Producer’s Blog: “Lalovavi” on The Art Show

Nadya Ellerhorst, CET and Think^TV Producer

It’s hard to believe that Season 15 of The Art Show is coming to its grand finale this month. But what better way to end the season than with a sneak peak at one of Cincinnati’s summer arts highlights: opera season! Tune in for the premiere Saturday, May 16, at 6pm on CET. You can also watch on the PBS app or online: https://watch.cetconnect.org/show/art-show/.

For our last episode of the season (bittersweet, I know), we’re bringing you a behind-the-scenes look at “Lalovavi,” taking the stage July 9 and 11 at Cincinnati’s Music Hall. “Lalovavi” is an Afrofuturist opera and the first of three works created as part of The Black Opera Project. Sending audiences 400 years into the future, it follows Persephone, the daughter of the ruler of Atlas, formerly Atlanta. After discovering that she possesses an immortality gene, and subsequently betrayed by her family, she flees and embarks on a journey of self-discovery. 

This segment of The Art Show has been in the works for some time. We actually conducted the interviews for this piece last summer. Most of our featured artists live outside of Cincinnati, so we were able to catch them during visits to town for this project. 

My colleagues Zach, Derrick, and I also got to film an orchestra rehearsal around then. Each taking a different angle with our respective cameras, we captured all sections of the orchestra, and the conducting of Kevin Miller. Fortunately, there’s no b-roll of me furiously waving my arms at Derrick and Zach across the practice space when it was time to cut, but I am sure that is burned in most orchestra members’ memories (sorry). 

Our Director of Local Content, Mark, also captured footage of Kevin Miller, composer Kevin Day, and librettist Tifara Brown at a “Studio Sessions: Soul and Sound” event last summer, where the trio presented a night of music and spoken word performance. 

Generally speaking, we’ve been capturing a work in progress. But, at least for me as a producer, it’s unlike any sort of work I’ve captured before. It’s not like a painting, whose layers and brushstrokes you can capture sequentially, or a piece of poetry, with words on the page you can see stitched together as lines are made. Instead, we’re looking at a multidimensional, many-layered body of work that had been in the works years before we ever picked this segment up – a unified body of artistic work comprised of music, lyrics, staging, sets, costumes, and more. And there’s been plenty before this final convergence of layers that has made “Lalovavi” what it’s shaping out to be this summer and beyond. 

We’ll never bear witness to the frank conversations singer Morris Robinson took part in that led to the creation of The Black Opera Project, and in turn, “Lalovavi.” We won’t see the countless hours Tifara Brown put into visualizing and writing the incredible Afrofuturist city of Atlas and the rest of a world 400 years beyond our time. We won’t get to get a glimpse at Kevin Day’s composition process, in which he considered a variety of styles to help tell a tale he calls an “epic journey.”

But we have caught an incredible behind-the-scenes look at a project that’s the first in a series that will continue over the next few years. For everything you don’t get to see firsthand, you’ll still get a first look at the incredible world of “Lalovavi,” and hear more from the creative team behind this monumental work. You’ll also get to hear two beautiful compositions from the opera in the segment, which we were kindly given permission to incorporate as part of our music track.

As the curtain closes on Season 15 of The Art Show (and rises on the Cincinnati Opera’s next season!), I also wanted to thank you for your viewership of our content and readership of our behind-the-scenes Producer’s Blogs. We appreciate you being by our side as we continue to explore Southwest Ohio’s nuanced and exciting arts and culture scenes. 

And Season 16 is already in the works! We’ve already begun taping our next batch of segments and are excited to bring you our corner of Ohio’s most fascinating arts stories. In the meantime, enjoy the summer – and be sure to get out there and enjoy some regional creativity, while you’re at it! Stay tuned: https://www.cetconnect.org/theartshow/.