The stage of the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center had been transformed into a split-screen tableau depicting ancient Rome and contemporary New York. A harpsichordist was playing ominous chords at furious speed. Singers, dressed in capes, suspenders and robes, scaled a rotating set.
This was the start of the American Modern Opera Company taking over Lincoln Center for a residency from Wednesday through mid-July.
The company, known as AMOC, is an experimental collective of singers, dancers and instrumental players. And the project it was putting together at the Koch Theater is the New York premiere of “The Comet/Poppea,” a work that pairs George Lewis’s adaptation of the W.E.B. Du Bois story “The Comet” and Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.”
Directed by Yuval Sharon, “The Comet/Poppea” is classic AMOC fare: an irreverent mash-up of stories that unearths difficult questions about race, society and art. “We’re getting it,” the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, a star and producer of the show, told his fellow cast members while frolicking in a golden cape at the end of a rehearsal on Sunday. “It’s all coming together.”
Once “The Comet/Poppea” opens, on Wednesday, it will be just the start of the residency, which features more than 100 artists in a dozen productions. It’s a milestone for AMOC, which was started by a group of restless artists in 2017 with the aim of shaking up the performance scene.
The residency also represents a shift for Lincoln Center, which has scaled back classical offerings in recent summers in favor of other genres, like pop, world music and dance, hoping to attract new audiences.
Zack Winokur, a stage director and founder of AMOC, described having the chance to perform at Lincoln Center as “profoundly surreal.” (Winokur is also the producing artistic director of Little Island, where he regularly features members of the company.) Many artists in the group met while studying at the Juilliard School, on Lincoln Center’s campus, and they never envisioned that their offbeat offerings might find an audience there.
“A lot of us,” he said, “didn’t think that we’d ever have an opportunity to be in any of those other buildings.”
Still, Winokur said, the company was not focused on the fact that it was helping restore some classical music at Lincoln Center. “What we’re excited about is that it feels like a homecoming for a group of artists who are making new with old and also making new work from a classical position,” he said.
Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer, said that AMOC was a natural fit for the summer festival because it transcended disciplines — a priority for the center’s leadership. She said that the company embodied the idea of collaboration and had created “something bigger than the sum of its parts in a way that’s so generous and generative.”
AMOC was born from a conversation between Winokur and the composer Matthew Aucoin in 2014. The company has since become a leading classical start-up, attracting prominent artists like the singers Davóne Tines and Julia Bullock, the instrumentalists Miranda Cuckson and Emi Ferguson, and the dancer-choreographers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber.
Although AMOC’s origins were scrappy — in the early days, company members met regularly for creative retreats in rural Vermont — many of its artists are now stars in their own right, with busy, independent careers.
The violinist and composer Keir GoGwilt, a company member, said that AMOC was trying to stay connected to its roots, to “maintain our identity, but also bring in players and artists who will continue to refresh that for us.” In July, he will present “Zarabanda Variations,” blending traditional Mexican music with Baroque works and contemporary pieces, featuring an array of composers, poets and musicians.
“We have a lot of people who work in the establishment, and people on the periphery,” GoGwilt said. “The magic of the group has always been this is a meeting place for both of those things.”
The lineup at Lincoln Center includes works that AMOC has spent the past few years fine-tuning in performances around the world. Winokur said that approach was intentional; the company wanted time to polish its offerings.
“We wanted everything to have had a life before coming to Lincoln Center,” he said. “It’s been years of work.”
The company will present Messiaen’s song cycle “Harawi” later this month, featuring Bullock and choreography by Smith and Schraiber. It will give the staged premiere of Aucoin’s “Music for New Bodies” in July, directed by Peter Sellars. And it will conclude its residency on July 16 with “the echoing of tenses,” a song cycle that includes works by seven Asian American poets.
Julia Bumke, AMOC’s executive producer, said that the residency’s programming had been organized with the hope of starting conversations.
“Every single one of these pieces has a real juxtaposition,” she said. “Even if it something like Messiaen or Monteverdi, it’s taking it in a very nontraditional direction.”
AMOC will deepen its partnership with Lincoln Center, which said on Monday that the company would return in January for “The Seasons,” an operatic spin on Vivaldi’s famous music that examines issues including climate change.
At the rehearsal for “The Comet/Poppea,” which premiered in Los Angeles last year, the atmosphere was convivial as the creative team worked on lighting, musical phrasing and stage entrances and exits. The opera is intimate; an audience of nearly 300 people sits onstage as the set rotates.
Costanzo, who sings the roles of the Roman emperor Nero and the father of one of the main characters in “The Comet,” said it could be difficult sometimes to parse feedback from outsiders. But the AMOC artists have created a sense of security, he said, that allows them to take risks and improve.
“The other musicians will tell me if something sounds bad,” he said. “I trust these people’s taste.”
Javier C. Hernández is a Times reporter who covers classical music, opera and dance in New York City and beyond.
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