- A communal guild of creators and performers supporting new endeavors -
- Opening the creative process to a wider community of participants -
Mission
Rhapsode Guild is a creative community that explores and presents new forms of music–drama and musico-poetic expression.
Each project bears the imprint of its distinctive creative team and partnering performing artists. Collaborating scholars and practitioners inform the artistic process and enrich the audience experience.
This collaborative model provides emerging and established artists a sustainable studio lab for experimentation, and offers community participants of all ages opportunities for creative expression and learning.
Aesthetic
Integrated Corporeal Theater: Singers, instrumentalists, actors, dancers, and visual elements all integrated into the dramatic presentation
Spaces: Using non-theatrical spaces or open stages to engage the audience in presentational theater, or draw them into stylized and ritualistic elements of music-drama
Musician as Individual: Intimate performing forces and highly idiosyncratic writing; small concertante chamber ensemble without conductor; colla voce approach that liberates vocalists to focus on color and characterization
Myth and Poetry: Honoring both the timeless themes evidenced in myths, dreams, folklore, and archetypes, and the literary inventiveness of contemporary poets and writers; merging the phenomena of ancient literature and oral tradition with adventurous narrative structures
Creative Individuality: Close interdisciplinary collaboration ensures that every creator and performer is emotionally invested in the process and work; performers are integrated from the earliest stages
