American Modern Opera Company Arrives at Lincoln Center

The stage of the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center had been transformed into a split-screen tableau depicting ancient Rome and contemporary New York. A harpsichordist was playing ominous chords at furious speed. Singers, dressed in capes, suspenders and robes, scaled a rotating set.

This was the start of the American Modern Opera Company taking over Lincoln Center for a residency from Wednesday through mid-July.

The company, known as AMOC, is an experimental collective of singers, dancers and instrumental players. And the project it was putting together at the Koch Theater is the New York premiere of “The Comet/Poppea,” a work that pairs George Lewis’s adaptation of the W.E.B. Du Bois story “The Comet” and Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.”

Directed by Yuval Sharon, “The Comet/Poppea” is classic AMOC fare: an irreverent mash-up of stories that unearths difficult questions about race, society and art. “We’re getting it,” the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, a star and producer of the show, told his fellow cast members while frolicking in a golden cape at the end of a rehearsal on Sunday. “It’s all coming together.”