Twenty-first-century North American opera houses have attempted to bring in new audiences to make up for a declining and aging population of subscribers through means both traditional and unorthodox. The San Francisco Opera (SFO) is one such case in point.Footnote 1 These changes have taken place beyond the walls of the War Memorial Opera house, in nightclubs in the Bay Area as well as in the SFO's new performance space in the nearby Veterans Building. Recent programming interventions draw from performance and marketing techniques from the world of artist-driven experimental opera companies such as Los Angeles’ The Industry, Toronto's Against the Grain, and larger companies like Beth Morrison Projects.Footnote 2 Does the use of experimental techniques borrowed from smaller companies disrupt social narratives of opera as an elitist or obsolete genre of performance in the twenty-first century in the United States, as the SFO suggests?Footnote 3 Or do these strategies signal towards rather than fulfill the promise of change?
Artist-driven, experimental, indie, or guerilla-style opera typically originates from the work of performers and directors who establish small companies with the goal of creating performance opportunities and pushing stylistic boundaries while introducing new audiences to opera.Footnote 4 Alternative opera companies might perform new or canonic works, produce site-specific or digitally mediated productions, and feature the work of established or little-known performers and directors. 2017 MacArthur Fellow Yuval Sharon and his experimental opera company The Industry represent one of the best-known alternative opera companies of the past ten years.Footnote 5 Another rich site of alternative operatic production can be found in Toronto, where eleven opera companies joined forces in 2016 to create the Indie Opera Collective.Footnote 6 While these are but two examples, alternative companies can be found in small and large urban centers across the United States and Canada.Footnote 7
For the majority of these companies, experimental practices are not limited to the stage alone, whether that stage is a limousine, on top of a building, or in an art gallery. Rather, these forms of performance often challenge traditional notions of spectatorship and operatic convention. This article explores the effects of mapping the “cottage industry” of small-scale opera—decentralized productions with often-reduced means of production support—onto the large-scale output of level-one opera houses.Footnote 8 What are the results of these “operatic experiments”? In other words, how might these attempts at experimentation re-inscribe canonic veneration and re-contextualize rather than eliminate class and intellectual hierarchies? This process of revisionism on the part of one of the United States’ largest opera companies reveals the broader class and racial barriers that remain even as companies attempt to sell a fully accessible vision of opera as “American” art.
I understand experimentation as a range of discursive practices—often extra-musical—that interact with established institutions and repertories. This approach thus draws on Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, Eduardo Herrera, and Alejandro L. Madrid's notion of experimentalisms as “a series of continuous presences that navigate fluidly in a transhistorical imaginary encounter of pasts and presents.”Footnote 9 The transhistorical encounters staged by the SFO are those of presence and absence, reflecting the ways operatic conventions are both amplified and ignored by the programs I discuss. Thus, the SFO's efforts have wide-ranging effects on how opera-as-genre is understood and performed in the United States.Footnote 10 More broadly, this application of experimental performativity demonstrates the ways, following Alonso-Minutti, Herrera, and Madrid, in which a focus on local encounters can yield broad applications for genres and/or scenes beyond opera in the United States.
Attempts to bring in new audience members and shape larger narratives around North American operatic performance are not exclusive to the SFO. Educational, outreach, and promotional programs—what I call “auxiliary programming”—have long been a part of the institutional identity of the majority of opera companies in the United States and Canada. In the past ten years, however, these programs have taken on new institutional importance and represent the established opera industry's response to the increased visibility of experimental modes of production and site-specific performance. This new connection between auxiliary programming and increased audiences is exemplified by OPERA America's “Building Opera Audiences” Grant program, funded by the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation through the national non-profit OPERA America.Footnote 11 The program distributed $1.2 million to thirty-seven opera companies, including the SFO, from 2013 to 2016 to fund a range of auxiliary and experimental programming initiatives.
Despite their now-established presence as a part of an opera company's identity, scholars have given little attention to auxiliary forms of programming such as pop-up events, pastiche programs, and other forms of promotional performance in the operatic world. Considering these performances in the context of an opera company's broader identity reveals emerging artistic and community priorities. Because these projects are often small-scale and require less financial commitment, they also have the potential to forecast possible financial and programmatic directions a larger company might be considering. Finally, initiatives provide a contemporary rejoinder to discourses of low, middle, and highbrow culture from the early and mid-twentieth centuries in their preoccupation with navigating opera's “popular” image in the United States.Footnote 12
My aims with this article are threefold. I highlight the ways in which non-mainstage programming has the potential to map a specific opera company within a local community. I then demonstrate the significance of this type of programming in understanding how the executives of a company enact and participate within a performative framework of opera in the United States. While a mainstage season may promote a certain image of opera, a company's auxiliary programming can direct and shape this image through other forms of programming, advertising, and outreach. Finally, I consider how this programming contributes to a larger discourse about access to the arts and the tension between populism and experimentation in the United States and in other parts of the Americas.
I use the SFO's opera lab series as a lens with which to explore the tensions inherent to a system of operatic marketing that uses traditional ideologies to promote new products and to sell conventional ideologies. More broadly, I analyze the fraught notion of a “populist” operatic aesthetic within the history of the SFO and within the current historical moment. That is, I consider how industry concerns over opera as an inaccessible, elitist genre are mistranslated into a form of anti-intellectualism that reorganizes opera's perceived class hierarchies. Even as the SFO signaled a desire to dismantle these hierarchies through experimental programming and alternative venues, the company's actions (and financial obligations to the board of directors) prevented the company from doing more than gesturing towards change. This anti-intellectualism is framed as an embrace of “populist” programming as easy entertainment within the opera house and shaded by the inclusion of other social rituals like drinking during performances. The significance of neoliberal economic, cultural, and ideological concerns illustrated through this case study cuts across national borders and speaks to broader twentieth- and twenty-first century aesthetic and political practices and histories.
