← LA Opera Podcasts: Behind the Curtain
LA Opera Podcasts: Behind the Curtain
BONUS: OperaFest LA and the Radical Future of Opera
00:45:07
In this episode, LA Opera President and CEO Chris…
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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to behind the Curtain, LA Opera's official podcast. Each week we dive deep into the creative process with the artists, creatives and scholars who bring opera to life. Get ready to decode the drama, dissect the music and hear the heart behind the high notes. From backstage laughs to history making moments, every opera starts with a story. In this episode, LA Opera President and CEO Christopher Kelsch is joined by leaders and luminaries of the Los Angeles Opera scene to discuss Opera Fest, a two month festival taking place this April and May that will give you the chance to experience opera all across Los Angeles County. Circle up with LA Opera, Beth Morrison Projects, Overtone Industries, Long Beach Opera and Red Cat to discuss the radical possibilities of opera, from inclusion and accessibility to platforming living composers. Then head on over to operafestla.org to learn more. It's a fascinating discussion and it's happening right now on behind the Curtain.
- [01:06]
B
Hello everyone and welcome back to behind the Curtain. I am your host today, LA Opera President and CEO Christopher Kelch. First launched in 2024 alongside the Opera America Conference and World Opera Forum, Opera Fest LA spotlights the rich and diverse opera landscape of Los Angeles. This two month event brings together leading companies including LA Opera, Beth Morrison Projects, Long Beach Opera, Overtone Industries, Roy and Edna Disney, CalArts Theatre, of course, known as REDCAT, Synchromy the Industry, the Wallace and the USC Thornton School of Music in a landmark collaboration. Collectively, these organizations are uniquely positioned to shape the future of opera in Los Angeles, showcasing the incredible breadth of operatic voices and visions that define the city's artistic identity. On today's episode of behind the Curtain, we are honored to have with us Beth Morrison of Beth Morrison Projects, Olan Jones, Artistic Director of Overtone Industries, Michelle Magaldi, CEO of Long Beach Opera, and and Katie Damers, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of Performing Arts at redcat. Welcome, everyone.
- [02:19]
C
Hi. Hi.
- [02:20]
D
Thanks for having us.
- [02:21]
B
So pleased that you're here. And more importantly, I'm so pleased that we are going to have our second ever operafest. I would say, personally for me, I believe so deeply that we all benefit so enormously from a rich, diverse and successful ecosystem of supporting artists. And in turn, by doing that, we're supporting audience development. And what I love about Opera Fest is that it just concretizes this philosophy and makes manifest this idea of how interconnected all of us are. I know that the LIA Opera benefits enormously, again from artist development and from audience development through all of the work that all of you have done over your entire careers. And so I just Want to start from a position of gratitude that I'm so grateful that all of you are here today to talk about this philosophically and just to pay tribute to all the work that all of you have done over the course of your careers. I'd love to start with you, Beth. Obviously, we're now more than 10 years into a collaborative venture between L A Opera and Beth Morrison projects, which for me is just characteristic, I think, of the interconnectedness of our world. You often say, from your perspective, that BMP has a mission of redefining opera for the 21st century. So I'd actually love to start with that, of what that means to you and more specifically, what that means to you in terms of how you think about collaboration in general and more specifically about Opera Fest la.
- [04:00]
C
Well, thanks for having me. It's great to see you. And it's always good to be at LA Opera. I feel like just another member of the family over here. So it's always great to walk in the building. Yeah. I mean, in terms of, like, trying to. What BMP has always been about and what I, you know, is really at the core of my mission all these years has been about creating a new kind of opera that is in conversation with the repertoire, that is in conversation with the history of this art form, but that puts it squarely into a 21st century culture. And that, for me has meant, like, in our vernacular, with young artists who are using all of the influences of their upbringings in their musical genre, in their musical writing, and that we're taking on stories of our time that are topical and relevant to young audience and everyone, not just young, but to really think about the cultivation of a new audience as well. And our partnership has been so great because we've been able to kind of really talk about this sort of spectrum of work that is opera. And what Opera Fest LA does is to really show that expansiveness, from the very experimental to the grand opera stage and everything in between, and how the music and theater can combine to be the most effective and extraordinary combination to create emotional response and hopefully, empathy and compassion and engaging with ideas. And again, like, really creating something that shows how that can be done in the tiniest of spaces to the largest of stages. And so that, to me, is what OperaFest is about, because BMP is an itinerant company and always has been. Partnerships are at the core of who we are. And so that's how I approach the world. And so, in thinking about operafest la, like this thing that came together around the world, Opera forum in 2024. It was such a wonderful way to talk about that was happening in this art form in Los Angeles and to really show the world, in this world opera form capacity, what LA has to offer in this art form. And so building on that, it seemed like such a great idea to keep this going. And I feel so excited about how this really landmark partnership between all these organizations has grown to include more organizations and in this plan to be a biennial festival, how it will continue to grow as we go and to embrace organizations who are interested in presenting this art form and all the different kinds of ways that it can be presented. It's thrilling to see this continue to flourish and for us to come together again to showcase what opera can be and to build not only audience, but also to build the community amongst the practitioners. Right. Like, it was so fun at the opening night party to, like, feel the community. You know, every company that got up and talked, like, said that it's like we're very rarely together as a community of practitioners of this art form and how powerful that can be.
