Project Title: Wuornos
Recipient Organization: Jon Sims Center for the Arts
Lead Artist: Carla Lucero
Genre and Date Awarded: Performing Arts, June 2000
Presented: June 22-24, 2001

Collaborating with composer/librettist Carla Lucero, the Jon Sims Center for the Arts (JSC) produced Wuornos, an opera based on the real life story of Aileen Wuornos, a lesbian, sex worker, and serial killer who was on death row in Florida at the time the piece was created. The completed work was a fully staged two-act opera with a live orchestra and cast of 21 singers. It premiered on the main stage at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and the premiere was co-sponsored by the 2001 National Queer Arts Festival.

Like many operas, Wuornos was a tale of love, betrayal, and murder, but its heroine was a working class woman who suffered from a history of abuse that led to her violence. According to Carla Lucero, “Among the core issues Wuornos explores, the repercussions of long term physical, emotional, and sexual abuse are most important. The pain and impact of these experiences are far reaching….” Working in this context, Lucero’s music, sung in English, achieved a complexity of styles and textures, representing the lead character’s fractured life as victim and villain. Flashbacks wove together the stories of her childhood and adult life. Music Director Mary Chun noted, “Composer and librettist Carla Lucero has managed to capture an almost old-fashioned lyric opera sense that she marries to her rich, modern harmonic language.”

Lead artist, composer Carla Lucero, previously had written a number of acclaimed works for dance and film; but Wuornos was her first completely self-determined compositional enterprise, her first libretto, and her first work requiring collective input from symphonic conductor (Mary Chun) and stage director (Joseph Graves). The project’s on-line producer was Lauren Hewitt, former Executive Director at JSC.

Jon Sims Center for the Arts began in 1978 with the formation of the Gay Freedom Day Marching Band. Spearheaded by Jon Sims, the Band was the first openly, public identified gay cultural art group in the world. In 1986, two years after Jon Sims died of AIDS, the San Francisco Band Foundation acquired its current facility and, in commemoration of Jon’s contribution to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered performing arts, named the facility in his honor.

Today JSC is a multi-disciplinary performing arts presenter and service organization offering programs that address the artistic, intellectual and social needs of all of the lesbian/gay/bisexual/trans-gendered/questioning (LGBTQ) communities of the Bay Area. It ensures access to the creative process, providing resources that support and promote new and existing art programs. Among these, JSC is home to a number of ongoing cultural programs including the AIRspace (Artist-In-Residence) program, dubbed by the San Francisco Bay Guardian as one of San Francisco’s “lesser known treasures.” AIRspace is a work-in-progress performance laboratory and rehearsal facility designed to incubate emerging lesbian/gay/bi//transgender/queer performing artists. The program strives to encourage and provide services for those artists who are including in their art provocative issues surrounding gender and queerness.

Carla Lucero began formal development of Wuornos in 1986 during an AIRspace residency. The scale and ambition of the project continued to grow after the residency, moving from a number of work-in-progress presentations to expansion and the eventual full-scale production. For both the lead artist and the organization, the project represented risk and ambition—the largest, most complex, and expensive work either had developed and presented.

JSC’s commitment to development of Wuornos stemmed from its interest in the socio-political implications of the opera’s content and its belief in advancing the professional development of women in opera whose works are rarely staged. (New York’s Metropolitan Opera had last performed an opera by a woman in 1903.) According to the lead artist, “I am determined to break with this bleak history and to be the first woman and lesbian to present an opera about a lesbian on a professional stage in a major American city….” Further, collaborators sought to attract new audiences to opera including: feminists, young queers, death penalty opponents, and advocates for the health and legal rights of sex workers. As Charles Wilmoth, then Executive Director of the Jon Sims Center, noted, “The most meaningful aspect of the project came with placing lesbian art about lesbian lives on the cultural main stage. The media attention that Wuornos garnered did raise public awareness about Aileen’s tragic life and the attendant issues of the death penalty and sexual and physical abuse directed at women and children and sex workers.”