Rebranding Opera Through Auxiliary Programming
In the twenty-first century, artist training, educational outreach programs, and other performances that fall under the umbrella of auxiliary programming have become an integral element in the success of a large opera company in the United States.Footnote 13 In the process of translating experimental initiatives to regional opera houses, auxiliary operatic programming takes many forms. For example, offerings might occur in the appearance of flash mobs like Opera Philadelphia's Knight Foundation “Random Acts of Culture” collaborative performance of the “Halleluiah Chorus” at an area Macy's department store in 2010; productions at local cultural landmarks oriented towards new audiences such as the Chicago Lyric Opera's Unlimited Rhoda and the Fossil Hunt performed at the Field Museum in 2018; or pop-up events like the SF Opera Lab's juxtaposition of popular arias with invited DJs at popular nightclubs in the Bay Area.Footnote 14 Auxiliary initiatives thus encompass any type of programming meant to increase visibility of the opera company in the community or act as a catalyst for community-company interaction.
As exemplified by the SFO, auxiliary programming conveys a great deal about an opera company's identity and programming priorities. James Steichen refers to this notion of a company's public-facing identity as “institutional dramaturgy,” which he describes as the strategies an institution employs to “stage itself for the public.”Footnote 15 An integral part of institutional health, auxiliary programming creates future opportunities for funding and publicity while “staging” this public identity.
Auxiliary programming is light on its feet and typically draws on institutional resources that are already available.Footnote 16 Thus, it can be a compelling means to not only shape institutional dramaturgy but also rebrand it through flexible, cheap means. Broadly speaking, opera's historical identity as an exclusionary, high-class art form in the United States has long established a fraught community legacy for companies struggling to draw in patrons.Footnote 17 Copious examples of opera-as-high-class lexicon in twentieth and twenty-first century public culture as discussed by Larry Hamberlin, Daniel Goldmark, and Jennifer Fleeger complicate this “branding challenge.”Footnote 18 These discussions are compounded by the historical realities of segregation on the stage and in the audience of the US opera house as well as practices such as blackface that continue even to the present as discussed by Naomi André and Lucy Caplan.Footnote 19 Auxiliary programming that focuses on education and access can be read as one broad response to this problematic cultural legacy.Footnote 20
The community-company relationship exemplified by auxiliary programming is facilitated through a variety of means. For example, Houston Grand Opera's (HGO) “HGOco” Initiative works to make connections between the opera company and its surrounding community. The HGOco landing page features racially diverse audiences and performers. The page gives information about attending student performances of not only Rigoletto but also composer Javier Martínez's El Milagro del Recuerdo. The latter is a sequel to the company's 2018 mariachi opera Cruzar la Cara de la Luna about an immigrant family divided between the US–Mexican border written by Martínez's father, José “Pepe” Martínez. Taken in its entirety, the promotional HGOco homepage then suggests student-targeted events that thematically reflect the makeup of Houston's community (or at least a projection of the community) and a desire to create art that speaks to contemporary concerns.Footnote 21 Closer to home, Opera at the Ballpark, the SFO's annual collaboration with the San Francisco Giants, attracted twenty-eight thousand and twenty-six thousand attendees in the 2015 and 2016 fiscal years, respectively, and represents a major outreach effort on the part of the opera company.Footnote 22 This event uses a large space—Oracle Park—to offer free simulcasts of performances happening at the War Memorial Opera House.Footnote 23
This cursory survey demonstrates a range of programming initiatives that convey different priorities and public images for each respective opera company. For example, the HGOco initiative communicates, among other things, the HGO's desire to create stories that may resound with Houston's large Latinx and immigrant community and contemporary political concerns over human rights and migration. SFO's Opera at the Ballpark collaboration uses a central community space to stage a simulcast in a more accessible and uniquely visible environment than the opera house. Theoretically, the change of venue and mode of presentation targets the more socioeconomically and racially diverse fan base of the Giants (in comparison to those attendees at the War Memorial Opera House).
From another angle, these supplementary forms of operatic programming—this “need” for a new and improved institutional dramaturgy—can be interpreted as a response to the values of musical entrepreneurialism vaunted by US conservatory programs and contemporary music ecosystems as recognized by multiple scholars.Footnote 24 As has been shown, twenty-first century forms of musical entrepreneurialism are impossible to disentangle from neoliberal ideologies and economics. By extension, auxiliary programming should be interpreted through a lens of entrepreneurially-driven forms of production and consumption. In fact, the proliferation of these programs at opera companies across the United States and Canada during the 2013–2016 “Building Opera Audiences” funding cycle demonstrates that while traditional funding structures remain in place as a fundamental way of supporting North American opera, the way these structures are employed has changed. Twenty-first century ancillary programs thus represent the result of a transformation of traditional funding structures (i.e., granting agencies and individual cultural patrons) into neoliberal economic strategy and product. Put another way, grant programs like “Building Opera Audiences” become an institutionalized way in which older systems of collective support (grant programs) participate in their own process of de-regulation through a process of validating the entrepreneurial enterprise of individual opera companies. As Andrea Moore points out, neoliberalism's projects of de-regulation and “commodification” are especially salient applications of neoliberalism within the classical music industry.Footnote 25 Auxiliary operatic programs like those employed by the SFO, which have a light economic footprint and rely on the efforts of a few precariously employed individuals within the opera industry, represent one of the ways in which the tenets of neoliberalism have transformed the marketing and production of opera in the twenty-first century.
Engaging the Opera-Curious: The Lab
The SFO's new auxiliary programming stream took the form of two overlapping initiatives described both individually and collectively as the SF Opera Lab. Located at 401 Van Ness Avenue, the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera can be found on the fourth floor of the Veteran's Building.Footnote 26 Beginning in March 2016, the center's first of two auxiliary programming initiatives took the form of chamber performances, new works, and collaborations between established ensembles or companies. Pop-up events, the second of these two initiatives, consisted of multiple nightclub-based performances of operatic highlights often with other stereotypical signifiers.
