The Chamber Opera
Aliceheimer’s, a chamber opera based on Dana Walrath’s graphic memoir series about her mother’s dementia journey, charts a path to magic, healing, and laughter in the midst of the cognitive changes brought about through dementia. With music by composer Erik Nielsen and a libretto by Dr. Walrath, this single-singer, full-length opera is envisioned to include an ensemble of six to ten musicians, sets and costumes using Aliceheimer’s art, and a silent dancer | actor to accompany Alice, a soprano, on stage. The first act is set in the present tense of Alice’s life as dementia brings her to physically live with her daughter while she travels across her entire life course seeking resolution. Act II follows Alice’s seven-year journey in care homes.
As audiences fall in love with Alice, an unexpected hero, it restores humanity to those living with dementia and other forms of neurodiversity.Accompanying Alice through the vital work of forgiveness that each of us needs to do to die in peace, the opera detoxifies death leading us collectively to heal. Aliceheimer’s also gets a host of other social justice issues on to the table from racial disparities in life expectancy, to who does the essential care work across the globe, to what are the health consequences of trauma. Telling Alice’s story through opera is particularly apt: For Alice, a daughter of the Armenian genocide who started life as a poor Brown person in a New York City tenement but died White, opera was a vehicle to the American Dream.