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. 

News

Events

17

Oct

 Oct 17, 2015, 1:30 AM – 1:30 AM
 Edlis Neeson Theater at the MCA Chicago, 220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago IL 60611

Mellon fellows 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 AACM, but as a “Bildungsoper”--a coming-of age opera of ideas, positionality, and testament.  

17

Oct

 Oct 17, 2015, 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM
 Humanities Day at University of Chicago, Logan Center for the Arts

915 E. 60th St, Screening Room 201

Composer George Lewis reflects on Afterword, an Opera as a “Bildungsoper”—a coming-of-age opera of ideas and testament—whose libretto he drew from his 2008 book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press). 

7

Apr

 Apr 07, 2020, 7:00 PM – 2:00 AM
 TBD

The Gray Center inaugurates its new streaming series Gray Sound Sessions with a singular event: Opera Povera's production of FULL PINK MOON: Opera Povera in Quarantine, a livestream fundraising opera performance of visionary composer Pauline Oliveros’s open-form people’s opera entitled “The Lunar Opera; Deep Listening For_Tunes.”

A durational virtual opera featuring vocalists, instrumentalists, noise practitioners, and performers of all kinds, FULL PINK MOON will feature a collective virtual performance by 250+ artists from around the world, and a pre-opera virtual discussion co-hosted by former Gray Center fellows George Lewis and Sean Griffin, artist Ron Athey, and additional guest curators and artists. Featuring an inclusive and collaborative score by Oliveros, FULL PINK MOON allows each performer to actively determine all creative choices: when and how to perform, choose cues, characters, costumes, and props, and harness creative performance power to reach out and share with each other in a time of separation and quarantine with a collective structure that Oliveros defined as “dedicated to tolerance and freedom.”