The options for a music student after undergraduate studies are slim. You can go to grad school and accrue more debt, participate in a young artist program where the artist often pays to sing, or if you are extremely talented, hit the audition circuit for regional companies. That was the landscape Daniel Ellis-Ferris and Dean Buck, both graduates of the New School in New York City, were surveying back in 2012, and, as is so often the case, dissatisfaction was the goad for a good idea: to put on their own production. Together with Brianna Maury, Ellis-Ferris’ stepsister who brought her business smarts to the venture, the three found LoftOpera. As a long-time opera lover, the staggeringly positive and astonished reviews brought me, in the midst of the 2014 polar vortex, to Bushwick’s icy streets to see their “La Boehme,” a performance that was peppered with the sound of beer bottles being accidentally kicked over underfoot and which paused between scenes for the heaters to kick on. A year later I dragged an opera newbie along to their selection of Verdi arias, staged on platforms around a cavernous warehouse even deeper into Brooklyn, where we sat literally three feet from performers, witnessing the sweat, spit, and labored breathing that goes into what can only be described as Olympic level singing, our own ears’ ringing, and body vibrating with the power of the sound. Whether a long-time fan or total newcomer: this isn’t what you think when you think “opera.” Now entering their fourth season, which begins on March 10 with Puccini’s “Tosca,” Daniel Ellis-Ferris and Brianna Maury sat down with ARTINFO to talk about the new model they’ve forged.Tell me about the nuts and bolts of putting that first production together.Daniel Ellis-Ferris: I studied music at the New School, so “Don Giovanni” was almost entirely New School students, staged in a Gowanus Loft, which we found through Google. Basically everything — how to use theatrical lights, how to build sets, or how to set a rehearsal schedule — we taught ourselves.Brianna Maury: We were unsure in the beginning if we could get past the first show, simply because we had never managed $16,000. In retrospect, looking at the budgets of our shows now, that isn’t much. But at the time the idea of being able to pay everyone was a nearly insurmountable task. And so we got together the first show saying, let’s just hurry up and do this and just see if we can do it as a proof of concept. DE: Success would be if the people we worked with wanted to do it again.So it was about supporting talent, rather than necessarily about the public or your audience?DE: Being a part of an ecosystem where young artists can grow has always been paramount. The term that I like to use is a “for us by us” production, where the idea behind it is that I’m making a show that my friends and I would like to go see.BM: As far as casting goes we choose always to work with people who are just about to cross over into being big.DE: We’ve had Met singers who have said, “I’m interested in working with you, I understand you don’t have the budget…” and we have to say, “It doesn’t make sense for us to work with you.”Was changing peoples’ conception of what it means to “go to the opera” something you set out to do?DE: I think from the beginning, or at least from the time that we realized we could keep doing this, we’ve been focused on maintaining the grassroots feeling — not aiming to be the new City Opera or Gotham Chamber Opera. Not aiming to have galas, not aiming to have a lot of people salaried. Opera is weird in so many ways. People take a strange ownership over it. They think their ideas are the be all and end all. That’s why opera gossip is what it is. You know, people treating the women on the stage the way they do, the way their bodies are talked about, is an example of how negative that world can be. And it happens in this art form because of this ownership people have over it, this idea that it needs to meet their expectations. Whereas when you go see a production of “Porgie and Bess,” you’re just there.BM: We are in the opera world, but not of the opera world. We made a conscious decision not to compete with it — we took our ball and went home. We didn’t need to have paper tickets, we didn’t need to even have a chorus. We could do general admission and have people sit on benches. We came in to this with zero technical expertise, but trusted our gut on what the experience of LoftOpera should be, and the notion that we don’t have to uphold a traditionalist idea of the art form.DE: And the fact is that that’s not a new thing. We’re not forging new territory, people put on grassroots productions off-Broadway every day. It’s just people don’t do that in opera. There are so many young people fresh out of whatever school, putting on black box shows and teaching themselves how to use theatrical lights, or how to build sets. It’s a model that exists in just about every other medium. But opera, for whatever reason, had people convinced that it couldn’t be