LEAD ARTIST

Carla Lucero

A native of Los Angeles, Carla Lucero received a B.F.A. in Music Composition from California Institute of the Arts in 1986, where she studied with composers Leonard Rosenman, Morton Subotnik, Alan Chapman, and Rand Stieger. Before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, Lucero worked with the Los Angeles-based Collage Dance Theater, where she composed the music for the nationally recognized performance piece Most Wanted (presented in a city jail) and for such site-specific dance performances as LaBrea Woman. Lucero won the 1998 Lester Horton Outstanding Achievement in Dance Award for an original composition for dance. She also has written film and video scores for Cineplay International, Action International Pictures, and HBO. Her composition in Never Come Back (Hand Made Pictures—director Patrick Yu) was featured at the June 1996 Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles. Currently, Lucero is working on her second opera based on the life of 17^th Century Latin American Poet and Nun, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Lucero is co-writing the libretto with Chicana Writer and Poet, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Professor of Chicano Literature at UCLA. The opera will be based on Gaspar de Alba’s book, “Sor Juana’s Second Dream”.

Compositions

• Aunt Gladys, a choral commission for Skyline College by the late Patricia Hennings, former Director for the Women’s Peninsula Choir (2001)
• Wuornos, work-in-progress showings and staged readings (1998, 1999)
• Liquid Assets, premiere of production produced by Collage Dance Theatre, Los Angeles, California (1998)
• Most Wante, premiere of Dance Collage Theatre site-specific performance, Lincoln Heights Jail, East Los Angeles (1998, 1997)
• Never Come Back,film by Patrick Yu, premiere Director’s Guild of America, Los Angeles, California (1997)
• La Brea Woman, reprise of a Collage Dance Theatre production, performed at the historic Ivy Sub Station, Culver City, California (19997, 1996)
• Life in the Lap Lane, premiere of production by Collage Dance Theatre, Sherman Oaks, California (1996)
• Out of Circulation, premiere of production by Collage Dance Theatre, Santa Monica Public Library, Santa Monica, California (1996)

Awards and Commissions

• The San Francisco Arts Commission, Individual Artist Commission for the development of Wuornos (2000)
• Bay Area Career Women, grant for the development of Wuornos (1999)
• Astraea Foundation, grant for the development of Wuornos (1999)
• Zellerbach Family Fund, grants for the development of Wuornos (1999, 1998)
• Lester Horton Award for Outstanding Composition in a Dance Production for Collage Dance Theatre’s Most Wanted (1998)
• Meet the Composer, commission for composition of music for Most Wanted (1998)
• AIRspace Residency, Jon Sims Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California (1998)

Mary Chun, Musical Director and Conductor

Mary Chun is Music Director and Conductor of the Opera Ensemble of San Francisco, which is dedicated to presenting new, unusual, and rare opera repertoire to Bay Area audiences. She has been a member of the conducting staffs of notable opera companies in the United States and Europe, including the San Francisco Opera, Los Angeles Music Center Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, East Slovakian State Opera, Châtelet Theatre in Paris and the Opéra de Lyon, where she was Director of Musical Studies for Music Director Kent Nogano.

Notable among her conducting activities was her work with the Finnish contemporary ensemble AVANTE in the Canadian and European premieres of John Adams'’ I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky at Festival de Théâtre des Amériques (Montréal), Festival d’Automne (Paris) and Thalia Theater (Hamburg). She was invited by the East Slovakian State Opera to conduct the European premiere of American Composer Maritin Kalamanoff’s Insect Comedy; and she provided musical assistance to American stage director Peter Sellars and composer Tan Dun on his opera, Peony Pavilion. She also led the United States premieres of Luc Ferrari’s Les Emois d’Aphrodite with the MC Band at the Other Minds New Music Festival in San Francisco in 2000. In the same year, she conducted sold-out performances of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in Honolulu with the Hawaii Opera Theatre.

Chun’s long list of recording credits includes music direction for a CD of works by American composer Peter Allen.

Joseph Graves, Stage Director

Joseph Graves began as a director, writer, and actor more than 25 years ago and has directed more than 36 productions in the United States and Great Britain. He has written 20 original scripts for stage and screen, acted in some 65 stage productions, and guest-starred in dozens of television shows. Among his directing highlights in Great Britain are: Hamlet for the Welsh National Theatre, Great Britain; Romeo and Juliet for Royal Court Theatre, London; The Alchemist for Haymarket Theatre, London; and Tartuffe for MacOwen Theatre, London.

In North America, Graves directed the World Premiere of Revoco, a musical based on the life of Martin Luther for the Texas Shakespeare Festival; Richard II for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Ontario, Canada; The Seagull for La Jolla Playhouse; Strange Snow for the Guthrie Theater of Minneapolis; The Glass Menagerie for Los Angeles Stage Company; and American Buffalo for Actors Theater of Louisville. Known for innovative projects, Graves directed Rouge et Noir, an environmental theater piece set in the National Archives of Old Washington, in which the audience followed the actors by horseback and on foot over a mile and a half path.