Music

SQUONK OPERA “rust-belt dada” – Buffalo News Squonk Opera created its first show in a gritty Pittsburgh junkyard, with roaring choreographed cranes and earthmovers, over a decade ago. A flexible interdisciplinary group of artists led by collaborators Jackie Dempsey and Steve O’Hearn, we were interested in a theater created from sound and image. We were also inspired by a rust-belt love of spectacle and humor - we were competing with football, catholic ritual, and beer-fed bar bands. Since 1992, Squonk Opera has created eight original shows and has performed in more than 200 venues across the United States. In 1995, we were commissioned by Marc Masterson to create Night of The Living Dead: The Opera for Pittsburgh’s City Theatre. Bigsmorgasbordwunderwerk was an Off-Broadway hit in 1999, a show that Ben Brantley of The New York Times called “ingenious, hallucinatory, hypnotic.” The show was then transferred to Broadway in 2000, where it received an American Theater Wing Special Effects Design Award (previously won by Julie Taymor and Robert Wilson). Squonkumentary, a film about our time in NYC, was produced by independent filmmaker Peggy Sutton in 2005. We have been touring internationally since 2003 - to Scotland, Belgium, Germany and South Korea, where we opened the World Music Theater Festival. Over 200,000 people have seen us around the world, and reviews include “insane majesty" from The Scotsman, and “…surreal and poetic” from USA Today. Squonk Opera has received more than sixty grants and awards over the years, including national grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, The Jim Henson Foundation and three grants from the NEA. We have performed workshops and residencies at over fifty universities, middle schools and museums all over the United States. Artistic Directors Jackie Dempsey and Steve O’Hearn have been working with a collective of between 10 and 20 performers, designers and artists at a time over the years. We have an ongoing desire to make interdisciplinary work that is accessible to a broad and diverse public. Our new project is a development of site-specific residency activities that we have done for years, judging pet parades at rural town halls and giving workshops at inner-city schools. A meta-civic celebration, (put your hometown’s name here): The Opera will combine a heartfelt toast of the city with a vaudevillian roast, poking fun at our own overblown grandeur. Jackie Dempsey and Steve O'Hearn Artistic Directors Squonk Opera 468 Broadway Blvd. Pitcairn, PA 15140 412-372-4264