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[purgatorio] POPOPERA is a guitar piece written for seven dancers who, previous to creating the piece, did not know how to play guitar. It is a collaboration between Emio Greco and Pieter Scholten of Amerstdam's Emio Greco/PC dance company, and Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon. They met in 2000 after Gordon was intrigued by Emio Greco/PC's "otherwordly energy that, when on the verge of cresting, just continues to get wilder and wilder." After much discussion, Gordon proposed a piece with dancers playing guitars.

The idea was met with reservations but five years later the dance company and Gordon met again in Massachusetts where they finally got to work. The dancers committed themselves to learning with admirable intensity and careful training from Bryce Dessner (guitarist for The National & Clogs) and Katie Geissinger (singer with Meredith Monk and on the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson opera, Einstein on the Beach). The dancers continued to train with Gordo...