- [07:17]
B
Yeah, I agree. And I think that the art form is itself inherently collaborative. And so this just feels like such a natural extension of that idea that individual projects have this aspect of collaboration. Why shouldn't we be able to, again, I think, to your point, really highlight just the depth and breadth of the amount of interest there is as a kind of active invitation for all Angelenos to find a place for themselves in this world.
- [07:49]
C
Yeah. And I'm definitely, like a believer of All Boats Rise. Right. And so I feel like this kind of initiative supports that idea and that we will grow an audience that is bigger than what we would have been doing on our own by coming together and by supporting the artists of our time that are creating this work and performing this work and bringing it to life as a large, larger community. We all stand to benefit from that hugely.
- [08:15]
B
And I mean, I think the idea that we are competitors is, on its face, just laughable. Our most solemn responsibility is to create platforms for artists. And all of us are doing that just in different ways, with different creative perspectives, but all, I think, with a common philosophy.
- [08:32]
C
And what a rich cauldron having all those different perspectives. That's what I think is so exciting about Operafest language.
- [08:38]
B
So a question for Olanne.
- [08:39]
E
Yes.
- [08:40]
B
So Overtone Industries develops and presents new multidisciplinary operas and music and believes that artistic expression is essential part of living, serving as a catalyst for artists and audience members to understand themselves in a new way. Again, philosophically, Just echoing everything we've said already. So from your perspective, what kind of transformation do you hope to bring to Angelenos that experience the work of your company?
- [09:08]
E
Well, the big thing about my company is that it's all original work. Since we began, it's only been about a new story. From my perspective, is only born of somebody's actual experience. So that's what we're developing. And I've never been part of the whole traditional opera form. So the transformation, I think there's an inner expansion in the meaning of transformation, and that it starts just with live performance, that we're all pointing at the same moment at the same time, all the performers and the audience. And it's as simple as feeling understood that somebody is expressing maybe a secret experience you've had, but you see it in front of you and it resonates and opens something up. And there's a kind of nourishment in that. Like sometimes just talking to a person, they don't have to say anything particularly wise, but you can tell they understand. And when these writers and composers are speaking from their understanding, it's like there's more wisdom clinging to it if they're not trying to be generic and universal, if they're speaking about a lived experience. But I also like it to be on a mythic scale so that there's room for exalted language and dramatic music. And I'm also very interested in the movement that's associated with performing opera. Because if you're going to sing, it's got to be about something pretty important, you know, not just, I'm going to the store. So as singing is to speaking, the movement has to be to just ordinary movement. It has to have a kind of inner rigor that is expressing the whole story.
- [11:16]
B
I really love that perspective. I think that's probably widely shared in the room, that opera is an extraordinary art form to express the inexpressible. And so it is an arena of heightened expression. So I love the rigor with which you describe that. Can you tell us more specifically about Original Vision Via Menagerie and what audiences can expect from that experience?
- [11:38]
E
Yes. So the Original Vision program is something that Fahed Sirat and I developed together. He's our musical director. The idea is to find people with an original voice, librettists and composers, and help develop just one scene. It doesn't have to be the beginning scene, but one scene from their whole vision of an opera, because it does hold the organizing principle for the whole story. And then we perform it completely. It's not just like standing there with music stance, which is fine. It's just not the way we do it. Because I feel like you do have to understand the whole theatricality. Like, I just spoke to one of the librettists who had had amazing amount of transformation going on, and there just literally wasn't time for that to happen, you know, physically. So she had to expand the music of it. So this time around, we have three different pieces. One is called Time is the Enemy, and that's composer Samara Rice and librettist Brian Sonja Wallace. And this, it starts with Rob is in the hospital dying. Clara, his estranged wife, is also an astrophysicist who's working on a time machine, of course. And in her spare time, it's being caught in this moment of dread and it moves into the chaos of her actually stopping time. And there's also like a fabulous duet that they've written where the love is connecting across all of this chaos and this hope to get out of this dreaded moment.
