Tag: White Snake Projects

  • “White Raven, Black Dove,” a new opera animated by its performers, and a computer, debuts at Strand

    By Madyline Swearing

    Inside a sprawling Brookline home, where koi swim in an in-ground living room pond and a pet pig named Mazipan can be seen through sliding glass doors, a troupe of performers flit around a makeshift stage, rehearsing a battle of futuristic proportions.

    The scene is set in the years after the Sixth Extinction — a human-made climate crisis that has left the planet Earth a dystopian wasteland —and a new opera, “White Raven, Black Dove,” which is scheduled for a three-day run at the Strand Theater this weekend (Sept. 26-28), tells the story of the segregated Silvers and Onyx, who are faced with building a new world.

    Steeped in international mythology, the opera combines live performance with computer-generated animation to explore themes of race and climate change.

    As a self-proclaimed “activist” performance company, White Snake Projects produces only original operas by living creators as a way to “authentically” explore societal issues, says Cerise Lim Jacobs, the company’s artistic director and founder.

    “Art can be used as an instrument of change,” Lim Jacobs said. “It doesn’t have to be didactic and burdensome, but fun and immersive.”

    The company was founded in 2018 following the success of Lim Jacobs’ first opera, “Madame White Snake” — a retelling of an East Asian folktale — which won a 2011 Pulitzer Prize for its composer, Zhou Long.

    An immigrant and woman of color, Lim Jacobs says her values “totally permeate” the company and its work.

    As rehearsals continue inside her Brookline home, haunting vocals detail the discord between the identity-bound light-skinned Silvers and dark-skinned Onyx, and reveal how a scarcity of resources has driven the two groups apart. Amid the devastation, characters Raven and Dove serve as proponents of change.

    Shows are produced thematically each year. With last year’s general election, the company’s theme was voting rights. This year the environment has taken center stage. Lim Jacobs says recent federal funding cuts to organizations like the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration helped influence that decision.

    “What could be more timely?” Lim Jacobs said. “It cannot be more urgent. The whole thing is frightening.”

    Beyond advocacy, Lim Jacobs says, a main objective of White Snake Projects is to modernize opera and make it appealing to younger generations. One way is through the integration of cutting-edge technology in operatic settings.

    For the company’s director of innovation and computer-generated imagery (CGI, Curvin Huber, this means applying gaming technology to live performances. A professor at the Lesley University College of Art and Design, Huber has worked in the 3D industry as a generalist for about 30 years. His expertise with Unreal Engine, a game development creation tool, has optimized White Snake Projects’ scene designs.

    With Unreal Engine, photorealistic graphics can be created and modified in real-time, creating a speedier design process. Once the 3D imagery is generated, it can be projected on stage in any format.

    “The advantages are that it can build content quickly and we can make changes as needed,” Huber said. “It allowed for a more efficient pipeline.”

    While Huber has logged almost 100 hours working on “White Raven, Black Dove,” the base work was done by Lesley design students, who spent three semesters working with the creative team to produce the 2D animations and 3D illusions that make up the set.

    As part of Lesley University’s internal internship program, which matches students with local clients, students are assigned to specific teams, depending on their skill levels and interests. Derek Hoffend, professor of game design and immersive technology at Lesley University, serves as the students’ project manager.

    “They could be doing drawings and concept studies for character and environment designs,” Hoffend said. “Some do game engine work, where they’re building 3D environments in Unreal Engine.”

    Huber says he then acts like a cinematographer, polishing and refining students’ work to make it production-ready. “It’s a great experience for them — they get to see how it works,” he said. “We force ourselves to take a step back and ask what we want visually and what’s the best way to tell a story.”

    Hoffend says the opportunity for students to see the physical manifestations of their work has been beneficial for them both creatively and intellectually.

    “They really appreciate having a client,” Hoffend said. “They’re used to doing things in the classroom, but to see something that gets out into the world that’s also politically interesting is important.”

    In times of increased political divisiveness, Lim Jacobs says, the company has to consider the implications of its work more than ever before. And while funding may have been cut, production levels haven’t.

    “People have to feel hope, otherwise they’ll give up,” Lim Jacobs said. “We make work for our community. I hope they come and feel inspired to do a little something.”

