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For the best experience we recommend viewing this video horizontally and listening with headphones.

This moment in the life of James Baldwin represents temporality, impermanence, futility of dreams and reckoning with the finality of inequality of life in the USA for Black Americans. Baldwin realizes that never in his lifetime will people of color achieve equity or equality..the boxes for blacks and whites have been set..with civil rights almost non-existent.

Cast

Renee Baker

Composer

Renee Baker

Composer

Her New Music demands to be heard and experienced in a new way. Listening to the horizontal line, one is more prone to listen, dismiss and move on.

Her scores are inadvertently defiant in the way they make listeners stop, stay with each sonic vignette, each sound. They have to reset old notions as to what music scores or filmsound arenas actually are, what emotional, aural and visual stimuli are.

They can, if they wish, take them apart with the wonder of children taking apart toys and putting them back together again. Hence, the re-ordering of the accepted audiovisual cosmology.
Renée Baker has created sonic arenas, scores and compositions for many museums including MCA CHICAGO, MOFA St. Petersburg, Fl., Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MOMA, NY, ARTS CLUB OF CHICAGO, DESTEJILK MUSEUM, Zwolle, NL , MOMA NY, Spurlock Museum Champaign, Il, Krannert Art Museum,Milwaukee Ibstitute of Art and Design, Stony Island Arts Bank, DuSable Museum Chicago, Gardener Museum Boston, alongside prestigious music orgs, Symphony Center, Chicago. She has the privilege of being Visiting Resident Artist of the CHICAGO SYMPHONY AAN 2017-2020.

Her film scores for BODY AND SOUL, THE SCAR OF SHAME along with two new opera projects BALDWIN CHRONICLES MIDNIGHT RAMBLE and A SOVEREIGN POUT both premiered at Symphony Center in 2019 and in 2020. She has authored 8 operas to date. The scene shot for Chicago Fringe Opera in 2021 is an excerpt of the third and final installation of the Baldwin Chronicles: Lone Alchemy (world premiere) featuring vocalist Dee Alexander and multi instrumentalist Adam Zanolini, fellow AACM members of Ms Baker..

Films with her scores have aired on NETFLIX and TCM.

Dee Alexander

Performer

Dee Alexander

Performer

Dee is among the premier vocalists and songwriters in American music today, and one of Chicago’s most gifted and respected artists. Her performances span virtually every music genre related to the African diaspora: gospel, blues, neo-soul, rhythm-and-blues, and world music. But her true heart belongs to jazz, the one idiom that can encompass all her influences. She gravitated toward jazz at an early age and names Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald among her major influences, as well as Chicago saxophonist Henry Huff, who encouraged her to take risks and cross boundaries, setting her on the path to becoming one of the most accomplished voice improvisers in the world today. Her 2007 “Sirens of Song” tribute to Nina Simone and Dinah Washington (commissioned by the Jazz Institute of Chicago), at Chicago’s Pritzker Pavilion, introduced her to a larger audience and helped her garner world recognition as well, resulting in frequent tours of France, Finland, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Poland. Dee boasts long and fruitful associations with Chicago’s jazz elite (including Ramsey Lewis, Orbert Davis, and Nicole Mitchell), and leads two of her own bands: the Dee Alexander Quartet and the Evolution Ensemble, which emphasizes original compositions.

Coco Eltsses

Percussion

Luv Mosley

Saxophone

Artistic Team

Concept/Director
George Cederquist

George Cederquist

Concept/Director

George is the Producing Artistic Director of Chicago Fringe Opera, called “the city’s alt-opera company” by the Chicago Tribune. Recent directing credits for the company include LA JETEÉ and CORSAIR, as well as the company’s long-running hit show THE ROSINA PROJECT, a Hip-Hop adaptation of THE BARBER OF SEVILLE.
In addition, George has directed new productions and workshops of operas, musicals, and plays with Opera Festival of Chicago, Chicago Dramatists, the Chicago Sinfonietta, Pittsburgh Opera, the Bay View Music Festival and Chicago Folks Operetta.
An inspiring mentor, George is the Producing Artistic Director of Opera and Theatre at North Park University.

Now in its ninth season, George hosts OPERA BOX SCORE [America’s Talk Radio Show About Opera] on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and WNUR 89.3 FM Chicago.

To learn more about George, visit gjcederquist.com. He proudly uses zero social media platforms.

Concept/Commissioning/Music Direction
Catherine O'Shaughnessy

Catherine O'Shaughnessy

Concept/Commissioning/Music Direction

Catherine O’Shaughnessy is a rising orchestral and opera conductor in the United States and abroad. Her performances have earned rave reviews from the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Classical Review (“great skill, alertness and sensitivity”), and Vocal Arts Chicago (“resourcefulness…scrappiness and…fierce concentration”). Avidly committed to Chicago’s dynamic musical scene, she is currently the music director of Chicago Fringe Opera, and Principal Conductor of the 5th Wave Collective. In 2020, she proudly helped produce Fringe’s contribution to the Decameron Opera Coalition’s Tales From a Safe Distance—winner of the “Best Collaboration” award from 360° of Opera—which makes innovative use of technology to reimagine this art for challenging new circumstances.

A semi-finalist in the 2016 Spazio Musica International Conducting Competition, Catherine made her New York debut conducting Antonio Salieri’s La Cifra with the dell’Arte Opera Ensemble. She has also music directed Pyramus and Thisbe in Freiberg (Mittelsächsisches Theater) and conducted Don Giovanni and La Traviata in Orvieto (Teatro Mancinelli). In 2013 she conducted the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra at a sold-out performance in Tchaikovsky Hall, and in 2017 she guest-conducted the Piccadilly Symphony Orchestra (Manchester, UK). Catherine holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in orchestral and opera conducting from Arizona State University, where she was a student of William Reber and Timothy Russell.

Concept/Editor
Brad Caleb Lee

Brad Caleb Lee

Concept/Editor

Brad Caleb Lee is a UK based visual dramaturge. With CFO he designed Lucrezia, The Long Christmas Dinner, Woyzeck, Corsair and co-conceived A City of Works. Other collaborators include East Riding Theatre, Opera’r Ddraig, Summer Theatre of New Cannon, Richard Burton Theatre Company, Elan Frontoio, Welsh National Opera, Opera Sonic, Music Theatre Wales, Prague Shakespeare Company, Theatre Tuscaloosa, Hell in a Handbag, and Filament Theatre.

Brad curated and designed YOUR VOICE!, an immersive community-driven exhibition reopening the Wales Millennium Centre, was the Curatorial Producer of Prague Quadrennial 2019, was featured in World Stage Design 2017, and co-designed the award-winning British pavilion, MAKE/BELIEVE for PQ2015 / Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Brad is the founding editor of Ascending and has previously edited other publications on theatre design. He holds an MA from the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama and both a BA and a BS of Commerce from The University of Alabama.

Supported by The MacArthur Funds for Arts and Culture at The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, The CityArts Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, & the Illinois Arts Council Agency. Chicago Fringe Opera is an Opera America Partner.

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