Binibon: An Opera by Elliott Sharp

About

WhiteBox and Elliott Sharp are responding to a dynamic changing landscape in NYC - the opera scene within an encroaching real estate gentrification. Staging this work in an untraditional, street-bound, enduring alternative art venue enables us to host an insightful, essential panel discussion on the affinities and divergences between the multifarious Bohemian East Village neighborhood art-scene’s culture and what today’s acutely ‘professionalized’ Lower East Side art district stands for. Discussions will be open to general art audiences as well as to local, variegated LES/Chinatown communities. 

The work itself draws upon Sharp's compositional and performance innovations developed during the time of these events with ties to punk, No Wave, noise, dance, industrial and exotic sounds. An East Village denizen friendly with the staff at the Binibon, Sharp was leaving just as Abbott and his entourage entered that fateful night, and the events that followed affected him greatly. Jack Womack is famed for his "Dryco Series" of novels portraying a post-Apocalypse NYC and was also a resident of Alphabet City when the events took place.  Together, they set out to tell this story.

According to Zachary Woolfe of the NY Times, a vital part of  WhiteBox Lower East Side Opera series programming that began with R.B. Schlather's Handel project’s “Orlando” and “Alcina”, is demystifying opera and its creation. Broadcasting rehearsals over the Internet, WhiteBox also opened them to passersby and the public came. Yoko Ono was among those who wandered in off Broome Street to watch some of the live rehearsal of Orlando, Handel’s glorious 1733 tragicomedy of competing loves.