UPDATE: Winter 2021 into Spring! Studying, producing, performing, planning...
Here’s what’s been going on from the winter of 2021 through the very beginning of spring of 2022.
PERFORMANCE
NOVEMBER
After Guerilla Opera's production of ELLIS closed in October, we engaged in our first partnership with the Museum of Science and created the first live presentation of SALT by Deniz Khateri and Bahar Royaee, and incredible video design by Nuozhou Wang.
SALT is a contemporary work of opera theater created by an all-women and BIPOC creative team. Written for one vocalist and electronics, it features dazzling video and sound design. This August we'll be presenting it again with a goal to prepare this work for touring. 🙏🏼 (More on that coming soon!)
DECEMBER
We streamed live to to our Patreon members for the first time, offering a preview of I Give You My Home by Beth Wiemann, from a residency at The Switchboard in Haverhill, MA.
We've been live streaming for a long time, but only recently have we thought to share more of our process and all the steps required to create new work. I'm so thankful that we can connect with out supporters this way.
JANUARY
Guerilla Opera launched The Guerilla Underground, our second time presenting an iteration of this series, which continues to evolve.
This season in The Guerilla Underground, not only are we presenting works by Guerilla Opera, but we also selected artists from a call for videos. So, our series this year is larger than just our work, an celebrates creators of new works from around the world with a live stream each month, and options to watch on demand through May.
This is all online, but still a huge effort. and it has been such a privilege for me to program these works and connect to a larger community.
MARCH
We were in residence at the University of Maine, Orono interacting with with students, and we fully recorded I Give You My Home by Beth Wiemann.
I Give You My Home is a three-part project that is:
The final live production of Guerilla Opera's 15th Anniversary Season in June,
A studio album to release simultaneously with
A short film with a subsequent screening tour coming to a city near you!
MARCH-MAY
I started rehearsals for a very contemporary and interdisciplinary staging of the play Death and The Maiden by Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman, directed by Eddie DeHais in Providence, RI to go up in May.
Artist exchange is so important to me. Interdisciplinary work is the art I truly choose to do, and I'm so thrilled to be included in this talented cast, especially because it includes several Latin-American actors and tells a story that is very close to home, emotionally.
I play an abstract character invented by the director that represents inner longings of the main character, and others. Adeliia Faizullina will compose all the music for the play, which takes inspiration from well known Schubert songs that I will sing, but through her ethereal compositional voice and incorporating sounds of nature.
APRIL
My new duo Bahué just closed the first LATINX COMPOSER MINIATURE CHALLENGE, where we ask Latino/a/x composers to write works for us that are 40sec or less. We record our parts remotely and premiere the miniature works on social media!
We’ll premiere seven works through out April and May, so follow us on Instagram!
MAY-JUNE
I go right from Death and the Maiden to simultaneously filming and rehearsing I Give You My Home to premiere the first weekend in June. The film and studio album will be released sometime in the 2022-2023 season, so keep you eyes peeled to see if we'll be doing a screening near you!
PRODUCING
Guerilla Opera has many works in progress and we hope to have different behind-the-scenes events so show you what is coming is seasons to come. These works include:
"Her Alive|un|dead" by Emily Koh and directed by Mo Zhou
"Ululations of the Invisible" by Elisabet Curbelo
"Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" by Elena Ruehr and Royce Vavrek.
These behind-the-scenes events are always offered first to our Patreon members, and we even live stream only to our Patreon sometimes, because the express goal of our Patreon is to create an active community of supporters that love our work, love to watch us work, and that want to see the work come to life. I'm on there a lot personally curating and writing blog posts that share insights into our work, our collective process, my process in selecting works, and much more.
There is only one tier to sign up for our Patreon at $7.50, and you can adjust the amount to any you want or select "no tier" if you don’t need the perks! I personally give $20 p/mo. to Guerilla Opera through Patreon - roughly the price of a gym membership (with group-x, lol).
STUDYING
This strange season, one foot in the pandemic and one foot out, has really expanded things for me. My hope is to continue learning so that I can continue to do the work that make my life feel meaningful and impact the lives of those around me.
This work, which you can join through our Patreon, is addressing gender parity by hiring more women into roles of artistic leadership, consistently hiring and creating an inclusive space for queer and trans individuals, and to continue to be a BIPOC-run ensemble that allows opera creators from underrepresented and undervalued communities to tell their stories.
I was accepted to two leadership intensive programs.
The 2022 Nonprofit Learning Institute, presented by Bank of America and Philanthropy Massachusetts is a competitive program that selects only 20 nonprofit organizations from a broad cross-section of the nonprofit sector in MA each year with a goal of fostering and empowering leaders in the Massachusetts nonprofit sector.
I am one of twelve artists, nonprofit and municipal leaders in the 2022 CCCI Changemakers who will spend the next eight months immersed in facilitated and project-based learning, peer networking, and leadership trainings, all designed to support a new network of creative civic leaders with the knowledge and skills to help build a more inclusive and sustainable arts and culture ecosystem in Essex County.
Guerilla Opera was accepted as a Boston University Arts Administration Class Project, which means we have a team of Master’s degree students working with us on an organizational and strategic plan to support our mission over time and continue our growth.
I confess that I frequently experience impostor syndrome. Opera is a world where artist-led groups are on the bottom of the food chain in terms of funding and institutional respect. I feel frequently that Guerilla Opera is seen as a "passion project", a term I have come to completely and utterly hate. It's frequently used as a diminutive term to belittle the work of artists creating their own work and their own project. But in truth, every business from the smallest to the largest is a passion project, because nothing can succeed with out passion or dedication.
To that end, I want to share with you an excerpt from my application to the Nonprofit Learning Institute. When asked why should Guerilla Opera be considered for this program even though we fall outside the minimum operating budget range of minimum $500,000, I wrote:
We are a small artist-run organization that has primarily served artists and their creative expression. I am self-taught through many years of experience running this company... Artists can be incredible leaders, bringing valuable skill sets to the workplace, such as creativity and creative problem solving skills. Artists are organized, excellent multitaskers, team players, and great marketers. All these skills are self-taught, learned in-house through trial and error, and yet we bring with us crippling student debt that make expanding our education, like attending high level programs for nonprofit management or other business skills, unreasonable and unmanageable.
Statistically, companies that are artist-run are among the nonprofits with the smallest budgets, and have the most difficulty growing. We need equitable opportunities to attend high level programs in order to make a meaningful impact in our community. I hope that we can be judged on our merit, creativity, distinction, hard work, and the quality of our work, over the size of our budget.
OTHER
The Greater Haverhill Chamber of Commerce has selected me as one of 10 BIPOC Business Leaders You Should Know.