Paul will join NYC-based theater director Karin Coonrod to complete an opera based on the apocryphal text Judith.

Professor Diana Henderson will host theater maker and artistic director Karin Coonrod at MIT to develop text-based theatrical works. At MIT, Coonrod will focus on crossing boundaries between the arts and humanities and working with old and new technologies and texts such as the Anglo-Saxon apocryphal companion manuscript to Beowolf, “Judith.”

“Judith” builds on Coonrod’s experience working with medieval mystery plays in Orvieto, Italy, from 2003 to 2006, which involved physical reclamation of a church tower and reinvigoration of a local performance tradition. This kind of community building and merging past and present to imagine new, more inclusive futures is at the heart of Colombari’s mission. Building on work for her play “texts and beheadings/ElizabethR” and extensive work in the Shakespeare canon, Coonrod is creating a text to be sung and spoken in Anglo-Saxon and in modern English rooted in Anglo-Saxon. Paul Vasile is composing the music for this new work, with whom Coonrod collaborated closely in the medieval mystery plays performed in Orvieto.