Barcelona Map of Shadows (opera)
Mabou Mines/Skirball CenterComposer Mika Karlsson (Recipient of a NYSCA Commission)
Based on a play by Lluissa Cunille
Barcelona Map of Shadows is a mysterious story of the rented rooms in a rented apartment in an upper middle class neighborhood, and its terminally ill lease holder whose dying request is to be left alone with his wife. In 5 perplexing scenes by turns comic and tragic, he and his wife ask their tenants - a french teacher, a second string soccer play/security guard, and a young pregnant immigrant - to leave. It is also a story of the city itself, on the brink of losing its identity to globalization. The characters identities are far from fixed, their shifting subjectivities undo the social codings of high and low, masculine and feminine, center and the margin. Far from being a story of nostalgia for a city mourning its own loss, it instead transports you to those mysterious, marginal, concealed spaces that exist in the realm of everyday urban life where identity is always elusive and enigmatic. Recipient of a NYSCA Commission for composer Mika Karlsson.