TELEKINETIK at 2025 Prototype Festival

Written By Catapult Opera

Excerpted from The New York Times’ Critic’s Notebook - 1.20.2025

At Prototype Festival, Opera With Lynchian Strangeness

This years’ Prototype, a showcase of experimental opera and theater, was stylistically broad but the focus was on the human voice in all its weirdness.

By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

Jan. 20, 2025

Telekinetik

Another memorable stylistic mash-up came in the form of “Telekinetik,” a 10-minute hip-hop opera video produced by Catapult Opera. In it, the bass-baritone and composer Khary Laurent trains his gaze on the split consciousness of a Black man torn between bloody vigilantism and self-discipline. The mix of classically trained singing and rap, some of it backlit with choral textures, works wonderfully in this context of a sleep sequence in which the borders between dream and conscious inner dialogue are blurred, a place where David Lynch would have felt right at home.

The full article can be found here: www.nytimes.com/2025/01/20/arts/music/prototype-festival-experimental-opera

Catapult Opera https://www.catapultopera.org
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