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Kurt Rohde

Composer, Violist, Teacher
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“The Newtown Creek is one of the most polluted industrial sites in the US, but traveling there by boat, gliding through reflections of New York City, can be a beautiful experience. Set upon the creek, Newtown Odyssey presents a non-traditional opera heard amid sounds of the surrounding traffic and industry. Written more like a travel diary, the score of the opera can be experienced in phases, reshuffling the narrative, giving each audience an entirely different experience of the work. Performers sing aboard moveable and floating stages, and the audience pass by in boats, connecting them physically to the opera’s themes of climate change, environmental justice, and civic responsibility.”

2021 Creative Capital award

March 15, 2021

Kurt Rohde will be collaborating with artist Marie Lorenz and writer Dana Spiotta on a new transdicsciplinary performance work that will take place over the course of several evenings on the Newtown Creek. The Newtown Creek is one of the most fraught waterways in the country, and also one of the most neglected. Recent advocacy and activism has forced a confrontation and appraisal of the state of this vital, yet toxic waterway.

Organizations such as the Newtown Creek Alliance and other Newtown Creek based groups are committed to take action and remediate centuries of damage and abuse.

Newtown Odyssey will be a large scale, mobile work. Performers and audience members will take part in a narrative constructed drawn from the Newtown Creek’s story - its present, past & future - while being based in both reality and fantasy. It is our goal to have us all come together collectively and be a part of a solution to the environmental and ecological disasters on this waterway.

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Kurt Rohde

Violist and composer Kurt Rohde is a recipient of the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, a Radcliffe-Harvard Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lydian String Quartet Commission Prize, and commission awards from the Barlow, Fromm, Hanson, and Koussevitzky Foundations, and New Music/USA. He has received the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.


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