From its inception, the Wilsey Center for Opera was meant to satisfy multiple needs of the company. The venue would provide centralized rehearsal spaces, an archival center, much-needed office space, and ultimately a theater that would allow the company to offer year-round performances: the Taube Atrium Theater. The SFO shares the War Memorial Opera house with the San Francisco Ballet, meaning no main stage performances are given by the SFO from January to May, although there is a second short season of operas in June. Thus, Wilsey Center performances were originally intended for subscribers and high-level donors in the SFO's off season—not opera for the opera “curious,” as new-to-opera patrons are called by the company, but rather for the initiated aesthete.Footnote 27 Once Elkhanah Pulitzer was hired as artistic curator of the space in early 2016, the imagined audience for the new space shifted. Pulitzer's background in directing experimental productions with the company West Edge Opera, combined with what the SFO observed as the emerging “trend” of experimental opera, suggested a different direction for the space. As Sean Waugh, Artistic Planning Manager at the SFO, explained:
We started to ask how we could think of [the Wilsey space] a little differently. Let's look at what other companies are doing, what LA Opera is doing with their Off Grand Series, look what Houston is doing with their Houston Grand Opera Co initiative . . . look at what Beth Morrison Projects is doing, look at how people are starting to pick [experimental productions] up and make that more mainstream. This is the direction we need to go. And the [Wilsey Center] is an opportunity here.Footnote 28
Waugh equates the growing trend of alternative forms of presentation undertaken by regional opera houses and artist-driven companies with two outcomes: one, making experimental programming more “mainstream”; and, two, increased interest from new audiences. What this quote does not reveal is what exactly “experimental” might mean in the context of the SFO.
Waugh is not alone in touting the power of alternative forms of presentation to draw in new audiences. In a 2016 New York Times article, then-General Director David Gockley argued that the SF Opera Lab would “allow [the SFO] to engage in this new wave of chamber opera that has really kind of come out of nowhere in the last decade, and is a very important part of our art form these days.”Footnote 29 Sasha Metcalf, however, notes that a belief in experimental practices to draw in new audiences is not new to the twenty-first century.Footnote 30 In fact, both Waugh and Gockley's statements reflect concerns expressed by OPERA America members in the latter decades of the twentieth century.Footnote 31 As Metcalf describes, in the 1980s executives such as Gockley (then General Director of the HGO) and Harvey Lichtenstein (President and CEO of the Brooklyn Academy of Music) “believed [Philip] Glass's synthesis of avant-garde and popular-music traditions attracted younger audiences and led to sold-out performances.”Footnote 32 In the twenty-first century, the SFO had faith in seemingly “edgy” performance formats to do the same. As we will see, however, the company's belief in the signaling power of experimentation was oftentimes in direct conflict with notions of what repertoire would be universally appealing to new audiences.Footnote 33
What exactly constitutes an experimental opera performance or form of auxiliary programming in the context of the SFO? Moreover, how different is an “experimental” work from a “new opera”?Footnote 34 The fraught notion of experimentalism is at the crux of the SF Opera Lab initiative. From the above comments, it seems “experimental” signifies multiple characteristics, many of which are not musical. While the word might refer to musical practices (and experimental musical practices can be a part of these works), more often, the phrase describes a scena that serves an explicitly social or political critique, such as Roxie Perkins and Ellen Reid's p r i s m (BMP, 2018). Experimentalism can also encompass practices of spectatorship: for example, a production that incorporates novel forms of digital mediation, such as Adam Taylor and Scott Joiner's 2016 Connection Lost: L'opera di Tinder or The Industry's 2015 Hopscotch. Finally, works given in alternative or site-specific locations, such as Tom Philpott and Tom Cipullo's Glory Denied (HGOco, 2017), would fit the SFO's definition of experimental works. This constellation of behaviors and practices constituting experimental opera is, following Eduardo Herrera's terminology, an “indexical cluster . . . a grouping that through repetition and redundancy becomes habitually and most strongly connected to other signs within specific groups of people.”Footnote 35 In this system of signification, “new operas” can certainly be experimental—and might even be more musically “daring”—but would more likely be produced within a traditional proscenium framework and perhaps by larger, longer-established companies such as the HGO.
By this logic, a premiere such as the SFO's 2017 production of Peter Sellars's and John Adams's Girls of the Golden West would be an example of new opera, while the same production with a reduced cast, more explicit political critique (and perhaps some sort of digital media component), given within the Wilsey space, would constitute an “experimental” work. Theoretically, moving this kind of opera to the alternative spaces described by Gockley, Pulitzer, and Waugh allows for a shift in appeal along with categorization. The conflation of place, spectatorship, and political narrative with the word “experimental” is not exclusive to the SFO. Associating this indexical cluster with the ability to attract new audience members is common among recipients of the Building Opera Audiences grants. “Experimental,” thus, indicates not just a set of practices but also acts as a rhetorical signal that amplifies the marketing allure of these practices.
In the lexicon of twenty-first-century US-American opera, it might be said that any event that does not appear in the large performance space of the opera house seems to be implicitly experimental and alluring. The following exchange between Waugh and Pulitzer reveals this focus on the work of experimental companies:
WAUGH: I remember when I first started working here, [alternative] companies were seen as “oh well, they're doing crazy stuff, we don't want to do that.” And now we're a company that is saying “wow! We want to work with them!” or “wow, they're doing some really cool stuff, and let's find a way to do that too.” It's a big shift.
PULITZER: That comes back to the relevance question—the big-scale houses are dealing with a changing audience, and I think a lot of organizations are wanting to experiment with what that future looks like—the different ways in which to engage with an audience.Footnote 36
The above conversation foregrounds the connection between experimental programming and the relevance of opera as a viable art form in the United States. Notably, the definition of experimental programming encompasses not only practices contained behind the fourth wall but also those performative experiments which, in Pulitzer's words, “engage” the audience in a different way. Performance space is a key indicator of these new forms of engagement.
Besides Waugh and Pulitzer, other forms of SFO advertising emphasized the role of the Wilsey Center as a “research and development” space for presumably the mainstage.Footnote 37 For example, a blog published by the SFO in early 2017 was titled “SF Opera Lab—The Many Faces of R&D.”Footnote 38 In the article, the first season of the Wilsey Center is referred to by Pulitzer as a series of “experiments.” She concludes by once more referring to the lab as a research and development (R&D) branch of the SFO and optimistically states that in this role the lab will continue “figuring things out.” While the emphasis on R&D could be a rhetorical attempt to appeal to tech interests within San Francisco, it is worth considering the implications of Pulitzer's writing in this article. If the lab is an R&D space, how will the operas or “products” developed in the lab make it to the “market” of the mainstage? Perhaps the targets of the R&D component of SF Opera Lab programming were not operas but rather audience members, in which case this strategy echoes the marketing strategies of social-media companies like Facebook who target user information over content.Footnote 39 This line of inquiry is in fact supported by commentary made by an anonymous SFO employee involved with the pop-ups. In our conversation on March 3, 2019, they mentioned that it was only during the final pop-up that the company began seeing more engagement between the SFO and pop-up attendees. “Rather than trying to capture people's data,” they explained, “we started to look at what we were doing to follow up [with audience members].” This comment reveals two important facts about the reality of the SF Opera Lab programming. First of all, research was being done on attendees (a standard practice for many opera companies). Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the SFO was unsure how to best leverage this R&D process, regardless of target.
