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IOT presents our 15th world premiere Italian opera: a new version of “Sogno di Una Notte di Mezza Estate”, based on Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, with music by award winning Filipino film music composer, Von De Guzman and libretto by world renowned Italian Maestro, Antonio Fava. This premiere will be presented in conjunction with The World Shakespeare Project in Teatro degli Avvaloranti, Citta’ della Pieve, honoring the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The production will be under the musical direction of Italian conductor, Maestro Mauro Fabbri, who conducts regularly in Germany.

American stage director Karen Lauria Saillant, who has created new works for The Philadelphia Orchestra, Smithsonian Institution, Museum of Modern Art, Bergamo International Festival of Culture, Teatro Valle, Rome’s oldest and largest opera house and many other cultural institutions in the US and Italy, will direct.Professional opera singers have come from more than 40 countries to sing in our projects.

Our project is both diverse and sustainable with costumes and sets made by fiber artists from recycled objects such as water bottles, trash bags, remainder fabrics, rubber bands, panyhose, lathe, duck tape.

This year’s opera will be another world first, as other abled youth from Citta’ della Pieve will design our costumes and sets. Above you can see them at work in their ceramic laboratory. As far as we know, this is the first time in history that other abled youth have designed costumes and sets for a world premiere opera!

We want to emphasize that our objective is to create and develop a non verbal intercultural communication model through musical and theater arts. We have been experimenting with our process and researching its development for the past 13 years in Italy and Philadelphia. This process enables a new generation of opera artists who are empathetic, resilient and filled with unbounded creativity that is in harmony with nature.