Amanda Berg Wilson of The Catamounts will work with Opera Steamboat for one production while stage director Chía Patiño pairs with Opera Colorado for another
Opera companies in Denver and Steamboat Springs have been awarded OPERA America 2024 Opera Grants for Women Stage Directors and Conductors in Colorado. Ten awards were made to opera companies nationwide, and Colorado was one of only two states to receive multiple awards.
Boulder’s own Amanda Berg Wilson was awarded a grant for staging the world premiere immersive production of Welcome to the Madness, a roaming vocal opera commissioned by Opera Steamboat set to run August 22-25. Ecuador-born pianist, composer and stage director Chía Patiño received an award for her company premiere production of Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment for Opera Colorado (November 9-17).
“Our Opera Grants for Women Stage Directors and Conductors are designed to encourage opera companies to enrich the art form with work of talented women who are new to the field,” said OPERA America president/CEO Marc A. Scorca. “We are delighted to see that companies in Colorado are at the forefront of this effort to increase gender diversity in opera.”
Some of the grants will give women directors, conductors and companies alike precious extra breathing space in the midst of the formidable demands of producing grand opera in traditional houses. Others will serve as an extra dose of jet fuel for pushing past those boundaries at a time when there may never have been more opportunities — nor more of a need — to do so. The work of Berg Wilson and her immersive theatre company The Catamounts — known to “plunge audiences into the wild and woolly” (American Theatre magazine) — falls firmly into the latter category.
A first for Amanda Berg Wilson
“As an artist, some projects are for spreading one’s wings and others are for doing exactly what you have become an expert in doing,” said Berg Wilson. “For me, Welcome to the Madness is both. While I have directed musical theatre and workshops of an original opera, I have never directed a full-length opera. Welcome to the Madness will be the perfect first opera for me. I have directed such feminist classics as Steel Magnolias, 9 to 5 and the more recent Men on Boats, and I am thrilled about the feminist story of two early 20th century female iconoclasts pursuing a vision that has gone on to create an indelible legacy.
“What can I say?” Berg Wilson responded when I pressed her for more. “I’m a dark horse. Not like the one about to be torn down in Boulder, alongside 50 years of dust and a squajillion undergrad memories (hazy though they certainly are), but like that new horse no one really knows but they have a good feeling about their chances. Thoroughly thoroughbred.”
Just like the magazine said — wild and woolly.
‘Huge deal’ for Opera Steamboat
“This is a huge deal for Opera Steamboat to be listed among such a prestigious group of major opera companies,” said General Director and CEO Julie Maykowski. “OPERA America is a pretty extraordinary service organization and they have been lifting up women for many years. Opera has historically been an extremely male-dominated field and they have made a concerted effort to fund equity for women. It is amazing!”
The awards, she said, allow companies to take a chance on stage directors and conductors who aren’t currently doing much opera.
“For Opera Steamboat, we see a future in new works and breaking all of the stigmas attached to traditional opera to bring in new audiences,” Maykowski said. “Amanda does these amazing immersive outdoor/indoor productions and feminist works which is why she is the perfect stage director for Welcome to the Madness. As I was casting I made it clear that this was not a ‘traditional’ opera and that the artists need to be willing to think outside of the opera box and experiment.
“I think the result of a woman-led production, telling a story about women, in a vocal theater and genre-bending production absolutely improves the quality of everything!”
The need for a little risk
The last two opera productions I’ve been to in Colorado were mounted by stage directors from the staffs of major opera houses on the coasts — the people whose job it is to make sure production revivals are as faithful as possible to the original director’s intentions. This certainly lessens the risks — when things start pulling in different directions as they inevitably do, you want someone who knows how to steady the boat. Yet that doesn’t generally make for experiences capable of truly transporting you to other realms, as opera can do — and should.
One of the most successful opera productions anywhere in recent years was Philip Glass’ Akhnaten directed by Phelim McDermott and co-produced by the theatre company he founded, Improbable (for the Metropolitan Opera premiere, the conductor was Karen Kamensek making her Met debut).
McDermott has spent a lot of time and effort trying to work out how dreaming can be harnessed as a tool for directing. In the early days of doing just that in his prep for Akhnaten, he had a session in a flotation tank where visions of juggling floated up into his mind’s eye. Intrigued, he asked around and discovered that the earliest depictions of juggling are from ancient Egypt. He invited a juggling troupe to collaborate on the choreography, and the result was a dynamic metaphor that encapsulated the central idea of the opera: the introduction of monotheism by the pharaoh Akhnaten, in which the sun was worshipped not as an object in itself but through its effects in supporting all life on earth.
The countless spheres revolving in near constant motion on stage were like syncopated electrons heated up by both the music and the light emanating from the massive upstage sphere in the set. After Glass saw that, he wanted every production to have juggling.
It’s that space for dreaming that this grant is gifting — the “special sauce” that can make an opera transport you to other realms like nothing else. In the realms of the wild and woolly, Berg Wilson has her own toolkit, assembled through years of experience of immersive dreaming with the theatre ensemble she founded, one of a precious few in Colorado. OPERA America’s remedy for the way in which the work of women stage directors tend to be under-resourced in the bigger scheme of things is deeply welcome and sorely needed as we work to reinvent a support system for opera and the arts in general that was so painfully exposed by the X-ray of COVID as being inadequate for the purpose.
More like this please!
LINKS:
American Theatre article on The Catamounts and other independent Boulder theatre companies
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