Afrofuturist opera `Lalovavi’ to premiere in Cincinnati on Juneteenth 2025

The Cincinnati Opera will present an Afrofuturist-themed production next year that commemorates the Juneteenth holiday and would mark the first of three commissions from the company to all-Black creative teams. “Lalovavi” is composed by Kevin Day with Tifara Brown writing the libretto and Kimille Howard set to direct the staging at Cincinnati Music Hall, the company said Thursday in announcing the opening presentation of its Black Opera Project. Discussions began in 2019 when Morris Robinson, a noted bass opera singer, starred in the Cincinnati Opera’s production of “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” and told company artistic director Evans Mirageas there were not any operas reflecting Black American culture. Robinson performed with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra on July 4, 2021, in a program that included Day’s “Lightspeed — Fanfare for Orchestra,” and he contacted Day on Instagram a few days later to ask whether he would be interested in composing an opera. The pair didn’t immediately come up with the idea for “Lalovavi.” Day and Brown discarded their first two ideas — a teenager with a family from the South readying for high school graduation and two brothers during the coronavirus pandemic — before settling last year on Afrofuturism at the spark of a comment by Howard, who is their dramaturg, or opera expert.