 I'm scared of this man. Also, maybe if I didn't do it, I wouldn't be that tender. Lights, lights, close, all so... It's academic and it's theater. The place we're able to meet. We have logics and arts and crafts. What is that about? Make sure we practice. Start with the practice. Samples of women sharing what it is they need to share and how they do that. There's no way you can ignore that. People's anymore. Oh, come on. I'm talking about what time is it now? Kenya. It started out about different people and about different things. A whole sea of llama. Theater for everybody. Yes, everybody. That's just what should be done. Absolutely. And in due to my understanding of what relationships get, I've already changed. Introduction to the evening at the same opening. The evening at the director. The director of programs. We do British academia and professional theater. International American theater. Tonight's evening, contemporary opera in New York City. It's truly close to our heart. We want to know more. And you will tell us a little bit more about the evening and the idea. So thank you all for coming. I know how busy you all are as an audience. But also you as the theater makers and producers are really... Thank you. It's a little bit outside the field. Normally it's more theater, theater performance performance. But we feel it is about time that we also represent what really is happening, that these borders and crossings and divisions are no longer really existing. The evening shouldn't last longer than 90 minutes. And there will be a little reception here in the room itself. If you have a cell phone, just take it out right now and I'll do the same and check if it's off. So thank you very much. And Antje, tell us a bit about the evening. Thank you. A big welcome from me as well. This is an evening that we have been looking forward to for quite some time and have prepared also for quite some time. So we have been looking around the new opera scene. And so I have seen that it's growing and developing over these last years. And we noticed that a lot of wonderful artists emerged in the field, artists that actually changed over from other disciplines. And they basically experimented with the genre. They brought in new styles, new dramaturgies, new approaches. And therefore, they're also changing the whole field and the genre. At the same time, traditional opera houses are struggling financially with the audience. And we thought, well, that's something interesting to look at. So what interests theater makers to go into this very old traditional art form and revamp it, basically? We're very fortunate to have six amazing opera makers, theater makers and producers here to talk with us about this. Before we start a discussion, all six of them will give you a brief glimpse into their work. So there will be six short presentations. We will start with Ashley Tata who directed this piece that you just saw created by a thing in New York, an ensemble of opera artist musicians here in New York. And then we'll have everyone come and give a presentation before we start our discussion. All right, so I'll hand it over to Ashley. Thanks, Antje. Thanks, everybody. Hi, I'm Ashley Tata. And I directed that piece. This takes place close by. There was a picture, but I don't know where it is anymore. I don't really have a presentation of... No, it's okay, Mike. Dude, it's cool. Don't worry. Thank you. I don't have a presentation of the work that I've been making in total. I thought this was a pretty good representation of some of the work that I have been making over the past few years. I've been making immersive environmental pieces for a while and had been incorporating music and asking composers to give their time to write music for pieces that I was working on. And Paul Pinto is one of those composers who wrote music for the production of Bertolt Breck's The Good Person of Szechuan, and that kind of gave me an intro into his ensemble thing and why. And they'd been working on this piece where, you know, what's really incredible with them as an ensemble is that they're composer performers writing together. And they're all here, so like whenever you guys want to chime in, please feel free to do this. We're ensembling this presentation. So they've been working on this piece and brought me in, and I don't know, we developed it. I worked with them over, they've been working on it for a long time. I worked with them on it for I think a year or so, and we decided to do it at the Knockdown Center in Queens, which is, I think it's a 50,000 square foot warehouse space. It used to make doors, knockdown doors, and this is a very particular type of door. And the thing, I mean, what's been attracting me to the form of opera is that, you know, it really is, artists at the height of their skill level are coming together to collaborate, to create a true, you know, multifaceted, multidisciplinary art form. And so the lighting designer on that piece is in the room today, also Abby Hoke Brady, the projection designer who, like I think we ended up using 13 projectors in this warehouse space. He, you know, sent me this file to accommodate tonight's performance because he's in, like, St. Louis or something right now. The scenic designer is a sculptor. So, you know, so we kind of were able to take over this space and make, like, a living, breathing vessel of sonic space and also physical space and the audience kind of is led through the piece. So I just, that's all I kind of want to say about that. And just thanks very much for letting me be here tonight and I'm really excited to hear more of the other work that we'll be talking about tonight and to make, to bringing everybody else to be more interested in this form that has incredible amount of potential. So