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Opera America’s New Works Forum

Opera America’s annual New Works Forum in New York City has been offered for the last thirteen years. The Forum on January 10 & 11 focused on the process of collaborating on the development, production and marketing of new works and was attended by Susan Galbraith, Artistic Director and Duane Gelderloos, Executive Director.

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It was a crammed two days of panel discussions, pitches by individual artists and companies that specialize in new works, “concert-style” sharing of excerpts, and attending full performances in the city. (This year the big outing featured the new work Angel Island by Beth Morrison at BAM in Brooklyn.)

Most would agree, I believe, that the most valuable parts of the Forum are the networking opportunities, not only discovering like-minded artists, establishing or renewing relationships, and finding new stories to tell, but reflecting on what each one of our entities can bring to the table and how we uniquely serve our communities.

Our take aways were gratifying and affirmed that our work contributes to the forging of a twenty-first century music-theatre. Whether it’s re-aligning with the principles of this most collaborative art form, thinking “out of the box“ regarding performance venues, cultivating artistic and community partners in co-developing and producing of new works, or launching radical “devised work” collective processes, our company has put in the time and developed experiences across disciplines, genres, intentionally-structured processes, and cultures to tell stories through text and music, sometimes infused with movement and film/video, which speak to our times.

And the field is changing because of work like ours. What was once seen as an old European-derived hybrid art form is now making ‘everything, everywhere, all at once.’ As Marc A. Scorca, President and CEO of OA, so eloquently said, “The field looks less like a pyramidal hierarchy and more like a funnel.” It is the smaller flexible companies like ours that are reinventing the art form and creating the artistic content that is now being adapted by the larger established opera companies.

So why are people still asking, “So, what is opera?”

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Susan Galbraith with Marc Scorca, President & CEO of Opera America