Timaeus and The Teacher

An opera by Associate Professor of Art Tammy Nguyen that explores the fragile intersections of global maritime trade, migration, and freedom.

Directed and Libretto by Tammy Nguyen
Composed by Neely Bruce
Choreographed by Jamal Jackson
Commissioned by Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts

Overview of Opera

Timaeus and The Teacher is an opera about freedom and nationhood. It follows the journey of The Teacher (performed by Brian Vu), a young Vietnamese man who is making a living teaching English to Chinese gold merchants when he attempts to flee Saigon by boat in 1977. Loosely based on Associate Professor of Art Tammy Nguyen’s father, The Teacher encounters a coterie of travelers on his journey, all of whom share his yearning for liberty. As they sail between nations, these voyagers find themselves trapped in the complexity of global maritime trade, where national identity becomes a mode of barter and trade designed to lubricate the circulation of goods while policing the migration of people. Adrift in the violence of this contradiction, The Teacher begins to question what it means to search for national belonging in a world that is steadily turning by the will of nature.

The opera is an evolution of Timaeus and the Nations, an exhibition by Nguyen originally created for the Sarasota Art Museum, which explores the “Flags of Convenience,” a common maritime practice system in which ship owners from one country can pay to fly the flag of another country, taking advantage of looser tax and labor regulations. Approximately 47 nations (the majority former colonies) have made their flags acquirable within this system. Using a mathematical contradiction borrowed from Plato’s Timaeus (a philosophy on the cosmic order), Nguyen began fractalizing the flags and anthems of these nations, combining these elements into new patterns and forms. Building on this system, John Spencer Camp Professor of Music Neely Bruce’s score for the opera features sequences that dismantle and recombine these songs of national identity, just as the borders between nations are blurred at sea. The Teacher and his companions drift through this unstable terrain, where freedom is both promised and deferred, and where the order of the cosmos collides with the messy politics of human borders.

Artist Profiles

Tammy Nguyen (Librettist and Designer, Director) creates lush paintings, drawings, artist books, prints, and ’zines that explore the intersections between geopolitics, ecology, and lesser-known histories. A story teller, Nguyen’s multidisciplinary practice takes two forms—her more traditional fine arts practice and her publishing practice, embodied through her imprint, Passenger Pigeon Press. Nguyen received a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2007, and an MFA from Yale in 2013. She was a Fulbright Fellow in 2007, and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2023. She has exhibited around the world including at the 2026 Venice Biennale In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh, the 2022 Berlin Biennale, and Greater New York 2021 at MOMA PS1. Her institutional solo exhibitions include the Blanton Museum of Art, ICA Boston, and the Sarasota Museum of Art. Her work is included in many institutions including Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She serves as an Associate Professor of Art on the faculty at Wesleyan University.

Neely Bruce (Composer) is a prolific composer, pianist, conductor, and leading scholar of American music whose career spans more than five decades. His original operas include Americana, or A New Tale of the Genii (1985), Hansel and Gretel (1996), and the one-act opera Pyramus and Thisbe (1965). His most recent stage work is Flora: An Opera, an expanded version of a 1728 ballad opera. Bruce’s largest composition, Convergence (2000), was presented at Lincoln Center. As a conductor, he has led the 20th-century revival of George Bristow’s opera Rip Van Winkle and premiered several major works by Henry Brant. As a pianist, Bruce is renowned for his interpretations of American composers of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was one of the seven harpsichordists who premiered HPSCHD by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller in 1969. Bruce is the John Spencer Camp Professor of Music at Wesleyan University.

For general inquiries or press information, contact the Center for the Arts.