Inebria me begins with an image that feels pleasingly familiar: a heroine of modest means, a rich and charming husband, a love story soured into control. It is the stuff of classic telenovelas, the genre that shaped San Cha’s childhood viewing. Rather than parodying that world, the work takes it seriously enough to break it open. Dolores is not a camp joke or a cautionary tale. She is a woman learning, very slowly, to hear her own voice above the noise of abuse, religion and expectation.

Musically, the piece behaves like a memory that keeps switching stations. San Cha’s score threads together ranchera, cumbia, mariachi, punk, industrial textures, choral writing and lush electronic environments, never settling into one genre long enough to become comfortable. The four vocal soloists and small ensemble move between styles with ease, giving the sense that Dolores’s inner life spills out across multiple musical lineages at once. The effect is not eclecticism for its own sake, but a precise mapping of a diasporic upbringing: church choir, queer nightlife, family parties and underground clubs folded into one sonic body.

On stage, the world sits midway between chapel and nightclub. Lighting and scenic elements create apparitions rather than fixed sets, allowing figures to materialise and dissolve like visions. At the centre of this is Esperanza, a genderless presence who reads as both guardian angel and queer elder, coaxing Dolores toward self-recognition. The dramaturgy is deliberately non-linear, looping back through scenes of devotion, humiliation, intoxication and revelation. Liberation, when it arrives, is less a triumphal finale than a spiritual rupture, an embodied decision to step out of the frame.

The jury responded strongly to the piece’s aesthetic courage. They noted the way San Cha and her collaborators refuse to tidy away the contradictions between Catholic iconography and queer desire, between melodrama and sincerity, between pleasure and pain. Rather than choosing sides, Inebria me lets these tensions vibrate on the same frequency, creating a theatre of feeling that is both unruly and finely crafted. The work also impressed through its clear understanding of opera as a social ritual. Instead of placing Latinx and queer experiences at the margins of an existing canon, it recentres them as the driving force of the evening.

In the current landscape, where calls for inclusion often result in cautious programming, Inebria Me feels refreshingly unafraid. It does not over-explain itself; it invites you in, or leaves you slightly overwhelmed, which may be the more honest response. The piece points towards a music theatre that trusts lived experience, hybrid sound worlds and unapologetic intensity as valid compositional tools in their own right.

Inebria me is a bold and visually striking contemporary opera that blends high drama, mysticism, and social commentary. Drawing from the divine ecstasy of religious iconography - particularly The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa - and the heightened melodrama of early 90’s Mexican telenovelas such as Marimar and Maria Mercedes, the opera explores themes of desire, transcendence and liberation. 

Inebria me reclaims the power of the feminine mystic, the working-class heroine, and the telenovela’s emotional intensity to create an opera that feels both deeply personal and radically universal. It is an invitation to lose oneself to the rapture of the transformation, in the hunger for something beyond limitations imposed by society, faith and fate.

Creator, composer and librettist
San Cha

Director, music director and arranger
Darian Donovan Thomas

Creative director
Gerardo Gonzalez

Project manager
Carlos Diaz Stoop

Booking and engagement
Roya Amirsoleymani

Tour stage manager
Antonieta Castillo Carpio

Dramaturgy
William Ruiz Morales

Lighting design
Pablo Santiago

Scenography
Anthony Robles

Costume design
Fern Cerezo

Lead hairstylist
Sonny Molina

Lead make-up artist
Mark Del los Reyes

Additional vocals and spear prop
rafa esparza

Basket props
Maria Maea

Cast

Dolores
San Cha

Madre Jutta
Lu Coy

Azalea
stefa marin alarcon

Rosa
Carolina Oliveros

Esperanza
Kyle Kidd
or Dorian Wood

Violinist Nun
Darian Donovan Thomas

Modular Synth Nun
Phong Tran
or Leeni Ramadan

Inebria Me is co-commissioned by Performance Space New York, National Performance Network (NPN), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana; and Roy & Edna Disney CalArts Theatre (REDCAT).

Additional support provided by Stylus, Denniston Hill, Oak Head, and The Limen Foundation.

Discover San Cha

Trailer