A message from OPrak’s Artistic Director
Greg Moomjy 

La Sonnambula is seen as a cute fable in the opera world, but actually our performance is more than this - it is an important work that highlights similarities in the disabled community. 

Sleepwalking is real and normal, yet often it is misunderstood just like a disability. Is it a disorder or disease? In La Sonnambula there is moral panic substituting for medical understanding: the village reads “sleepwalking” as “sleeping around.” A neurological event gets processed as a scandal and is a familiar story in the disability world.  

Our in workshop, we are boldly experimenting with incorporating Deafness and Deaf culture with opera. 

What I have learned specifically during this workshop is if you make Lisa, a disabled character, Deaf in this case, it does two things: it makes the story one of discovery as she learns about her self identity as she helps Amina discover her own disability. One can say Lisa is Amina’s crip-dula . Lisa’s deafness conveys a deeply rich form of communication that adds color and expands the world of this classic belle canto opera. I like to think that Alex Bellini and Felix Romani are up there in heaven nodding their heads and tapping their foot with approval.

GM