Black Lodge, World Premiere Opera with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Libretto by Anne Waldman

Music by David T. Little
Libretto by Anne Waldman
Story & Screenplay by Michael Joseph McQuilken
World Premiere
Film Screening with Live Performance
Part of Festival O22 and the 2022 Philadelphia Fringe Festival

Saturday, October 1, 2022, 9 pm

Sunday, October 2, 2022, 8 pm

What does it take to face ourselves? Enter the darkness in search of something beautiful, transcendent. But be very careful what you need to know…

Drawing on the disturbing and complicated mythologies of the surrealist writer William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Black Lodge uses dance, industrial rock, classical string quartet, and opera to take viewers through a Lynchian psychological escape room.

Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her. 

Part film screening and part industrial rock opera concert, this world premiere event features glam opera band Timur & the Dime Museum alongside musicians from the Opera Philadelphia Orchestra.