thanks. Yes, Jeffrey. We in ThingNY have been doing collaboratively composed experimental offers for a few years. And this was our fourth one, but it's the first one where we brought in an outside team, including Ashley and the other designers. I just thought that was worth noting that we'd finally gotten to a certain point and we decided we needed to bring in more people to help us expand our vision. They asked me if I wanted a podium and didn't realize that this was what the podium was going to look like. So excuse the formality. I guess I could walk elsewhere if I needed to. But it gives me something to do with my hands. My name is Aaron Siegel. I'm a composer and one of the co-founders of Experiments in Opera. And we're in our sixth season of programming. And the work that Experiments in Opera does and a lot of the work that I do in opera comes out of really the composer's wish to expand on the capacity and the potential of his or her musical work. So it definitely comes from the place of music and wanting to add stories and characters and sets and video design to the work. And I think that helps us as an organization and as a community of composers to think a little bit about what it means to make opera and what it means for composers to do it and how that's different from, say, a company that's led by singers or by an orchestra or by producers. And I think one of the ways in which that is an interesting opportunity is just thinking about the idea of a commission, right? What does it mean when composers are commissioned to write a work? I've always found that the most interesting commissions are the ones that have the most creative constraints, the ways in which there are rules or guidelines that are shaping the commission of the work from the very beginning and that those rules and guidelines help to shape a work that feels different and maybe would be something that the composer wouldn't necessarily write on their own but would also allow for the composer to really contribute their own vision and voice to the project. So an example of that is Experiments in Opera last year commissioned six composers to create basically 20-minute video operas. These are works that are meant to be screened on video. They were actually screened at the Anthology Film Archives on the Lower East Side last year over the course of two nights. And we really saw this as an opportunity to ask composers and their communities of artists to think a little bit more broadly about what it means for them to create work and to think a little bit further outside of their own musical boxes than they would normally think. And to do so in ways that would sort of challenge and push and pull the traditional modes of writing for voice and writing stories. So the clip that I have to show you tonight is a segment or an excerpt of the opera that I ended up writing for that program. And the opera is called T Before You Go. And the premise of the work, because we're going to see a section in the middle, is that an older man who in this case is played by the really amazing John Hagan, an actor. And he is a terminally ill man. And it's made clear in the beginning of the opera very quickly that he's going to die. And he's come to visit his therapist. And his therapist, they've talked it out many times and they kind of know where they're at. And the therapist has recommended that this character, who doesn't have a name, undergo a psilocybin treatment, which is like magic mushrooms for those of you who aren't familiar with the technical term. But he's going to trip. He's going to go on a trip. And he's going to hallucinate and he's going to talk to his therapist about it while he does it. And this actually came from some stories and literature that I had been reading about the reemergence of hallucinogenic therapy in the last 10 or so years after a long hiatus that was brought about by, I don't know, a bunch of people from the 60s who kind of lost it or whatever. I don't know. But they hadn't been doing this therapy for a while and it's kind of come back into fashion. So I was really intrigued by that. And so what we're going to see now is the man, John, who is by this point already tripping. And so we're going to see some of his visions and we're going to hear his narration to his therapist and he sort of explores his visions and the thoughts that he's having while he's seeing them. And we're not going to see, it's about five minutes of clips so we'll see kind of, it's square in the middle so we don't see the end or anything like that. And there we go. Rich, what's going on? I don't know. I was in the sea and I was so worried. It all happened so quickly. I think it was my house. It looked different. I can't sort it down. I'm beginning to feel afraid. And cold. I'm having trouble breathing. It's all down there now. But I'm not here. I don't know if this makes any sense. Can you tell me what it means? My video is exactly seven minutes long so I'm going to let it sort of speak for me. But the project is called Virio, the Spiritual Biography of a Witch's Accuser. It's the composer and also one of the executive producers and it's an opera that's being created over the course of several years as an episodic television show in partnership with KCET in LA. So we've shot nine episodes out of 12 and we're going to be finishing up shooting in January and the whole series will be available later in the spring. When we first had the idea to make an opera together and this would be the librettist Eric Ann and I, it was 20 years ago and we were thinking a traditional opera. What was innovative then is still innovative now. The subject matter was innovative which was we wanted to make an opera about a teenage girl whose story would be modeled on actual teenage girls' personal histories