Prototype Festival is an annual, weeklong contemporary opera and musical theater festival held in New York City.

Program

Prototype Festival is an annual, weeklong festival of contemporary opera and musical theater. The festival encourages nontraditional operatic compositions and performance, or "

black-box In science, computing, and engineering, a black box is a system which can be viewed in terms of its inputs and outputs (or transfer characteristics), without any knowledge of its internal workings. Its implementation is "opaque" (black). The te ...

opera", combining classical techniques with

experimental theater Experimental theatre (also known as avant-garde theatre), inspired largely by Wagner's concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, began in Western theatre in the late 19th century with Alfred Jarry and his Ubu plays as a rejection of both the age in particular ...

. Prototype has a reputation for showing "brash, socially engaged, and substantially post-classical" work—shows with highly charged, "dark, edgy" themes. Its shows are held in venues across New York City, including venues such as the HERE Arts Center,

La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (sometimes abbreviated as La MaMa E.T.C.) is an Off-Off-Broadway theater founded in 1961 by African-American theatre director, producer, and fashion designer Ellen Stewart. Located in the East Village neighborho ...

Joe's Pub Joe's Pub, one of the six performance spaces within The Public Theater, is a music venue and restaurant that hosts live performances across genres and arts, ranging from cabaret to modern dance to world music. It is located at 425 Lafayette Str ...

St. Paul's Chapel St. Paul's Chapel is a chapel building of Trinity Church (Manhattan), Trinity Church, an Episcopal Church (United States), Episcopal parish, located at 209 Broadway (Manhattan), Broadway, between Fulton Street (Manhattan), Fulton Street and V ...

, the

Park Avenue Armory The Park Avenue Armory, also known as the 7th Regiment Armory, is a historic armory for the U.S. Army National Guard at 643 Park Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. Designed in the Gothic Revival style ...

, St. Ann's Warehouse,

National Sawdust National Sawdust is a nonprofit music producer and Music venue, venue in Brooklyn, New York (state), New York with the goal of providing "composers and musicians across genres... a setting where they are given unprecedented support and critical re ...

, and

Skirball Center for the Performing Arts The Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, generally known as NYU Skirball, is an 850-seat theater at 566 LaGuardia Place in Manhattan, New York, owned by New York University. It was named after philanthropist Jack H. Skirball. The ...

Organization

The first Prototype Festival was organized by alternative opera producer

Beth Morrison Beth Morrison is an American producer of contemporary opera. Morrison is known for her collaborations with many artists through her company Beth Morrison Projects includes composers David T. Little, Missy Mazzoli, Du Yun, Paola Prestini, Kamala Sa ...

and the HERE Arts Center's Kristin Marting and Kim Whitener in 2013. Their intent was to highlight composers whose nontraditional work rarely received commissions.

Reception

The festival has a reputation for producing new operas of high quality. While classical music institutions struggled to sell new work to its core audience, classical music critic

Anne Midgette Anne Midgette (born June 22, 1965) is an American music critic who was the first woman to write classical music criticism regularly for ''The New York Times''. She was the chief classical music critic of ''The Washington Post'' from 2008 to 20 ...

cited Prototype as developing an audience for opera outside of these institutions and evolving the form into less of a "bourgeois art form". Prototype rose to prominence quickly, Midgette wrote, from a confluence of the opera world's "desperation" to find new, good work and the reduced costs of staging an experimental show outside of major mainstages. Without remaking the genre, she wrote that Prototype provides the creativity and energy to attempt new works. ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...

'' wrote that Prototype's 11-day 2014 lineup produced more substance for the format than a decade of the

New York City Opera The New York City Opera (NYCO) is an American opera company located in Manhattan in New York City. The company has been active from 1943 through its 2013 bankruptcy, and again since 2016 when it was revived. The opera company, dubbed "the peopl ...

. The magazine noted the festival's equal time given to female artists as deviant from New York theater norms. In 2024

Blogcritics Blogcritics is a blog network and online magazine of news and opinion. The site was founded in 2002 by Eric Olsen (writer), Eric Olsen and Phillip Winn. Blogcritics features more than 100 original articles every week, and maintains an archive of a ...

noted that the festival is "known for adventurous and outstanding programming from around the world" and ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'' wrote that its offerings "tend to be politically charged, scrappy and stirring."

World premieres

As of 2019, Prototype's headlining shows tended to premiere outside of the festival.

References

External links