Created by the Spring 2025 Opera Theater class at CalArts, this original production features bold, genre-defying works by Talulah Howard, Ronen Marlow, Sofi Jaquez, Amit Maish, Morgan Rotenberry, and Jaz Jendersee.

Each piece begins with a death aria—drawn from the operatic archive—and ruptures into a personal act of transformation: refusal, survival, reinvention. Featuring music by Monteverdi, Purcell, Vivaldi, Handel, Gluck, Verdi, Amish, Jendersee, and Lesher, the work reclaims the tragic soprano not as a figure destined to disappear within inherited systems of erasure, but as a myth-maker in her own right.

At its core, DIVA EX MACHINA is a ritual of reclamation—of narrative, voice, and visibility. Each performer claimed authorship not only over sound, but over image, presence, and self-representation. They designed and constructed their own costumes, crafting the visual language of their transformation. They shaped dramaturgies meant not to polish the canon, but to rupture it from within—to disarm the structures that have historically silenced and constrained the feminine. Their voices, their bodies, their choices. What emerges is not a reenactment of trauma, but a chorus of radical self-authorship and liberated narrative power.

This is opera as resistance. Rooted in research and rebellion, the class engaged deeply with Catherine Clément’s Opera, or the Undoing of Women, confronting opera’s long legacy of silencing, spectacle, and control. Their response: raw, interdisciplinary works that fuse text, movement, vocal experimentation, electronic sound, and handmade costume design.

DIVA EX MACHINA is a fractured whole—intimate, ecstatic, and unafraid.

It’s not a tribute. It’s a takeover. A ritual. A refusal. A reckoning. A rebirth.

Content Advisory:
This performance contains partial nudity and scenes of simulated violence.