Mikael Karlsson

Mikael Karlsson  lives in Harlem, NYC. He moved to New York from Sweden in 2000 and graduated Summa Cum Laude with departmental honors with a Masters Degree in classical composition from the Aaron Copland School of Music in 2005.

Mr. Karlsson’s music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, at the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden, The Paris Opera, The Oslo Opera House, the Royal Swedish Opera House, The Semperoper in Dresden, Le Poisson Rouge in NYC, The Ingmar Bergman Center at Fårö, The Joyce Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and at new music festivals and opera houses across the world.

His commissions for dance include works for The Paris Opera (Play – Ekman), The Norwegian Opera and Ballet (Rooms, A Swan Lake, Resin – Ekman; Player – Proietto), Vienna State Opera (Blanc – Proietto), The Paris Opera (Play – Ekman), NDT 2 (Left Right, Left Right – Ekman), Ailey II, The Royal Swedish Opera  (Tyll, Midsummer Night’s Dream – Ekman), The Semperoper (COW – Ekman) and many works for Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet (among others Tuplet – Ekman).

He has composed for the International Contemporary Ensemble, the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, Callie Day, Black Sun Productions, Lydia Lunch, Claire Chase, Joshua Rubin, Mivos Quartet, Sirius Quartet, The Dahlkvist Quartet, Niklas Brommare, Blythe Gaissert, John Kelly, Lennart Mårtensson, Abby Fischer and pop singers Lykke Li, Anna von Hausswolff and Mariam Wallentin.

His first opera, The Echo Drift, premiered at the PROTOTYPE Festival in NYC in 2018.

He composed the music for the 2018 Nobel Prize Banquet with Anna von Hausswolff. von Hausswolff and he performed the four pieces with the Royal Swedish Orchestra and basses from the Royal Swedish Opera Choir to the 1350 dinner guests (heads of state, royalty, Nobel laureates) in Stockholm City Hall.

Mr. Karlsson has released over a dozen albums with works for orchestra, chamber works and soundtracks ranging from pop and film music to sound collages, dance scores and avant-garde concert music. In 2007, Karlsson was included in Out Magazine’s Out 100 list of influential people. The score to his piece Nasty Fucker was published in Butt Magazine. In 2012, NYC Public Radio’s listeners voted him as one of their 100 favorite classical composers under 40. In 2016, he was one of the hosts of the highly prestigious radio show Sommar i P1 on Swedish Radio. In May 2014 he received the Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond award “for an exceptional mid-career composer” from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Mr. Karlsson’s enjoys an ongoing working relationship with celebrated choreographer and director Alexander Ekman. Since they first started working together, in 2012, the two have presented 9 stage works - among them Play (Paris Opera Ballet, 2018), Tyll (Royal Swedish Ballet, 2012; US premiere in 2015 by the Joffrey Ballet), A Swan Lake (Norwegian National Ballet, 2014), Midsummer Night’s Dream (Royal Swedish Ballet, 2015), COW (Dresden Semperoper, 2016) and Rooms (Norwegian National Ballet, 2017). Karlsson composed an electronic version of the Flocking section from Alexander Ekman’s A Swan Lake for envelope-pushing fashion designer Henrik Vibskov’s SS15 at Paris Fashion Week and at Copenhagen Fashion Week. In 2014 Mr. Karlsson founded his own production company, Rough State Sound.

Royce Vavrek

Royce Vavrek is a Canada-born, Brooklyn-based librettist and lyricist who has been called “the indie Hofmannsthal” (The New Yorker) a “Metastasio of the downtown opera scene” (The Washington Post), “an exemplary creator of operatic prose” (The New York Times), and “one of the most celebrated and sought after librettists in the world” (CBC Radio).  His opera Angel’s Bone with composer Du Yun was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

With composer Missy Mazzoli he wrote Song from the Uproar, premiered by Beth Morrison Projects in 2012, and subsequently seen in multiple presentations around the country. Their second opera, an adaptation of Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, premiered at Opera Philadelphia, co-commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects, and directed by James Darrah to critical acclaim in September of 2016. The work won the 2017 Music Critics Association of North America award for Best New Opera and was nominated for Best World Premiere at the 2017 International Opera Awards.  A new production premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in the summer of 2019, produced by Scottish Opera and Opera Ventures, helmed by Tony Award-winning director Tom Morris and earned star Sydney Mancasola a coveted Herald Angel Award for her performance. 

Their next opera, an adaptation of Karen Russell’s short story Proving Up, was commissioned and presented by Washington National Opera, Opera Omaha and The Miller Theatre in 2018, was a finalist for the MCANA Best New Opera Award of that year.  They are currently developing a grand opera for Opera Philadelphia and the Norwegian National Opera based on an original story by two-time Governor General’s Award-winning playwright Jordan Tannahill, as well as an adaptation of George Saunders’ Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo for The Metropolitan Opera.

