Opera Theater Rutgers with Helix!

New Music Ensemble Chamber Opera Performances of Act I of Matteo Neri’s Escobar and Melissa Dunphy’s Alice Tierney with the Helix! New Music Ensemble. Escobar is a Spanish-language grand opera in two acts about Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, whose boundless ambition launched him to greatness and threw the lives of his family, his associates, and his country into chaos. He is pursued by police commander Hugo Martínez, who himself is pushed to increasingly violent means to justify a peaceful end. In Alice Tierney, four archaeology grad students excavate the property and history of 19th-century “dissipated woman” Alice Tierney. Tierney was found hanging dead on a fence in a seedy Philadelphia neighborhood one morning; despite suspicious circumstances, her death was ruled accidental. But who was Alice? Through their finds, the archaeologists invent three different versions of Alice which perhaps reveal more about themselves than about their subject.