The Artists in Conversation Festival is an annual program that explores the future of opera and the performing arts through the lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The 2023 Artists in Conversation Festival presents live performances of two song recitals, American Patriots and She Loves You Back, exploring the theme of the 2023 season,“Climate” through a broad approach, ranging from socio-political to ecological.

Schedule of events:
Saturday, November 18 – 3:00pm She Loves You Back
Saturday, November 18 – 7:00pm American Patriots
Sunday, November 19 – 3:00pm American Patriots
Sunday, November 19 – 7:00pm She Loves You Back

She Loves You Back is a fresh and surprising collection of works exploring the role of Earth as mother – a feminine body that is exalted and exploited. What befalls a feminine body befalls the planet.  The collection of staged works includes Ashi Day’s For Whom the Dog Tolls, Shruthi Rajasekar’s The Letter, Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben, and two works by Lisa Neher: excerpts from No One Saves the Earth from Us But Us and Sonnet at the Edge of the Reef.

American Patriots, created by Samantha Rose Williams and Yaniv Segal, is a new music-theater production that explores what it means to be American from four vastly different perspectives: African-American, Native American, New American, and white Working-Class American. Songs set to the text of interviews with Americans today, take an unflinching look at the day-to-day realities of American ideals. Featuring compositions by Regina Harris Baiocchi, Gala Flagello, Danielle Jagelski, and Yaniv Segal, the four composers’ unique styles create a dynamic auditory experience that is at times classical, jazzy, broadway, funny, serious, and alarming but always engaging and unexpected. American Patriots asks audiences to actively examine the way they think about identity, unconscious bias, and who this country is for; and to foster meaningful connection with people they may not have previously identified with.