from the Presser Foundation

for the commissioning, development, and production of the Kassof/Hut Kono opera Ganymede 5.

This money has empowered us to create a bigger, more robust production in a theatre in the heart

of Center City Philadelphia. To manage the rest of the costs associated with this production, and to

help ENAensemble grow for future productions, we’re asking for your help in matching the $10,000

Presser Foundation grant. We will be updating our Instagram and Facebook Page during the campaign

with media from ENAartists around the world about why you should show ENAensemble some love! 

The Serial Opera Project

The Serial Opera Project is a six-month experiment in new opera making. Each month, a different composer/librettist team present their new work for a small ensemble of ENAartists. The premise, devised by Aleksandar Hut Kono, is simple: put your opera in a rundown old apartment building with a terrible, shaky, noisy elevator. Each month’s team has responded with drastically different interpretations of this premise, from a haunted elevator ride to a lesbian love story interrupted by the old lift’s noisy intrusions. Two singers and six instrumentalists will share many roles as we present the “binge-staging” of all six episodes in a newly devised production directed by Rose Freeman. ENAensemble is proud to have collaborated with 5 new composer/librettist teams, many of which have never written opera before. The first episode, The Elevator, was by the Kassof/Hut Kono team. April’s episode, Maximum Capacity was by ENAviolinist and composer Michael Shingo Crawford and librettist Traci TroiJustice Williams, May’s @Giselle, Love Fran was by composer Abigail Klempson and librettist Jerry Mathes III, June’s Lifting the Multiverse was by composer Timothy Arliss O’Brien and librettist JL Williams, July’s Potentialite is by composer Roger A. Martinez and librettist Alize Rozsnyai, and August’s yet-to-be-premiered opera is by composer Cortlandt Matthews and librettist Rick Beck.

Ganymede 5

What does humanity look like millennia after the planet is destroyed by climate change, resource wars, and the insatiable machinery of capitalism? This new opera by composer/librettist team Kassof/Hut Kono– their fourth collaboration – takes place in the far-future, where the answer to these questions is the basis of society. Here, representations of terrestrial nature have become the most taboo, pornographic imagery imaginable, and the innate human desire to seek the smell of hay (smut!), the feel of grass (filth!), and the sound of insects (perversion!) leads to catastrophe. Directed by Rose Freeman, four singers and seven players will bring to life this terrifying, passionate, and disturbing drama that, at its core, calls into question our own, contemporary objectification of nature.