an opera-theater work on grief and transformation

Elliot Menard is an opera-maker—a vocal performer, composer, and producer—working at the nexus of opera-theater, new music, and experimental performance. As a composer, Elliot explores how text allows music to emerge and the expressive range of the voice. A recent composer in residence at Millay Arts and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, her work has been programmed at Highways Performance Space (“Southern California’s boldest center for new performance”), the Hear Now Music Festival, CalArts, the N.E.O. Voice Festival, Open Gate Theatre, and Renegade Opera. As a versatile mezzo-soprano, Elliot brings her sincere and sensitive artistry to interdisciplinary and polystylistic music-theater projects. Recent performance highlights include Metabolic Studio’s Bending the River: An Oratorio, Overtone Industries’ production of Songs and Dances of Imaginary Lands as part of Opera Fest LA, CalArts’ production of Here Be Sirens (Kate Soper) as Polyxo, and New Opera Days Ostrava’s premiere of Partial Memories (Judith Berkson). She holds an M.F.A. in Voice Arts from CalArts and a B.A. in Classics from Reed College.

Héctor Alvarez is an interdisciplinary artist working in performance, theater, film, and opera. His directing has been praised as “visually gorgeous and fulsome, so rich and sensitive in detail” (The Chicago Reader). He is a Princess Grace Award Winner, Drama League Directing Fellow, Watson Fellow, and was the Theodore U. Horger Artist-in-Residence in the Performing Arts at Lehigh University in 2023-2024. In 2025 he was awarded Opera America’s Robert L.B. Tobin Director-Designer Award. Recent directing credits include the operas Umbra and Here Be Sirens, the plays Antigonick, Roberto Zucco and The Water Station (CalArts, Los Angeles) and We’re Gonna Die, a film re-imagining of Young Jean Lee’s existential cabaret about mortality. The film was created in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic and was named one of 2020’s Top Cultural Picks by WDCB’s The Arts Section. Héctor is the founder of Stupleme, a collective of emerging BIPOC and immigrant artists committed to experimentation and is assistant teaching professor of theater at Emory University.