What is V-day?*

* contents borrowed liberally from a note on Facebook by Jason D. Riddle, V-day Toronto and V-day*

If you are not in Toronto and want to know what your city is doing for V-DAY events go to: V-day

V-Day is an international UN theatre festival and a global movement to end violence against women and girls that raises funds and awareness through benefit productions of Playwright/Founder Eve Ensler’s award winning play The Vagina Monologues and related artistic works. All proceeds go to various charities that make a tremendous difference in our community and around the world.

Last weekend a group of very talented and dedicated men and women came together in a “A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer.” Commissioned by V-Day for the first Until The Violence Stops festival which took place in June 2006 in NYC, this is an unabashed and disturbingly beautiful look at violence against women and a shout out to the world to demand an end to it. Inspired, funny, poignant, angry, heartfelt, tragic, and this groundbreaking collection of diverse voices rising up in a collective roar to break open, expose, and examine the insidiousness of brutality, neglect, exploitation or "just a little put-down", together creating a true and profound portrait of this issue's effect on every one of us.

The second show of V-day Toronto 2009 opened last night with the one that started it all, Eve Ensler’s ground-breaking masterpiece “The Vagina Monologues.” A poignant and hilarious tour of the last frontier, the ultimate forbidden zone, this play is a celebration of female sexuality in all its complexity and mystery. Based on interviews with over 200 women about their memories and experiences of sexuality, this stunning phenomenon that has swept the globe gives us real women's deepest fantasies and fears through stories of intimacy, vulnerability, and sexual self-discovery, guaranteeing that no one who reads it will ever look at the female body, ponder the female mind, or think of womanhood in quite the same way again. It is witty and irreverent, compassionate and wise. And GUYS, have no fear: it’s not hard to sit through, it’s funny, heart-warming, powerful, moving and awe-inspiring. This is truly a show for everyone.

THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES more info at V-day Toronto
Saturday March 14, at 7:30 pm and Sunday March 15, at 5:30 pm at The Capitol Theatre

The third show “Any One of Us,” makes its Canadian premiere later this month. Written by female inmates through an outreach program to incarcerated women in major federal prisons, AOOU reveals the connection between women in prison and the violence in their lives that often leads them there. This play is powerful, life changing - and the cast is amazing! (I'm biased because I'm stage managing this one, but IMHO if you can see only one V-day event this year, this is the one you must see.)

ANY ONE OF US: WORDS FROM PRISON more info at V-day Toronto
Saturday March 28, 8:00 pm and Sunday March 29, 5:30pm at The Workman Theatre

This year, 2009, the global spotlight for V-day International is the Congo. The UN recently declared The Democratic Republic of Congo to be the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman. “Voices of the Congo” is being developed right here in Toronto, but due to time constraints the show will be held in the fall of 2009. In the meantime, an educational teach-in called “Congo 101” provides a crucial opportunity to inform and educate ourselves and each other about the circumstances in this region and the western world’s tacit complicity in the brutal atrocities perpetrated against the women who live there.

CONGO 101: The V-Day Teach-In more info at V-day Toronto
Sunday April 19, 10:30am and 1:30pm at the Centre for Social Innovation

The last event, “Strike a Chord, Not a Woman,” is an unplugged benefit concert with several prominent Toronto Musicians, all men, all promoting non-violence against women.

STRIKE A CHORD, NOT A WOMAN, V-Day Benefit Concert more info at V-day Toronto
Sunday April 19, 6:30pm at Trinity-St. Paul's Centre

I don’t think there is a single person out there who has not been affected by the violence committed against women. For the guys who might think this event is not for them, just think about ALL the women in your lives, your mothers, sisters, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, girlfriends, wives, friends and all the other women who have come into your life. There is no way violence against women has not affected you in some way or another. Come help us speak out against the violence, come out and support your mothers, your sisters your lovers, your friends and indeed all women world wide. Come out in solidarity and show your support, be a part of the solution. I guarantee that you will have a new outlook when you leave.

