For the past several years Emily Wells has been knocking on the door of an opera. Each year the door cracks open a little wider, the story gets louder, and the collaborators become clearer. This opera is a story about remaking the past in order to understand, and perhaps change, the future. It’s a conversation between a “mirror father” living the life he might have lived had he come out in the early 80s instead of living a closeted life, and his “phantom daughter” who he begins dreaming about. The two discover overlays: their queerness, their art, their relation to capital and its effects on community. At the center is each one's desire to have a child but choosing not to due to their fears of the end of the world, his AIDS, hers climate catastrophe.
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This is the tragedy of the opera, the dual deaths, the missed love, the children that were not, and what gives the work the audacity to call itself an Opera with a capital O, though the form will be experimental. It is as much opera as it is album, song cycle, or perhaps “a play with songs”.
This February Wells will open the door decidedly wider through a residency and subsequent performance at National Sawdust with collaborators Raja Feather Kelly as director and Gideon Crevoshay as “Mirror Father”. After two days in residence exploring song, movement, harmony, and story, alongside video, sound design, and lighting, they will invite an audience directly into the room of creation, completing the loop between performer and audience to teach them what they can not discover on their own at this stage in the process.
// This is a seated performance. If you require accessibility accommodations, please email boxoffice@nationalsawdust.org.
// This performance is made possible thanks to the generous support of The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation and Ted Cornwell and Pedro Carroll.
ABOUT EMILY WELLS
Forging a bridge between pop and chamber music, polymathic composer, producer, and video artist Emily Wells builds songs from deliberate strata of vocals, synths, drums, piano, string and wind instruments. Wells has toured extensively throughout the world, including performances at Lincoln Center, the Guggenheim Museum, and the National Gallery of Art. She has released six critically acclaimed albums including 2017’s “visionary” (NPR) This World is Too ____ For You, and 2022’s “complex, vibrant, and dynamic” (Pitchfork) Regards to the End.
Recent collaborations include the premiere of The Glass Age in choreographed musical dialog with conceptual artist Alex Da Corte at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Regards to the End as Expanded Cinema with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at ICA Boston. Wells will perform alongside Metropolis Ensemble as 15 piece string orchestra + harp, drums, synths, and solo violin at Brooklyn Botanic Gardens June 21, 2026. The program is a conversation between Wells’s works and Vivaldi’s 4 seasons as reimagined by Max Richter. Her first multimedia solo show, Fever, is on view at The Berman Museum of Art in Pennsylvania through November 2026. .
Wells’s evocative music (described as “thrilling” by Pitchfork) and performances (called “quietly transfixing” by The New York Times) impel listeners to be attuned. Her latest release, the ten-song album Regards to the End, explores the AIDS crisis, climate change, and her lived experience watching the world burn. A work of radical empathy, Regards to the End foregrounds the power of art, critique, and care to connect and perhaps redeem us.
Emily Wells is a 2025 Opera America Discovery grant recipient, a 2022 NYU Center for Ballet and the Arts & National Sawdust Toulmin Foundation Fellow, and a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts grant recipient.
ABOUT RAJA FEATHER KELLY
Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer and director and the Artistic Director of the feath3r theory (TF3T), the Brooklyn-based company he founded in 2009. In 2026, TF3T will premiere A Body of Dangerous Ideas, a triptych including a collaboration with Bill T. Jones and two new works by Kelly.
In 2025, Kelly served as Production Dramaturg for AUTOGYNEGAMY at the National Arts Centre and as a DanceWEB Mentor at the ImPulsTanz Dance Festival. He returns to both institutions in 2026.
Recent projects include co-directing Complications in Sue at Opera Philadelphia, choreography for Lincoln in the Bardoat the Metropolitan Opera, and direction and choreography for TEETH.
Kelly choreographed the Tony Award–winning A Strange Loop and Fairview (SoHo Rep, Berkeley Rep, TFANA), both Pulitzer Prize winners. Additional credits include White Girl in Danger, SUFFS, Lempicka, The Listeners at Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Macbeth in Stride at Brooklyn Academy of Music. His play The Fires was a 2024 New York Times Critics’ Pick.
He is the recipient of a 2025 Doris Duke Artist Award, a Princeton Arts Fellowship, an Obie Award, and multiple Princess Grace Awards.
ABOUT GIDEON CREVOSHAY
Gideon Crevoshay is a vocalist, teaching artist, composer, facilitator, and sonic eco-archaeologist from the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. He works with the countless dimensions that sound, improvisation, and deep listening can touch upon. Gideon has studied and taught myriad forms of vocal music from around the world, finding inspiration from the wisdom contained within these traditions and how they can inform ideas of music-making, communities of resilience, ritual, and explorations of consciousness.
He has toured, performed, and recorded extensively, including recent work with Meredith Monk, Bread and Puppet Theater, Tenores de Aterúe, David Cieri, Redwing Blackbird Theater, Starry Mountain Singers, Catherine Brookman, Devin Greenwood, and Sanaya Ardeshir (Sandunes).
In addition to performing, Gideon creates interdisciplinary sound installations, recently completing a multi-year collaboration with the visionary visual artist, Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees, entitled Un-Tying Our Cosmic Ancestry, weaving together vocables – sounds without literal meaning – collected from nearly fifty contributors across the globe.