Theatre Alumna Ashley Tata '12 Directs Live Digital Performance 'Con Alma'

Theatre alumna Ashley Tata ’12 is the director of Con Alma, a live digital performance of classic songs from the Mexican and Jazz tradition and original works by composer Paola Prestini and vocalist and composer Magos Herrera. 

Con Alma began as an album created remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recorded with over 30 musicians across three continents, it is an exploration of how to bring people together during a time requiring so many to be apart. It has been a challenging period for Prestini and Herrera, who rely on each other and their broader artistic community to create and thrive. Con Alma seeks to cultivate a shared experience in a moment when division—geographical, political, ideological, and spiritual—runs deep. 

Tata will incorporate live elements into the pre-recorded album: storytelling, live drawing, and a social media campaign that calls for audience submissions relating to “the sound of isolation.” 

According to Prestini and Herrera, “Con Alma is a sonic painting representing a 15-year friendship through a collaborative process of writing, telling the story of shared ambitions and triumphs, love, trials, hope, and losses. The artists we worked with form our international musical family, and it’s a joy to be able to connect through this album, leaving an artifact of this time, and our response to the pandemic, alone, but together.”

Tata makes multimedia works of theatre, contemporary opera, performance, cyberformance, live music, and immersive experiences. Her work has been presented at venues and festivals in the US and internationally: Theatre for a New Audience, LA Opera, Austin Opera, The Miller Theater, National Sawdust, EMPAC, BPAC, The Crossing the Line Festival, the Holland Festival, The Prelude Festival, The National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, and the Fisher Center at Bard. 

Her other creations during the pandemic include a live cyberformance of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest, which transferred from Bard College’s Fisher Center to Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA); a Zoom-accessed Virtual Nightclub and dance party called The Boot with Beth Morrison Projects; a music video for rock band Sylvan Esso, which aired on Colbert’s YouTube COVID channel; and a “physically-distanced adherent, landscape-integrating adaptation” of John Luther Adams’s Ten Thousand Birds with ensemble Alarm Will Sound at PS21 in Chatham, New York. 

Tata has taught, guest taught, or been a guest artist at Mannes School of Music, Harvard University, MIT, Marymount Manhattan College, Colgate College, Bard College and LIU Post. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors’ Lab, the recipient of the Lotos Foundation's Emerging Artist Award in Arts and Sciences, and a winner of the 2017 Robert L. B. Tobin Director/Designer grant. Currently, she is in residence at 153 Coffey, a multi-disciplinary warehouse space in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Con Alma will premiere on December 13, 2020 at 7 pm Eastern. It will be available to stream here and on National Sawdust. In the New York area, the event will be broadcast live on the ALL ARTS TV channel; it will also be broadcast live in Mexico. After December 13, Con Alma will be available to view on the ALL ARTS streaming platform for one year.