“We must not abide by the violence one miserable person lets loose on another.
We must Shout and Scream until it STOPS!” – from MMRP

“We were worried about vaginas” – from The Vagina Monologues

“I DARE you to be a man of substance” – from Any One of Us

A male actor in the MMRP cast said recently, “I am a Feminist. If you think about it, being a Feminist is the same as being a Humanist. You cannot have Humanity without that which makes Humanity special.”

Why we do what we do - Art vs. Entertainment:

The spirit, power, purpose and truth of music and art in our world.
The following is transcribed from the welcome address to parents of freshman, given by Dr. Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory.

“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school—she said, “you’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier—even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?”

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

'If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.'”

Re-introducing:

QUINTIMACY!
A Toronto-based group dedicated to rebuilding a close working relationship
between composer, performer and audience.

Please join mezzo soprano Ramona Carmelly, composer Chad Martin, pianists Elaine Lau and Joseph Ferretti, with producer Eleanor Johnston and special guest artists for intimate performances of rare and wonderful selections from the repertoire of vocal and chamber music. Selections for this season include magnificent songs by Ravel, DuParc, Mompou, Rachmaninoff and Wagner, as well as the premiere of a new commissioned song cycle from resident composer Chad Martin, and much more.

Our season of soirees opened with the debut event, Conversation, Canapes and Cancions, on November 16, featuring seldom heard songs by Henri Duparc and Federico Mompou, as well as some witty new inventive pieces for toy piano by our own Chad Martin, was very warmly received. The concept of a return to an intimate salon-style of music presentation with conversation, proximity and artistic immediacy is making a bit of a buzz among performers and audiences.

For the next concert Ravel and other pleasures, on Sunday February 22, 2009, at 5 pm, we are planning another eclectic program featuring Ravel’s fabulous Chansons Madécasses for voice, piano, cello and flute, with special guests Shauna Basiuk (flute) and Liza McLellan (cello), as well as Ravel's piano duet La Valse (the single piano, 2 pianists version by Lucien Garban) and Ravel's whimsical Ma Mere L'Oye (Mother Goose) Suite, and some special surprises. We hope to see many of you there!

And our program for spring, i will open petal by petal myself: love, poetry and song! on May 3, 2009 will be about love, poetry and song, featuring Wagner's lush and rapturous Wesendonck lieder and the exciting premiere of a newly-commissioned song cycle by resident composer Chad Martin,"i will open petal by petal myself", setting love poems of ee cummings. Don't miss this fabulous concert!

Come hear these gems performed in an intimate and accessible environment of camaraderie, with conversation, good company and complimentary refreshments. Then come back next season as we begin to explore the impact of socio-political events in the early 20th century, in particular the dissolution and/or evolution of the more intimate and accessible musical forms and performance styles, especially after the escape or expulsion of many composers from Europe during the growth of the Nazi regime in Germany and beyond.

for more information, please see Facebook: Quintimacy or click on one of the links above.

A new intimate concert series!

If you are in the GTA (greater Toronto area) Please join us for a season of soirees
opening with Conversation, Canapes & Canción:
Come hear mezzo soprano Ramona Carmelly, composer Chad Martin, pianists Elaine Lau and Joseph Ferretti, with producer Eleanor Johnston and special guest artists for intimate performances of rare and wonderful selections from the repertoire of vocal and chamber music. Selections for this season include magnificent songs by Ravel, DuParc, Mompou, Rachmaninoff and Wagner, as well as the premiere of a new commissioned song cycle from Chad Martin, and much more.

SUNDAY NOVEMBER 16, 5:00 pm - programme features:
the lush and lively Cançons Becquerianasby Federico Mompou and selected gems from the mélodies of Henri Duparc, as well as whimsical new compositions for toy-piano by resident composer Chad Martin.*

Informative discussion of the pieces will be offered during the performance
and light refreshments will be provided to follow.

Venue is the lovely home of Dr. Bill Johnston, on Avenue Road near St Clair.
(for privacy, specific directions will be provided to guests upon reservation)

*programme subject to change without notice.

