“Inmate 568 sits in the Minnesota Correctional Facility, Shakopee. It’s Mother’s Day, and she listens anxiously as a prison guard calls out other inmates’ numbers when children come to visit. Her daughter never comes,” reports Dan Kraker on Friday (7/20) at Minnesota Public Radio. “It’s a despair New York composer Wang Jie unearthed while teaching music workshops this spring inside the Shakopee women’s prison. She and playwright Zhu Yi wanted to find a way to turn that feeling into opera…. The women they worked with became more than simply inspiration for fictional inmate 568 in the opera, ‘It Rained on Shakopee,’ which [premiered Friday] at the Lake Superior Chamber Orchestra. Eleven of them also make up a chorus featured in the performance…. Wang calls this recorded ensemble a ‘ghost choir.’ … ‘We’re hearing a choir … but we don’t see them … because they’re incarcerated, they’re behind bars.’ … Wang, Zhu and Lake Superior Chamber Orchestra director Warren Friesen spent two days at the Shakopee prison working with the chorus.… In September, Wang plans to present an opera performance inside the prison, with the inmate chorus singing live with the lead singers.”
Posted July 24, 2017
