Hello from beautiful Tuscaloosa, Alabama! We just wrapped 9 days of the Druid City Opera Workshop, a young artist program for collegiate singers (BA, BM, MM, & DMA) at the School of Music at the University of Alabama. “Druid City,” as it's nicknamed, is a fast & furious version of the training singers within the University of Alabama Opera Theatre program receive during their time in school. Singers take classes throughout the week in role preparation, musical theatre dance, yoga for singers, acting, diction (This year at Druid City we had masterclasses in English, German, French, and Russian.), auditioning, and the business of singing. In the afternoons & evenings, the singers were in music and staging rehearsals with their coaches and directors in preparation for a final scenes program they put on at the end of the week. This week I've been here as a directing intern which essentially means I direct my two scenes ("High Adventure" from Disney's Aladdin and "The Prologue" from Appomattox by Philip Glass, quite the combo), serve as an assistant director for two scenes (Così fan tutte and Die Zauberflöte), serve as an audition class panelist, and observe the acting classes. There are only two directing interns, but we have our own meetings with the stage directors on the Druid City faculty who - in addition to leading directing roundtable discussions with us interns - serve as mentors for our directing scenes. Most of our discussions revolve around special problems in directing for the operatic stage and leading opera programs at colleges in which the Opera Director has to wear all the hats of production. All of our faculty here teach at their respective universities within their Schools of Music so it has been a joy hearing their personal experiences from a practical rather than theoretical standpoint. I've enjoyed being a part of this conversation now that I'm sitting on the other side of the table. I came from this program where we did almost everything ourselves. There were no stage managers or shop staff for our productions in my undergrad. Most of the designers we worked with took on our shows in addition to the workload they carried at Theatre & Dance and as such had to wok on our shows on their off hours. (Mad respect!) As a student within UAOT you were expected to help facilitate most aspects of the production. We built, begged, and borrowed and it has as a result made me fairly scrappy in the works I teach and direct. However, it's been a minute since I've been as immersed in the opera world as I've been this week so it has been a nice checking in again, this time with a year of my MFA under my belt. In this new Walden-esque return to nature, I feel like I (hopefully!) bring more know-how and suggestions to the table now. One of the issues my mentors and fellow intern frequently brought up was the DMA-Turned-College-Opera-Workshop Director. There are so many things thrown at these individuals coming out of DMA (Doctorate of Musical Arts) programs that they aren't always fully aware of and are expected to know how to teach when they take on Opera Workshop. Acting tends to be a big one. I knew this coming from a music undergrad, but it still irks me a bit because I feel like there is so much we as theatre educators can be doing to help out our operatic colleagues, but so infrequently does the inner-departmental conversation occur within academia. I've always wondered why that's the case. Isn't our goal to provide our students with the knowledge they need most to succeed? In both theatre and opera the goal is simple: tell the story. Therefore, I can't help but ask, what can we do to help one another out more? There has to be a better way of doing this on a grand scale. For those individuals and departments reaching across the aisle and sharing resources, BRAVA! You're showing your students true collaboration and respect for different forms, a valuable set of lessons. As an arts community, I think we owe one another that much. Anyway, I digress... When I go back to sing or direct or see operas, I am always super aware of how the singers are relating to the words that the librettist or lyricist wrote. As someone from the Mandy Law Hughes School of Directing who believes the playwright gives us everything we need, I'm always craving action based out of the words we are singing. Subtext be damned. Opera provides us with an odd conundrum because we have the music layered on top of everything we do, but we can't simply exist within the music emotionally. The bodies onstage must drive the story. However I feel like getting our young singers (and let's face it, a LOT of older singers) to fully utilize all of their acting mechanism to be a challenge. Perhaps it's opera's natural conservative nature (I thought we were wild and crazy in opera... until I met theatre people.), or our tendency towards musical academia, but I often find myself hungry for singers to take off the kid gloves and be a bit messier. The voice will follow. So how do we solve this issue? I'm curious as to how I as a director can help singers shape their world onstage by bringing all of the action from a character-based place that comes from the WORDS. As a fellow singer, I get it. I've been in their character shoes and I know they have an incredible amount of things to keep track of in performance between the voice and the conductor and the music, but ultimately I think everything we do has to come back to the text. We talk a lot about this in theatre since we as actors are in control of how we affect time and space vocally, but I see less of it in opera since the music dictates time and space of the musical line. As a byproduct of this, I see a lot of young singers simply existing in the music, playing emotion and varying repeating phrases for variety's sake. While this is obviously a gross generalization, I think that disconnect can oftentimes lead to a performance that feels stilted or disconnected from a sense of truthfulness (whatever truth even is). It's something I've been paying attention to throughout this process and something I want to keep communicating to my casts utilizing action-based terminology. On this final day I've been so pleased to see so many of our singers take up this challenge and roll with it. These singers are passionate and HUNGRY for the work. I know everyone is working exceptionally hard, but I have to give a special kudos to my Appomattox ladies who are taking my dramaturgical work and Brechtian gestus and blending it to their own understanding of these Civil War era women. My Aladdin men are bringing their own physical sensibilities to this crazy active and zany number. With less than nine days to put it all together, I wish I could continue our work for longer simply because they're delightful people and artists, but alas... TOI TOI TOI, all!
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