The Cooper Union’s Gardiner Foundation Great Hall Forum presents Native Voices Karenna—Lay Our Vibration Down featuring the New York-stage premieres of two short operas, Trials and Tears and Sacajawea: Women of Many Names. Both pieces are by Dawn Avery, a Grammy-nominated cellist-composer of Mohawk descent. Danielle Olana Jagelski (Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe) serves as music director. 

Registration on EventBrite is required. However, an EventBrite ticket does not guarantee entry as this is a first-come-first-served free event. 

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Trials and Tears is a collaboration between Avery and Oneida/Ojibwe multi-disciplinary artist Ty Defoe; the piece is in response to Trail of Tears (2005), a painting by Benny Andrews (1930–2006), that was acquired by the Phillips Gallery in Washington, D.C. Trials and Tears was commissioned by New Music Theatre Alliance in 2022, and this Gardiner Foundation Great Hall Forum will be its first live performance. Baritone-actor Jarrod Lee plays Andrews, who taught art in the New York prison system and was a co-founder of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, which advocated for more Black artists to be represented in New York City art museums. Lyric tenor Bo Shimmin (Pueblo of Acoma) also performs. The opera connects dark chapters of American history: the forced resettling of Indigenous people and the trials that have resulted in incarceration of minorities. 

Sacajawea: Women of Many Names is the result of Avery’s collaboration with Blake Hill-Saya, a librettist-soprano of Waccamaw Sioux descent, with input from Shoshone Advisor and Elder, Francesca Mason Boring. The opera sets out to show Sacajawea, as performed by mezzo-soprano Kate Morton (Cherokee), from the perspective of her Shoshone ancestral traditions, unfettered from Western mythologies about her life and motivations. 

The evening also features original video design by Kate Freer.