BABA: The Life and Death of Stana – World Premiere!

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Created by world-renowned Slovenian composer, author, and stage director Karmina Šilec, BABA is a new opera inspired by the lives of Balkan sworn virgins, women who live as men after taking lifelong vows of celibacy.

An imaginative, multidisciplinary take on Balkan epic storytelling traditions, BABA explores themes of gender, custom, and the complexities of interpreting the female-to-male transformations of sworn virgins through a contemporary, liberal, Western gaze.

Šilec’s work has been praised by The New York Times as “Vibrantly theatrical, genre-blurring, unusual in its techniques, eclectic in its musical style, and politically charged.”