Former PIMA Student Awarded Prestigious Princeton Hodder Fellowship

Malena Dayen ’20. Photo credit: Sharan Kaur

Malena Dayen ’20 M.F.A was already an established opera singer when she came to Brooklyn College. The New York Times had called her 2013 Carnegie Hall Performance in The Blizzard Voices outstanding. The mezzo-soprano had concertized all over the world with accomplished composers and built a name for herself in New York City’s independent opera scene.

But the Argentinian native with a deep love for tango wanted to be around artists who approached their work from different perspectives, in different mediums, especially technology. The graduate Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) program—with its emphasis on developing in students a variety of skills, a multidisciplinary bent, and a conceptual sophistication—turned out to be exactly what she was looking for. She came out of the program directing projects for major opera companies, pushing her own boundaries, and ready to experiment.

For her ingenuity, she was awarded the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University’s Hodder Fellowship, a one-year appointment given to artists of “exceptional promise” and extraordinary intellectual and artistic talent.

Congratulations on the fellowship. What do you plan to do with it?

The fellowship will allow me to continue pursuing independent projects. It starts in September and is meant for artists in diverse fields to have the freedom to move their disciplines forward. I’ll be able to collaborate with other artists in the program. It feels like a push and encouragement to continue creating work that is experimental and interesting to me. It’s a vote of confidence to be able to create freely in a supported environment.

The Lewis Center emphasizes that they are looking for artists who will transform the art world with their work. What are some of the interesting projects you have worked on that lead up to this?

The first project I completed was my [Brooklyn College] thesis, The Presence of Odradek. The show was a mix of online live performance with pre-recorded materials, so the people watching didn't know what was happening live and what wasn’t. Later, The Decameron Opera Coalition commissioned nine works inspired by the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The singers performed in their homes in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris and were edited together to seem like they were in the same place. That project was chosen by the Library of Congress for an archive of work about the pandemic. My upcoming project is Thomas Cananiss’ Firesongs with Bare Opera. The show embodies the use of interactive media. It’s a cycle of songs based on different poems about the meaning of life and death by Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, and others. The singers on stage will be wearing sensors connected to lights that will shift according to their movement on stage. It opens in June.

And from your Argentinian background, you bring your love for tango music to your work.

I grew up with tango since my parents are both amateur musicians. Malena is a tango name, I guess I was destined to love tango! The culture of tango is very rich and deep, and I think it informs everything I do. Working as a tango singer allows me to connect with this tradition that is a mother tongue of sorts for me.

You also embrace the changes that technology has brought to opera. Can you talk about that?

Since the pandemic, every performer in the world has had to adapt and figure out a way to reach people when people could not come to the theater. Communicating online has the benefit of being more inclusive for those who have not had access to the theater. For my PIMA thesis, we created a new opera and were planning to perform it in a tiny venue downtown that would fit 30 people. Then the pandemic hit, and we had to shift it online. On opening day, we had 400 people watching and we added shows at different times so those in other time zones, such as in Asia, could view them. I started my career as a digital director in this format. From a practical point of view, technology increases accessibility to opera. Creatively, the digital shift has opened a new avenue, which is the possibility to create material specifically to be shared or performed live online. Rather than just filming and sharing online, it can be used as an opportunity to create something new.

What made you choose the PIMA program and how did it shape you?

I have always trained as a singer. A few years ago, I was thinking of becoming a director and I looked at the programs available, but there wasn't anything really for people in my position. There are a few for opera directing, but they're targeted at people who come from theater to learn music, not for musicians to learn how to stage shows. I was interested in more experimental work and technology in particular. I found the PIMA program and the fact that it was here in the city where I live was a huge plus. When I interviewed, I saw the people who were teaching, and I was blown away. They are all artists at the top of their game. And it's a small program, so I was able to interact and collaborate with artists that already have practices in other disciplines, different than mine. I worked and graduated with a group of five and we still meet weekly. Since then, at least one of my fellow PIMA graduates has been involved in each of my projects. The program is really avant-garde not only in its use of technology but from the artistic point of view. It’s really interesting the way they think about art and collaboration. I had an awesome experience.