Newtown Odyssey: An Opera on a Creek

Sponsored by the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology and the Department of Landscape Architecture 

Executive director of the Newtown Creek Alliance Willis Elkins and New York-based artist Marie Lorenz will be giving a talk about the development of the place-based Newtown Odyssey, a new opera that debuted in September 2023 that is for and about Newtown Creek, the industrial waterway that divides the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. The opera is a collaboration between Lorenz, musician Kurt Rohde, and librettist Dana Spiotta, a modern mythological voyage set on the waters of Newtown Creek, with its ebbs and flows of waste and toxicity. Performers and the audience, arriving in floating barges at sunset, are the opera’s protagonists, with citizen-scientists, tour guides, developers, a ghost, and the creek itself driving the narrative. Elkins and Lorenz will share insights into their long relationship around a beloved polluted stream, their collective resistance to green gentrification, and the capacity of opera and performance to tell stories about place, sound, relationships, the environment, and meaning. Don’t touch the water! 

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