A New Festival Embraces the Possibilities of Disability-Centered Opera
The three works at the Makemake festival at National Sawdust make the case that disability-led opera is artistically ambitious, despite the logistical challenges.
In Brooklyn, mezzo-soprano Hailey McAvoy, who has cerebral palsy, is rehearsing for "Sensorium Ex," a disability-centered opera. McAvoy also created a music-theater piece, "Wholly Unwinding," for the makemake festival. Jakob Jordan, an autistic actor with apraxia, never imagined starring in an opera. In 2025, he became one of two nonverbal actors to take the stage in Paola Prestini’s sci-fi opera at the Common Senses Festival in Omaha.
The opera provides Jordan, 24, with a voice through custom-built technology, Sensorium AI, which enables him to control his speech and even sing. Jordan will now perform excerpts from "Sensorium Ex" at National Sawdust, alongside two other works exploring the past and future of opera and disability, for the inaugural Makemake festival.
The festival highlights the challenges and possibilities of creating disability-inclusive opera, such as limited rehearsal time, tight budgets, and inflexible spaces. Music scholar Joseph N. Straus suggests that classical music's focus on the score's demands over "human fragility" can lead to an impoverishment of the full range of human experience.
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