Orchestra Videos

Picture yourself in a luxurious nightclub in Singapore where patrons bid for their favorite songstress to perform a special number. It's redolent with smoke, liquor, and glamorous abandon. Got it? OK, now transform that atmosphere into sound.

An interdisciplinary work.

The music of John Adams's Fearful Symmetries inspired an original video by world-renowned video artist, Elliott Forrest, and a new dance featuring video by Saulius Slezas and choreography by Rose Flachs. Forrest has become a regular staple of video presentations by such familiar names as the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic.

This is an excerpt from Act 1 of Dark River: The Fannie Lou Hamer Story, a full-length opera by Mary D. Watkins. In this scene, Fannie Lou Hamer has just told her husband "Pap" Hamer that she has joined the first group of African-Americans to register to vote in Mississippi. He has asked her not to do it because it is too dangerous, but she is determined. In this song, he admits that he loves her for being "stubborn" and "hard-headed" and ends by telling her to "do what you have to do."

This is an excerpt from Act 1 of "Dark River: The Fannie Lou Hamer Story," a full-length opera by Mary D. Watkins. In this scene, Marlowe, the owner of the plantation where Fannie Lou Hamer lives with her family, tells her that she must leave the plantation unless she withdraws her voter registration.

This is an excerpt from Act 1 of "Dark River: The Fannie Lou Hamer Story," a full-length opera by Mary D. Watkins. In this scene, Robert Moses and Fannie Lou Hamer speak to white students who have come to Mississippi to join the struggle for voting rights for African-Americans in Mississippi.

This is an excerpt from "Dark River: The Fannie Lou Hamer Story," a full-length opera by Mary D. Watkins. In the previous scene, Robert Moses has told all members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee that they cannot carry weapons of any kind while they are organizing voters, even though three of their members have just been killed. In this scene, four men tell a story about how guns have been an important way for people to protect themselves from the Ku Klux Klan.

This is the finale of Act 1 of "Dark River: The Fannie Lou Hamer Story," a full-length opera by Mary D. Watkins. Members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee rally and march to demand their freedom.