Led by past Opera Omaha General Director Roger Weitz and ONE Festival Artistic Director James Darrah, ONE Festival amplified the Omaha creative spirit by curating a yearly group of interdisciplinary, world-class artists and providing them the time, space and resources to create new opera collaborations on location with local partners. Each of the festival’s creatives were Artist-in-Residence, partnering across respective mediums to push beyond their own disciplines and craft multiple live performances and events during five intense residency weeks.
Together, this carefully selected group of artists worked to bring to life a two-week festival which included two new staged opera productions and a series of performance events that explored the boundaries of opera while saturating the community with films, lectures, and intimate musical and theatrical experiences. The ONE Festival’s projects included the 2018 new production of the world premiere opera, Proving Up by Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek, the 2019 debut of Playground by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Reid and poet Zackary Drucker, as well as new productions and explorations of work by a wide range of diverse artists that included Philip Glass, Anne Sexton, Charles Gounod, G.F. Handel, Kate Bush, John Adams, Luigi Cherubini, and Pauline Oliveros.
