Previous Mellon Collaborative Fellowship

Afterword: AACM as Opera

Composer and musicologist, George Lewis, composer and director of Opera Povera, Sean Griffin, and film and theater artist, Catherine Sullivan (University of Chicago, Department of Visual Arts), embark on the creation of an opera, film and related presentations based on the final chapter of Lewis’ award-winning 2008 book A Power Stronger Than Itself: the AACM and American Experimental Music.

Founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1965, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians has long played an internationally recognized role in American experimental music. On the occasion of the AACM’s 50th anniversary, George Lewis, Catherine Sullivan, and Sean Griffin have joined forces with the trail-blazing new music group, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), to fashion a multimedia opera that functions not as a history of the collective, but as a Bildungsoper–a coming-of age opera of ideas, positionality, and testament. The libretto is drawn from Lewis’s award-winning 2008 book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press).

Sullivan and Griffin have collaborated since 1996, creating historically minded performances in immersive theatrical environments that deploy unexpected turns of logic and deconstructed modes of behavior. The staging and choreography they have created deploy a very tangible and essential sense of ensemble that grows out of a rehearsal process born in improvisation.

Afterword eschews direct character representation of AACM artists. Rather, vocal and instrumental sections become avatars for young black experimentalists facing issues of power, authority, identity, culture, aesthetics, self-fashioning and representation. The awareness that we are hearing history, as it was being made in real, human time, brings us face to face with contingency, empathy, and wonder.

Afterword premiered at the MCA Chicago, October 15-17, 2015. More about the production HERE.

Course

Improvisational Dramaturgy
In Spring of 2014, composers Sean Griffin and George Lewis, and theater/film artist Catherine Sullivan taught a course exploring interdisciplinary and improvisational strategies for performance. Coursework was integrated with the development of a staging of an operatic composition by Lewis. Titled Afterword, the piece further explores the ecology of Lewis’ 2008 book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The A.A.C.M. and American Experimental Music. Issues of public assembly, spatial language, music as social text, documentation, collaboration, and the dynamics of improvisation were explored in theory, history and practice. The class, made up of students from many disciplines, worked as an ensemble, contributing original material and working with various groups both on and off campus.

Fellows

CATHERINE SULLIVAN

Catherine Sullivan works in a variety of media including film and theater. Her work is concerned with the psychic dilemmas of the performer and the historical and stylistic regimes that mediate our reception of performance. She has produced several performances, theater works and films wherein the performers are often coping with written texts, stylistic economies, re-enactments of historic performances, gestural and choreographic regimes, and conceptual orthodoxies.

GEORGE LEWIS

George E. Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Lewis has received a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), a United States Artists Walker Fellowship (2011), an Alpert Award in the Arts (1999), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

SEAN GRIFFIN

Los Angeles director, composer and conductor Sean Griffin is the director of Opera Povera, an interdisciplinary consortium devoted to the creation and performance of new operatic, musical, performance and exhibition projects. Griffin has been a resident fellow at Yaddo, MacDowell, EMPAC, and the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry.

Dr. Tung’s research focuses on disparities in chronic disease management, with a special interest in race, place, and poverty. She has participated in community-based strategies to improve chronic disease management in East St. Louis, Chinatown New York, and West Providence, in addition to her work on the South Side of Chicago. These experiences have led to a vested interest in addressing the social determinants of health and a commitment to eradicating health disparities. Her current research focuses on two main areas of inquiry. First, Dr. Tung is examining the relationships between race, poverty, and access to healthcare in adults with chronic disease, and has published on topics such as bypassing healthy resources, implicit bias, and retail redlining. Second, Dr. Tung is examining the intersection between community violence and chronic disease, and is applying geospatial analytical tools to bridge the worlds of violence epidemiology and health