When Emmy-nominated composer Levi Taylor saw Terence Blanchard's opera Champion (2013), it awakened something in him.
"I was like, 'wow, wait, there's somebody who looks like me who's writing diverse stories that are just as relevant and compelling,'" he told NPR's Michel Martin. "There's just so much room to talk about Black identity and dignity."
Taylor, who has mostly worked in film and television, has now lent his hand at crafting a short opera about the Black experience. The Seer, which premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 10 tells the story of a young Black office worker in Detroit who dreams of a better future.
Taylor says he leaned heavily on his librettist, Brittini Ward, to reflect some of the struggles and joys of the Black female experience in the words sung in the opera. The narrative follows the personal and spiritual awakening of the main character, Ama.
"It was very powerful... creating the story that's telling a lot of what she's dealing with as a Black woman... just dealing with white supremacy," Taylor said. "We share our stories and the emotion that we have through these stories. And I think about the communal expression and venting and recognizing one another through our stories. That's why we make art, right?"
Opera can get a bad rap these days as a tired art form catering to the wealthy and featuring mostly white artists. It's also had an uneasy history with race, from representation issues to racist behavior on and off the stage.
The Cartography Project, a commissioning initiative from the Kennedy Center in collaboration with Washington National Opera, is trying to change all that. This year's cohort produced two new 30-minute works, including The Seer and Future of Dreams. Future performances are planned in Detroit, Houston, New Orleans and Seattle.
In Future of Dreams, composed by Jaylin Vinson, two Black women are running as mayor in Houston, Texas in 2064. The opera was already deep in development when Kamala Harris took over as the Democratic presidential nominee last year, making her the first woman of color to be chosen by a major party to run for the White House.
"We kind of just looked at each other and we're like, 'What did we write?'" librettist Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton said. "It's going to look like we wrote this in reaction (to Harris's nomination). But in reality, we wrote this months before, thinking about what it means for a Black woman to live in that kind of power seat and what changes in policy she'd make."
Mouton, Houston's first Black poet laureate, integrates spoken-word poetry in the opera and played the role of narrator during the premiere. The approach is unusual but the result is seamless here.
"I think especially as we talk about oral histories and how Black people and culture have always been represented in oral storytelling, maybe even more so than they have been in the written word, it makes sense for us to be able to incorporate that as an authentic point of view, even in opera and classical space," she said.
The best known opera around Black people is Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin — who was white. And the content itself has been controversial, with critics saying it perpetuates negative stereotypes about Black people. On the other hand, there is a rich tradition and history of Black composers and other artists in classical music that has long been overshadowed.
"So it's like, what does it mean to be able to hold the pen in your own narration," Mouton said. "We now get to show all of those colors outside the lens of someone interpreting how they feel our culture looks. It actually is us on stage. I think there's something just really beautiful about being able to tap into that."
The broadcast version of this story was produced by Barry Gordemer. The digital version was edited by Obed Manuel.
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