CRC Music Presents: Steam - A New Music Workshop

CRC Professor of Vocal Music, Omari Tau participates in two days of open rehearsal for Volume 1 of Steam, a new experimental multimedia work for the stage with the composer, David Dominique, librettist Joseph Tepperman, pianist Jennifer Reason, and Left Coast Ensemble conductor Matilda Hofmann. At this event, the group will give audiences a sneak peek into this work set to premiere at the Bayview Opera House on June 6 and 7.

Steam is a three-volume cycle of multimedia works, with fragments that break off from it—preludes, afterlives—in which the retelling of slavery becomes a site of rupture, distortion, and risk. Set in a speculative present, the work follows contemporary figures who attempt to adapt Black Thunder, a novel of slave rebellion, only to encounter the limits—and violences—of narrative itself: aesthetic failure, ethical collapse, commercial extraction, political capture.

A Black actor-activist enters into collaboration with a chamber ensemble, staging history as performance while the ground beneath it destabilizes. Elsewhere, an impostor assumes the identity of Harlem Renaissance author and librarian, Arna Bontemps, moving through institutions as both fraud and prophet, exploiting the same systems that claim to preserve the past.

Across its three volumes, Steam does not reconstruct history—it corrodes it. Scenes repeat, fracture, and misfire. Images are rehearsed until they betray themselves. What emerges is not a stable account of slavery, but a field of competing performances, where memory is under pressure and every attempt at representation risks becoming another form of violence.

Volume I of Steam premieres with Left Coast Chamber Ensemble in June 2026, starring Omari Tau, under the musical direction of Matilda Hofman; The Imposter, a prequel and postlude to the work's expanding world, premieres in April 2026 with Ensemble Télémaque. Steam's libretto was conceived and written by David Dominique and Joseph Tepperman. Its score was composed by David Dominique. Its films were directed by Kevin Jerome Everson and produced by David Dominique.