Davóne Tines has had a busy couple of weeks. When we spoke late last month, the Virginia-born bass-baritone was preparing for the release of an opera recording on which he portrays Malcolm X. He had spent almost two weeks performing in "Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)," a composition by Tyshawn Sorey staged by director Peter Sellars at the Park Avenue Armory. He followed that with "Everything Rises," an intimate two-person show he'd created with violinist Jennifer Koh, in its New York premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
“I've been fairly busy for a while now,” Tines said in a recent telephone interview. “But this is a really unique time, when a lot of projects that I'm very personally connected to are happening all at once.”
Tines still hasn’t slowed down. Last week, he debuted with the New York Philharmonic in Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. And tonight he'll make his Carnegie Hall recital debut, performing a program called “Recital No. 1: Mass," which includes an original piece he co-wrote to honor Breonna Taylor. He envisions his work as stretching the boundaries of what classical music can be – and what impact it can have on an audience.
“But also, it hopefully allows arts to be something that's concerned very directly with its social context,” Tines said. “And I hope that that endeavor of socially conceptualizing art is possible for all sorts of artistic output, not just quote-unquote activistic work."
He continued, "I've been engaging in work that hopefully pushes the boundaries and expectations of what classical music can do by trying to offer pathways for artists to engage their intersectional identities, as well as for audiences to think about the larger social context that they connect to, and also how they as individuals are expressing their lives through their engagement with art.”
Like any performing artist, Tines, 35, had a long life in the arts before stepping onto the stage. He grew up in Northern Virginia singing in a church choir, performing in school musicals, and studying music while earning a sociology degree at Harvard University.
“It didn't really dawn on me that pursuing opera as a career could be something for me until maybe after college,” Tines recalled. “I knew I wanted to be involved in the performing arts, but I didn't know if performing or actually being a singer was the route to do it.”
Initially, he thought he might pursue a career in arts administration. After graduating, he worked for a number of arts organizations, including American Repertory Theatre, and started singing at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington to continue his musical practice. His range of behind-the-scenes experience meant that when it was time for him to step into the central role as a performer, he already understood how everything supporting that role works.
“I understood fundraising, I understood producing, I understood how an arts organization thinks about its life over the course of a year or over the course of five years,” he said. “And I continue to find that that unintentional but ultimately very broad and deep experience in the broader performing arts allowed me a lot of agency as a performing artist to create my own work, or to also have a lot of say in the work that I do.”
Some of his more personal creative pursuits over the years have included “The Black Clown,” a musical-theater work based on Langston Hughes’ poem, and “VIGIL,” a piece dedicated to the memory of Breonna Taylor, which he created with composers Igée Dieudonné and Matthew Aucoin and pianist Conor Hanick. But while much of his work incorporates themes of social justice, Tines wouldn’t go as far as to call himself an activist. Instead, he said, his work is meant to support the thoughtful work of activists, and get people to engage with issues they would otherwise ignore.
In "Everything Rises," violinist Jennifer Koh and vocalist Davóne Tines interrogated their path through a mostly white classical music world.
In much of the work he’s presented this year, Tines has addressed and contextualized his place as a Black man in classical music, an overwhelmingly white space. “Everything Rises,” a multimedia work made entirely by people of color, interrogates experiences he and Koh have had as people of color forced to “code switch,” hiding integral parts of their identities to find success in the classical world.
“I've always had to navigate what it means to be an other individual in a white context,” Tines said. “So being in the performing arts with that same context, demographically, and having the agency that I guess I gained through my work in different parts of the performing arts — it's just led me to a place of having the tools to talk about what that actually means.”
His efforts are leading to more opportunities to pursue his mission. In January, Tines will join BAM as its first artist-in-residence in more than a decade. David Binder, BAM's artistic director, said the decision to provide Tines with rehearsal space and financial support during his yearlong residency, during which he’ll pursue both independent and BAM-related projects, was made in hopes that Tines can help the institution learn how to support artists in a deeper way.
“He's bringing seemingly divergent artists together to make work that is exciting and surprising,” Binder said. “And I think there's something that we here at BAM can learn from that.”
Tines plans to continue pursuing deeply personal work that might resonate with others, as well. “My work has been dedicated to engaging identity and social context for years now, so I don't need to actually change anything about what I'm doing,” he said. “I just need to continue to be honest about my existence in the world as it is. And that will mean that I naturally will engage with these larger, complex problems.”
