At an Omaha, Nebraska, festival this summer, new work explores the intersection of art, disability and technology, asking questions like "who has a voice?" and "who gets to be heard?"

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports For PBS News Hour

• Jeffrey Brown:

  A mother sings to her disabled son of her love and hopes for him, but there is danger threatening.

  
  

• Jeffrey Brown:

  And, together, they decide to flee. We're in a dystopian future world, though perhaps not so very different from our own, in which artificial intelligence is being used to create what? Some new kind of life.

  
  

  The opera titled "Sensorium Ex" is both art and advocacy, aimed at giving new voice and opportunities to the disabled, using A.I. to benefit, rather than harm, and changing the world of opera itself.

  
  

• Composer Paola Prestini:

  I'm very interested in how art can open up new avenues, and that's what I felt like "Sensorium" did.

  
  

• Jeffrey Brown:

  In this case new avenues to?

  
  

• Paola Prestini:

  To listen more deeply and to create more welcoming spaces for folks who express themselves differently and who have different disabilities.

  
  

• Jeffrey Brown:

  Prestini's collaborator, poet Brenda Shaughnessy, wrote the libretto and grounded it in her lived experience as the mother of a disabled child.

  
  

• Jeffrey Brown:

  Her son, Cal, now age 18, seen here at 12 listening to music by Prestini played by her husband cellist Jeffrey Zeigler.

  
  

• Shaughnessy, who'd never written for an opera before, says this work was deeply personal and often painful, but, for her, necessary.

  
  

• Brenda Shaughnessy:

  Nonverbal, nonambulatory. Kids like him don't get to be part of anything. In a way, I wrote him into the opera because I wanted him to get to be part of the mix, get to be — get to do something, get to be the hero of a story, get to be — be heard

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