Rosalind Morris and Yvette Christiansë win major Sloan grant to support their opera, 'Southern Crossings,' with music by Zaid Jabri

Yvette Christiansë, Zaid Jabri and Rosalind Morris, are thrilled to announce their receipt of a major award from the Sloan Foundation for their new opera, ‘Southern Crossings.’ The Foundation announced its grant for the opera this February. The project will be housed at Barnard College’s Africana Studies, which will also develop an educational program to accompany the opera, slated for production in late 2021.

“The material support from Sloan, and the confidence that it expresses in our project, makes it possible for us to now take our idea, realized in the musical score and the libretto, and make it real as a performance. We are honored and excited, as well as grateful, to be working with Sloan.”

Southern Crossings, synopsis

In the century of discovery, of empire and emancipation, six characters confront each other with their fears and doubts about what science demands, and what it may cost them and those whose world it is about to transform. SouthernCrossings is a chamber opera that takes audiences back in time, to 1836, when the famed astronomer, John Herschel and his wife, Margaret, are about to return to England from Cape Town where, two years earlier, they had hosted Charles Darwin on his return voyage on the Beagle. Darwin took inspiration from Herschel to tackle ‘the mystery of mysteries’; Herschel hoped Darwin would join his crusade for abolition. Nonetheless, the dinner was not a great success. While packing with her servants, whom the Herschels have manumitted and who now await their freedom in a period of mandatory apprenticeship, Margaret recalls the dinner in the dream-image of what might have been. As she does so, the servants have their own conversation about what they overheard that evening (tales of people abducted from Tierra del Fuego and animals they havenever seen), and what they desire for a future after bondage.