Trained at the Peabody Conservatory and the Boyer College of Music and Dance at Temple University, soprano Kerri Lynn Slominski conducted in Texas, Arkansas, “up and down on the East Coast,” in her own words, and in Italy. But not very much in the Rochester area, much to the sadness of the Spencerport High School graduate, and she’s not alone.
“We have several classically trained professional musicians in Rochester, and many of them don’t have opportunities. It’s a shame for me,” Slominski said. “I’m from Rochester and I leave Rochester to perform.”
This setting was one of Slominski’s encouragement and two other sopranos, Elisabeth Halliday-Quan and Heather Holmquest, to create ROCOpera, an opera collective designed to produce and publicize new works, as well as reinterpret the classical canon of fashionable sensibility and bring out the opera. concert halls and spaces.
Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, ROCOpera’s first functionality will in fact be outside the concert aisle, out of physical space, period. “Total Request Live (TRL): The Opera Edition” will be presented online at the KeyBand Rochester Fringe Festival 2020, one of more than 170 occasions as a component of next month’s 12-day festival, which is completely online this year from September 15 to September. 26. “TRL” will be a loose show, with donations accepted.
In its ninth year, the Fringe fest is a birthday party of the artistic spirit in all its forms, offering a little bit of everything: dance, serious drama, comedy, improvisation, spoken creation, storytelling, visual arts, interactive works, magic, circus. arts, cinema, even yo-yo experience, as well as music in many genres, ranging from a cappella to select rock, from bronze church bells to metal drums. Last year, the festival brought more than 100,000 people to Rochester last year for a variety of art, for everyone.
“TRL” Slominski’s original idea, a way to interact and invest directly to the audience in the series. Until September 10, others can vote online for their favorite opera melodies, as well as what they need from a specific singer: seven are concerned about functionality (the 3 founders and Pablo Bustos, Tyler Cassidy-Heacock, Juli Elliott and Nicholas Kilkenny, as well as pianists Alex Kuczynski and Lee Wright) – to sing. Songs that receive maximum votes will be presented in a countdown similar to watching the MTV music video a few years ago.
“We were looking for a way to make our audience worry, we were looking for them to have what we do in general,” Slominski said. “I’m a thousand years old. I grew up with MTV, I used to see the countdown to the music video as a teenager. I had this idea, what if we got to the public to vote on the air?” The Fringe Festival seemed the best position to launch the exhibition, and the collective, due to its popularity and the experimental and unconventional nature of many of its exhibitions. A TRL-themed opera exhibition seemed like the best combination.
And it is in line with the collective’s mission: “Fundamentally, we seek to create an opera that was for and for the city of Rochester,” Slominski said: to provide new works through living artists; Reinvent older works (the big shots of the opera world, such as “La Bohéme” or “La Traviata”, with fashionable sensibility, and give the opera outdoors its classic stages (and with singers not necessarily dressed and tuxedo) – presenting the opera as a live and breathing art and entertainment instead of a museum piece. Slominski said he was in negotiations with venues, which usually host rock or jazz displays, to host ROCOpera once the pandemic is over and that entertainment venues can simply reopen.
“We need to show the audience that the opera is still applicable, and that’s pretty good!” She.
You can vote for the air in shorturl.at/arM57. The exhibition will be available from September 15 and the festival in rochesterfringe.com.
On the strip
“TRL: Opera Edition” is just one of 175 virtual productions that will be presented next month as a component of the “KeyBank Rochester Fringe Festival @Home”. This year, thanks to the new coronavirus, the functionality rallies ended: the 2019 festival included more than 665 performances in more than 25 locations, but Fringe remains a fear in the dozen days planned. The festival will take place online from 15 to 26 September, with a combination or occasions loose and paid as in a general year.
“Unfortunately, there will be no giant floating sea creatures in my living room,” Senator Joe Morelle said Tuesday at an online press conference, referring to last year’s popular Plasticiens Volants aerial puppet show. But I can’t wait to take part in many other occasions and enjoy the festival at home.”
