OUTsider at UT x PPP’s Fridays@2 - APOLAKI: Opera of the Scorched Earth

About the Creative Team

Micaela Tobin is a soprano, sound artist and teacher based in Los Angeles, California who specializes in experimental voice and contemporary opera.

As a sound artist with a background in opera, Tobin integrates voice and electronics within the genres of noise and drone music. Her work incorporates ritualized gesture and amplified object-symbolism and explores her diasporic identity as a first-generation Filipina-American. Tobin’s vocal practice is based in building connections between the physical voice as a means of empowering one’s "inner" voice and challenging colonial stories and systems.

Composing primarily under the moniker "White Boy Scream,” Tobin dissects her operatic and extended vocal techniques through the use of electronics, oscillating between extreme textures of noise, drone and operatic sound walls. Her most recent full length album, “BAKUNAWA” (Deathbomb Arc) includes elements of sonic ritual, ancient myth and ancestral memory. Of the album, Steve Smith of The New Yorker Magazine asserts that “opera would do well to pay attention.” The album was ranked the #9 Release of 2020 in The Wire Magazine. 

In May 2021, Tobin premiered the cinematic adaptation of the album through REDCAT, titled “BAKUNAWA: Opera of the Seven Moons.” In July 2023 Tobin premiered her second opera, titled APOLAKI: Opera of the Scorched Earth, which will be adapted into her next album release.   
Tobin is the proud recipient of the 2021 MAP Fund, the 2022 New Play Network Creation & Development Fund and was most recently awarded the 2023 Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, where she will begin composing her next opera.

Tobin is currently a voice teacher on faculty at California Institute for the Arts and teaches through her private studio, HOWL SPACE, in Los Angeles, California.   

Carlo Maghirang (he/they) is a Los Angeles-based installation artist, scenographer and experimental space designer, originally from San Pedro, Laguna, Philippines. Specializing in sculptural and architectural interventions that bridge the gap between art object and environment, much of his body of work deals in immersive experiences and performative spaces. Such recent works include: Apolaki: Opera of the Scorched Earth with Micaela Tobin (LACE), Wake with Jay Carlon (REDCAT), Sweet Land (The Industry) and Vibration Group with Anna Luisa Petrisko (LACE). 

His work in Sweet Land won the La Mama Design Competition in 2020 and has received recognition from publications such as Live Design and the LA Times. Other works in design (Glass Mountain, Fore!) have also been exhibited at the Prague Quadrennial in 2019 as representing the American delegation in both the professional and emerging artist categories, with his installation "Ocean of Milk" being exhibited there in 2015. 

UPCOMING: Maghirang’s outdoor installation ‘MA-NA-NANG-GAL’ – a biographical exploration of the artist’s journey of immigration/displacement told through the lens of the manananggal folklore - is set to open March 2024 at Lincoln Center’s Hearst Plaza Tree Grove, as part of the Social Sculpture Project (Collider Project, Lincoln Center, Mellon and Ford Foundations).   

Jay Carlon (he/they) is a queer dance artist, choreographer and community organizer whose work is grounded in a collective journey toward decolonization and sustainability. His work facilitates shared healing and the exploration of post-colonial identity, ancestry and the complex queer and Filipinx experience in relationship to site and space. The youngest of 12 in a Filipino Catholic migrant family, Carlon connects a global network of Filipinx creatives, organizing community around art and food. Carlon’s continued work with these collectives spans opera, dance and installation.

Carlon’s work along the West Coast engages Filipino enclaves around shared experience; through the Filipino American National Historical Society on the Central Coast, and in Los Angeles at REDCAT NOW Festival, homeLA, The Broad Museum, the Japanese American National Museum and more, along with performances with Makini, The Industry Opera and Oguri. In New York, they have presented work at 92ndY and The CURRENT SESSIONS and performed with the Metropolitan Opera and Bill T. Jones. Carlon also researches and develops work internationally and in his ancestral family’s home in Bohol, Philippines.

As teacher and facilitator, Carlon has spoken and led workshops on decolonizing the body and reclaiming space at Johns Hopkins University, UCLA, University of the Arts, USC, School of the Art Institute Chicago and Asians @ Google, among others.

Carlon’s commercial work empowers black and brown artists with agency and autonomy; including choreography for Mndsgn and Kanye West and performance with Solange Knowles and Rodrigo y Gabriela. As associate director and aerial performer with Australian spectacle theater company Sway, they have choreographed for Lincoln Center and performed at the Olympics and the Super Bowl. 

Carlon is a recipient of the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Production Grant, California Arts Council Established Artist Fellowship, and one of Dance Magazine’s “25 To Watch.”