In 1807, 37-year-old Omar Ibn Said was made to board a ship bound for Charleston, South Carolina—the site of his enslavement and sale. Created by Giddens, the Grammy Award-winning musician and MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient and Abels, composer of the score to the Oscar-nominated film Get Out, this New England premiere narrates Said’s 1831 autobiography, beginning from his childhood and ending some 30 years before he was laid to rest. This record of his life and Muslim faith reveals a refusal to be defined or erased by his captors. It’s a seminal work of strength, resistance, and religious conviction—a work underscoring the indelible power of the written word

Commissioned by Spoleto Festival USA, Carolina Performing Arts, L.A. Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and San Francisco Opera, and inspired by Dr. Ala Alryyes’s translation of Omar Ibn Said’s autobiography in his book, A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said.

This production of Omar was supported in part by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Aaron Copland Fund, The Amphion Foundation, and Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. Community engagement programming for Omar is supported in part by the Cabot Family Charitable Trust and the Virginia Wellington Cabot Foundation