Daniel Bernard Roumain, BMus’93, (right, with the production’s assistant director and choreographer Bill T. Jones, center), composed the music for the opera We Shall Not Be Moved, which was named by The New York Times in December as one of the best classical music performances of 2017. Daniel Shirley, BMus’04, was among the six featured cast members in the production. The work, with libretto by poet and spoken-word artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph, was produced by Opera Philadelphia last September for its fall festival. Based on the deadly 1985 bombing by Philadelphia police of the building housing Move—a group of black separatists—and its resultant fire, the opera went on to play the Apollo Theater in New York and the Hackney Empire in London. Also reviewed by Opera News, it was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered.
Read a September 2017 New York Times story about We Shall Not Be Moved at vu.edu/move-opera