from hundreds of years of Western history. So these girls had some kind of visionary experiences that caused them to be separated from society somehow by groups of doctors or priests who decided that they were witches and they could name witches or they were hysterics. So for some reason or another because of their visionary experiences and what they purported to see in these experiences they got separated out from society and put in some different place. So that was the story and then 20 years later when we started working with director Charles Adi and KCET we actually started to imagine with this medium of episodic television what it might be like to make this opera into an actual series. We were talking about how we might want to do this show and figure out a way to bring it to the public and trying to produce a new opera and just doing it traditionally on a stage was going to be crazy. Opera is a wonderful medium and we love it but it is also a tradition-bound medium that has been the same for a long, long, long time. The fact that we're shooting it episodically means that we're able to really spend attention to detail, character twists Have you noticed any change? Different musicians new locations The cast remains the same and we get to bring them into all these different environments instead of just mounting an opera on a big stage that's pretending to be a prison that's pretending to be a farm I mean, we just shoot it there. Every time we do another shoot in a new location we're not also working with the same orchestra. We're changing up the location we're changing up the musicians like here we have a local group of singers who sing with this group, Capella SF and they're in the San Francisco Symphony Chorus and then we also have a string quartet here that's different. We had the chronos quartet now we have a acme string quartet different performers every time we had a marching band in episode 5 It means that from the point of view of the musicians side we're creating a huge community of artists that have been involved with this project hundreds of people that will have been in an episode because we can have them participate because of their relationship to the location where we're shooting so that's powerful. At this point in the story she's gotten sent to boarding school she's gotten sent to a convent they've had doctors investigating her and then eventually in episode 9 which we're shooting here she gets thrown in jail and it just came up we're like, you know, we should shoot that scene on Alcatraz I wrote the music for this episode some of it was sketched out 20 years ago the aria that Vario sings in her cell was probably the very very first thing I wrote for this entire project I mean I've reworked it but when Eric and I first had the idea to make an opera on this subject long before we knew it was going to take this form we had this sort of first experience with it and of the entire libretto that aria that she sings in jail so moved me that it's the first music I wrote and that's what we're shooting here tonight My hopes for Vario are that it's received extremely well by audiences and maybe not now but later on down the line it gets recognized as one of those groundbreaking projects something that made a difference in the artistic world and that's visual arts that's performing arts that's music, opera what's been a big challenge a unique component of this is fundraising for such a project because people haven't experienced this yet they don't understand how it's going to unfold as a television show until you really have a product to show them Here we go! There's a love and a passion in this project and I think 20, 30, 40 years down the line hopefully this is references to one of those projects that was groundbreaking and changed what opera is Projects BMP was founded about just over 10 years ago by Beth Morrison we commissioned, developed, produced and tour new opera theater music theater and multimedia concert work for us it all starts with the composer it all starts with the music a few years ago we decided to commission all of the pieces that we produce and tour and for us that means that we're getting in right at the start we are able to ask composers what's your craziest idea which is one of our favorite things to ask what's the thing that you want to do that no one else will let you do and for us we then created a developmental program for them which is specific to them for how they want to work you know some composers need a lot of piano vocal workshops and some want to to write, direct to score and have orchestral workshops we work in partnership on every project and for us that means that we're able to share the resources of multiple organizations so we have a multi-year partnership with LA Opera they present two of our works a year and we work with them to bring new chamber opera to Los Angeles in New York we have the prototype festival which we co-produce with Hear Art Center and Kristen's going to talk more about that and for us it's so important to be able to bring new work to the stage and to be able to really expand the meaning of opera so it's about broadening the definition and saying maybe opera also includes pop music, maybe it also includes rap, maybe it also includes multimedia concert work and jazz and so I'm going to show the trailer for some of the projects that BMP is working on this season and also just to say at a week when the Met is getting a lot of press for producing an opera by a woman in the last two years BMP commissioned six works by female composers which represents over half of the works that we commission and that's really important to us too Welcome young masters come in and quickly be seated I'm a director of hybrid work artistic director of Hear and co-director