Looking at You Kamala Sankaram & Rob Handel

• Kamala Sankaram (b. 1978) & Rob Handel:
• 1 SankaramHandel: Opening Sequence: This is where the winners end up 05:18
• 2 SankaramHandel: Opening Sequence: Dorothy 02:50
• 3 SankaramHandel: Opening Sequence: Thirteen Eyes 03:31
• 4 SankaramHandel: Ethan 03:21
• 5 SankaramHandel: Scrolling Back 04:00
• 6 SankaramHandel: First Day at Work 03:33
• 7 SankaramHandel: Fuck You Dorothy 03:29
• 8 SankaramHandel: Transit 03:57
• 9 SankaramHandel: Bike 03:36
• 10 SankaramHandel: Ghosting 02:26
• 11 SankaramHandel: Flashback 07:52
• 12 SankaramHandel: I Hate the Media 00:39
• 13 SankaramHandel: Geek Trio (Nothing to Hide) 04:21
• 14 SankaramHandel: Exterminator 03:12
• 15 SankaramHandel: Burn it to the Ground 04:15
• 16 SankaramHandel: The Agents 02:02
• 17 SankaramHandel: Interrogation 04:29
• 18 SankaramHandel: Executive Office 05:22
• 19 SankaramHandel: The Algorithm Learns 04:38
• 20 SankaramHandel: Off the Rails 03:32
• 21 SankaramHandel: Product Launch 07:42
• 22 SankaramHandel: Epilogue (Something to Hide) 01:30
• Total Runtime 01:25:35

Info for Looking at You

Looking at You is an immersive techno-noir music theater piece by Kamala Sankaram and Rob Handel that confronts the issue of privacy in our digitized society. The highly charged narrative, directed by Kristin Marting, is a story of love and espionage. It fuses Edward Snowden with Casablanca, driven by a dynamic score inspired by dance music, crime jazz, and operatic arias. Set inside a corporate headquarters and integrating data mined from the audience in real time, Looking at You lays bare urgent questions of our time.

The global architecture of the Internet is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it facilitates access to knowledge, economic growth, and freedom of expression. On the other, it erodes our right to individual privacy. LOOKING AT YOU questions how loss of privacy could transform us as a global culture and confronts the audience with the fact that their personal information is available to anyone who cares to search for it. Additionally, the piece explores the issues of women in the tech industry, surveillance of communities of color, and the chilling effect of surveillance on free speech. At its heart, this project is an activist piece, addressing issues that confront every class and demographic worldwide and include representation of groups frequently underrepresented. Aesthetically, it has also been essential to bring different musical perspectives together in service to the story. While opera and EDM might not seem like an obvious fit, they are both musical genres with a strong sense of tradition and place, and situate the narrative in specific cultures. Thus, our show is diverse in terms of the dramatic arc itself, the characters who drive the narrative, and the musical world.

Spectators are seated at tables with built-in touchscreens in a Silicon Hills company headquarters that encompasses a coffee shop, saloon, health club and roof garden. Once you click on a standard user agreement, information from your digital footprint — information you have shared publicly on the internet — begins to be folded into the lyrics and visual content of the show. As the drama of high romance amidst government and corporate surveillance unfolds around you, your screen reassembles into a series of a singing faces: your face, the faces of your tablemates, the faces of your loved ones. The drama reimagines the morally complex love story of CASABLANCA in our age of total surveillance. When Dorothy lands her dream job as chief software engineer at a social media behemoth in Silicon Hills, she doesn’t expect her past will come crashing in as her ex-boyfriend Ethan becomes the world’s most famous whistleblower. Pursued by the U.S. government and at the mercy of whoever harbors him, Ethan’s only hope is to delete his fragile physical existence and upload his consciousness permanently to the cloud — but for that he needs the help of the woman he abandoned without explanation in order to expose a secret worldwide surveillance structure. Will Dorothy choose to save Ethan or to hold on to her shiny life by turning him in?

Kristin Marting (director) has constructed 28 stage works, including original hybrids, opera theater and music theater, reimaginings of novels and short stories, and classic plays. She has directed over 19 works at HERE, where she serves as the founding artistic director.