    See “White Raven, Black Dove” at the Strand on Sept. 26 at 8 p.m., Sept. 27 at 7:30 p.m., and Sept. 28 at 2 p.m. A talkback with a member of the creative team will follow each performance. Tickets are “pay what you can.”

    This story is part of a partnership between the Dorchester Reporter and the Boston University Department of Journalism.

    This article was originally published on September 24, 2025.

  • ‘To the People Like Us’ — Students tackle community changes through opera

    From left  – Katelyn Geary, Nina Evelyn, Timothy Steele (piano), on the floor is Cerise Jacobs and Kayla Faccilongo, Linda Maritza Collazo and Jesús Daniel Hérnandez. Miu Tung Rong photo

    Daniela Martinez, a graduating senior at the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, joined 826 Boston in the fall of 2023, thinking she’d be writing plays, not the libretto for a new opera. But for six months last year, Martinez worked alongside other students at the writing nonprofit brainstorming, scene writing, and creating the text for the opera “To the People Like Us.”

    A year later, on June 28, the opera is set to premiere at the Strand Theatre in Uphams Corner.

    “To the People Like Us” follows three teens living in an unnamed city neighborhood. Costanza and Malakai, who are native to the area, confront the possibility of displacement when Indigo, whose mother is the developer responsible for the pressure, moves onto the scene.

    The opera was created by a dozen students from 826 Boston’s Youth Literary Advisory Board — a program that offers students stipends for their work as writers and editors — in collaboration with White Snake Projects, an activist opera company.

    Above: Nina Evelyn. Miu Tung Rong photo

    “White Snake came to us with the idea of students writing the libretto,” said Asiyah Herrera, a teaching artist for the Youth Literary Advisory Board. “I was cautious and hesitant because I’ve never written a libretto before.”

    Herrera said there was a steep learning curve for everyone involved, herself included. The writing they had worked on together previously was done on a much smaller scale, she said.

    She split the students into three groups, assigning each team specific scenes in the story to work on. Two individuals from White Snake Projects came to the sessions to guide the students through the writing process.

    “It was mainly just us and the writers at White Snake,” Martinez said, “making sure the plot points would be something that White Snake would want to represent, or the characters would be something that they would want on the stage and be okay with.” 

    Mezzo-soprano Kayla Faccilongo. Miu Tung Rong photo

    Each season, White Snake Projects assigns a social justice issue as the focal theme of their shows. The organization chose climate change for 2025.

    While students centered the opera on climate change, they used the opportunity to adapt the story into a real-life issue they’ve seen firsthand: gentrification.

    “They wanted a story that was about themselves and their own experience, like all of the places they’re talking about are real places in Boston,” said Pascale Florestal, the opera’s director.

    “The 826 Boston location is in Jamaica Plain, and Jamaica Plain is currently being gentrified,” Martinez said. “A lot of us — including myself [because] I live in East Boston, which is also being gentrified — had experience with it, so that came from ourselves.”

    Jorge Sosa, who composed the music for the opera, said it was important for him not only to stay true to the students’ vision but also to use art as a tool to explore related social issues.

    “I think that music is speech. Art is speech, and we can use it to say whatever we need to say,” Sosa said. “For me, I use my right to free speech to talk about the issues that are important to me.”

    Even though Sosa has never met the students in person, he said he shares their vision and concerns, and though the music may not change the world, he thinks that it still has the potential to create an impact.

    He said the music needed to reflect the characters and the world in which they lived. He jokingly describes the opera as an “electronic zarzuela,” a Spanish operetta style that alternates between spoken and musical scenes. He also included references to salsa and bolero in the show.

    Florestal acknowledged that opera has a reputation as a higher-class, elitist activity. She said it will be interesting to see how typical opera-goers react to the performance.

    “My job is to show people in opera who may not think about what it means to tear down this building and build a skyscraper, to the families who live in that building or the families who rely on that corner store for groceries,” she said. “Those people, oftentimes, who are affected by these larger implications of the system that we live in don’t get an opportunity to have their voices heard.”

    Martinez said she wants this opera to motivate people “to open their ears and listen to each other and have actual conversations, instead of just yelling back and forth at each other and sticking by their stubborn ideals.”

    “To the People Like Us” will have two performances on June 28, at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Ticket prices are “pay what you can.” RSVP information is available on the White Snake Projects website.