of the prototype festival I wanted to talk just real quickly about what we do it here because that's how we got into working in opera and music theater work we have a residency program that's for nine to twelve artists that we support from inception through work in progress workshop and then full productions and then we launched that work on tour and we are focused on hybrid work and so we started working this is high we started working we work with artists from all disciplines but who are trying to incorporate other things going on in them we work with theater, music, dance puppetry, media arts but all of them are trying to make something that doesn't quite fit that form so it was a pretty natural extension to start working with composers who were thinking of opera since there's often quite a blending of forms in the first hybrid form perhaps currently in residence we have Paul Pinto who you saw earlier in the Thing and Why show as well as Alia Koloff and Lainey Fefferman just recently took a leave so we have three composers that we're currently making pieces that will be full scale pieces that are thinking differently about how the form works so and that's stretched over a number of years just in what you just saw Thumbprint was in prototype a couple of years ago but Kamala Sankaram was another composer that we had worked with starting back about six or seven years ago there's a whole community that is thinking differently about the form and thinking differently about what it means today to make that work and we were really interested in that we, Kim and I and Beth sat down over a glass of wine which is always the best way to make any decisions and started talking about the idea of making a festival that would try to speak to this new form that we saw happening that we thought was largely composer driven we saw a number of composers, particularly in New York City but also in little pockets around the world that were thinking that they wanted to make their work the way they wanted to that they weren't waiting for someone to commission them that they weren't waiting for an established house to bring them in that they had an idea and that they were going to pursue that and we were really excited by the work that we were seeing that was being made that way and so we started the festival this will be our fifth festival this January we do seven pieces you just saw a couple of them in a BMP clip this year we'll have Anatomy Theater and Breaking the Waves both of which you saw in there and then you'll hear from Im Le Mar in a little bit and he's also in the festival this year we also have what's been in development with us for about four years now in the heart program Mata Hari is the world premiere in prototype this year Mata Hari is the work of Matt Marks and Paul Pierce and they started from the non-fiction material but then they've created something that is something of what happened to Mata Hari but also something of what they imagine was going on with Mata Hari and Matt is another composer who he is taking from all different musical styles and creating his own original pastiche of those forms and very freely from Frankie Valley style singing to classically trained to a woman whose spoken text is all scored you know very precisely the way that she speaks there's an actor who plays Mata Hari and she doesn't actually sing the men in her world are the singers but she actually is scored as a spoken voice so Mata Hari is coming up in January and then I'm directing a piece called Silent Voices which is a piece that I'm working on with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus I've been working on it about a year and they were looking for someone to work on the project because Diane who's the music director and the executive director no she's the artistic director something director at Brooklyn Youth Chorus Diane had an idea of making a piece about race and gender in class but what she knew about was how to direct music and what composers she was interested in and she wanted to help her figure out how to formulate a piece which as a theater artist is something I've been doing devised work in all different forms for many years so it was a great collaboration to come together and we devised a form for the piece and then together we curated about 13 composers and BYC commissioned them to create short pieces in response to these issues and the piece is a choral piece but I think that one of the things that I've learned over the years of doing prototype is that the whole notion of where's music theater where's choral work, where's opera all of that is so it's inseparable you can't tease it apart you can't say that opera starts here and music starts here because the artists that are writing today are writing they're borrowing whatever they want to borrow to write from so who's to say what it is and some of my favorite things that I've overheard during prototype are people saying what was that? and someone else being like no actually I think that was and they have them engaging in a debate and that's part of what interested us with the festival but with Silent Voices we've been making this piece we just did our first concert a multimedia concert at National Salas last week we'll be in prototype in January and then we'll be in the BAM opera house in May for two performances and it's been a really interesting process of bringing theater designers into the collaboration with the musical work most of them have worked on opera or music theater pieces before but they're primarily trained in the theater and I think that there's a collaborative brain space that happens among designers that they can bring to the composer's conversation that's really exciting and we've had some really great conversations on the design front as