Thursday, May 20, 2021 @ 8PM EDT

Friday, May 21, 2021 @ 8PM EDT

FREE ADMISSION (DONATION ENCOURAGED)

Join Guerilla Opera, composer Gabriele Vanoni, and stage director and video artist Laine Rettmer for a first listen to Island of Hope, Island of Tears (working title). Soprano and Artistic Director, Aliana de la Guardia and percussionist, Mike Williams perform a fully-staged scene from this world premiere multimedia and immersive opera that reminds us that we are all wanderers looking for a place to call home.

This work breathes life into forgotten voices of our past through the true stories and actual voices of immigrants to the US from oral and written interviews documented in the Ellis Island Oral Histories. Explore themes of the clash of cultural identities, the artifacts immigrants bring to this country, and the acceptance or intolerance of different immigrant cultures through time, while encountering stories that are human, true, touching, and eliciting emotions we can all relate to.

Island of Hopes, Island of Tears is supported in part by a Grants for Arts Projects award from the National Endowment for the Arts and an award from the Haverhill Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency, and from a generous gift from Mike & Sharron Mollerus..

With special thanks to The Gloucester Stage, Revolutionary Spaces, theatre KAPOW, and Ovation Theater Company.