"Foreman is the mind-roiling warlock of avant-garde drama."
- The New York Times
World premiere
Production of the Center for New Performance at CalArts, in conjunction with the New Century Players
What to Wear is a raucous, bitingly funny post-rock opera from avant-garde theater icon Richard Foreman and celebrated composer Michael Gordon. In Foreman’s signature style, What to Wear is a surreal extravaganza of operatic tableaux come to disturbing, hallucinatory life. A pageant of seductiveness gone wrong — as everyone on stage turns less and less beautiful, something more ecstatic that beauty slowly reveals its awesome 21st-century face.
Foreman’s brilliantly staged action is set to a powerful score by Gordon, a cofounder of the Bang on a Can Festival, who has been widely lauded for bringing the unruly vitality of popular forms to contemporary art music. Foreman, one of the seminal figures of the American avant-garde, first worked with CNP in 2000, creating the enormously successful Bad Behavior in association with Sophie Haviland.
Developed at CalArts with generous support from the Audrey Skirball Kenis/REDCAT Music-Theater Program, funded by The Skirball Foundation. Commissioned by the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, with funds provided by the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, and by Meet The Composer Commissioning Music/USA. Produced with the support of The Shubert Foundation.