- [13:23]
B
Very Tristan and Devolda. Yeah.
- [13:27]
E
Then we have one called Carsonize. The composer is Murphy Severtson, and the librettist is George Landau Pincus. And this is a bigger than life pilot who has crashed on an island. And she's used to being a public figure and now she's alone with inhabitants which are crab kind of creatures who want to devour her in a different way. And she's making a choice about whether to stay in this place of completely being alone or going back to where she knows who she is from the reflection of how people are speaking to her. And that's the piece we're going to do at the Wallace. We're going to do five minutes of that and then this time I'm going along for the ride with a piece called Mine. Yeah. I always feel like I have to say how the idea came because Fahad was telling me about how he and a friend of his were cleaning out the friend's mot house after she died. And it was like the mother was a hoarder. But you couldn't just shovel everything out the door because you dig down and it's like, oh, here's a jade coffee table and here's treasures everywhere. And for some reason, it felt like an absolute metaphor for the inner life, that there are jewels, there are jewels of insight and it's layers of petty stupidity over it and just like. And practical things you have to do. So this is kind of like the fractal flow of the inner life. And I'm in it and there are four other people in it who are representing some of the essential denizens of my world, which there's the scribe, the theorist, the lover, the flying fish, of course, that can travel between both worlds. So that will be our evening. It's 15 minutes. Each scene is like 15 minutes and they're all very different from each other.
- [15:36]
B
That's fantastic. And in the development process is the idea that this is the first step on their journey to becoming longer.
- [15:41]
E
Oh yeah. In fact, Molly Pease and Divya Mouse, who are doing something at the wall is too. That piece started with our very first original vision. So Synchromy actually has picked up a couple of things that we started and they've moved along.
- [15:58]
B
I love the investment in the future architects of the art form. It's so important. Turning to Michelle Magaldi, Long Beach Opera has been challenging norms, taking risks and sparking meaningful conversation for 45 years now. Chapeau older than the L A Opera, the company is committed to centering underrepresented voices and striving to make opera more accessible. How do you think about how the company has achieved that historically and how will it continue with that vision going forward?
- [16:33]
F
Yeah, I think over the course of its history, Long Beach Opera has approached that in a few different interconnected ways, starting with prioritizing work by living composers, artists of color, women, queer creators and interdisciplinary artists. These are people whose voices have historically been marked marginalized or left out of some of the traditional operatic canon. And we start with that aim to provide a platform for those artists to share their voice and share the stories that matter most to them and make sure that their voices are central to the work and not peripheral in the stories that we're telling. In one example, we're bringing Shelley Washington, an emerging composer, to bring her new opera, the Passion of Nell, over the next few years. So we'll see that coming. Think also about how we present the work. So Long Beach Opera has a long history of presenting performances in non traditional venues like warehouses, museums, outdoor spaces, the Queen Mary. And being in these spaces changes the relationship between the audience and the art form and can make opera feel more open, less formal and more inviting to audiences, especially for those who might not have a lot of experience with opera. So hoping to meet people maybe where they are or give them a different perspective on what opera can be, projects like last year, Pauline Oliveiro season feature different participatory elements. Deep listening, ritual, improvisation and community based practices which bring audiences in and make them a part of the experience. So rather than sitting back in a seat and watching something happening before them, they're immersed in it and really taking in the experience from a different perspective. So it's about relevance, representation, and creating spaces where people can see themselves in the work.
- [18:19]
B
And so when you think about Central Park 5, which is your inclusion in OperaFest L A, how do you think that that work in particular embodies these ideals?