Teaming up with Swedish composer Mikael Karlsson, Royce wrote the story and text for two dance projects, Crypto, choreographed by Guillaume Côté for Côté Dance and Evidence of It All, choreographed by Drew Jacoby for SFDanceworks, featuring narration by the Academy Award-nominated actress Rosamund Pike. They are currently developing two grand operas: an adaptation of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia to premiere at the Royal Swedish Opera in 2023, and Fanny and Alexander, working alongside creative partner Ingmar Bergman Jr. to musicalize his late father’s classic film for La Monnaie de Munt in 2024, in a production to be directed by Ivo van Hove. Both operas are to feature renowned mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, for whom Mikael and Royce wrote the song cycle So We Will Vanish, premiered by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra in 2021 to critical acclaim.

His collaboration with composer David T. Little led Heidi Waleson of the Wall Street Journal to proclaim them “one of the most exciting composer-librettist teams working in opera today.”  In April of 2016 they premiered their first grand opera, JFK, at Fort Worth Opera, a co-commission with American Lyric Theater and Opéra de Montréal that was called “ravishing” (Opera News), earning a ten-star review in Opera Now Magazine.  This followed the success of their first opera, Dog Days, which received its world premiere in September of 2012 at Peak Performances @ Montclair, in a production co-produced by Beth Morrison Projects and directed by American maverick Robert Woodruff.  The work was celebrated as the Classical Music Event of the year by Time Out New York and a standout opera of recent decades by The New York Times.  They are currently developing an original work for the Metropolitan Opera through the Met/LCT commissioning program.

Royce has also worked extensively with composer Paola Prestini, first on the song cycle Yoani, inspired by the blog posts of Yoani Sanchez, and then on The Hubble Cantata, a virtual reality oratorio produced by VisionIntoArt/National Sawdust in association with Beth Morrison Projects. They recently presented the workshop premiere of Silent Light, an opera based on the Cannes Jury Prize-winning film by Carlos Reygadas at the Banff Centre for Creativity, a collaboration with the director Thaddeus Strassberger, and are currently working on a new opera inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. They are also developing Film Stills, a project for mezzo-soprano Eve Gigliotti that dramatizes four of Cindy Sherman's iconic photographs through musical monologues composed by Paola, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly and Ellen Reid, and directed by R.B. Schlather.  Royce and Paola's collaboration can be further heard on the AIDS Quilt Songbook: Sing for Hope recording, where their song Union, as sung by Isabel Leonard, is featured.

In 2014 Royce premiered 27, his first collaboration with composer Ricky Ian Gordon, at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.  Created for renowned mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, the work brought to life Gertrude Stein’s famous salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris.  Mark Ray Rinaldi of the Denver Post wrote that the opera “tells a great American story, about Gertrude Stein, as well as opera in the 21st century.”  The opera was subsequently presented by Pittsburgh Opera, MasterVoices at New York City Center, Michigan Opera Theater, Opéra de Montréal and Opera Las Vegas.  In 2017 their adaptation of Gail Rock’s Christmas classic The House Without a Christmas Tree for Houston Grand Opera was premiered to critical acclaim.

Other recent and upcoming projects include Strip Mall with Matt Marks for the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Epistle Mass with Julian Wachner for Trinity Wall Street, Midwestern Gothic with Josh Schmidt for Signature Theatre, Virginia; Naamah’s Ark with Marisa Michelson for MasterVoices; O Columbia with Gregory Spears for HGOco; Knoxville: Summer of 2015 with Ellen Reid for the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and National Sawdust; The Wild Beast of the Bungalow with Rachel Peters for Oberlin Conservatory; Jacqueline with Luna Pearl Woolf for Tapestry New Opera; Adoration (based on the film by Atom Egoyan) with Mary Kouyoumdjian for Beth Morrison Projects; The Cremation of Sam McGee with Matthew Ricketts, supported by a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts; and Agnes with Daníel Bjarnason for the Icelandic Opera.

Royce is co-Artistic Director of The Coterie, an opera-theater company founded with Tony-nominee Lauren Worsham.  He holds a BFA in Filmmaking and Creative Writing from Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Montreal and an MFA from the Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program at New York University.  He is an alum of American Lyric Theater’s Composer Librettist Development Program.

Sláva Daubnerová

Sláva Daubnerová is a director and a performer that pioneered alternative approaches to theatre, defined new tendencies within Slovak performance art, and introduced multi-genre approach to theatre making. She is considered a pioneer of analysis of the delicate and often avoided topic of female identity.

