Called “a twenty-first century masterpiece” by Alex Ross, Ipsa Dixit is a theatrical chamber opera for soprano, flute, violin, and percussion.
Exploring the intersection of music, language, and meaning, the piece blends elements of monodrama, Greek theater, and screwball comedy to skewer the treachery of language and the questionable authenticity of artistic expression. Each of the piece’s six movements draws on texts by thinkers such as Aristotle, Plato, Freud, Wittgenstein, Jenny Holzer, and Lydia Davis, delivering ideas from the linguistic disciplines of poetics, rhetoric, and metaphysics through extended vocal techniques and blistering ensemble virtuosity. Ipsa Dixit, which premiered at EMPAC, was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in music.
Kate Soper is a composer, performer, and writer whose work explores the integration of drama and rhetoric into musical structure, the slippery continuums of expressivity, intelligibility and sense, and the wonderfully treacherous landscape of the human voice. She has been hailed by The Boston Globe as “a composer of trenchant, sometimes discomfiting, power” and by The New Yorker for her “limpid, exacting vocalism, impetuous theatricality, and mastery of modernist style.” A Pulitzer Prize finalist and 2024 Rome Prize fellow, Soper has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Koussevitzky Foundation, and has been commissioned by ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, and Yarn/Wire. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Camargo Foundation, the Macdowell Colony, Tanglewood, and Royaumont, among others.
Ashley Tata is a director and artist who makes multimedia works of theater, contemporary opera, performance, cyberformance, live music, and immersive experiences. Her work, described in the New York Times as “fervently inventive,” has been presented at venues and festivals throughout the United States and internationally, including the MIT Playwrights Lab, Theatre for a New Audience, Los Angeles Opera, Austin Opera, Miller Theater, Crossing the Line Festival, Holland Festival, Prelude Festival, National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, and the Fisher Center at Bard. In 2020, she directed Out of the Silence: A Celebration of Music, a series of streamcast concerts for the Bard Music festival; a live online production of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest, a piece created with Bard undergraduates and a professional design team that subsequently transferred to the Theatre for a New Audience with student performers; and the live multicam streamcast of the four ceremonies that made up the College’s 160th Commencement weekend. She has served as a guest artist or guest teacher at the American Conservatory Theater, Columbia University, Mannes School of Music at The New School, and Harvard University, among others. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors Lab, the recipient of the Lotos Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award in Arts and Sciences, and a winner of the 2017 Robert L. B. Tobin Director/Designer grant.
Director Ashley Tata
Composer Kate Soper
For soprano, flute, violin, and percussion
Soprano Kate Soper
The Wet Ink Ensemble
Josh Modney violin and viola;
Erin Lesser flute
Ian Antonio Percussion
