RE | CLAIM
Karim Sulayman, Sean Shibe, and Kalanidhi Dance
NYC
Washington, DC
May 1, 2025, 7:30pm
Terrace Theater, The Kennedy Center*
About the Production
Celebrating a visionary
Can you imagine a time before there was Opera Lafayette? Difficult as it may seem, the nation’s oldest period instrument opera company was once only the speck of an idea in the mind of a visionary young violinist, Ryan Brown. Leading the first concert performing French Baroque chamber music in the Corcoran Gallery’s magnificent Salon Doré in 1995, Ryan Brown has built Opera Lafayette into a major cultural force, celebrated from the American shores all the way to the theatre at Versailles. This concert will focus on the music, the musicians, and the composers that Ryan Brown has championed and elevated during his 30-year tenure as Artistic Director. Help us rejoice in the rich and consequential history of The Nation’s Period Opera Company made possible through the revolutionary vision of Ryan Brown.
*This performance season is an external rental presented in coordination with the Kennedy Center Campus Rentals Office and is not produced by the Kennedy Center.
Language: French with English Supertitles
Running Time: 90 minutes, including a 15-min intermission
Artists
Opera Lafayette Chamber Orchestra
* Opera Lafayette debut
About Producers & Partners
This groundbreaking program seeks to examine the question of “who owns culture?” through a two-part music and dance exploration.
The first half of the program will feature two extraordinary artists, tenor Karim Sulayman and guitarist Sean Shibe, performing music from their award-winning album “Broken Branches.” Sulayman and Shibe’s program weaves baroque music of Giulio Caccini and Claudio Monteverdi with traditional Sephardic and Arab/Andalusian works and ballads by contemporary composers and singers from Egypt and Lebanon, and frames the program with songs of Purcell and Britten.
For the second half of the program, Kalanidhi Dance will present traditional Indian classical dance and ballets from Félicien David’s Lalla Roukh and a surprise finale.
Before the program (6:30pm), join Dr. Gülru Çakmak, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Associate Professor specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French, English, and Ottoman art, for a fascinating pre-show talk called, Reclaiming the Present through the Past in Late Nineteenth-Century Istanbul: Osman Hamdi in Three Acts.
And stay after the concert for a talk back with choreographer Anuradha Nehru, and performers Karim Sulayman and Sean Shibe , moderated by Dr. Gülru Çakmak.