A Message from the Music Director We are thrilled that you have chosen to spend a few days with AMOC* in the bucolic Ojai Valley and share a slice of our vision of what an opera company can be. We usually gather as a company every summer at our spiritual home on a mountaintop in Vermont to retreat and make new work together. In many ways, we are bringing that ethos to Ojai this weekend. The Ojai Music Festival has been an artistic oasis for many decades, a place where audiences and artists alike go to be refreshed by the Festival’s atmosphere of openness, experimentation, and adventure. AMOC* is thrilled and honored both to uphold Ojai’s essential spirit and to expand the Festival’s scope this year with offerings that span many performative languages, centuries, and artistic voices. For 400 years, opera has brought different artistic disciplines together into a single piece of work. Why are we called an opera company? For us, opera is a template for collaboration; we’re interested in the ways these art forms come together. United by a core set of values and collaborating at every stage — from proposal to performance — we make a wide breadth of ambitious work possible and create new pathways that connect artists and audiences in surprising and visceral ways. “It takes a village” only begins to describe the incredible effort that dozens of people have put into making our dream of a festival into a reality. From the countless hours of conversation among our 17 core artists in crafting a program that reflects the many facets of our company, to months of workshopping and rehearsal with nearly 20 of our dearest collaborators, to the heroic dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s by the production teams of both OMF and AMOC*, the process of arriving here has been truly a collective labor of care. This effort over the past year has been particularly meaningful as we climb out of the global pandemic and meet each other in a moment where, we believe, it’s more important now than ever to find intimacy again and gather together through rituals of performance. This Festival, with its numerous world premieres (including six new theatrical productions), is a loving portrait of this moment in time: a reflection of the many individual worldviews of our artists and the product of our protean nature as a company. In this coming together, it is hard to imagine a better representation of that which is “operatic”: dancers, instrumentalists, vocalists, poets, designers, writers, composers, and directors collaborating to tell stories. This place, the Ojai Music Festival, has always been about such a collision and exchange between its participating artists and, importantly, you. Our journey on this road together is nascent, and we could not be more grateful to have you join at this transformational moment.
ZACK WINOKUR Co-Founder and Artistic Director, AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company)
The residency of AMOC* as Music Director is made possible by the generous support of the Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund.
10 | 76
TH
OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL
| JUNE 9-12, 2022
