Long Beach Opera presents West Coast premiere of IPSA DIXIT with Martha Graham Dance Company

Long Beach Opera presents West Coast premiere of IPSA DIXIT with Martha Graham Dance Company

Long Beach Opera (LBO) continues its 2024 season with the much-anticipated staged West Coast premiere of trailblazing composer Kate Soper’s IPSA DIXIT (“She, herself, said it”), a 90-minute tour-de-force that explores the integration of music, drama, and rhetoric, and was a finalist for a 2017 Pulitzer Prize. Called a “philosophy-opera” by The New Yorker, the work blends aspects of monodrama, Greek theater, and screwball comedy in a musical journey that examines the treachery of language and the questionable authenticity of artistic expression. Performances take place June 1, 8 & 9 at the historic Art Theatre cinema in Long Beach. A reception for all follows each performance.

The brand new production represents a continuation of LBO’s relationship with Soper, having most recently presented the world premiere of her opera The Romance of the Rose in 2023 to rave reviews. Notably, it also marks a role debut for the luminous soprano and frequent Darrah collaborator Anna Schubert, recently voted Best Opera Singer in 2023 San Francisco Classical Voice Awards, and whose LBO credits include The Romance of the Rose and Les enfants terribles

James Darrah, LBO’s Artistic Director & Chief Creative Officer, directs – integrating opera, film, text and dance to craft an overlapping and multi-sensory experience. Darrah’s new production of IPSA DIXIT will feature star dancers from the iconic Martha Graham Dance Company (marking their second appearance as LBO’s official artistic partner). Soper’s work will for the first time be complemented by original choreography based on unique fragments of Martha Graham’s works, choreographed and devised by the Graham Company artistic director Janet Eilber.  

Guided by LBO Music Director Christopher Rountree and staged with instrumentalists, dancers and film in a transformed former 1924 silent movie theater, the evening also draws unique visual and thematic juxtapositions to Soper’s text by featuring an overlapping screening of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s pivotal 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, here manipulated and re-created by filmmaker Adam Larsen. LBO’s production of IPSA DIXIT evokes Soper’s poignant inquiry into how art transforms across contexts and languages at every turn and Darrah says, “The show promises to be an avant-garde layered experience unlike any other we’ve produced—one that furthers our company’s dedication to groundbreaking art that evolves the boundaries and definition of the operatic form.”

IPSA DIXIT has captivated audiences since it first premiered in New York in December 2016. Composed over six years, and unfolding over the course of ninety minutes, Soper uses the piece to boldly question, “How can music unveil the very essence of being a thinker, a language-wielder, with all the glorious contradictions and limitations language itself brings?” To answer, she weaves her own words with excerpts from luminaries spanning disciplines and eras, from Aristotle to Freud to Lydia Davis. 

IPSA DIXIT will be at Long Beach’s Art Theatre June 1 and 8 at 7:30 pm and June 9 at 2:30 pm. For tickets and more information, click here.  

IPSA DIXIT by Long Beach Opera features Martha Graham Dance Company, Image credit Long Beach Opera