Description
For mature audiences
This interdisciplinary, experimental chamber opera-in-development for May’s Art X pilot event is a 30-minute performance of short scenes that include songs, dialogue, multimedia, puppets, audience interaction, acting, and stagecraft. The libretto and songs would be based on the forthcoming book Backvalley Ferrets: A Rewilding of the Colorado Plateau by Lawrence Lenhart. It should last approximately 30 minutes followed by a talk-back, reading, or panel discussion.
The project addresses environmental conservation, habitat restoration, and climate change. The opera brings these issues home by focusing on the fate of the black-footed ferret. Twice declared extinct, the black-footed ferret is making a comeback thanks to a conservation regimen at more than thirty reintroduction sites, including one in the Aubrey Valley in Northern Arizona. The ferrets inhabit a critical ecosystem that has dwindled to 1 percent of its former size. The plot interweaves the story of the ferrets with the personal drama of one family’s struggles to have children, asking what those choices mean in terms of environmental impacts and existential significance.
If the developmental chamber opera for the Art X pilot is successful, we intend to continue developing it into a full-length, fully produced opera for the Art X event the following year.
Will Cordeiro has an MFA and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Will’s work has been published in AGNI, Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Will won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award for Trap Street (2021). Will is also coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, forthcoming from Bloomsbury (2024). As a playwright, Will’s work has been seen on many off-off-Broadway stages in New York City and in venues throughout Arizona. Additionally, Will coedits the small press Eggtooth Editions.
Lawrence Lenhart holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. He is the author of The Well-Stocked and Gilded Cage (Outpost19), Of No Ground: Small Island/Big Ocean Contingencies (West Virginia University Press, 2024), and Backvalley Ferrets: A Rewilding of the Colorado Plateau (University of Georgia Press, 2023). His work appears in Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is the co-author of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024). Lenhart is the Associate Chair of the English Department at NAU and Executive Director of the Northern Arizona Book Festival.
Writer, musician, and teacher Rob Wallace holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His recordings can be found on the pfMentum and Ambiances Magnétiques record labels. He is the author of Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism (Bloomsbury) and co-editor (with Ajay Heble) of People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now! (Duke), along with numerous other articles, book chapters, reviews, poetry, and other publications.
Rebecca Whitehurst received her BA in Philosophy from Stanford, and then attended the CalArts MFA program in Choreography before embarking on a professional career with Diavolo Dance Theater. Freelancing as an actor, director, & choreographer in New York City led her to the Institute for Advanced Theater Training MXAT/A.R.T. at Harvard, where she received an MFA in Acting. While on a Fulbright Scholarship to Russia, Rebecca spent a year doing research, guest teaching and choreographing for actors at the Moscow Art Theatre School. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Theatre at NAU.