- [18:29]
F
Central Park 5 exemplifies this sort of vision of accessibility and bringing opera forward in that it brings this vital contemporary American story, which centers on five black and Latino teenagers who are confronting systemic injustice, into conversation with audiences. So it's something that really sparks conversation and sadly is very relevant to our time. Still. It's not something that's just a distant historical story. It's really connected to our contemporary life. People can see themselves in the work and in the story that's being told. So part of the way that works is that Anthony Davis brings a wide range of musical traditions. And Beth, you commented on this earlier, bringing that the contemporary composers you work with bring their own life experience and their own styles and, you know, music from when they were growing up and their own. Their own personal histories. And for Anthony, that might include jazz and experimental music. So the sound world is expanding beyond what we might expect from, you know, European operas. So this, you know, broadening the voices and the vocabulary of the opera are part of that experience for the audience.
- [19:44]
B
Katie turning to you and REDCAT. So REDCAT is CalArts multidisciplinary center for the visual and Performing arts in downtown Los Angeles. We have a proud history at LA Opera with Beth Morrison projects of presenting work there. Now, for 10 years, you guys have been so supportive of platforming opera and contemporary composers in the curatorial idea of Red Cat. Where do you see that opera kind of fits into the incredible diversity of work that you present?
- [20:14]
D
Yeah, it's a great question. You know, so much about Red Cat is the focus on interdisciplinary contemporary experimental practice, which often means the creation of new work, which we've been so pleased to do with you, Christopher and Beth. So thank you again for our long standing partnerships with LA Opera and Beth Morrison projects. Just last year, our presentation together of Adoration was an incredible success. And to your point earlier in this conversation, we couldn't do it without each other doing a production of opera. It's every single art form. And at redcat, we're aligned with the California Institute of Arts. We support all of our schools there. So of course music is a huge part of that theater. When we Think about direction and the scale of opera dance, which is also involved in choreography and movement, visual art, when we think about production quality, everything from backdrops to lighting to costume design, of course, the words themselves, the language that relates to our work in critical studies. And as we do ever more contemporary opera, there's often video or projection or animation. So opera for us at Red Cat feels in some ways like the emblematic form that brings together everything that we do and seek to support. So we've had a great history of doing that with you all, but also in commissions and projects that we've done with local LA artists, people like Sancha, who was in our previous season this past fall, and folks like Holland Andrews that we've done smaller one nights of that also look at an expanded notion of the voice as a really virtuosic vessel. Something that's full of emotion and possibility, but that stretches from incredible classical training to really pushing beyond a more normative notion of what sound or music or composition might be. So we do a lot of opera at Red Cat and it's a form that we find particularly within our LA based audiences, is really beloved. People are so curious both to contend with opera that might consider a narrative, like a work, Magdalene that we did with Beth Morrison a few years ago that took in some ways a very old story of Mary Magdalene and brought it into a new perspective to things that might be more abstract, but opera gives it away, as you mentioned, Holland, to say what cannot be said or to bring a different level of emotional resonance. So you noted too, you know, Red Cat is a space that has an incredible black box seating up to 250 folks, a flexible space, a place for great operatic scale and yet intimacy, which I think brings a layer of possibility to our audiences. They're curious to get up close to these incredible artists, but also to new work. And we also have a gallery space. And so some projects like with Beth, that we've done in the past have actually utilized both of those architectures and even within our gallery. Last year I worked with the LA Philharmonic and Wild up to present a series of works about Arthur Russell and Julius Eastman, many of which had resonance with opera. So we're really seeing opera in every crevice of Red Cat. And it was beautiful to start the LA Opera Fest out in our lounge and lobby space last week with our kickoff event. So not only are we a place for performance, but also a community hub to support large scale collaborations like this across the city.
- [23:45]
B
What I love about those reflections, actually is that again, it makes manifest this idea of. Of how we benefit from the existing infrastructure that you think about Wild up and Chris Roundtree being the music director of Long Beach Opera, to just name one example. And having conducted a couple of works for us for LA Opera Off Grand, I'd actually love if you and Beth could talk about Jodi Landau's performance of Self, which is your collective contribution to OperaFest LA, and tell us a little bit more about that work.
- [24:19]
D
Sure.
- [24:20]
C
Well, we've been working on this work for 10 years together, which is slightly insane, but sometimes it takes a while. And it's a piece that's very personal to Jody. Landau is an incredible musician, performer, artist, thinker, and this piece is really his reflection on gender queerness, identity, loss, all from his own personal lens, from his life as a millennial. And I think he has such a compelling way of telling his story and provoking ideas and imagination in the audience. It's funny, it's poignant. There's dance in the form of the Backstreet Boys, and his music is really compelling. It's, you know, it's a solo opera, if you will. It's his solo opera, which is in his musical language, which is really more in the contemporary avant pop style, and it's really, really compelling. Katie, what do you want to say?