Kamala Sankaram (composer) has received commissions from Washington National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Beth Morrison Projects, the PROTOTYPE Festival, Opera on Tap, Opera Memphis, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, among others.

Rob Handel (librettist and playwright) has worked on collaborations with composer Kamala Sankaram including Enchantress (American Lyric Theatre, Opera Ithaca), Bombay Rickey, and PROTOTYPE Festival at HERE; and Tête à Tête in London.

Kamala Sankaram
Praised as “strikingly original” (NY Times) and “new voice from whom we will surely be hearing more” (LA Times), Kamala Sankaram writes highly theatrical music that defies categorization. Recent commissions include the Glimmerglass Festival, Washington National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Shakespeare Theatre Company, and Opera on Tap, among others. Awards, grants and residencies include: Jonathan Larson Award, NEA ArtWorks, MAP Fund, Opera America, NY IT Award for Outstanding Production of a Musical, the Civilians, HERE, the MacDowell Colony, and the Watermill Center. Known for her work with emerging technologies, her recent genre-defying hit Looking at You (with collaborators Rob Handel and Kristin Marting) featured live data mining of the audience and a chorus of 25 singing tablet computers. Sankaram, Handel, and Marting also created all decicions will be made by consensus, a short absurdist opera performed live over Zoom and featured on NBC and the BBC3. With librettist Jerre Dye and Opera on Tap, she created The Parksville Murders, the world’s first virtual reality opera (Samsung VR, Jaunt VR, Kennedy Center Reach Festival, “Best Virtual Reality Video” NY Independent Film Festival, Future of Storytelling, Salem Horror Festival and the Topanga Film Festival.)

Also a performer (hailed as "an impassioned soprano with blazing high notes" (Wall Street Journal)), Kamala moves freely between the worlds of experimental music, creative music, and contemporary opera. Kamala recently sang the role of Gwen St. Clair in the revival of Meredith Monk’s ATLAS with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. A frequent collaborator with Anthony Braxton, she has premiered his operas Trillium E and Trillium J, as well as appearing on his 12-hour recording GTM (Syntax) 2017. Other notable collaborations include The Wooster Group’s LA DIDONE (Kaaitheater, Brussels, Edinburgh International Festival, Rotterdam Schouberg, Grand Théâtre de la Ville, Luxembourg, St. Anne’s Warehouse, NY, REDCAT, Los Angeles), the PROTOTYPE Festival’s THUMBPRINT (Baruch Performing Arts, NY, REDCAT, Los Angeles), and appearances with John Zorn, the Philip Glass Ensemble, and Petr Kotik, among others. Kamala is the leader of Bombay Rickey, an operatic Bollywood surf ensemble whose accolades include two awards for Best Eclectic Album from the Independent Music Awards, the 2018 Mid-Atlantic touring grant, and appearances on WFMU and NPR. Bombay Rickey’s opera-cabaret on the life of Yma Sumac premiered in the 2016 PROTOTYPE Festival and was presented in London at Tête-à-Tête Opera’s Cubitt Sessions.

Dr. Sankaram holds a PhD from the New School and is currently a member of the composition faculty at SUNY Purchase.

Rob Handel
was a founding member of the playwrights’ collective 13P, which won four Obie Awards, and heads the dramatic writing program at Carnegie Mellon University. Recently, he wrote the libretti for a cycle of mini-operas produced by Opera Theater Summerfest via a commissioning grant from Opera America. His latest play, A Maze, has been produced by New York Stage and Film, Rorschach Theatre (D.C.), and Just Theater (Berkeley). His work has been produced by Long Wharf Theatre, SPF, Target Margin, City Lights (San Jose), Curious Theatre (Denver), Theater Ninjas (Cleveland), and Half Moon (Poughkeepsie). Residencies include The Royal Court Theatre, Donmar Warehouse, The O’Neill Playwrights Conference, Soho Rep, Portland Center Stage, and Todd Mountain Theater Project. Honors include the Helen Merrill Award and the Whitfield Cook Award. Millicent Scowlworthy and Aphrodisiac are published by Samuel French. Rob studied at Williams College and with Paula Vogel at Brown University. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, poet Joy Katz, and their son.

Booklet for Looking at You