Whether user or platform oriented, the R&D portion of the lab was supplemented by a partnership with other marketing resources from the beginning of the initiative. The first opera pop-up was a result of a collaboration with the Stanford d.school and intended as a prototype event for future Wilsey Center programming.Footnote 40 This performance, however, was so well received that the company began offering pop-ups as recurring performances. The Wilsey space was named the SF Opera Lab, and the pop-ups were intended to work as feeder events that would draw new audiences to the lab, supporting the notion of the lab being an R&D space for consumers. It was the hope of the SFO marketing team that in the future these same opera-curious attendees would eventually be converted into mainstage subscribers.
The SF Opera Lab produced two seasons in the spring of 2016 and 2017. Typical seasons were made up of two productions and one recital or ensemble performance, following Gockley's requirement that performances incorporate both “theatrical” and “vocal aspects.”Footnote 41 For example, the first season, which ran from April 2 to April 23, 2016, was made up of Svadba-Wedding, The Triplets of Belleville Cine-Concert, and two ChamberWORKS recitals featuring SFO orchestral performers.Footnote 42 In the second season, the Wilsey Center took on the role of both presenter and producer. The second season ran from February 24 to April 23, 2017 with performances of Beth Morrison Projects’ digital oratorio The Source by Ted Hearne, La Voix humaine, and a one-night performance by Roomful of Teeth.Footnote 43
The Wilsey space can be configured in multiple ways: audience members might be seated in the round around a large circular stage with tables and chairs clustered within the space as they were for Ana Sokolovic's Svadba-Wedding. The space could also be adjusted to allow for multiple-aisle-style seating.Footnote 44 All performances offered the opportunity to purchase beverages at the bar and to bring those drinks into the performance space; a press release regarding the center mentions the crucial detail of cup holders next to each seat.Footnote 45 In contrast to other forms of experimental operatic performance, the audience was seated and in one contained space the entire time. Additionally, they were not directed to interact in any specific ways that challenged notions of spectatorship. Even this overview of the 2016 and 2017 seasons demonstrates the flexible ways in which the draw of the “experimental” was used by the company.
“Opera Singers: They're Just Like Us!” The Pop-Ups
The pop-up opera events were held from March 2015 to November 2017 and then again in September 2018.Footnote 46 Provocatively titled “Barely Opera,” the first event was held at the Rickshaw Stop, a music venue and bar in March 2015. “This isn't your grandmother's opera!,” proclaimed the slogan for the night. A live DJ, drinks, and a huge “Wheel of Songs” (not arias) that audience members could spin to select the next piece to be sung provided further evidence that this was a different sort of opera event altogether. Rather than relying on supertitles or translations, the SFO's Adler Fellows performed each aria or duet with memes providing translations (“supermemes” rather than supertitles), which illustrated the text appearing on a screen behind them (Figure 1).Footnote 47
Figure 1. Mezzo-Soprano Zanda Švēde sings “Que fait-tu blanche tourterelle” from Gounod's Romeo et Juliette, as the “supermeme” image provides a translation to spectators. Photo Credit: Karla Monterroso.
Since the initial prototype event, SFO produced six more pop-ups at various clubs and bars in San Francisco and Oakland and two additional “Meet the Adler” events (Figure 2).
Figure 2. SF Opera Lab Pop-Ups and Adler Events.
A short promotional video advertising future pop-ups using footage from the February 11, 2016 event at Public Works positions the event as hip, intimate, and inviting. The video shows Adler-fellow Toni Marie Palmertree singing Wagner's “Dich, teure halle” from Tannhäuser into a microphone to a packed room with people in their twenties and thirties holding drinks. The film then shifts to footage of (primarily) millennials posing with Ring Cycle–inspired props in front of a photo booth and includes interviews with spectators. “I wouldn't say it felt like I was at the opera. It felt like a really big party with people performing their favorite songs,” one woman explained. Countering another operatic stereotype, a second attendee related that “you can enjoy the music without having to feel like you are in a stiff environment.”Footnote 48 “Favorite songs” performed by Adler fellows at the pop-ups tend to be canonic arias and duets. For example, in a YouTube video created by 2015–2017 Adler-fellow Anthony Reed, problematically titled “Opera in da Club,” Reed and Adler directing fellow Aria Umezawa discuss repertoire for an upcoming pop-up.Footnote 49 Repertoire discussed includes “Non più andrai” (Le Nozze di Figaro, Mozart), “La calunnia” (Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Rossini), “O namenlöse freude” (Fidelio, Beethoven), and “Sempre libera” (La Traviata, Verdi).Footnote 50
Although traditional repertoire dominates the opera pop-ups, the events are marketed by the suggestion of other musical genres through multiple means. Audience members are encouraged to cheer at high notes and clap boisterously at the often-campy antics of performers. Rhetorical suggestions of other genres also abound. For example, “Operatronica” was an Electronic Dance Music (EDM)-inspired Pop-Up held at the nightclub Mezzanine on October 12, 2017.Footnote 51 As described in the promotional materials, DJ Troupe Loves Company was hired to “bring the beats for an opera party like no other.”Footnote 52 Tickets were $20 in advance, $25 at the door, and $40 for VIP access, which included the option to purchase bottle service and reserved seating, VIP entry, a meet-and-greet with the singers, and a swag bag.Footnote 53 A section on the website advertising the event read, “Who's gonna love it: The Opera Curious, EDM fans and those who enjoy the VIP treatment.” Interspersed with traditional repertoire, Umezawa performed Menotti's “The Seventh Glass of Wine” on a vocoder, and Adler-Fellows Amitai and Pene Pati played The Zuton's “Valerie” while accompanying themselves on guitar. As Pulitzer and Waugh described in our 2016 interview, the move away from rhetorical operatic signifiers is a deliberate component of SF Opera Lab marketing strategy. Part of the goal of the Lab, according to Waugh, is to “break down the perceptual barriers of opera to people who, right now, say opera isn't for me.”Footnote 54 He continued, “The measure of success should be really when that user leaves that [operatic] experience that their positivity levels, if you measure it in the sense of brand positivity, the word opera to them has a little less of a negative connotation than what it had before they came.”Footnote 55 This comment reduces an operatic experience to a commodity, which in turn implies a form of standardization, cogent signifiers that will sell “opera” consistently. This “brand” depends on an array of canonic markers, operatic stereotypes, and signifiers of social capital. Well-known arias are performed, and audiences are given the “VIP treatment” in attending the pop-ups.
