Opera Briefs

26 September, 2012

I'm not sure how I feel about opera, and I'm not sure I'd pay full ticket-price of $60 a head to find out. In fact, opera's just not something I thought about very much - India has it's own classical dance + music + drama forms.

So I volunteered for Tapestry's shows over last weekend to find out more. It's always a great idea volunteering my way into things which I don't have previous exposure to - it gives me a chance to talk with the people involved & learn more than I would as an audience member.

Opera Briefs, the show I helped out with, was a good place to start, though it wasn't traditional opera. In fact, Tapestry New Opera helps develop, as the name suggests, new pieces. Big advantage: they're in English, and have contemporary-ish themes, so I know what's going on rather than trying to frantically Google my way through the classics.

Tapestry had a program called LibLab where writers & composers were paired off in different combinations and they wrote short sketches that could be developed into full-length pieces based on audience feedback.

The sketches were funny, poignant, and much much more intriguing than any short story I've read. I think it was a combination of the writers being fantastic (I felt pangs of envy throughout) and the performance artists being nothing short of brilliant. The music was appropriate too, but I've to say, it was hard to isolate it given the force of the writer + artist brilliance.

I'm hoping to catch a full length, more classic opera piece tomorrow, to contrast... if I manage to leave office early enough to get door-tickets. Fingers crossed.