TICKETS
From $20–$65
ABOUT
6 hours long, scored for 28 musicians (including three microtonal pianos), 8 singers, and 6 dancers with music by composer Dylan Mattingly and text by Thomas Bartscherer, Stranger Love is a grand celebration of being alive. It follows two lovers whose romance unfolds to the rhythm of the seasons. Set on a vast time-scale against the ever-expanding universe, it broadens in scope and frame over the course of three acts, moving from the personal to the archetypal to a vision of the divine — a love supreme. Stranger Love evokes the visceral thrill of a gospel revival, the ethereal calm of watching snow fall, the wonder of staring into the night sky. Stranger Love reaches for the impossible. Breathtaking in scale, with burning intensity, the music dances from moments of manic energy to stretches of unearthly serenity. At six hours long, Stranger Love is deliberately countercultural. Stranger Love offers an epic celebration that embraces complexity and abstraction and aspires to total joy. Neither denying the world as it is, nor imprisoned by it, Stranger Love envisions the world we might hope to inhabit.
The creative production team for Stranger Love features Lileana Blain-Cruz as director, Matt Saunders as set designer, Chris Emile as choreographer, Hannah Wasileski as projection designer, Yi Zhao as lighting designer, and Kaye Voyce as costume designer. Contemporaneous performed a concert version of Act I of Stranger Love on the PROTOTYPE Festival in 2018, concert versions of Act II and Act III on Day of Imagination in 2021. May 20, 2023 will see the world premiere of the full production after 11 years of development, produced by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and featuring Contemporaneous as the performing ensemble at Disney Hall in Los Angeles.