Bonita Oliver, composer/librettist

Bonita Oliver is a multidisciplinary artist and improviser whose work focuses on transformation and transitions. She creates deeply emotional concept art using voice, music, environmental soundscapes, and movement — driven by a motivation to heal personal and ancestral trauma in order to make way for discovery and connection. Oliver engages audiences through interactivity rather than passive observation, providing opportunities for co-creation and communion. Her performances are often responsive to real-time stimuli and therefore frequently change direction in the moment. Oliver was raised singing in a multicultural church choir, and her vocal style, musical sensibility, and approach to engagement are heavily influenced by this background. She is a founding member of Moving Star, a vocal ensemble that is an artistic community partner of Carnegie Hall, and is also an actress and award-winning filmmaker.

During her IDEA Opera Residency, Oliver will explore ways of integrating opera and augmented reality. In this area, she is curious to find the boundary between audience engagement and distraction. Her aim is to create a way for audience members to share their own distinctive visions during moments of the performance by using the technology at their fingertips. 

Yosvany Terry, composer

Yosvany Terry is a saxophonist, composer, and educator who received his earliest training from his father, Eladio “Don Pancho” Terry, a violinist and Cuba’s leading player of the chekeré. After mastering this Afro-Cuban percussion instrument, Terry went on to receive his classical music training from the National School of Arts and Amadeo Roldan Conservatory in Havana. As a musician-composer, he incorporates American Jazz traditions with his own Afro-Cuban roots to produce performances and compositions that flow from the rhythmic and hard-driving avant-garde to sweet-sounding lyricism. He is a practitioner of the Arará tradition and draws on Yoruba practices and melodic traditions for his compositions. Terry brings his inimitable style to stages all over the world, and he has been recognized with a Grammy nomination, a Doris Duke Award, and commissions from Chamber Music America, the Jerome and Rockefeller Foundations, and the MAP Fund. He is on the faculty of Harvard University.

Terry’s IDEA Opera Residency will allow time for him to compose Aponte, an opera about the 19^th-century Afro-Cuban hero Jose Antonio Aponte, who ignited the 1812 rebellion in Cuba to overthrow slavery. The residency will result in a workshop with piano, which will incorporate Aponte’s paintings from a recently discovered book.

Qian Yi, composer/librettist

Qian Yi is a leading figure of Chinese opera (Kunqu) who established her career as a soprano with the Shanghai Opera Company. She rose to international prominence in 1998 when she performed the lead role of Du Liniang in Lincoln Center Festival’s 19-hour production of The Peony Pavilion, which toured throughout the world. She created the role of Precious Auntie in San Francisco Opera’s 2008 world premiere of The Bonesetter’s Daughter, by Stewart Wallace and Amy Tan. More recently, she appeared as the Woman in Huang Ruo’s Paradise Interrupted, a new installation opera at Spoleto Festival USA for which she also wrote the libretto. Yi has written two plays, A Robe for the Moon and Fox Spirit, and developed the collaborative ensemble piece Moonlight Meditation. She composed a series of arias, The Legend of Rainbow Fairy, and performed in its premiere in Taiwan in 2009.

As an IDEA Opera Resident Artist, Yi is composing her first opera, The Encompassing (working title), which tells the stories of three women in China and the United States, spanning time from 5,000 years ago to the 19^th century. Yi will use the residency to combine her Eastern forms and theater techniques with the Western styles she has learned since arriving in New York City.