Sláva Daubnerová received and has been nominated for several awards both internationally and domestically (i.e. Golden Mask Award - nominated for Best Opera Production in Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg in 2020, Tatra banka Foundation Award for Art 2021, The Crystal Wing Award 2021 in the theater category and audiovisual art, etc.

Sláva Daubnerová’s productions have represented Slovak independent theatre at the most prestigious domestic theatre festivals (e.g. New Drama festival [Slovak: Nová Dráma], The International Festival Divadelná Nitra, or Eurokontext, Opera Nova) as well as being shown at international festivals and showcases abroad (e.g. USA, UK, Russia, Italy, Germany, Poland, South Korea, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, and Armenia).

Andrea Molino

Andrea Molino established a reputation as conductor in great demand on the international scene. He is equally at ease in the 20th and 21th century music (with numerous world premieres) and in the traditional operatic and symphonic repertoire. He has not least had a large number of prestigious assignments at well-established symphony orchestras.

Opera projects in recent years include Berg's Wozzeck directed by William Kentridge and Shostakovich Nose directed by Barrie Kosky at the Sydney Opera for Opera Australia, the world premiere of Cathy Marston's The Cellist at the Royal Opera House in London.

At the Royal Swedish Opera he has previously conducted Szymanovsky's King Roger, an opera he previously conducted for Opera Australia and directed by Kasper Holten. Other opera productions include Carmen, Tosca, La bohème, Macbeth and Un ballo in maschera (the latter with La Fura dels Baus). In 2010, he opened the season at Teatro La Fenice in Venice with the world premiere of Bruno Maderna's Requiem.

Andrea Molino is also active as composer.

Boris Kudlicka

Boris Kudlicka, who comes from Slovakia, studied at the Stage and Costume Design Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava (1990–1996), then at the Minerva Academy of Arts in Groningen, the Netherlands. In 1995 he started working at Teatr Wielki, where he worked as a freelancer since 1996.

He collaborates with well-established directors, not least with Mariusz Treliński. Together they have staged operas such as Madama Butterfly, King Roger, Otello, Don Giovanni, Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, Andrea Chénier, La Bohème, Orfeo ed Euridice, Boris Godunov, Jolanta, Aleko, La traviata, Turandot, Der fliegende Holländer and Manon Lescaut, as well as guest performances in Brussels, Berlin, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Washington, Los Angeles, Bratislava and Valencia as well as at Edinburgh. Hong Kong, Tokyo and Baden Baden.
Death in Venice marked the start of a collaboration with Keith Warner. With operas such as Lear, The Tempest in Frankfurt, Simon Boccanegra and Tannhäuser at the Opera National du Rhin in Strasbourg, Le nozze di Figaro at the Polish National Opera and The Devils of Loudun at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen. He also collaborates with the American director Dale Duesing (Il Viaggio a Reims, The Rape of Lucrezia and The Tales of Hoffman, Hänsel und Gretel and L'Étoile, the latter at the Staatsoper Berlin).

Boris Kudlička has also designed sets for several films, the Polish pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hanover and Expo 2010 in Shanghai, where he won a silver medal.

Christi Karvonides-Dushenko

Chrisi Karvonides-Dushenko has 30 years of experience as a professional costume designer in theater, film and television. In 2003, she received an Emmy for her costume design work on NBC's American Dreams. She was also Emmy-nominated for FX's American Horror Story, and HBO's Carnivàle and From the Earth to the Moon (produced by Tom Hanks). She was nominated for four Costume Designers Guild Awards during five seasons of HBO's Big Love. In addition, Carnivàle, From the Earth to the Moon and the pilot for ABC's Pan Am were also nominated for CDG awards. Her other TV credits include Alan Ball's HBO series Here and Now, starring Tim Robbins and Holly Hunter; and the Starz TV series Blunt Talk, starring Patrick Stewart. Karvonides-Dushenko's feature films include The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond (2008), The Glass House (2001) and Beautiful (2000).

Her theatrical designs have been featured in productions at the Old Globe Theater, Geffen Playhouse, South Coast Repertory, Seattle Repertory, Guthrie Theater and the Kennedy Center. On Broadway, she designed the costumes of August Wilson's production Two Trains Running. Karvonides-Dushenko's designs for opera include Alcina in Karlsruhe, Germany; Proving Up for Opera Omaha; The Human Voice and Breaking the Waves (based on the 1996 Lars Von Tier film) for Opera Philadelphia; and Iphigenia in Tauris for Teatro National San Carlo in Lisbon, Portugal. She has given guest lectures on the art of costume design around the world including in Prague, Czech Republic; Cardiff, Wales; and New York City. In the summer of 2018, she will conduct a week-long seminar in Lecce, Italy.

Christi Karvonides-Dushenko received her M.F.A. in theater design from Yale School of Drama and her B.F.A. from Emerson College.