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 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 HERE Arts Center is a New York City off-off-Broadway presenting house, founded in 1993. Their location includes two stages specializing in hybrid performance, dance, theater, multi-media and puppetry in addition to art exhibition space and a cafe ...

, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club,

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 St ...

, St. Paul's Chapel, the

Park Avenue Armory __NOTOC__ The Park Avenue Armory Conservancy, generally known as Park Avenue Armory, is a nonprofit cultural institution within the historic Seventh Regiment Armory building located at 643 Park Avenue on New York City's Upper East Side. The ins ...

, St. Ann's Warehouse, National Sawdust, 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 th ...

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 ...

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 weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

'' 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 2013 (when it filed for bankruptcy), and again since 2016 when it was revived. The opera company, du ...

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

World premieres

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

References

External links