Tammy Nguyen opera aria to close Venice Biennale
An aria from an opera by artist Tammy Nguyen will help bring down the curtain on this year's Venice Biennale in Italy.
The performance is scheduled for 13 and 14 November as part of the Biennale's closing programme, according to The Art Newspaper. The piece is taken from Timaeus and The Teacher: Foreword, an opera Nguyen created with collaborators in the United States.
The wider closing programme runs from 13 to 22 November at the Arsenale in Venice, one of the Biennale's two main venues. Organisers describe those dates as the final ten days of the 61st International Art Exhibition, with performances, lectures, discussions and roundtables, according to La Biennale di Venezia.
The opera was commissioned and produced by Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where Nguyen is an associate professor. She made it with composer Neely Bruce and choreographer Jamal Jackson.
An aria, in plain terms, is a solo song within an opera, often the moment a character steps forward to tell their story. Here, the aria and the larger opera take on nationhood and journeys for freedom. Wesleyan describes the full work as an exploration of global maritime trade, migration and freedom, according to the university.
Nguyen is not only arriving in Venice as a composer of sorts. She also has a series of paintings on view in the Biennale's main exhibition, titled In Minor Keys.
Those paintings link the legacies of the Cold War and the Viet Nam War, and address the continuing threat of nuclear war, according to the Biennale. It means audiences will be able to see her visual work and then hear her work on stage in the same visit.
Nguyen previously won a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American award that supports artists, writers and scholars, according to Wesleyan.
What makes this stand out is the double appearance. Few artists show in the main exhibition and close the festival with live performance. For anyone in Venice in mid-November, it is a chance to catch both sides of one artist's practice in one place.