produced on that scale.Which is kind of astounding.DE: Well not really. The more you know the opera world, the more it makes sense. The culture of opera and the art are two distinct things, but they’ve become conflated. People think that when they’re talking about opera, they’re talking about the culture that has been built around the music and the art and the theater. But that art can live on its own. You can put it anywhere, in any culture, in any setting, in front of any audience and it’s so good that it’ll stand up and it’ll be an amazing experience. And problematically, people don’t understand that it’s not the same thing as foundations and grants and galas.You’re in your fourth season now, is it still a challenge to be working in a way that’s different to the traditional model of opera?BM: Interestingly, this wouldn’t have always been so different. We hear stories all the time and it’s in history books, back in the day, people were having sex in the highest tiers and were drunk and it was a good time and a place to go on the weekend.DE: That’s what family circle used to be!BM: I think when you start listening to people with a lot of money, their taste can be more conservative. It just tends to be, and then you just move in this conservative direction and lose a lot of your original vision. It’s been hard for us to keep making conscious decisions about what we want and what we don’t want. But we don’t compete with the traditional model. We’re an event. In my mind we compete with Brooklyn Bowl, we compete with getting drunk at a bar; we compete with going on an OKCupid date somewhere else that’s not LoftOpera.DE: But we do have to be constantly aware about the fact we need to manage the expectations of very different audiences.Who is your audience?DE: I would say that question speaks to the most difficult thing about LoftOpera, and that is that we tread a very fine line between the expectations of the established opera crowd and the expectations of the audience more like, I would say, my friends. It happens in staging all the time, for example. Do you strip Tosca down to her underwear before she sings her aria? No, because that would make so many people upset it would ruin the experience for half the audience, though it might be a fun breaking of boundaries for the others.BM: Another example is that at “The Rape of Lucretia,” we got six complaints from people about house music being played at intermission, which I received during the actual show. The subject line was like, “Terrible Idea for Intermission Music.” They were saying, “How could you do this? You’re ruing the opera for me.” I wrote back and said we’re not going to change the way we produce, because everyone here loves having a beer and listening to music, and that can be opera as well as Soft Cell and David Bowie. I mean, we weren’t playing anything crazy. We make conscious decisions when trying to navigate those boundaries, and we stick with them. You’re not going to be able to please everyone, so you lose six people.So, whether unintentionally or not, you’ve created a movement, a new model even. Do you have a set of rules or definition of what constitutes a LoftOpera production?DE: The idea of forming a model is now very intentional, so we can show others how to replicate what we’re doing, and maybe see this type of thing springing up in Detroit, or New Orleans. We’ve also talked about the idea of franchising. LoftOpera can really happen anywhere with a few main ingredients: An artistic audience, a wealth of talent but a dearth of opportunities, and alternative spaces.So if you bring it to other cities, what are the things that carry through; what are the tenets of LoftOpera?BM: A ticket above $30 is unacceptable.DE: Supporting young artists, as we talked about; a cheap, good beer and alcohol during the performance; general admission seems to be really important, so a democratic seating situation; and brand sponsorships and partnerships have been hugely important as well.BM: In the beginning we had rules like, we would never have an opera in a church basement; we would never do it in a school auditorium.DE: None of the sad places that classical music seems to find itself in. We want no part of that.What can we expect from the 2016 season?DE: We’re doing four full productions, which we’ve never done before. We’ve really figured out that we can handle about one every three months, and we’re doing a range: “Tosca,” “Le comte Ory,” “Cosi fan tutte,” and “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.” “Tosca” is a grand opera, as is “Mahahonny,” arguably; “Cosi fan tutte” is Mozart, which we haven’t done since our first two productions so with that we’re getting back to our roots; and “Le comte Ory” is a comedy, which is hard, much harder than tragedy. So we’re pushing ourselves there as well. It’s so much easier to make people fall in love with someone and then kill them off. It’s not so easy get the laughs — to form that relationship.
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