Be the first to experience a groundbreaking collaboration between contemporary artistic powerhouses: Grammy Award-winning composer Bryce Dessner (The National, Train Dreams) and award-winning poet Ocean Vuong, setting a powerful collection on immigrant histories, war and displacement, queer identity, and family lineages to music on stage.
Now considered to be one of the foremost creative writers in America today, Ocean Vuong (author of 2019's acclaimed On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous) made his career debut with Night Sky with Exit Wounds in 2016, becoming the youngest person ever to win the T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry at 29 years old, and the second ever debut collection to win it. The book was also listed as a New York Times Top 10 Book of the year. Based on his family's history as Vietnamese immigrants, the collection "beautifully attests to Mr. Vuong’s own ability to use the magic of words to summon and preserve the past" (The New York Times).
Bryce Dessner is equally at home in the world of rock, achieving fame as the co-founder (along with his twin brother Aaron) of The National—multi-award winning band, including two GRAMMY Awards and two NME Awards for Best Album and Best Band in the World (2018)—as he is in the world of contemporary classical music. Dessner is a producer and composer, having worked with Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Alejandro Iñarritú, Paul Simon, Sufjan Stevens, and Taylor Swift. He also co-founded Dream House Quartet with pianists Katia and Marielle Làbeque and guitarist David Chalmin, and has a new opera of Herakles Mad, with libretto by poet Anne Carson, premiering in Basel, Switzerland in May 2027.
Born out of their friendship and mutual artistic admiration, bringing Night Sky with Exit Wounds to the stage is a collaboration between Vuong and Dessner and close collaborators, theatre director Silvia Costa, mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron, and 2025 MacArthur Fellowship recipient and visual artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen on projection design. With Costa and Dessner navigating the delicate balance between the raw vulnerability of Vuong’s poetry and the dynamic interplay of music and visuals, the collaborators are embarking on an exploration that transcends conventional design boundaries toward a universe where live music, poetry and visual art find a seamless, deeply charged flow.
This workshop presentation will feature a post-show Q&A with artists on site for the residency, including Dessner, Barron, and Costa.
"Vuong's poems combine to form a view that's at once movingly personal and energized with a message that needs to be heard." - Lonesome Reader
"Vuong accomplishes with sophistication and grace what many poets only strive to accomplish: he invites us to experience a world where hardship and isolation are expectations ... This voice, Vuong’s necessary, shimmering voice, fills us to the core." - Harvard Review
"Dessner moves fluidly between rock and classical and everywhere in between." – Guardian
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