we've been evolving and then lastly just a little more on prototype it's a festival that is a curated festival we don't take submissions although people send us things and we'll look at them but we're always hungry to see work so we're always interested in being invited to what's going on and we try to between the three of us and also and other producers at BMP and my dramaturg Pete at here we go out to see a lot of work and we're really interested in knowing what's going on so I'm going to show you a little prototype trailer that's very short I decided to talk more and show less so here here you go they're going to show it to you for some reason I feel compelled that I should lean over but I probably don't have to do that my name is Im Lamar I'm a composer singer, pianist visual artist so maybe I guess at some point I was in art school at the San Francisco Art Institute and then I was at graduate school at Yale in the sculpture department and then I sort of decided to drop out a graduate school because I wanted to be in a rock band and be a rock person like I wanted to sort of be a confrontational provocative front person maybe sort of like Iggy Popper of Marilyn Manson but black and singing in like a counter-tenor male soprano thing and so somehow that sort of sound that soprano sound wasn't going as well as I hoped it would with sort of the goth punk metal bands I was in and so maybe about ten years ago I started doing these pieces solo with just piano like in the band I was just sort of a front I wasn't playing an instrument but I was composing all the music I sort of liked to do everything and so I was writing all the music all the guitar parts, bass parts, all these things on piano and so then I started doing these solo pieces well sort of songs because I had written all these songs and sort of started performing these songs I had written for the band and then I realized I wasn't interested in sort of doing these five minute songs and then having the audience applaud and then doing another song and so then I realized that I was much more interested for myself emotionally in having sort of a journey going on a journey that could like arc without the audience interrupting with sort of applause and these sort of things but so I realized I had to sort of start writing little things in between the songs just lead to the other songs which are sort of I guess recities and anyway so somehow I accidentally ended up I guess sort of making what some people call opera I guess the prototype festival calls it that and so I'm in the prototype festival this year and if you'd like to come see the piece that I'm doing there it's called funeral doom spiritual and it's not just me the point of all these pieces that I make is that I want to be able to do all of them alone because I do sort of these big pieces in sort of prototype festivals or Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and Merckin Hall with ensembles of various kinds but I always like to sort of be able to go in some DIY space alone and perform these pieces so it's important that everything that I do I can do alone and that my work really is about my own kind of it's about me it's all very sort of selfish and self-involved maybe by literal and fictional becoming a negrogothic devil worshipping free black men in the blues tradition so what I'm going to show you people usually laugh but I mean I'm very serious but people usually laugh for some reason and so what I'm going to show you is a segment okay so I'm also making a film not quite like your film but it's a film of this piece so there's a piece called surveillance punishment which is I guess a theater piece I don't know exactly what to call it and so I'm making that into a film and so I'm going to show you maybe two and a half minutes of it and this is the moment in the piece when it takes place in 1947 and it's loosely based on the story of Willy Francis very loosely and this is the moment when Willy Francis was a 16 year old black boy who was executed in 1947 and that was the second time like the first time they tried he got all these folks electricity and didn't kill him anyway it's a very interesting story Google it but for the moment what I was interested in is the fact that he was accused of killing a white man who was 53 years old a pharmacist for whom he worked and I was interested in what this sexual relationship was about allegedly it was consensual and so then the piece sort of starts in 1947 and it goes to 1847 to try to sort of think about what interracial relationships would be like on plantations and then back to 1947 and this is the moment in the piece when the main character who's about to die realizes that the man that he's been having a sexual relationship with is the man who killed his father and he was a clan member who was a member of the KKK and murdered his father anyway so it's sort of like this sort of yeah very traumatic so I'll just yeah we can talk about it more later this is called legacies thank you all very much it was a fantastic presentation so I would like to ask a semi-private question to all of you so what was the first opera that you remember seeing Aaron, why did you start I guess it was probably Wozak and how old were you probably 19 Porgy and Bess at New York City Opera and how old were you when you were 18 or 19 I don't remember when my parents were musicians so it was probably very early but I think it's likely it was something early you know something early music probably something like that it was my guess La Traviata, the Zefarelli production at the Met I was like 15 15 or 16 wow that's something I'm from Mobile, Alabama and I saw a production of Turin Dode I was 15 and it was like Mobile's the opera or something but they would like half sing anyway I was fell