- [25:27]
D
Yeah, I'll say to your point, Christopher, Jody is somebody who feels emblematic of opera centrality in the LA ecosystem. Jody is someone that we've worked with with Performance of Self, which is going to be amazing, but also with Wild up, also with Room Full of Teeth, also his own prior solo work. And Jody is someone who touches almost every corner of our musical ecosystem, also records for film and Hollywood, things like that. And Jody is someone, too, who I think in this piece is bringing a vulnerability and a narrative storytelling that in some ways is very intimate. And so Red Cat offers a space to really hold that in a way that might be in some ways akin to cabaret or to solo storytelling performance, and yet has an operatic register not only in the vocal performance, but also in the direction by Diana Wyon, which is new for this production, for its setting at Red Cat, and for the ways it continues to go really deep. Jodi and Diana were just at Red Cat a couple days ago, starting to rehearse and work through some of the things in our space. And I think it will be a really unique orientation at Red Cat to a piece that's having its west coast premiere. So we're thrilled to be supporting it.
- [26:40]
C
Yeah. And I think that intimacy is such an important Part. And, you know, Jody didn't want a traditional theater. And so we've talked about lots of different configurations. And in the end, we're sort of keeping the end on configuration, but we're like adding in couches on the stage. And so it's like, gets to feel a little bit more like a living room, that you're part of something and not just watching, which I love that Red Cat has the capacity and the ability to do that.
- [27:07]
D
Yeah. And Jody said in a kind of like, touching speech at our opening party just a couple nights ago that Red Cat has been a home for him from age 16 to now. And Jody is much older than 16 now. So it's been amazing also to see how Red Cat and the LA opera community more broadly can really support artists in their maturation and development from actors or singers in a piece of to now helming a solo show. That gives a really in depth and I would say layered approach to considering what performance is and what it means to perform self, both within a landscape as an artist, but also as trying to figure out what it means to relate to others, to have intimacy and to be part of a community.
- [27:54]
B
I'm always amazed there's a kind of pernicious and persistent myth around opera of its imminent demise. I often think that it's some part of the appeal for people is that it all seems so fragile. And then you have a conversation like this, and what emerges is you have so many people, producers, artists, audiences, that are so committed to this art form as being so essential in the landscape of expression. And again, I think of this as it's an arena of expressing the inexpressible, a kind of secular religion. It's giving us a kind of level of communal catharsis that you can't get from any other art forms. Not to denigrate other art forms, but because of this idea of the interdisciplinary approach to it. It's just such a amazingly both capacious art form and flexible art form that I think is very attractive to artists. And then you think about the diversity of the program that all of you just talked about. And what emerges for me is this surge of optimism about the future of the art form, because there's such creativity and there's such evangelism for the belief in the essential power of the art form. This is not because of that thing I said before about this pernicious myth that's not the prevailing wisdom. I think about the state of the art. And it's one of the reasons why I think that Opera Fest is so powerful is that it's a direct challenge to this kind of slightly lazy notion of its imminent demise.
- [29:37]
C
I'd also say I speak a lot to rooms of young composers at schools, and I always ask, is anybody interested in writing an opera? And without fail, at least three quarters of the class wants to write an opera. People are interested in storytelling, and we have the ability to do extraordinary storytelling in this art form. And I think for the young composers, they've grown up with storytelling in music through music, video, and film and all of the different influences. And so they don't want to wait to create this kind of work, which is a huge undertaking to make an opera. They want to start now. They want to tell stories now through music. And they're deeply inspired and engaged in what this art form is and can be for the future. And so that's where I get my inspiration, is they are the future. Right? The young folks are the future. And for them to show this incredible excitement around this art form means that this art form is going to be alive and well.
- [30:42]
E
And there's also a new crop of performers that can do anything in the world. They can do back flips and keep the note just perfect. And there's something about what they're bringing to the whole. You know, I think when I'm composing something like 10 years ago, I would even. I would be like, well, can they sing that and do. It's like, yeah, they can do anything now. Just throw it in their cage and they can do it.
- [31:09]
C
So it's.
- [31:10]
E
That helps.