Seating is limited so please book in advance c/o:
eleanormaraj@gmail.com or mezzodiva@sympatico.ca

The Vagina Monologues

I'm writing quickly to invite you to attend one of the most important shows I have encountered.
As some of you know, I was recently asked to assist with a production of The Vagina Monologues and I leapt at the chance. I am honoured and grateful for the opportunity to contribute to V-Day’s quest to eradicate violence against women and to assist them in raising funds for Street Haven. I am humbled by the talents and commitment of the remarkable cast and of V-Day Toronto Producer/Director Tanisha Taitt, who was honoured by V-Day Founder Eve Ensler in March 2008 for her dedication to social change and creative excellence.

Eve Ensler's THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES is a smart, moving and hilarious look at female sexuality in all its facets. It inspired V-Day, a dynamic international grassroots movement with the goal of ending violence against women. V-Day is now active in 90 countries around the world. In a phenomenon that has swept the globe, the play has been translated and performed in 24 languages. Often imitated but never duplicated, Eve Ensler's award-winning masterpiece gives voice to women's deepest fantasies and fears through stories of intimacy, vulnerability and sexual self-discovery. Come and see what two standing ovations were about... you'll be glad you did.

If you are in the GTA (general Toronto area), I hope you can join us for this important event.
Best Regards, the MezzoDiva

THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES
The 10th Anniversary, Revisited
SAT. OCT. 25TH at 7 PM (Saturday's show is ASL interpreted) & SUN. OCT. 26TH at 5 pm
Location: The Workman Theatre, 1001 Queen St. West
Tickets $22.50 Adults, $18.50 Students
General Admission seating.
Proceeds to Street Haven at the Crossroads (www.streethaven.com).
Produced by Ashley Ballantyne, Daphne Simone, Jill Andrew & Tanisha Taitt.
With special musical guest Theresa Sokyrka.

Upcoming Appearances:

See Ramona Carmelly in a dual role as The Mother and The Witch in Humperdinck's family opera classic HANSEL and GRETEL, with Opera Jeunesse on Wednesday March 19th, 2008 at the Oakville Centre Studio Theatre, under the direction of Music Director Dr. Christopher Foley and Stage Director Madeline Young. Tickets are available at the Oakville Centre Box Office, by phone at: 905-815-2120 or online: www.oc4pa.ca

EMILY, THE WAY YOU ARE, a new lyrical portrait of the boldly nonconformist visionary Canadian artist and writer Emily Carr, by poet poet Di Brandt and composer and painter Jana Skarecky, will premiere on Sunday April 20, 2008, at 1:30 p.m. at the McMichael Gallery Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, featuring mezzo soprano Ramona Carmelly in the title role, with The Talisker Players Chamber Ensemble under the baton of maestro Gary Kulesha through the auspices of the Canadian Music Centre New Music in New Places program.

So, tell us a little bit about yourself...

(The following questions and answers were originally posted for another forum, but they provide a structure I like, so I'm using them here to anchor my answers.)

1. Why do you like opera? Why did you pick this genre?

Actually, it sort of chose me. In childhood I was always interested in performing, and pursued singing in music theatre and popular music since adolescence. In my early teens I could do a perfect Barbara Streisand imitation, a phase I fortunately outgrew. While singing pop/rock covers with a band in my late teens (from Heart and Pat Benatar to Carole Pope and Grace Jones) I was starting to lose my voice, and a band member gently recommended that I might want to see a singing teacher. Good thing too, because I was pre-nodal and could have damaged my voice completely through misuse. I started lessons, somehow gradually drifted into more and more classical repertoire, and discovered a whole new realm of vocal arts.

Initially, classical singing (by which I am referering to a vocal technique which encompasses genres from the middle-ages to the present – I’ll leave the stylistic era definitions and arguments to the historians and musicologists) was one of those “oops, how did I get here and whose idea was this anyway?” experiences for me. But I came to feel a deep rapport with this realm of artistic expression. Opera is the consummate art form. It communicates the profound eternal truths of human experience in a remarkably visceral way, with a richness of language and abiding musical expression that often transcends the more popular vocal and theatrical idioms of contemporary culture.