An integral element of the pop-ups is the way the events depict performers as relatable. Both Waugh and Umezawa emphasized the importance of the Adler fellows drinking and mingling with audience members during performances. Waugh explained: “There is no backstage” and “we want [the performers] to go back in the crowd, to hang out with people, talk to them.”Footnote 56 As many pop-up attendees have indicated, these behaviors have had the effect of humanizing performers for those unfamiliar with opera. Waugh confided that “a pop-up attendee shared that one of the most powerful moments was seeing this bass-baritone get up and belt out and sing the shit out of this incredibly powerful aria, and then go back out and dance to Beyoncé on the dance floor.”Footnote 57 These events are successful partially because of the way they juxtapose operatic stereotypes with elements that counter these stereotypes. In Umezawa's words, “we needed to humanize the singers . . . opera singers, they're just like us! Let them be seen drinking a beer or dancing really poorly with their friends.”Footnote 58 These actions humanize not only the performers but also counter perceptions of the genre as stuffy and inaccessible.
Another branch of outreach events that Adler fellows seemed to understand as an extension of the pop-ups were the SFO's “Bravo! Club: Meet the Adlers” events. While not officially under the umbrella of the lab programming, these events were described in interviews with Adler fellows when I asked about the pop-ups. The Bravo! Club is a young professionals group founded by the SFO in 1991 that “aims to bring together a dedicated and dynamic group of young adults throughout the Bay Area with a love of opera and a burgeoning interest in arts and culture, while helping to build the future audience for San Francisco Opera [sic].”Footnote 59 “Meet the Adlers: Unmasked Edition” was a Bravo! Club event held on November 1, 2018 that, according to Adler pianist and coach César Cañón, was more about the audience socializing with the Adler fellows than operatic performance.Footnote 60 During the event, attendees got to know the Adler fellows through a Q&A based on information that had been gleaned from social media about each artist. Cañón and his fellow collaborative pianist, John Elam, were then featured in a two-part “IPA Faceoff.” Cañón described the event:
The IPA faceoff [used] the International Phonetic Alphabet, in which I read IPA and we had to guess which aria it was. . . . And then John had to [translate] German IPA from a German fragment. The second faceoff was another IPA faceoff in which we had to chug an IPA in front of the audience, and who ever chugged it first was the winner.Footnote 61
This activity both reveals “insider” information about the career of a professional singer or coach and plays on the humorous implications of the abbreviation IPA. The International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic representation established in 1886 by the International Phonetic Association, is often used to communicate phonetic pronunciation in an array of languages. Singers at all levels use IPA to phonetically represent the entirety of a role in an unfamiliar language or as shorthand for challenging moments of pronunciation (for example, an [e], as in the German “der” for example, versus an [ɛ] as in the German “Herz”). The second faceoff Cañón describes plays on the other meaning of IPA—an India Pale Ale.Footnote 62
The pop-ups, “Meet the Adlers,” and Wilsey Center programming alike seem to be working from a position of minimizing the discomfort of operatic performance, albeit in different directions and with different effects. The Wilsey Center programming suggested experimentalism through an intimate performance space with the goal of envisioning new forms of operatic performance. The pop-ups and Bravo! club event softened the stereotypes of opera while reinforcing the dominance of traditional repertoire. As Waugh described, “What we're performing really at all of these pop-ups is pretty much the greatest hits of opera, you know? You're hearing all of the music that you've probably heard in a commercial, or you've heard in a movie . . . and that music is the music that you'll hear on the mainstage.”Footnote 63 The pop-ups rebrand canonic operas as hip and accessible through humor, pastiche, and dynamic forms of spectatorship, while the lab space sells experimental works in a traditional but intimate set up.
The Mainstage and Populist Appeal
Waugh and Pulitzer initially expected that the pop-ups would appeal to the same consumer base as that of the Wilsey Center. A follow-up conversation regarding the SF Opera Lab in 2018 with Waugh, however, revealed a different result. Waugh described how, contrary to the SFO's expectations, the pop-ups had led to a modest increase in mainstage attendance rather than boosting that of the Wilsey Center. According to Waugh, the Wilsey Center programming had been regarded as “more intellectual” and “esoteric” in comparison to the “populous” programming on the mainstage of the opera house. Put another way, the pop-up events marketed a specific definition of opera which unintentionally corresponded to the mainstage, not the offerings of the Wilsey Center.Footnote 64 Although the pop-ups were conceived of as feeder events into the Wilsey component of the SF Opera Lab, new audience members tended to choose to attend canonic works on the mainstage rather than venture into the experimental programming in the alterative space. Waugh attributed this consumer path partially to repertoire:
We especially saw this [pattern of pop-up to mainstage] last summer when we produced very popular titles in the summer season. We produced Don Giovanni, La bohème, and Rigoletto. These three titles, they're considered “A” level operas, and they are more accessible and familiar. And we saw a pretty significant number of former pop-up attendees, who have never engaged with the opera before, make a purchase to attend one of those operas. The number was around ten to fifteen percent. But that's a pretty significant number of people making that jump without [the SFO] really targeting them, and without that ever being the design of what we were trying to do with the pop-ups. Footnote 65
Rather than communicating experimental or alternative notions of the genre, the pop-ups seem to balance both “barely opera” and “opera” to attract new audience members to the mainstage to the detriment of performances that do not fit into this standardized category.Footnote 66
In our 2016 interview, both Pulitzer and Waugh acknowledged the problems in using experimental operas for the sole purpose of drawing patrons into the mainstage space. However, in the conversation, they also seemed unable to move away from this traditional model of investing in future subscribers—that is, the same model of the white, wealthy, and over-the-age-of-fifty subscriber who currently supports the house. Pulitzer explained that the SF Opera Lab was interested in:
the patron journey of the young user who is unencumbered, there are no kids, there's no huge mortgage . . . they have a disposable income and time to leverage to be able to go to stuff—that's the sort of people we're trying to reach now, but most studies show that those people drop out—they go heavy on career and family . . . and then they come back in their forties and fifties. The long play is to build opera patrons and advocates for the future.Footnote 67
The SF Opera Lab seems to be focused on audiences who, in twenty years, will resemble the audiences of the present in terms of race, class, and age. Simultaneously, experimental opera techniques such as intimacy, participatory spectatorship, and changing venues are used to draw in spectators, while a traditional notion of opera is promoted within an alternative venue.
