VCCA Fireplace Series 12
Featuring: Randall Eng and Dan Jian
When: Thursday, October 15, 2020, at 7:30 p.m. ET.
Where: Facebook Live and YouTube
Composer and VCCA Fellows Council member E. Shawn Qaissaunee will host the October 15 event featuring composer Randall Eng and visual artist Dan Jian.
Randall Eng’s music lies at the intersection of opera, music-theatre, and jazz. He will present an excerpt from Remain, a choral setting of a “Know Your Rights” immigration pamphlet.
Dan Jian is a visual artist who works across painting, drawing, and project-based installation. The work she’ll share is a continuation of the direction and path initiated at a VCCA residency in 2017.
Randall Eng
Randall Eng’s music lies at the intersection of opera, music-theatre, and jazz. His operas Florida, Before the Night Sky, and Henry’s Wife have been presented across the country at UrbanArias, Lyric Opera Cleveland, New York City Opera’s VOX Festival, the Virginia Arts Festival, the American Opera Project, and the Center for Contemporary Opera.
Recent works include the song “As for me,” premiering in April 2021 by Mirror Visions Ensemble, and Harbor, a song for soprano and orchestra created with U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, which premiered in 2019 by the Boston Pops. The piece excerpted at the Fireplace Series is Remain, a choral setting of a “Know Your Rights” immigration pamphlet, which premiered in 2018 by MasterVoices.
He is a graduate of Harvard University, Cambridge University, and NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, where he now teaches and leads the Tisch Opera Lab.
He has written much music at VCCA, often in residence with librettist Donna Di Novelli. His main project during the era of COVID has been a musical adaptation of a film.
Dan Jian
Dan Jian (b. 1986, Hubei, China) is a visual artist who works across painting, drawing, and project-based installation. Dan’s recent solo show and two-person shows include 934 Gallery and Sean Christopher Gallery, OH, and Organhaus Contemporary Art Space in Chongqing, China. Her group work has been exhibited extensively across the U.S., as well as internationally in China and Italy.
Dan was a Fellow in residence at VCCA for more than a month in 2017, in which period she met many life-long friends and broadened her practice. The work presented in this session is a continuation of the direction and path initiated back then. Under the COVID-19 pandemic, Dan’s two major solo shows are postponed; one in China, given the circumstance of China-America relations, might be canceled eventually. However, Dan is not discouraged.
. 
About the Series
The VCCA Fireplace Series — in the spirit of the sharing of work that takes place among VCCA Fellows after dinner in front of the fireplace at Mt. San Angelo — features live presentations by two Fellows every other Thursday. The focus of these events is on new work, particularly by artists with public events affected by the pandemic.
Watch Other Events in the VCCA Fireplace Series
As more events take place, we’ll add the recordings to this YouTube playlist: