Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

I've been thinking a lot about the state of the performing arts since I attended Opera America. Much of what was discussed was the survival of opera, but the theme of cooperation kept coming up. Opera is the perfect combination of all of the arts. Sets and Costumes embody the visual arts, theater is embodied in the direction and many operas include dance and movement to tell their story. And of course, in the middle of it all, is vocal and instrumental performance. It's all there and yet opera does not reach out to its fellow art genres.

They're not alone. I feel like so many art forms are totally insulated from the rest of the art world, and in this society where the arts are so often thrown aside as frivolous and unimportant, I feel like we all need to come together with a common goal or we'll perish.

I'm working on "Samson et Dalila" right now, and as I was reading about Samson's story before we began rehearsals, I realized that Samson was the one who took all of the small, disparate Hebrew tribes and brought them together to create one Jewish faith. For all intents and purposes, this is why the Jewish faith still survives today . . . the whole "united we stand" idea. I think this is a relevant story for the arts. We are all sitting in these tiny little tribes. If we don't start banding together soon, we may truly be erased.

Cross Marketing is going to be imperative as our funding slowly slips away and our audiences (especially in opera) slowly die off. It will take brainstorming and creativity and, ultimately, it will take a complete overhaul in our little, insulated, pretentious worlds. Companies forget that other arts organizations exist most of the time - definitely to their detriment.

The other big thing that kept coming up was how we speak to our public. Society (especially American society, in which we sit) has changed rapidly in the last twenty, thirty, fifty years. Opera, however, has not. Our society has become relatively addicted to technology and telecommunications. Opera, however, has not. Our society is driven by pop culture, American Idol, reality television, football, etc. etc. etc. We've had a complete overhaul that's resulted in a dumbing down of our everyday world. Opera, however, has not.

Now...the last thing should never change for opera. So many of our speakers, Dana Gioia, being one of them, were correct in saying that to truly keep opera alive in this era, we will have to exact a cultural shift back to a learning and learned society. Opera can't do this alone (again . . . we're back to the whole "cooperation" thing), but it can learn to speak to our society in a language that they can understand.

We have to learn to embrace technology, not only on stage but as a marketing tool as well. We have to learn how to market our opera seasons to appeal to what our society is looking for. This doesn't mean creating productions that cater to our culture of ignorance so much as it means that we should learn who we're actually talking to in the first place. I honestly believe that if we can get people in the door, large portions of them will enjoy what they see.

Perhaps that's a bit utopian but I really think that people don't "like art" because they weren't exposed to it when they were young so it hasn't become part of their fabric. We have to let them in slowly, but the most important part is that we have to LET THEM IN. They won't knock on the door of their own volition.

How we open the door and offer the reward is the real question. And Dana Gioia made a very good point when he said, "It's not about the money." People will pay $200 to sit in crap seats at a baseball game. It's not the ticket price - it's the interest in the first place.

I know a big part of our problem is that so many of our organizations are all talk and no action when it comes to true audience development. Changing people's minds is hard work and I can't sit here right now and say that I have any answers that haven't already been thought up, but we have to keep brainstorming and trying and, ultimately, FIGHTING for the importance of arts and culture in this society.

It WILL go away while we're busy being snobs. Truly.

So I'm not sure I said anything profound here, but this is what I've been thinking about a lot. I need to put my action where my mouth is I know, and hopefully the more I hash out for myself, the more ideas I'll have and the more I can put into action. Arts education (which is ultimately the genesis of audience development) is what I'm talking about here, and perhaps we all just need to realize its true and PROFOUND importance.

Enough. I'm leaving this post with two quotes I liked from Osvaldo Golijov's keynote address on the first morning of Opera America:

In order to understand who we are now, we have to understand who we are. Period.

And

Opera is the possibility of absorbing and transforming the spectrum of human experience.

Time is the Enemy

So I've been looking back on my meager posts lately.

They all seem a little disgruntled. A little rushed. A little mournful.

And perhaps that does sum up where I'm at, but I'm noticing that they don't particularly capture what I was hoping to capture when I started this blog a year and a half ago. I wanted to really explore what this life was, what it was to live and work in the performing arts, what it was to be in this rootless job, the intricacies of putting up a show and dealing with a life that is dictated almost entirely by what you do.

It's hard to talk about all of these things without detail, and perhaps my life would have been made infinitely easier had I started this blog as an anonymous writer. But then again, my goal was never to (as my documentarian husband says) "expose the seedy underbelly of the opera business," it was to document process in all of its joys and difficulties. Because, truly, the process is the only thing that makes art worth DOING . . . for me that is.

I've become somewhat nervous to talk about difficult projects which really defeats the purpose of this blog. You can take as much from the difficult moments as you can from the joyous ones, sometimes more. Suffice to say, "Samson et Dalila" has been a difficult process, and for the same reason that most operas will claim when they are struggling to open well:

TIME.

Opera production suffers from a quickening disease. The productions are huge and lavish but the rehearsal time is painfully small. Big budgets conflicting with meager cash flow dictate that rehearsal and technical schedules be reduced to their absolute minimum. It's a frustrating truth that looms darkly over many, many productions, and it is felt in every company I've ever worked for.

Most productions go up in three weeks or less. A month of prep/rehearsal time is luxurious. This is not so in straight or musical theater. Directors who come to opera from that tradition are shocked and dismayed to get their first production calendar. Dancers work months on a ten-minute piece, musical theater gets an extensive preview period wherein they can tweak a piece until it's been drilled to near perfection. Opera starts on a Tuesday morning , and three weeks or less later the critics are there with their light pens and tiny notebooks, ready to judge.
The trick as a director/maestro/lighting designer etc, is to organize your time so effectively that you can fit everything in. Some people would say you can't be a perfectionist in this business, which I don't really agree with. I think that perfectionism works here as long as its always coupled with a severe organization (this is where my OCD ends up working for me). Everyone working on an opera has to walk in the door knowing exactly what they want and exactly what they're doing or frustrations will ensue and multiply.

For "Samson," it was tech time that was fighting. This is a difficult technical show with collapsing temples, pyro effects and a two-minute scene change that defies belief. We're finally getting there, but I am constantly amazed at how much has to be achieved in so little time.

It's the time factor that will keep most opera from ever truly achieving the slickness that we see in Broadway shows (and I'm not sure that opera should really ever go there even if it could). Don't get me wrong, to be granted more time is a luxury that any of us in the business would grab at and clamp onto like an alligator's jaws should it ever be held out towards us, but I have to say that I thrive on the race. I love that feeling after a meet-and-greet or first production meeting, as if we've all set ourselves down on a giant toboggan and then pushed ourselves over the side of an impossibly high, icy mountain. There's no stopping it once it starts. We're going to hit every tree and rock on the way down, and we're only going to get faster and faster and faster as we go. But if we reach the bottom without capsizing, then the rush, the adrenalin, the cold in our faces is the most exhilirating feeling I know.

The moment that orchestra tune rises out of the pit on opening night, no matter how many times I've banged my head against the wall, walked out of a rehearsal searching blindly for a scotch rocks, buried my head in my hands as a tech rehearsal grinds to a halt for one reason or other, I know the curtain will rise and a show (our show) will be on the other side.

It's the reason I can't even fathom doing anything else.

One Tech Down...

...and one to go.

I'm on a bit of a caffeine kick at this moment, mainly because I left the theater in Ft. Lauderdale after midnight tonight and swigged down some cold coffee as I made my way down Highway 1 so that I wouldn't swerve off the road during my 45 minute drive.

They're doing construction on Interstate 95 at night right now, so every time we leave the theater we have to take the extremely long way home. I've never seen a place shut down freeways the way Southern Florida does. It's baffling and frustrating when your entire job revolves around making your way through these massive construction zones. It took me nearly 2 hours to get up to the Broward Center this afternoon because of construction and various stalled vehicles. And I thought I'd be happy to have a car...

So we had our first tech rehearsal tonight. We got through all of Act I which is a LOT of chorus work. There are deaths and huge running exits, supers running down temple steps with huge spears and live torches being handed off during frantic chorus sequences. I was proud of how swiftly we moved through despite the fact that there was no bridge to the stage from the house so I had to run out of the house, down the hall and up onto the stage many, many times to adjust spacing and make sure everyone knew where they were going.

We were going to work a couple of things in Act II, but this was the first time the crew had done the move from Act I to Act II and it took the entire rest of the rehearsal, so our rehearsal ended with a brief conversation with one of the principals about stair useage and spacing, and we released everyone else..

Tomorrow is all Act III all the time. It's a spacing nightmare because of the dance and the dark exits at the end, plus the amount of rail moves, trips, falling statues and rubble drops put it somewhere in the sixth level of tech hell. It's all about remaining calm. Easier said than done.

The picture is a sphinx on the grounds of Vizcaya in Coconut Grove. My stage manager and I took a sight-seeing trip to the lavish mansion on our last day off. Sometimes it's nice to abandon work for a few hours and be a tourist.