The Spoon Theory Song Cycle with Opera Praktikos
Spoon Theory comes from an essay by Christine Miserandino, who used spoons as a metaphor to explain what it's like to live with a chronic illness or disability. The idea is that you start each day with a limited number of spoons, and every activity costs you one. Things most people take for granted, like getting dressed or making breakfast, use up your supply. Once you're out, you're out.
It's a powerful concept, and turning it into a song cycle is exactly the kind of thing Opera Praktikos does. OPrak is a disability-affirmative opera company based in NYC that's been around since 2021. Their whole mission is making opera more accessible and building community between people with and without disabilities through live performance.
The Spoon Theory Song Cycle premiered in November at Marc A. Scorca Hall in the National Opera Center. Christine Miserandino herself was in the audience, which added weight to the whole evening. It's an intimate space, which matched the subject matter well. There was a closeness between performers and audience that felt appropriate for music exploring such personal experiences.
The program featured eight new works by different composer/librettist teams. Each piece approached the Spoon Theory concept from a different angle, covering emotions that ranged from grief to joy to frustration to what artistic director Greg Moomjy called "disability-silly" in his program notes. Soprano Katharine Li and bass-baritone Marcel Sokalski handled the vocal duties, with narrator Eman Rimawi-Doster reading Miserandino's original essay throughout.
The chamber ensemble was tight. Pianist Sunny Zhi, cellist Mercedes Yvonne Lysaker, and clarinetist and music director Kyle Glasgow provided the instrumental foundation. The blue backdrop of Scorca Hall made for clean, focused images with the performers standing out against the solid color.
What I appreciated about this concert, from a photography standpoint, was the range of visual moments. You had intimate solo performances, the interplay between singers and instrumentalists, and the narrator's readings that provided breathing room in the program. The reception afterward showed exactly the kind of community OPrak talks about in their mission, with performers, composers, and audience members all mixing together in the lobby.
Performance photography for smaller companies like OPrak serves a different purpose than shots from large-scale productions. These images help tell the story of an organization building something new, documentation that matters for grants, future programming, and reaching audiences who might not know the company yet.
If you're running a smaller performing arts organization and want to discuss how photography can support your work, I'd be glad to talk through what that might look like.
