Join three distinctive artists for a lively discussion and creative insights into the major project they are building together.

Taking a pause during their weeklong design residency at the MCA, acclaimed composer and musician George Lewis, media/theater artist Catherine Sullivan, and director Sean Griffin discuss their vision and aims for Afterword. This multimedia chamber opera is based on the experiences of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the great African American experimental music collective born in Chicago in 1965, in confronting issues of power, authority, identity, culture, aesthetics, self-fashioning, and representation.

Afterword premieres October 16–17, 2015, at MCA Stage.

About the Artists

George Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, as well as a MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971. Lewis’s work is documented on more than 140 recordings, and has been presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonia Orchestra, Ensemble Dal Niente, Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, and others. In 2015, Lewis received a doctor of music (DMus, honoris causa) from the University of Edinburgh. MCA Stage has presented Lewis’s work several times, most recently in a portrait concert with ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble).

Sean Griffin is a Los Angeles-based composer and director. The director of Opera Povera, an interdisciplinary consortium devoted to the creation and performance of new operatic, performance and exhibition projects, Griffin’s work often features the unique talents of the instrumentalists and performers with whom he collaborates, and ranges through musical compositions, immersive operas, installations, films, and stage works. Griffin has collaborated extensively with artists Catherine Sullivan, Charles Gaines, and Aiyun Huang, and has been a resident fellow at Yaddo, MacDowell, and EMPAC. Griffin’s works have been presented at venues including the 2015 Venice Biennale, MoMA, REDCAT, LACMA, Berlin’s Volksbühne, and the Tate Modern.

Catherine Sullivan is an associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. Her work engages theater, film, video, photography, writing, sculpture, and more. She produces performances and theater works that address a broad spectrum of historical and cultural reference, where the performers are often coping with written texts, stylistic economies, reenactments of historic performances, gestural and choreographic regimes, and conceptual orthodoxies. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metro Pictures, Tate Modern, London; Opéra de Lyon, and the Volksbühne (Berlin), Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels and Galerie Christian Nagel, Antwerp/Berlin.