BARCELONA, MAP OF SHADOWS

Based on a play by celebrated Catalan playwright Lluïsa Cunillé, Barcelona, Map of Shadows is takes place in a single evening during the radio broadcast of Maria Callas’ 1956 studio recording of La Boheme. The opera within the opera is heard intermittently in 5 scenes in which HE and SHEask their renters - a French teacher, a second-string soccer player turned security guard, and a young Latin American immigrant - to move out so that they can be left alone in the waning days of HE's terminal illness. Throughout the opera, we come to find HE is the retired doorman of Barcelona’s Liceu Opera House, where he once had a chance encounter with Callas herself. The contradictions and secret entanglements of HE and SHE’s lives are revealed alongside the past and future of their city, haunted by the Spanish Civil War and in the throes of gentrification.

Co-Produced with American Opera Projects and written in collaboration with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).