Jozaphine Freedom

Suzie Silver will perform a video score for Eric Moe’s JOZAPHINE FREEDOM, with a libretto by Denise Duhamel at Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts in Davis, California on April 18 at 7pm.
JOZAPHINE FREEDOM is an exploration of celebrity culture in the form of a one-woman “entertainment”, combining features of opera with cabaret and art song. JOZAPHINE features the immensely versatile soprano Haleh Abghari in surreal scenes from the life of a contemporary celebrity – a cabaret act, an interview, accepting an award, etc. The text, by poet Denise Duhamel, places the vignettes along a narrative arc that follows the familiar pattern of a celebrity’s career: entering the limelight, receiving a coronating award, falling from grace, the promise of eventual rehabilitation. Franz Kafka’s last story, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”, which, among other things, deals with the elusive tangibility of popular and critical success and achievement, provides a subtext and background for the enterprise. The phenomenon of media-stoked fame – which transforms ordinary mortals into mythic heroes (albeit clay-footed ones) – is investigated both playfully and seriously.