- [31:11]
B
Yeah. Beth and I talk about this a lot. Is actually, I think that both artists and audiences are interested in hybrid art forms. I think that the general public tends to think about opera as being a fixed entity, but actually, all it is, as Beth points out, is just the combination of music and storytelling. And it can be as traditional or as experimental as the artists involved want it to be. And so it is an inherently hybridized art form in an age that I think demands that idea of interdisciplinary approach to expression. We live in a very confused and confusing world. And so this idea. I always think of artists as cartographers, and they are helping us map a world that kind of doesn't really make any sense through any rational means.
- [32:02]
C
I love that analogy. That's so great.
- [32:04]
B
I'm an adopted Angeleno, but I've been here long enough that I'm an evangelist for the city. And one of the things that attracts me about the city is this pioneering spirit that, definitionally, to our sense of place is the Idea that we're trying to create the future and the old rules don't apply. I'd love to hear the reflections from all of you on why you think that there's such an incredible market for the idea of getting invested in the future of creative expression. Expression, Michelle.
- [32:35]
F
Well, your question made me think about how interconnected all of our artistic community is and how we have. You were saying earlier we collaborate with artists across our various companies and I feel like there's a great opportunity here. And it's something about the spirit of Los Angeles that there's not a lot of competition necessarily. It's the All Boats Rise. It's an artist can be singing with one company the afternoon and then go and do another project at night or the next day or the next week, and everyone's sort of there to support each other. Sure, there's maybe some friendly competition, but it's really about an exchange of ideas and everyone's energized to find synergy with the various members of our community. So that might not exactly answer your question, but it's something about the spirit of LA and there's less needing to demonstrate your prominence over another artist or another company. And it's really about being able to all practice in the same space and to let all of those different creative avenues open up and come to fruition.
- [33:42]
C
I think it's really unique to la, actually. For someone who lives and works in both New York and la, the cities are very, very different. And I feel like the collaborative nature of what this is feels more organic to Los Angeles. You look at it as well, even in the funding community of the arts here. How many people support so many organizations out here? It's very different than it is in New York, which feels a bit more proprietary and sort of go all in on one organization. There's a feeling out here that I have experienced that the people who want to support this art form or the performing arts in general in Los Angeles feel this sort of responsibility to make sure that Los Angeles is a world class city for the arts. And I think that has been created and that is true in a city like New York, which just has such a volume of everything, it doesn't exist as much. And so I feel like Opera Fest LA is a kind of program that can flourish in the city very specifically because of this notion of collaborative perspective, of making sure that all boats do rise, that we do create a fertile ecosystem in Los Angeles. And I also feel like LA is always sort of at the cutting edge. If you're Thinking about the arts in general, whether that's contemporary art or film or fashion or food. Like, so much of that starts here in LA and then moves out. And so it feels like the city is ripe for this kind of a festival to really flourish.
- [35:21]
B
Do you have any thoughts to why the audience is so invested in the idea of forging that future?
- [35:27]
E
I have a feeling that there's this backlash from all of the virtual world and that people are hungry for that live experience. And I just remembered this thing that happened. It was actually in New York, but when this young man in his, like, late 20s came to see an opera of mine at La Mama. And afterwards he said, I didn't know you could feel things if they weren't your own personal life. He was like a smart guy, but it was like a new thought because you can't help it when people are up there singing their hearts out. And it's. It touches people. So I think there's that real desire for human energy going back and forth that is making that world more attractive to people.
- [36:22]
B
Yeah. I think two things. One, opera's an extraordinary machine for empathy, maybe in the same ways that novels or paintings can be. But you tend to occupy someone else's psychology and lived experience in a way that. That is very hard to resist when you have music involved, because it's just inherently very.
- [36:45]
C
And the human voice.
- [36:46]
B
Absolutely. And then on the point of digital mitigation, I think this idea of people trying to assert the things that humans can do that AI or a robot or that a digitally mitigated relationship can't do, that feeling, we see it in all kinds of sectors of people returning to communal experiences, to analog experiences, in order to reassert their humanity and offer such an extraordinary platform for them.
- [37:20]
C
I've been thinking so much about this. As AI becomes more and more a part of our lives, I feel like the live performance, those of us who are in the business of live performance, I think we're going to see a real resurgence of audience, because people don't know what is real anymore. People don't know what's truth, people don't know what's fact. And people don't know what is real in terms of what they're looking at, because it's more than likely being created by AI. But you sit in a room with a bunch of opera singers who are singing, there's no doubt it's real and it's in front of you and you hear it and you're with people, and your hearts start to become in the Same rhythm together and you're breathing together. And I really, I believe literally, literally, literally saying no, I'm saying literally, yeah. My prediction is that, that the live performing arts are going to actually really flourish in the wake of what AI is creating.
