In its 11th season, the mavericks’ jamboree known as Prototype serves up six new musical offerings, each unapologetically sui generis. Rejecting formula, catering to niche creators and niche audiences, the festival produced in its first decade not one but two works—Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone, and Ellen Reid’s p r i s m—that went on to collect the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Quite a track record! This year’s Terce: A Practical Breviary promises “a radical rethinking of a monastic 9:00 AM mass,” and “a wild meditation/celebration of the sacred mothers alive in all of us.” Adoration, adapted from the film by Atom Egoyan, focuses on terrorism, intolerance, and racism at the intersection of fact and fiction. Angel Island weaves a requiem from the graffiti in a San Francisco Bay detention center, etched into the walls by hundreds of thousands of immigrants refused entry into the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Chornobyldorf follows the last descendants of humanity as they wander the ruins of a “post-societal” world, dissolving into “the white noise of nature.” In Malinxe, two Indigenous composers recreate the myth of La Llorona, a weeping female spirit who drowns children yet warns others away from the water. The Promise is an eclectic contemporary song cycle on themes of identity, origins, and motherhood. For what it’s worth, our money is on Angel Island (for Huang Ruo’s music), Chornobyldorf (for the haunting conceit), and Malinxe (ditto). —Matthew Gurewitsch

Terce: A Practical Breviary will take place at The Space at Irondale; Adoration will take place at The Sheen Center for Thought & Culture; Angel Island will take place at BAM’s Harvey Theater at BAM Strong; Chornobyldorf will take place at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Ellen Stewart Theater; Malinxe will take place at The Playscape at Battery Park; and The Promise will take place at HERE Mainstage.