Many of the comments made by Waugh and Pulitzer about overcoming the perceived barriers of opera attendance also have to do with improving the impressions around the SFO brand. Critics, composers, and opera fans have praised David Gockley for commissioning a number of new operas by US American composers during his ten years as General Manager of the SFO from 2006 to 2016. Gockley's openness towards new works, however, should be interpreted within a broadly populist aesthetic. As Gockley himself admitted in a 2016 press interview: “I've been pilloried [for saying] Modernism has failed the mainstream opera establishment in the U.S.A . . . I think it's too intellectual, it's too unattractive to the ear. So obviously, I've tried to steer the new pieces away from that.”Footnote 68 Gockley's bias against pieces he considered “modernist” have had long-ranging effects on dialogues about the effectiveness of “experimentalism” at the SFO. Put another way, the SF Opera Lab, inaugurated during Gockley's tenure, had more to do with rebranding opera as a genre than rebranding opera at the SFO specifically.
While neither Waugh nor Pulitzer commented directly on the perceived conservatism of the SFO, marketing efforts seem to imply that the SFO brand could be perceived as conservative or old-fashioned.Footnote 69 By contrast, Waugh described that the hope after leaving a pop-up event was that the consumer would “walk away not necessarily saying, ‘Oh I want to see an opera now,’ but next time someone says San Francisco Opera to them, they'll say, ‘oh yeah, they're cool. I went to this cool event they did once.’ So that in the end is going to have a massive pay off when they—they may be looking for a new experience, and they may say, ‘well let's give this a chance because I did try this once, and it was really great’.”Footnote 70 A cynical perspective on this example might be that the SF Opera Lab programming was, in the long run, meant to improve the brand of the San Francisco Opera. The SFO saw an opportunity to capitalize on what has appeared to be an effective strategy used by other opera companies to draw in new audience members. These efforts were partially successful, especially with regards to the pop-ups, which, according to Waugh, brought in groups of attendees in which 75 percent of the median age was under thirty-five and over 56 percent of the attendees were new to the SFO online guest system.Footnote 71 By zooming out and examining the labor constraints and the 2019 status of the program, however, it becomes clear that the SF Opera Lab illuminates the difficulties of large opera companies attempting to incorporate experimental models drawn from smaller companies.
“It's a bandwidth issue”: The Fate of Small-Scale Opera at the SFO
The SF Opera Lab initiative provides a specific example of the ways in which a tier-one opera house engaged with experimental practices and forms of spectatorship through the formation of a separate line of lab offerings. In a conversation with the author on April 10, 2019, an anonymous Adler fellow suggested that this effort created a “company within a company.” While the lab space garnered significant press attention, including a detailed review in the New York Times, and press coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle, this attention was not without pushback from the traditional sectors of the SFO. Waugh explained that, despite excitement for the Wilsey Center space, this new branch of programming faced ideological challenges from its inception. He explained: “the company is very much rooted in the grand opera model. . . . If you say to the rest of the company, ‘we're gonna start producing these small-scale experimental works,’ they're gonna say ‘hey, that's not what we do’.”Footnote 72 At the same time, this idea of what was normative for the conservative SFO seemed to conflict with the company's direct competition. Waugh related: “You see the other opera houses, the A-opera houses, like LA, Chicago, Houston, Washington DC, are starting to launch these new kinds of programming initiatives, and that, I think, is really driven by the kind of artist-driven work that's happening outside of the opera houses that is making that huge impact.”Footnote 73
Waugh's comments about the SFO's identity as a company also foreground issues of labor and identity that appeared in our discussions as well as in my conversations with other anonymous SFO Adler fellows. As Waugh explained during our 2016 dialogue, the lab space was problematic from a union perspective. The SFO's employees are represented by eight unions, including the American Federation of Musicians, American Guild of Musical Artists, and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.Footnote 74 The Wilsey space presents a challenge because it does not require the full forces of unionized performers which would be overkill for the smaller space. Mainstage performances, for example, require a union minimum of twelve dressers.Footnote 75 While Theatrical Wardrobe Union business agent Bobbi Boe noted that, for those members of Local 784, the Wilsey Center provided more days of work for the local crew, she also acknowledged some of the intricacies of incorporating the Wilsey Center into negotiations. For example, the SFO was unsure the extent to which the Wilsey Center would be used, and the small space meant that the “size and type of production” could, in Boe's words, “be limited.”Footnote 76 The issue of balancing union requirements and supporting union laborers is challenging with regards to any large opera company's desire to experiment with new forms of production. Experimental opera companies, like those introduced in the beginning of this article, do not have to contend with these types of restraints, and for better or worse they are more financially sustainable with regards to experimentation.
At the same time, maintaining the SF Opera Lab required additional labor on the part of many full-time employees of the SFO. In a conversation with the author on April 10, 2019, an anonymous Adler fellow hinted at the extent to which the lab drew on the efforts of staff members:
[The SF Opera Lab programming] is a bandwidth issue. When you have a staff that is trying to put on a mainstage season, and then they're side-desking what is essentially an entirely other company, maximizing their efforts becomes an issue. I think the drive was there, I think people in the company thought the work of opera lab was incredibly important, I think they got very excited about it, and I think they also had full-time jobs that they had to do extremely well.
