Davóne Tines
Singer
WHAT’S COMING UP FOR YOU IN 2024?
This year I’m making my Metropolitan Opera debut in a piece I’ve loved for years. I’m singing the role of Joseph/Herrod/God in John Adams’s El Niño, a contemporary retelling of the Messiah story from female and Latinx perspectives. When I was at Juilliard, there was a certain amount of shame associated with specializing in contemporary music. But that’s where I found my home: in work that was being made by living people, because the reason for doing it was always up for discussion. No one could hide behind the anonymity of time-tested “excellence.” Classical institutions are reshuffling their values and investing in (or betting on) contemporary work for survival. It’s been an interesting sensation to silently think, Girl, I been over here all along.
I’m also releasing my first album with my band Davóne & the Truth. The project takes the music of Paul Robeson, the mid-20th-century singer, actor, and activist known for the song “Ol’ Man River,” and reimagines it through the lens of a CIA-induced LSD trip in a hotel bathroom in Moscow.
““Classical institutions are reshuffling their values and investing in (or betting on) contemporary work for survival.””
WHAT’S SOMETHING PEOPLE GET WRONG ABOUT YOU?
I get asked often if I am trying to center politics or the Black experience in my work. I always respond with some version of: “I make work that is honest about my identity and interrogates the contexts in which my identity exists. I happen to be a queer, Black, cis male, so the lens of my identity presupposes me to make work that addresses how those identity vectors intersect and interact with the world through interpersonal, communal, and sociopolitical relationships.” I’m not inherently making Black work, I’m making work that is an honest articulation of who I am.
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SEE MORE OF IN YOUR INDUSTRY? LESS OF?
I want people to ask, “How are you?” and mean it. Then I want people to attentively listen to the answer.
in your life?
