The 25th season of Boston University’s Fringe Festival has officially begun — the first opera of the festival, “The Infinite Energy of Ada Lovelace,” premiered on Oct. 15 and performances continued throughout the weekend.
This was the first BU opera performed in person with unmasked singers since the COVID-19 pandemic. The Fringe Festival has been pre-recorded and held on Zoom through the pandemic with one fully masked opera singer in a room at a time.
The Fringe Festival’s “mission is to produce new or rarely performed significant works in the opera and theatre repertoire,” their website said. The festival prioritizes performing in minimal performance spaces, like the black box theatre in the Joan and Edgar Booth Theatre.
This is also the festival’s first year utilizing Booth Theatre since it opened in December 2017. “The Infinite Energy of Ada Lovelace,” with music by Kamala Sankaram and the libretto by Rob Handel, was the first of three operas performed with the festival.
Allison Voth, an associate professor of music and principal coach at BU’s Opera Institute, was the music director for “The Infinite Energy of Ada Lovelace.”
“What I think is very special about our Fringe is … we have a remarkable collaboration between the School of Theater and the School of Music,” Voth said. “We have very fine music schools in this town, but we are the only voice program that actually has this remarkable collaboration with a school of theater design program so our productions are just so rich and very creative.”
The opera provides an active collaboration between different schools, students and faculty, and a variety of interests — including in its subject matter. Ada Lovelace was a mathematician in the 1800s and is also considered one of the first computer programmers. She was also the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, a famous poet. In the play, she struggled with her duties as a wife and mother and her passion for mathematics.
Emily Ranii, the stage director for “The Infinite Energy of Ada Lovelace” and the artistic director of the Wheelock Family Theatre, said the opera tells a compelling reimagining of Lovelace’s life.
“This particular project I think is really important and exciting by a female-identifying composer about a female-identifying mathematician,” she said. “The story is really about investigating Ada Lovelace, whose dreams were bigger than society’s expectations of her because of her gender, and her journey to find the freedom to be able to follow her dream.”
Voth said they get a wide range of audiences because they have a variety of topics they can cover with opera. Voth said she hoped math and poetry students alike could find their way to “The Infinite Energy of Ada Lovelace.”
Ranii also spoke on the partnership that the Fringe Festival invokes.
“It’s an opportunity to delve into new [and] newer works, but it’s also the way that in collaborating with the design teams too that we tell the stories in a really immersive, collaborative way,” Ranii said. “So much of opera or traditional operas [are] in a proscenium and this is so incredibly far from that, and the design is very integral to the storytelling.”
The Booth Theatre has no proscenium, which is a large, arched elaborate stage synonymous with classical opera productions. “The Infinite Energy of Ada Lovelace,” and the other more modern operas that will be performed during the festival flourish in the small, immersive black box theatre. Voth said the minimally designed sets make it so “the audience can really get inside the performances because of the intimate space.”
“I feel like the intimacy of those production spaces, it creates and it demands a really honest, acting from the singers,” Voth said, “because they can’t hide behind the proscenium, they can’t hide behind lavish sets.”
The minimal sets are paired with carefully thought-out music. Two female composers are featured in this year’s festival — Sankaram and Missy Mazzoli, who composed “Proving Up.”
“Proving Up” tells the story of a fictional family in the 1860s finding their way through the American dream. Performances are set for this weekend from Oct. 22 through 24. The final opera in this festival is “Colossal” which follows a football player through love, expression of masculinity, and injury. “Colossal” will have its opening night on the following weekend on Nov. 4.
Voth said she is looking forward to the Fringe Festival performances because they’re playing at the Booth Theatre with so many stage spaces within the space.
“There are so many opportunities for creating different types of performing platforms within that space,” Voth said. “It’s a large one, but it’s also an intimate space. It’s upfront and personal, and we’re just so excited to be performing [there for the] the Fringe Festival.”