Over a year’s work. From a team of over a hundred artists and community members. Sacrifice Zone: Los Angeles (SZLA) is coming soon! SZLA is an immersive environmental justice experience that merges an art installation with live performance. Utilizing multimedia enriched, documentary theatre and film storytelling tools and techniques, SZLA highlights…
Our new short opera, FIRECRACKERS, premiered at White Snake Opera in Boston as part of their Let’s Celebrate festival on December 10–and what a fun show it was! Here are some early views of the production.
Sacrifice Zone: Los Angeles (SZLA) is an Arts in Action project created and curated by Michael Bodie and Paula Cizmar to look at the many ways our environmental policies–or lack of them–fail the people of certain neighborhoods. Neighborhoods where industrial pollution is rampant. Neighborhoods where health risks are a matter…
FIRECRACKERS!, a new opera by composer Guang Yang and librettist Paula Cizmar, premieres in December 2022 in the Let’s Celebrate series, produced by White Snake Opera. The Boston-based company specializes in world premieres of brand new operas. Under the artistic leadership of Cerise Lim Jacobs, White Snake is devoted to…
Writers are alone with the blank page when they create. As a natural introvert, this is something I look forward to much of the time. But then there is a gnawing sensation that won’t go away: What is going on outside? What am I missing? How can I be a…
Selected for the Palm Beach Dramaworks New Year/New Play Festival, The Chisera was performed Saturday, February 5, 2022 at 7:30 pm Eastern (4:30 pm Pacific), directed by Emilie Pascale Beck. The cast: Liza Fernandez, Erin Ruth Walker, Jason Grasl, Romi Dias, Dinah Lenney, Steven Sean Garland, and Leianna Weaver. For…
The global arts event, Climate Change Theatre Action, happens every two years to coincide with the UN climate change conference, and so the 2021 CCTA is underway. I’m delighted that my short comedy, The Pageant, is part of it. This year’s theme is A Green New Deal–so I couldn’t help but imagine…
Our short opera INVISIBLE was part of Snapshot this summer–and the San Francisco Chronicle doled out some much-appreciated compliments, calling it a “compressed explosive bundle, just primed to erupt.” Produced by West Edge Opera at the outdoor Bruns Amphitheatre in the Bay Area, the live performance was a welcome change…
A scene from THE NIGHT FLIGHT OF MINERVA’S OWL, music composed by Guang Yang, libretto by Paula Cizmar, is being presented on Friday April 30 by Thornton School of Music at USC. Performed online with animations and puppetry, OWL tells the story of three young women in different parts of…
Sacrifice Zone: Los Angeles (SZ:LA) is now launched. This ongoing, evolving project about environmental justice issues was presented in its first-phase form in March 2021. Produced online with a hybrid of live performances, video, and animation, this multimedia, documentary theatre project has many moving parts–and they each got a test…