in love with Turin Dode I was sort of very obsessed with her and that sort of all that all her grandness and I loved the Wagnerian aspect of her role in the middle of this Puccini thing I think I think it was Marriage of Figaro and I was probably 11 or 12 nice so all of you started pretty early like in your teens and when did you get really involved in it so Emile Lamar you told us a little bit about this but my thing with getting into opera though was much even though I sort of in college I went to art school and stuff but I was studying like I was in choir in high school and I was sort of studying like singing and I was obsessed with like black soprano sounds maybe and that started when I was like maybe 11, 10 or 11 like much earlier I just it was a private sort of obsession so it was much earlier than I ended up sort of singing actually because I sort of thought I would be a visual artist and I would just sort of sing for myself or something so maybe we want to quickly do the same thing no when did you actually start getting involved with it like actively as a I guess for me it must have been in college I remember performing some of the late John Cage pieces that are very theatrical and the directions are really stage directions just as much as they are musical directions and found that a really interesting approach to extending a musical language past just the sort of orchestra pit so I studied classical violin while I was growing up and that's what I thought I would do for the rest of my life and then got tired of classical violin and got really into jazz and so I put down the violin picked up a trumpet and studied music theory and jazz theory for a number of years and then theater kind of like seduced me so I started doing a lot of theater and then when I was in grad school I decided I went to see soldier songs at Poisson Rouge because I was living with Eileen Mack of Newspeak living she was my roommate which meant that I became friends with David Little and I watched this piece at Poisson Rouge and I said they're probably going to need directors I mean there was a director on that but I kind of was thinking about the form and was thinking about this crew of kind of new music composers and started following them kind of obsessively and then I heard that David Little was going to be working on a piece that Robert Woodruff would direct and I asked David if it was okay if I wrote Robert and asked him to assist on that and that put me in touch with with Beth Morrison projects and I basically from 2012 till now have been an assistant on a number of Beth Morrison project pieces starting with dog days and kind of like a bunch of the pieces that we saw have worked on and actually I started listening to your album this summer while I was working on Ouroboros because Wait, which one? I have it on my iPhone Speculum Ouro, Shackle to the Dead? No wait, I'm going to find it for you as we move on I'll tell you It's exactly the one, yeah totally so that was my other soundtrack for Ouroboros I also studied violin it was like three, I had no talent for it but I worked very hard at it I played it for 13 years gave it up when I was 16 My father was a composer so and my mother is an early music performance practice scholar and so my brother and I were writing music from the time we were very small and I was singing in my mother's choir she's a church organist and I studied piano so I was writing music from the time I was really young and I was singing also and singing contemporary music singing early music I sang at my mother's doctoral recital at Stanford when I was nine stuff like that but I remember one memory I had was when I was really quite young they did a performance of crumbs, ancient voices of children at the my father's university music department and my brother who was very talented but only tangentially interested in performing was chosen to sing it and I really wanted to sing it but they were like no it's for a boy so he was like oh okay I'll do it those experiences were I think what got me really interested in inhabiting whether as a singer because I'm a professional singer also whether as a singer or as a composer or in other projects is to get women especially young women in roles finding a way to expand the ways in which young women women in general can be the range of kinds of women one might see in these kinds of epic representations that opera offers so that's kind of and it was at Yale when I was an undergraduate literature major that I did all this research actually and sort of when I went away from music that I got very interested in that particular in that particular aspect I was assisting Robert Wilson on a theater piece and on Hamlet machine and he asked me to work with him on Salome so that was the first opera that I worked on and I got to go to La Scala so I got to work at a huge opera place as my first opera out and deal with all those crazy unions Bob yelling the wrong words in Italian at the mechanisties and them sticking their heads out saying what's going on I mean to me I think it's really interesting I mean that you say that you were studying literature I think when you were at Yale and I think that it's interesting that people who come from other mediums or other disciplines end up sort of working in opera I think that the most interesting work isn't often it could possibly come from people who have been at Yale for several years and only studying music but it tends to come from people who are studying literature or politics or sociology or these other kinds of things I mean I'm sort of grateful in a way that I went to art school where I was also reading a lot of like French critical theory and the art stuff I was doing at the time French theory was very important this sort of post-modern kind of