As this individual details, the SF Opera Lab was a difficult branch of programming to maintain because there were not specific staffing resources dedicated exclusively to auxiliary programming. Adler fellows already receiving twelve-month salaries were the primary performers at the pop-ups, but this was additional labor they and others were asked to do. The Adlers I spoke to expressed mixed opinions about this extra work. One stressed the opportunities and exposure provided by the Adler fellowship, concluding that “I might have felt exploited if it wasn't the SFO, and I wasn't getting this incredible injection of clout into my career.”Footnote 77 Similarly, during a conversation about the preparations required for singers and pianists for the pop-ups, Cañón emphasized the ways in which the pop-up performances tended to use repertoire the singers were already working on or with which they were familiar, for example, Mozart and bel canto standards.Footnote 78 By his rationale, the low-key style of the pop-ups were meant to prevent them from being stressful as performances.
It remains to be seen what the long-term implications of the SF Lab Programming will be. As of now, the Wilsey Center programming has been on hiatus since 2017. At the April 5, 2019 SFO Annual Membership Meeting, General Director Matthew Shilvock answered a question about “chamber operas [returning] to the Wilsey Center Atrium” in the negative, explaining that “financial constraints” limited Wilsey Center productions. Shilvock also suggested that West Edge Opera and Opera Parallèle “serve the region's opera ecosystem” with regards to chamber opera.Footnote 79 Shilvock's language is striking in this example; “experimental” practices in 2016 seem to have been subsumed by “chamber works” in 2019.
One pop-up, “The Battle of the Divas,” occurred in September 2018; since then, however, there have been no events. A perusal of the SFO's finances reveals another troubling fact: the company operated at a deficit of $500,000 in fiscal year 2016, and in fiscal year 2017, that deficit increased to $700,000.Footnote 80 The company's decision to decrease the rate of auxiliary programming while putting on the Ring Cycle in the summer of 2018 can be read as an example of this kind of conservative financial programming. Finally, the SFO cut ten staff positions in March 2019.Footnote 81 As a program that is now on hiatus (perhaps permanently), the SF Opera Lab represents a temporally constrained effort that diverged from other more traditional streams of still-ongoing auxiliary programming such as educational outreach. The past two years of auxiliary programming, however, reveal an evolving notion of just what constitutes “experimental” opera and audience appeal in the twenty-first century and the consequences of what it might mean to “brand” opera.
Bohème in Bars and as Border Walls: Concluding Thoughts
The story of the SF Opera Lab auxiliary initiative exemplifies tensions between spectatorship practices and content. Conflicts between accessibility and experimentation too are grounded in historical precedent. When describing his inclusive programming initiatives at the HGO in a 1984 interview, Gockley stated: “We have people coming through the turnstiles at three times the rate of the grand opera series. All sorts of people—corporate executives, voters, politicians … if some crusty old man attends a Lena Horne show, in a front box, and has a great time, that's our way to get his contribution. If I take him to Wozzeck I'll never see him again.”Footnote 82 Gockley's 1984 language is strikingly similar to Waugh's 2018 analysis of the draw of the mainstage versus the Wilsey Center space: “You just want to have a feel-good night, you know? You're going to choose La bohème over going to La voix humaine, right?”Footnote 83 The SFO mistranslated the success of small-scale experimental efforts such as those put on by The Industry and Beth Morrison Projects. While these companies perform new music, they are also alluring because of the way they market new forms of spectatorship. In the case of La voix humaine (and Wozzeck), the SFO conflated twentieth-century modernism with twenty-first century experimentation. Inherent in both Gockley's and Waugh's quotes is the belief that certain kinds of repertoire will draw in audiences and, by contrast, certain kinds of repertoire will not.
Gockley, Waugh, and, in turn, the SFO are also making a broad statement about just what constitutes “populist” operatic repertoire. In contrast to the pop-ups, the Wilsey Center inadvertently served as a foil to the populist programming of the mainstage rather than serving as an experimental venue. I find Waugh's statement that the canonic repertoire in particular exemplified “populous programming” to be telling. It seems to me that despite the company's best efforts, the SFO sold canonic operatic repertoire historically understood as elitist as populist repertoire and experimental material meant to welcome in the “opera curious” as elitist and stereotypical. The company's greatest success was not in rebranding the SFO but in rebranding the canon. The pop-ups worked to break down the “perceptual barriers” of the operatic genre and those surrounding the performers, but they also re-inscribed notions of the canon and traditional figurations—or hierarchies—of the opera house.Footnote 84 In so doing, the SFO managed to support the needs of traditional opera attendees who still constitute the majority of ticketholders and donors while drawing in new audiences. Practically speaking, “rebranding” the canon was also a good business choice given the financial precarity at the SFO beginning as early as 1996. As David Levin notes, from 2003 to 2006, then–General Director Pamela Rosenberg made the financial choice to cut down the annual number of productions and “in lieu of launching new productions … [sought] to restage earlier ones.”Footnote 85 Twenty years later, rebranding the canon seems to have shifted from solid financial move to company ideology.
The SFO's experiment with operatic populism, and more broadly, the status of traditional and experimental opera today, reveals faults in US culture over the status of historically defined “high” culture—who can make it, and how, drink in hand, we can consume it. Populism, political scholar Margaret Canovan writes, is “an appeal to the people against both the established structure of power and the dominant ideas and values of the society,” such as “individualism, internationalism, multiculturalism, permissiveness, and belief in progress.”Footnote 86 Populism is pernicious in that it promises to upend established power structures while eliminating the ideological pathways by which these structures can be improved. Marketing the canon within the institutional space of the opera house as “for the people” makes invisible other processes of violence and erasure such as xenophobia, misogyny, and white nationalism, while it also minimizes the complexity of individual canonic works. While forms of experimentation-in-performance could serve as one of the means by which these hegemonic values are challenged, they are instead considered overly intellectual and thus problematic.Footnote 87
Populism is not the property of the political right or left. Rather, it performs a kind of theoretical opposition to institutionalized norms. While experimentalist movements can also be (broadly) characterized in this way, twentieth and twenty-first century Latin American and US history suggests they are more often affiliated with an opposition to traditional institutions and/or the political left. In fact, as Susan Thomas and others suggest, notions of aesthetic experimentalism in a Pan-American context have historically included forms of leftist political commitment or action.Footnote 88 It is this system of commitment that I find essential to understanding the implications of the SFO's actions towards experimentation and populism on a global level. Argentine composer Graciela Paraskevaídis's comments to Herrera regarding avant-garde aesthetics are illuminating in this regard. Paraskevaídis says: “Truthful are works that break codes, that establish a fringe situation … that are taking risks.”Footnote 89 Political populists often (whether inadvertently or deliberately) bolster the status-quo while branding their actions as revolutionary. Their rhetoric or policies might appear to break with tradition while in fact inscribing certain norms more deeply. In turn, the canon-as-populous repertoire seems to have limited potential to “break codes” and “take risks.” Likewise, while experimentalism might “take risks,” it is also not free from the influences of capital or politics. Some of the experimental practices used in the Wilsey space and in forms of auxiliary programming across the country might be understood as a form of commodified experimentation without actually breaking from convention.
