Pre-Opera Talks

Nedra Dixon is a celebrated performer, director, and choreographer. She has received critical acclaim in venues spanning Broadway and Off-Broadway, national tours, regional theatres, concert venues, White House, and Kennedy Center performances, with credits including Bubblin’ Brown Sugar, Tintypes, Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, Into the Woods, Man of La Mancha, Children of Eden, Annie, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Songs for a New World, Let’s Call The Whole Thing Gershwin (in which she sang the role of “Bess” from Porgy and Bess), Oklahoma, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream—to name just a few. She has shared the stage with such eclectic artists as Kristin Chenoweth to Meat Loaf, and has worked with noted theatre industry powerhouses including Stephen Schwartz, John Caird, Susan Stroman, Jerry Zaks, Richardo Khan, Luther Henderson, Martin Charnin, Arthur Faria, and Charles Strouse and Lee Adams.

Directing projects include In the Heights, Hair: Then and Now, Once On This Island, Grey Gardens, Sophisticated Ladies, Children of Eden, and Beehive. She is active in Kansas City’s lively arts scene, directing world premiere productions of Maya and the Magic Ring, Listen! Wilhelmina, and Sketchbook for Ollie for Lyric Opera of Kansas City. This Fall she is looking forward to re-staging The Lyric’s production of The Haberdasher Prince. Dixon recently directed Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill at Kansas City Repertory Theatre and appeared as The Storyteller in their holiday spectacular, A Christmas Carol. She has also been seen onstage in Kansas City productions of Uncle Vanya, Fat Ham, Skeleton Crew, Dot, Company, Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, Ruined, The Piano Lesson, Welcome to Fear City, The Wiz, Black Pearl Sings!, and A Raisin in the Sun.

In an unexpected turn, Nedra can be seen in popular rapper, Tech N9ne’s, hip-hop music video, “Fear”, which has been viewed over 3 million times on YouTube. For five years, she performed with national and international luminaries of the jazz world as a featured vocalist and co-host” on Kansas City’s NPR-affiliated jazz show, “12th Street Jump”. She also serves on the Board of Directors of Kansas City Actor’s Theatre (KCAT), and of Spinning Tree Theatre.

Nedra and her colleague and friend, Pamela Baskin-Watson, are 2022 recipients of OPERA America’s IDEA Grant for their creation of a new folk opera, A God • Sib’s Tale. This dynamic endeavor brings to the forefront, in soaring music and vivid story-telling, the intricate lives of eight Black women, set in a 1957, racially-tense, fictional town, Floyd County, Ohio. It was presented as a staged reading in Kansas City in January 2022; and currently, there are new possibilities on the horizon.

As an artist who is ever-curious and ever-evolving, at this point in her artistic journey, Nedra enthusiastically embraces the role of “Griot”, sharing rich, diverse stories, glorious sounds, beautiful movement, from a cross-section of cultures, backgrounds and identities. The arts and story-telling, are an inextricable part of her being—as necessary as oxygen. She is a “Keeper of the Flame” of her undeniable artistic traditions.