The Amity Trio is roaring into Indiana, bringing a full eight days of activities to Bloomington and surrounding rural communities. The group will be joined next week for a variety of performances and workshops featuring Nur Slim’s opera Lucrecia y el Canto de los Dudasaurios, a special appearance by IU alum and tubist Richard White in recital titled The Dance Goes On, and a premier of Maggie Polk-Olivo’s recently commissioned song set, Illuminating Apologues. A complete list of events is included at the end of this article.
The Amity Trio, consisting of soprano Katie Dukes, horn player Michael Walker, and pianist Kimberly Carballo, is a strong advocate for music written by living composers, especially that of underrepresented voices. Officially formed in 2018, the group met during a community engagement project near the end of their school studies and have been working and performing together ever since.
The Amity Trio will be first performing Nur Slim’s children’s opera Lucrecia y el Canto de los Dudasaurios. “Nur is one of the first people that we had asked to write a commission for Amity,” says pianist Kimberly Carballo. “She’s an amazing artist of all sorts. She started as a jazz musician and guitarist and sort of came to composition through that and through being a working musician on a rock band tour…she is just so fantastic to work with and a composer with a completely unique voice and a lot of interesting things to say.” The opera will be sung in Spanish by mezzo-soprano Olga Perez Flora, while Nur Slim will make an appearance to narrate the opera in English.
Following the Lucrecia premier by a large ensemble in Mexico during the pandemic, Nur Slim condensed the instrumentation into a smaller ensemble version for the Amity Trio to present in communities throughout the United States. Previously performed in areas surrounding Albuquerque, Carballo expressed the trio’s excitement in bringing the production to Indiana: “We are hoping that…we will be able to offer not just to little people and not just to the LatinX communities, but really to the broader south central Indiana community this opportunity to enjoy interactive and playful live music performance that just happens to be an opera and just happens to be in Spanish and English. We would love for people to go away singing the songs and doing the dances and imagining what else might happen with Lucrecia, beyond what’s told in the opera itself…we hope to spark their imagination in that way.”
Amity Trio members will next be joined by tubist Richard White in a recital titled The Dance Goes On. A performing musician, professor, author, and motivation speaker, White is also the outreach chair on the trio’s board of directors. “I think probably what has impacted us with him collectively is his generosity of time and spirit, even beyond being a musician,” says Carballo. “He’s just so positive and so encouraging and so uplifting of other people, whatever their circumstances might be. He helps get all of us jazzed up about the next project and to really keep our energies moving forward. We’re really lucky to have him on our team. He helps us to think outside the box and be innovative and to work through the world with love and authenticity in addition to keeping us helping to keep us accountable to our mission.”
The recital program will feature three sets by North American composers who identify as women- Dr. Carrie Magin, Barbara York, and Dr. Alice Jones; two of these sets will be included in the group’s soon-to-be-released debut album, Between Us Now. Carballo says the recital commemorates the end of the pandemic’s isolation: “It’s kind of a celebration of returning to being able to play together in person- that kind of musical dance and the dance of spirits that happens with all [of us] being in the same room at the same time.”
The week’s activities will also include two performances of Bloomington-based composer Maggie Polk-Olivio’s newly commissioned work, Illuminating Apologues. This work was created for the Amity Trio in collaboration with visual artist Haran Kim and poet Luba Winship, combining Polk-Olivio’s love of music composition, collaborative art making, and programming with youth in mind. Polk-Olivo, music teacher and arts coordinator at Bloomington’s Fairview Elementary School, also serves as the Bridges Musical Arts Youth Organization’s program director, Jacobs Academy’s IU Musical Beginnings director, and is the founder and director of the BloomingSongs project.
These activities are made possible in part by the Brown County Community Foundation, the Indiana Arts Commission (which receives support from the State of Indiana), Latin American Music Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the IU Center for Rural Engagement.
Complete List of Amity Trio Events
Monday March 21st
10:15am | Lucrecia Performance | Rogers Elementary School
Tuesday March 22nd
12pm | Project Jumpstart Well-Advised Lunch | Amity Trio | IU Merrill Hall room 11
5pm | Latin American Song Lecture | Olga Perez Flora | IU Music Annex room 350
Wednesday March 23rd
5pm | Concert with Richard White | IU Bloomington Auer Hall
Friday March 25th
1:15pm | “Illuminating Apologues” | Maggie Polk-Olivo | Brown County
Saturday March 26th
2pm | Lucrecia Performance | Monroe County Public Library
Monday March 28th
9:30am | “Illuminating Apologues” | Maggie Polk-Olivo | Fairview Elementary
Tuesday March 29th
10:40am | “How to be a Professional Musician” | Huntingburg High School
12pm | Lucrecia Performance | Huntingburg Elementary School
6pm | Lucrecia Performance | Thyen-Clarke Cultural Center, Jasper
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