Anathema: The Turing Opera

Born in Boston, and raised in New York City, Will now lives in Athens, Greece. He began his studies and career at an unusually early age. After studying privately with Richard Danielpour, Lucas Foss, Neil Ginsberg, Roger Ames, Dan Carter and Kim D. Sherman, he was accepted to the Tisch School Of The Arts Music Theater Summer Program at age 14, and then to The New Dramatists’ Composer/Librettist Studio at age 16. Since then he has worked with many theater and film artists in the United States and abroad including Lee Breuer, Giles Foreman, Eamonn Farrell, Christa Maiwald, Will Taylor, Ersi Pita, Panagiotis Christopoulos, Dimitris Kollatos, and Phaedra Soutou. His songs have been performed by renown singers such as Isaias Matiaba, Janelle Lannan, Jason Papowitz and Margarita Sygeniotou. In addition to his theater and film work, William’s compositions have been performed by many classical ensembles and soloists such as The National Opera of Greece, L’Anima String Quartet, Aeolos Woodwind Quintet, The Greek Contemporary Music Ensemble, The Municipal Orchestra of Athens, The Orchestra of Patras, Nikos Zarkos, Thanasis Zervas, Saulius Sondeckis, ALEA III, and Idee Fix.

David Bloom is founding co-artistic director and conductor of Contemporaneous, a New York-based ensemble of 21 musicians dedicated to performing the most exciting music of the present moment. Noted for his “energy and passion” (I Care If You Listen) as well as his “enthusiastic commitment and exactness” (Shepherd Express), David is a devoted advocate for new music, regularly working with composers and ensembles to bring new works to life.

David has conducted over 200 world premieres for such presenters as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Merkin Concert Hall, and Bang on a Can. He is a frequent guest conductor for NOW Ensemble, Hotel Elefant, and Present Music, among others. He has worked with such composers as Donnacha Dennehy, Judd Greenstein, Gabrielle Herbst, Yotam Haber, Dylan Mattingly, Andrew Norman, and Julia Wolfe and regularly works outside of the classical realm with such artists as Jherek Bischoff, David Byrne, and Courtney Love.

Especially active as a conductor of new opera and theater works throughout the US and Canada, David regularly conducts productions for PROTOTYPE Festival, Experiments in Opera, Beth Morrison Projects, American Opera Projects, Pig Iron Theater, and Opera on Tap. He has recorded for the Innova, New Amsterdam, Mexican Summer, Mona, and Starkland labels.

Also a passionate educator, David is orchestral and special projects conductor for Face the Music, the nation’s only youth music program dedicated to the work of living composers. He also conducts the orchestra and opera programs at Special Music School High School. Along with Contemporaneous, he leads frequent educational programs for students of all ages in the areas where the ensemble performs, including residencies at City University of New York, the University of New Orleans, Williams College, and his alma mater, Bard College.

Ashley Tata is a freelance director of new opera and multi-media performance and the Creative Director of Immersive Escape Productions where she devises environmental and immersive experiences. Recently: the multi-channel-video, immersive escape room, Paradiso: The Memory Room; the multi-media pop-up series “Out of Bounds” (PROTOTYPE Festival); Kate Soper’s Ipsa Dixit (EMPAC; Dixon Place) — hailed by Alex Ross in the New Yorker as a “21st century masterpiece”; Molière’s Don Juan at the Fisher Center at Bard College; a multi-media concert staging of David T. Little’s opera Soldier Songs with video by filmmaker Bill Morrison (Atlas Theatre, DC and The Holland Festival, Beth Morrison Projects); the premieres of George Lam’s Dolly Parton-fan inspired opera Heartbreak Express (Rhymes with Opera); thingNY’s opera This Takes Place Close By (Knockdown Center); Mojiao Wang’s opera Encounter (National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing Modern Music Festival, Beijing, China); Lainie Fefferman’s oratorio Here I Am featuring Newspeak Ensemble and Va Vocals (Roulette); and Morningside Opera Company’s A Weimar Flute, incorporating texts of Weimar-era writers with Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (Housing Works Bookstore). As an assistant she regularly works with Beth Morrison Projects and directors Robert Woodruff, Jay Scheib, Daniel Fish and JoAnne Akalaitis in such venues as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Lincoln Center Theater Festival, Spoleto Festival, USA, Fort Worth Opera and LAOpera. Her work has taken her to Kiev, Ukraine for the International Bulgakov Theater Festival, to Poland to train at the Centre for Theatre Practice Gardzienice, to Prague to create a piece of environmental theater at the 2011 Quadrennial and to Berlin to conduct research for her MFA thesis production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan. She is the recipient of the Lotos Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award in Arts and Sciences. She received her BA in Theater Studies from Marymount Manhattan College and MFA in Directing from Columbia University where she studied with Anne Bogart and Brian Kulick.