- [38:12]
D
I think in addition to that, Beth, like one thing we've seen already that dovetails with this is that people want the grandeur of opera, the elegance of opera, even in an experimental form that might not have the dripping and glittering beautiful costumes that we're used to at LA opera. They want that sense of occasion, they want an event, they want something that might also have, quite literally, duration. So often when I talk to artists about why they want to do an opera, they want to go in deep, they want to go in long, they want to go in big. And as we think about the rise of immersive performance, that's a whole world unto itself. But I think it really departs from opera in that way. Even if someone is sitting in a proscenium based theater or something like what we'll do for Jody's performance of Self, it still envelops you in the music, in the storytelling, in the movement and performance and all of the production value. And I think audiences are so hungry for that right now.
- [39:14]
B
Totally agree. I don't want to miss the point. I think Beth said this at the beginning, but I think that sometimes people can worry that we are collectively thinking we just throw out everything that was not written in our lifetime and somehow devalue that. As opposed to the prospect of all of this work is in conversation with the tradition. Whether it's, you know, you adopt some of the tradition, you sublimate it in some way, you satirize it in some way, that all of it is part of a continuum and that all of us are doing work that's built on the foundation of the so called canon. Although I don't exactly know what that is. But part of the pleasure for me is that I think that if curated correctly, a 16th century opera can speak directly to the experience of a 21st century audience. And that I'm always asserting that compositionally, Philip Glass and Monteverdi are closer connected than people would kind of assume. And so when I think about that, our inclusions in Operfest include canonical work. So we have Verdi's masterpiece Falstaff, we have Benjamin Britten's Noah's Flood, we have the final concert of James Conlon which includes work by Mozart and Wagner and Verdi, and of course we have Mozart's Magic Flute that we're Trying to do those works all in ways that feel like they're connected to these very human desires of wanting that catharsis and connection. And yet, to go back to the first question, I am so thrilled to be part of a community that has this appetite, hunger for demand for contemporary work. I wasn't around for this, but my understanding of the history of music in Los Angeles is really Zubin Mehta, in his work as music director of the LA Philharmonic, who kind of just by sheer force of will, created an audience for that. So that now there's an expectation, I think, inside the community of a commitment to the future generations of the art form as a community. We're on the cusp of this extremely exciting moment for our city, which is the opening of the David Geffen Galleries at lacma. And in reading about that building, I also see echoes of a lot of this conversation about hybridity and thinking about how you inherit this art form and reconstitute it in different ways. And I think that the timing of it feels like kismet to me that Angelenos will be having this conversation about how you look at traditional museums and how you look at new work and how that can get mixed up. And I think when I hear what everyone is doing as part of Opera Fest, it just feels like, well, this is just the musical version of this idea. It feels like a very modern idea and a very Angeleno idea. I want to thank all of you so much. Again, just pay honor to the incredible amount of. Of work that you have done to get us to this moment. Like Beth, I share this vision for this idea that this can be this Biennial, and that the capaciousness of the art form can be reflected in the scale of Opera Fester Lay, and it continued to grow. The next one we have to look forward to will be in 28, which, of course, is concurrent with the LA 28 Olympics and the Olympics Arts Festival. And so it is my expectation that this will continue to grow. And so. So, again, I just want to thank all of you today for having this conversation with us.
- [43:06]
C
Thank you. Thanks for having us.
- [43:07]
D
Thanks.
- [43:09]
E
I just wanted to add one thing, that the importance of the energetic collaboration of, like, when we were all together in that meeting room for the first time, and there was just like, the gamut of the whole arc and process of opera. There's something about in this violently weird time to keep this current alive, that it's not like, oh, put on a happy face or get distracted. It's like a living, important current of beauty in this form.
- [43:45]
B
That's such a beautiful grace note and I think it's a perfect description of what I think the art form does. I often say that like it doesn't actually function unless people of wildly differing backgrounds, perspectives and skill sets come together towards a common purpose. That is an inherently optimistic act and in this very dark and very confusing time, it's very affirming and so I really appreciate that perspective. It's a beautiful note to end on. And thank you all so much for joining.
- [44:23]
D
Thank you, thank you.
- [44:25]
A
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