Tickets for the exhibits went on sale on Tuesday; can be ordered at rochesterfringe.com, where a full program was also created on Tuesday with brief descriptions of each program.
“We are very pleased with the number of artists, from across the Greater Rochester region, the United States and around the world, who would not be discouraged by a global pandemic or the global virtual, and have taken the opportunity to be artistic and with the public,” festival maker Erica Fee said in a statement. “The fact that we have so many attractive productions this year shows that there is a genuine desire for virtual platforms like that, that allow artists to be listened to, and that communities face complicated unrest in these difficult times.”
In fact, many of the systems deal with facets of reports of blacks, LGBTQs, deaf people and the elderly, and some are directly confronted with the pandemic and related blockade. In the comedy “Edith vs. Quarantine: 89 – One Touch Cookie”, for example, an octogenarian who hasn’t left her apartment in New York since the virus hit through the virus shows her affair – Zoom with her late husband, making a song to her taxidermy cat, pretending to be a snake. In “The Canadian Wiggler,” in the middle of the lockdown in May, a lonely boy (played by well-known local actor Rick Staropoli) and a troubled young woguy (played by Emma Neukirch, a sophomore primary at the Rochester Institute) of Technology) find themselves through the possibility in a remote domain of a park at the height of the pandemic , locating the comfort they seek with the help of an elusive bird.
There are several favorites coming back this year: “Between Silences” sold out last year, in which 8 of Rochester’s top actresses make up 17 other women in various situations, getting a cover. Brooklyn-based black-folk-folk cabaret duo Charming Disaster, who played in 4 performances at the Nox Cocktail Bar last year, is on the itinerary, re-associating each of their songs with tarot cards drawn through members of sudiance, as well as Hobart and William Smith. Katherine Marino’s whimsical combination of mime, ballet and functional art, “Muffin Theatre Presents, a Cookie Show,” in a marginal exhibition film from last year. BIODANCE artists, who have provided Frange exhibits with sold-out tickets, will provide a series of short videos.
Also back: the podcast called Pultizer through Nate DiMeo, “The Memory Palace”. Last year, Fringe commissioned DiMeo and The Memory Palace to a podcast of “George Eastman”; This year he brings two more podcasts on local history: “From the Parking Lot” (a world premiere) at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, where Frederick Douglass delivered his outstanding speech “What to the Slave is the Four of July” and “High Falls” which debuted on “On-Site Listening Experience” last year. Both new episodes will be available through Radiotopia, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Stitcher, as well as on the Fringe website.
To give some of Fringe’s diversity, here is a small pattern of the performances:
In comedy, a socially applicable woman who, according to Orlando Weekly, “sets racial stereotypes,” “Mo-to-the-onole” (another Fringe display, redesigned for online media) talks about a black bronx teenager who will have to wear a monocle after her father has lost confidence in her vision.
Al Biles and Gen Jam is an unconventional jazz duo: the professor emeritus of the Rochester Institute of Technology Al Biles is a human trumpeter, while Gen Jam, or Genetic Jammer, is a PC software that evolves its musical concepts in real time. They will pay attention to others and respond in spontaneous improvisation to melodies from various sources: bop, swing, Latin, pop.
A plays several characters in a fictional exploration of the 2006 film in an Amish network school in Jessica Dickey’s film “The Amish Project”.
“Conversations” is a collection of dance works (traditional and contemporary) from various cultural practices in Africa, including performances through Brockport’s Sankofa African Dance and Drum Ensemble, Guinean drummer Mohamed Diathrough and choreography by Jenise Anthony and Kelly Johnson of Trinidad.
– Unmissable for ‘The Office’ enthusiasts, Literally Entertainment presents ‘The Scranton Strangler: An Office Musical’, a parody of the TELEVISION series in which a killer targets Dunder Mifflin’s staff.
The Bard is enduring as Fringe’s favorites Matt and Heidi Brucker Morgan, and his team will create a visual production of their Shakespeare-based libertine drinking game: “Shotspeare presents the complete works of William ShakespeareArray… more or less.”
The full schedule, price ticket information, sponsor list, and product store can be found in rochesterfringe.com.
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