BORN working team member Naomi André has published a short reflection on Rhiannon Giddens’s and Michael Abels’s new opera, Omar, on the website of Carolina Performing Arts. We include a link to the article, titled ‘Sounding the Shadows as Omar Engages the Past and the Present’, below. Meanwhile, fellow BORN working team member Michael Mohammed has been leading pre-performance talks on Omar during the work’s San Francisco Opera run (5-21 November).
Omar reconstructs the historical experiences of Omar ibn Said (1770-1864), and Arabic man born in Senegal and transported to America as an enslaved person in 1807.
We are thrilled about BORN members’ contributions to public discourse around this exciting new work!