Populism is not a new character on the stage of political or operatic theaters. Historian Joan Rubin frames the tension between elitism and populism with regards to access to art as being part of a “paradoxical” process of sacralization and de-sacralization that has long been a part of cultural history. While twentieth-century US cultural institutions attempted to broaden access to high art, Rubin explains, they also sacralized certain products of Western art music and deepened the cultural hierarchy between non-experts and experts.Footnote 90 As Metcalf notes, an emphasis on populist musical idioms motivated impresarios such as Gockley to commission works that might appeal to a broad US public.Footnote 91 According to Gockley “composers who were thought of being too ‘popular’ or pandering … were slammed” in the 1970s. In 2016, new compositions written to appeal to a US public are instead marked as too political or elitist.Footnote 92 By contrast, the warhorses of the canon are more desirable and appealing to new audiences than might first be expected. For example, a market research study put out by Opera Theatre of St. Louis (OTSL) in 2018 concluded that in 2016, 2017, and 2018 “warhorse operas were more popular with younger audiences than contemporary, socially relevant works.”Footnote 93 As Nicole Freber, OTSL director of development, concluded in the report, “we thought that new work was the most appealing thing to younger audiences and more diverse audiences . . . and we're seeing some of that, but we're also seeing the very traditional rep is appealing to those groups as well.”Footnote 94 The OTSL study confirms that, for some new operagoers, repertoire is a complicated signifier. Perhaps even in 2019, Le Nozze di Figaro—canonic opera, “genius” composer—has more reliable cultural cache or familiarity than a new and/or “experimental” work.Footnote 95
Another historical marker of the populist aesthetic has emerged in twenty-first century auxiliary programming: drinking. The session, “Building Opera Audiences: Updates and Inspirations” held on Friday, May 20 at the 2016 Opera America Conference in Montreal, promised to impart strategies for increased audience engagement based on information from the “past four funding cycles.”Footnote 96 An anonymous opera industry executive had a cynical take on the session. They explained that, from their perspective, the main strategy promoted during this session was what they disparagingly referred to as the “Bohème in a Bar Model.” As they commented to the author on August 25, 2016, “It was as though the only way companies were going to attract new audiences was to serve booze and pair to an opera . . . and it was like, this is how you engage an audience, you move it to a casual environment, you do the same piece, and you're immediately going to have new audiences.” Despite this individual's skepticism, this model has had a small amount of success within many companies, including the SFO.Footnote 97 At the same time, their observation is acute: booze is often used by companies especially in auxiliary programming as shorthand for accessibility and experimentalism, not to mention everyman allure.
Waugh's description of a pop-up seems to invoke a similar theme of alcohol and accessibility, but also something unexpected: a rejection of experimentalism along with the embrace of popular drinking culture.
When you go to a pop-up . . . it's the same stuff that you would hear at the War Memorial Opera House, just in an informal setting. And with microphones, and with the singer not in a costume, and with a beer in hand, and so when you make that jump from [the pop-ups] to the mainstage, it's actually an easier jump than making a jump from a pop-up to yes, a smaller theater, a more intimate space, [the Wilsey Center] but with a program that you've never heard of, a composer you've never heard of, a theme that seems a little intellectual, very deep.Footnote 98
This quote is suggestive on several levels. The singer “with beer in hand,” in Waugh's anecdote, and pianists chugging IPAs from the Bravo! performance are equated not just with accessibility but also with a strand of anti-intellectualism. Intellectuals are the new elite, the SFO's Opera Lab programming seems to suggest, and canonic opera—populous programming—is the new antidote to this needless experimentalism.
Using alcohol to connote accessibility is a common theme in experimental and auxiliary programming alike. Drinking a beer with a potential US presidential candidate serves as short-hand for accessibility, likability, and lack of pretension.Footnote 99 Drinking a beer with an opera singer serves the same purpose. Just as this voting “suggestion” may mislead the US electorate into choosing candidates for a perceived likability (to say nothing of the implications of gender, race, and sexual orientation connoted by popular US beer-drinking culture), the beer-drinking opera singers singing the Lucia di Lammermoor act 2 sextet sell a popular but opaque and incomplete history of twenty-first century US operatic production. In the history of the United States, the canonic sextet, for example, takes on additional meanings of racial violence and class conflict.Footnote 100 Marketing it as populous entertainment—and nothing else—feeds into the strands of populism as rejection of, in Canovan's words, “individualism, internationalism, multiculturalism, and permissiveness.”Footnote 101 US opera history is rife with examples of racial and class exclusion onstage and within the opera house. Promoting a vision of the canon, however, that ignores operatic works and performance histories that do engage with inclusive values and reparative practices does a disservice to the ways the genre can be performed today.Footnote 102
While Le bohème is not a border wall, it is clear that marketing initiatives such as the SF Opera Lab re-inscribe operatic hierarchies by initiating a new set of elites into canonic tradition while furthering stereotypes of experimentation as needless and overly intellectual. The audience members the SFO was attempting to invite into the house through auxiliary programming initiatives could be understood to be a newly-moneyed elite being taught the historical value of opera as signifier of status. Auxiliary forms of programming meant to normalize operatic culture and make it more accessible are not a bad thing—and neither is the performance of canonic opera. Moreover, those individuals marketing, promoting, performing, and attending opera are acting within a complex network of monetary, cultural, and personal factors. Those of us in and outside of the opera house, however, should ask why attempts at the popularization of operatic culture in the United States—a historically class- and racially stratified art form in this country—are being translated to populism at the expense of experimentation. More broadly, we should consider the extent to which our political and aesthetic affiliations—left, right, traditional, experimental, or somewhere in between—affect the ways we produce, circulate, and consume art on a global scale.
