“ . . from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, 1859
Claudia Stevens wrote the text for Blue Lias in 2005-6 while in residence at Brandeis University as Visiting Scholar/Artist at the Women’s Studies Research Center. The piece deals with confrontations of gender, class, religion and science in nineteenth century England, given expression by the life, personality and career of famed fossil collector Mary Anning. Stevens gave the piece its first reading at Cornell University during a short residency in fall, 2005 for an audience including distinguished scientists. Its official premiere occurred at the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University in March, 2007. Subsequent engagements have included leading colleges, universities and museums of natural history.
About Claudia Stevens
Claudia Stevens is a musician, actor and performance artist, as well as a playwright and librettist. She has created a unique body of interdisciplinary works for her own solo performance, which have been presented at the national and international level since the early l990’s.
Trained as a pianist, singer, musicologist and composer, Claudia holds degrees in music from Vassar College, California at Berkeley, and in piano from Boston University. Her academic positions have included Williams College and the College of William and Mary, where she now has been appointed Visiting Scholar in Music. A composers’ pianist in the 1980s, she championed the music of Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter in performances at Carnegie Recital Hall and other leading venues, and was the featured artist in several “Performance Today” broadcasts on National Public Radio.
In her subsequent career as an interdisciplinary artist, Claudia received grants from the International Theater Institute, the Virginia Commission for the Arts (continuously from 1994 to 2005), a “New Forms” grant from the NEA, and artist residencies including the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, RS9 Szinhaz in Budapest, the Gitameit Art Center in Rangoon, Burma, and the Baltimore Theater Project. Recent university and college engagements performing original works include Swarthmore, Stanford, Williams, Carleton, Cornell, Colgate, UCLA, Haverford, Lehigh, Occidental, Washington and Lee, Purdue, Claremont McKenna, the universities of Kansas, Michigan, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Notre Dame, and many others. In 2008-9 she appeared at venues in Toronto, Houston, Portland, Cleveland and L.A. Claudia’s most recent project is a new science-based interactive play,“Wick,” set to premiere in Charlotte, NC in March, 2010. Also a librettist, she collaborated with composer Allen Shearer in the creation of new chamber operas, The Dawn Makers, which premiered at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco in Feb, 2009 and the more recent short comic opera, A Very Large Mole.
About Allen Shearer
Allen Shearer, composer, has received many awards in music, including the Aaron Copland Award and residency, the Rome Prize Fellowship (Prix de Rome), a Charles Ives Scholarship, an Alfred Hertz Fellowship, four residencies at the MacDowell Colony, several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, including one for the creation of his first opera The Goddess, grants from Meet The Composer, and most recently the 2008-9 Sylvia Goldstein award from the Aaron Copland House in New York for Three Lyrics.
In addition to works of opera and music for the stage, Shearer has written orchestral, choral, chamber and solo music. His Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra was premiered and broadcast in Rome by the Orchestra sinfonica della RAI. His choral works, many of them written for the male choral ensemble Chanticleer, have been performed in nearly every state of the U.S. as well as in Europe, the former Soviet Union, Asia, and South Africa. His opera, The Dawn Makers, a collaboration with Claudia Stevens, premiered in San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre Feb. 4, 2009. A new collaboration with Claudia as librettist is a chamber opera, A Very Large Mole, premiering in fall, 2009.
Allen is artistic co-director of the San Francisco new music presenter Composres, Inc. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley as well as artist diplomas from the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg, and teaches at California State University, East Bay and at the University of California at Berkeley. Also a baritone, he performs vocal music old and new, including his own.
Statement by the playwright/performer Stevens
In addition to issues of gender, religion and science, I am interested in exploring intersections of artistic and scientific experience. I’m also having fun with “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” John Fowles’ postmodern novel set in his - and Anning’s - home town of Lyme. Fowles was fascinated by Anning’s life and career. His unpublished monograph about her suggests that she may have been the inspiration, if not the model, for his feminist heroine, Sarah Woodruff.