Rhymes With Opera annual Opera Potluck Salon at the Flea Theater

Rhymes With Opera
hosts annual Opera Potluck Salon
at the Flea Theater
Wednesday, December 4, 2019 at 7:30pm

Rhymes With Opera (RWO) will present its annual Opera Potluck Salon on Wednesday, December 4, 2019 at the Flea Theater, 20 Thomas Street, NYC. Doors open at 7pm and performances begin at 7:30pm, with a suggested donation of $10. The Salon features performances from the Rhymes With Opera ensemble, composer and cellist Fjóla Evans, songs from the Downtown alt-cabaret songwriting No Hope, and sound artist Matthew Sullivan.
 
The RWO Salon series was founded in the fall of 2011 as a communal event at which composers and new musicians could try out new work in front of their peers. As much a social event as it is a performance, the RWO Salon is a celebratory gathering where performers are invited to share their work, and attendants are invited to bring dessert to share as they experience new pieces performers have to offer. By design, the boundaries between performer and audience fade, so the audience gets to witness professional new music at close range and the performer gets the rare chance to interact with their audience face-to-face.
 
This year’s RWO Salon will take place at The Flea Theatre, where Rhymes With Opera serves as an Anchor Partner for the 2019-20 season. 
 
For more information, visit www.rhymeswithopera.org.

No Hope songwriting team, Tim Aumiller and Scott Schneider, has written five full-length musicals and presented more than a dozen evenings of new music including two sold out shows at the legendary Joe’s Pub – Siren/Kings In Concert and their anniversary celebration Pulling The Plug: a decade of NO HOPE. Their musical Hello, My Name Is Billy was a FringeNYC award winner and a Backstage “Critic’s Pick.” On film, their song “Fools Like You” was featured in the award-winning documentary Actress and their music video for “Evolution” featuring Siren was released in the Fall of 2017. Sheet music for their compositions is available through The NO HOPE Songbook Volume I: 2003-2013 (published by Scissortail Press), which includes their MAC Award nominated song “So Many Reasons.” Their song cycle The Year After debuted to a sold out house at The Green Room 42 in the fall of 2018. Their most recent work, Once Begun, was presented at The Fresh Fruit Festival this past summer and received an award for Outstanding One Act.
 
Fjóla Evans is a Canadian/Icelandic composer and cellist. Her work explores the visceral physicality of sound while drawing inspiration from patterns of natural phenomena. Commissions and performances have come from musicians such as Bang on a Can All-Stars pianist Vicky Chow, Grammy-winning ensemble eighth blackbird, and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. Her work has been featured on the MATA Festival, Bang on a Can Marathon, Ung Nordisk Musik, and the American Composers Orchestra’s SONiC Festival. As a performer, she has presented her own work at Cluster Festival of New Music, (le) poisson rouge, and at Toronto’s Music Gallery.
 
Matthew Sullivan is a Brooklyn-based sound artist and producer whose diverse career in creating and curating sound encompasses records, films, dance, and theater. He graduated from the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins before moving to New York to work with Quentin Chiappetta at Medianoise and at the recording studios Sear Sound and Reservoir Studios. Recent projects have included collaborations with Tyrone Page Jr, Rhymes With Opera, Tender Creature, Will Wells, and Regina Spektor. msullivan.bandcamp.com
 
Rhymes With Opera (RWO) was founded in 2007, and includes founding company members Ruby Fulton (composer); Elisabeth Halliday (soprano); George Lam (composer); Bonnie Lander (soprano); and Robert Maril (baritone). During the 2012-2013 season, Rhymes With Opera expanded to include a house band, the Rhymes With Orchestra, a chamber ensemble comprised of some of this generation’s most exciting contemporary instrumentalists. With the addition of the RWOrchestra, RWO has become a self-contained contemporary opera machine, commissioning and producing works that can be performed whole-cloth by the company. Since 2007, RWO has commissioned more than 17 new operas, ranging from one-minute “signature” pieces to evening-length productions. New operas commissioned and produced by RWO include Travis Sullivan’s Three Modern Pieces, Thomas Limbert’s Numbers / Dates, Jenny Olivia Johnson’s Book of Gazes, Kathleen Bader’s Leads, Douglas Buchanan’s Goblin Market, David Smooke’s Criminal Element, Adam Matlock’s Red Giant, and Erik Spangler’s Cantata For A Loop Trail, an outdoor hiking opera set in Gwynn Falls Leakin Park in Baltimore and Inwood Hill Park in New York City.