2. What is the most difficult thing to learn when trying this genre of music?

I think the most difficult thing for contemporary musicians is to learn to respect their own artistry. As students and young professionals we can be overwhelmed by the rigours of training in musicality and style, in technique, and for singers also languages and theatre arts. We often allow our own creative wills to be subsumed by the axioms and strictures we are taught, as well as by the aesthetics of our teachers and mentors. This fosters a culture of restraint, where the artist is afraid to experiment, to play with choices, to be "wrong", resulting in an artistic confinement of expression which permeates much of the work being produced, and hence a proliferation of homogeneity which is quite frankly rather boring.

It is, unfortunately, possible to over-teach, to train the individuality out of an instrumentalist or a singer, both technically and artistically. As teachers and mentors, we need to be careful not to allow our own convictions to be enforced so unequivocally as to overwhelm and suppress individuality, but encourage the quirky and interesting qualities of the performers we train. And as emerging artists we need to take all we have been taught and filter that through our own experiences, our own emotional and physical creative impulses, and ultimately to reclaim ownership of our instrument, our skills and our artistry, and take the creative risks to produce truly thrilling experiences we can share with an audience.

3. What is your favourite thing about singing this kind of music?

There is a remarkable euphoria that comes from using your body as your instrument in this way. Particularly when singing in an operatic style, the breath and the open-throatedness are extremely honest and revealing of your vulnerabilities, and can evoke sweeping emotions, passions and deep cathartic experiences, all of which are heightened by being shared when you are truly connecting with the audience or interacting with others on the stage.

4. What is your favourite memory/experience performing or learning?

The most exciting things for me occur in rehearsal when we allow ourselves to play and explore, inventing and discovering different ways to say or sing or do something, reducing a musical or gestural expression to the kernel of its essence or embellishing it to the point of absurdity, and then distilling a clear and powerful authentic communication from that process.

And, in the greater sense, I believe that art is more than entertainment: it has a true contemporary relevance. Art can change the world - both through communication of socially relevant eternal themes and through artistic efforts and endeavours on behalf of worthy causes.

5. What do you think about the opera industry, worldwide or local? Is it a strong community? Can you comment on its growth since you started studying it?

We need to provide the much-needed opportunity for emerging artists to hone and develop their performance craft in the most time-honored and effective way: by doing it regularly! We also need a strong networking system for artists and more widely accessible support for professional development, including master classes given by renowned industry professionals with international careers. And we need to foster a sense of social relevance and engagement in the artists themselves, to build an ongoing commitment of artists to social responsibility through artistic means.

There is an unfortunate shortage of opportunities in the apprenticeship programs attached to the larger opera companies in Canada, as compared to those in the U.S. and abroad. These are a vital transitional phase in the developing career of an opera singer, providing on-the-job training, performance experience, and immersion in an atmosphere that prepares one for a performance career. Often application or selection criteria for these programs are narrow or very conservative, and many exceptional and gifted performers fall through the cracks. Many similar programs require the already cash-strapped (student loan bearing) artists to pay for the privilege of performing.

6. What would you like to see happen within the opera community?

I would like to see a greater cross-pollination of ideas among the various art forms. Particularly in the performance arts there seems to be a rather narrow adherence to conventional sub-genre definitions and stylistic performance codes. Musicological insight absolutely should inform current performance practises of these forms, but when applied too strictly the current interpretations of this knowledge often confine the range of expressions available to performers to virtually archival reproductions instead of contemporary and relevant communications. Some of the most exciting creative work is being done by collaborative partnerships between the conventional opera producers and cutting edge artists from other media, such as film and visual arts, who bring modern sensibilities to the genre while respecting the historical idiom.

Grass roots projects developed by artists for other artists and general audiences, (such as, for example, collaborative hybrid performances integrated with storytelling), bridge the language barriers and promote contemporary understanding of the classical art forms for audiences unfamiliar with the opera genre as well as for the die-hard enthusiasts, offering artistically and financially accessible opportunities for cultural enrichment, and encouraging audience members to interact with the artists in a warm atmosphere conducive to getting to know the performers as members of the community. Therein lies a tremendous opportunity for growth in all the strata of opera and theatre production, as well as the development of future audiences.