Barcelona, Map of Shadows is takes place in a single evening during the radio broadcast of Maria Callas’ 1956 studio recording of La Boheme. The opera within the opera is heard intermittently in 5 scenes in which HE and SHE ask their renters – a French teacher, a second-string soccer player turned security guard, and a young Latin American immigrant – to move out so that they can be left alone in the waning days of HE’s terminal illness. With each encounter the contradictions and secret entanglements of their lives are revealed alongside the past and present of their city, haunted by the Spanish Civil War and in the throes of gentrification.  The characters shifting subjectivities undo the social codings of high and low class, masculine and feminine, center and margin. Surprising in its approach to social/political divisions, the opera transports you to those marginal, concealed spaces that exist in the realm of everyday urban life where identity is elusive and small acts of transformation are possible.

Co-Produced with American Opera Projects.