Umbra is an adaptation of both an ancient myth and a true story: in 2017, my childhood best friend passed away by suicide. In the dizziness of her loss, Ovid’s Metamorphoses became my compass and my experience grieving for her became entangled with Orpheus’ story. I knew Orpheus’ grief—the feralness, the katabasis of dreams, the way time peels off from its linear trajectory and loops into itself.

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Umbra begins where the story typically ends—after Orpheus emerges from the Underworld without Eurydice. He wanders, feral and lost, in a mourning-silence. He returns to song, changed, and sings stories of love and death, drawing out the Bacchae from the woods to dismember him so he can finally reunite with Eurydice. 

 

Sung entirely in Latin, the production mirrors the ineffable, otherworldly experience of grief. The staging unfolds like a dream, inviting audiences to navigate the disorientation of loss with their emotional compass, traversing a surreal landscape where reality, myth, memory, and time collide. Characters move fluidly between mythic and contemporary worlds, while the Chorus shape-shifts from narrators to Bacchae, from extensions of Orpheus to figures in his memory and the world surrounding him.

 

The music draws from a variety of vocal traditions, such as Balkan folk song, Greek polyphony, madrigals, medieval liturgical chant, and choral jazz. The compact yet high-impact orchestra achieves complex texture through extended techniques, electronic processing and looping, and percussive roles taken on by the ensemble.

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The opera’s title itself bridges worlds: between its singular (“shade”) and plural (“underworld”), “umbra” contains ghosts, traces, simulacra, shadows, and shelters. Both nurturing and haunting, “umbra” entwines life and death.