Jing Jing’s work Splitting Sand has been included in an OPERA America grant to White Snake Projects of Brookline, MA. This grant supports the commissioning of new works by women composers as part of OPERA America’s Opera Grants for Women Composers program. Details at operaamerica.org.

The Opera Grants for Women Composers program enriches the art form by supporting the work of women who bring their creative perspectives, experiences, and stories to stages across the country. It consists of two parallel granting initiatives: Discovery Grants, awarded directly to women composers to advance the development of new work; and Commissioning Grants, awarded to opera companies for commissions by women composers. The program has distributed nearly $1.8 million to composers and companies since its creation in 2014 and has helped propel the careers of countless women creators in the opera field. Of the six composers supported by 2023 Commissioning Grants, five were formerly supported by Discovery Grants.  

Splitting Sand – Jing Jing Luo, composer
Cerise Lim Jacobs, librettist

Splitting Sand, composed by Jing Jing Luo and commissioned and produced by White Snake Projects, is a work of resistance. Through music theater, dance, puppetry, and robotics, it calls out the repression, cruelty, and suppression of free speech, artistic innovation, and intellectual freedom during the Cultural Revolution in China, a genocide of unimaginable dimensions. It is a little-known fact that the number of people killed during this purge exceeds that of the Holocaust and other horrific genocides. The work integrates historical reality, memory, and fantasy as it retraces a dissenter’s arrest, imprisonment, torture, public humiliation, and brainwashing as they are broken, physically and mentally. Yet, there is resistance, the resistance of art and music, which is an everlasting legacy that cannot be recanted away.

Jing Jing Luo previously received a 2015 Discovery Grant from the Opera Grants for Women Composers program.