conversation was really important and then all this sort of stuff about race and race critical theory was really important so I'm really so grateful because I write for librettos as well as the music for my work and I do a lot of research that I think you have to have a lot of other things to bring to the table you know and opera really is a sort of a very exciting form for that I mean these sort of very grand ideas and I'm very I've always been very grand myself and then I mean you know I'm a singer so and I've always sort of like I love all this sort of big Birgie Nielsen all those sort of like big Wagnerian Strauss singers you know those sort of diva five people like I love all that stuff as well as you know sort of trying to be a scholarly person so I think that having in terms of the interdisciplinary aspect of it I think that having other backgrounds is really useful and having something to bring to the table having something to say like it means to me it seems really clear that everyone here can play with like what they want to do with their work and that's really important my pathway and opera was really through new music my background is as an instrumentalist I played the flute all the way through undergrad and grad school and when I was about 14 I think I had a music theory teacher who was also a composer and she played us different trains by Steve Reich and then the next week she played us Voice of the Whale by George Crumb and I was obsessed I had no idea that music could sound like that and and from that point on I was pretty much a devotee of contemporary music and of working with composers I thought it was the coolest thing in the world that a composer would write something for you that you could have a conversation with them about how it should sound and so all through undergrad and grad school I only played new music and that was really my pathway into working with BMP is that I've been around theater for a long time as well opera is the place where all of the genres are intersecting and it's like those corners where the most interesting work is happening where you are pushing boundaries and redefining what form is and getting to bring not just an amazing composer into the room but amazing designers and video and directors and there's just such an incredible wealth of talent out there and opera is a form which in the way all of us work has enough flexibility to really encompass all of that and bring all of that to the table and that's for me the most interesting thing about it I just wanted to add something about a few things that were just said there's like the history of how this is how I got into it but the other thing that I think is really important that I think could be a part of this conversation is the why and getting into this working with this new music kind of world that is happening in New York I was studying at Columbia and we're making theater in basements and things and I'm very happy that I went to Columbia's group program but there is something about this feeling very much like contemporary as theater artists we had to apologize for what we make and the pieces become smaller and smaller and the themes become smaller and smaller and it has to fit in this space and what I was excited about the idea of opera is the audacity of how big it is and it's interesting to me that part of what is exciting about working in the form right now is that it's collapsing under the weight like the aforementioned New York City opera and so it's funny to me to be working at it right now because I was so excited about how big it could potentially be and there's a lot of kind of like kitchen sinking of opera right now which I love I've worked on many of them Apocalypse is another genre of opera that I like but I just think it's really but I think that what's really exciting about it is that we're kind of like the form is breaking right now and we're kind of like either pick up the pieces and saying that's a shit piece let's throw it out or we're like oh let's keep this piece or we're finding all these other pieces to like to create something and like everything about it the stories that are being told like what is a grand story who is a hero the languages that they're being told in whether a voice is amplified you know whether the band is amplified I mean everything about it is kind of like is open you know what type of media are we able to include in it because something about the form is just it wants to have all sort of media involved in it and so it's kind of like there's a way in which it's like this old thing and you know you say to people I'm an opera director and they go but there's this thing where it's actually kind of like needs to be a 21st century form I mean like the media that we have around it it supports it like the form itself is so absurd that like having these other kind of like video and live streaming and all these other elements to it are like that actually will support it so I just want to kind of like what I want to add to that is this okay so there's like the grandness of the production but when I first started doing these like sort of music theater pieces solo it was like me and my boyfriend he's a visual artist he makes comic books and then he sort of had like I wanted to do my lynching tree like thing with the cross and so we had at the time we weren't like I don't know we didn't know Resilum or Isadora any I don't know we weren't even like there was this we I think that we was in some club in Brooklyn and we had like a sort of a magnifying glass and anyway it was just ridiculous but the point it was very like low budget I think that one of my points is that I really until the last few years I haven't had any kind of a budget right I mean prototype is like we it's a lovely thing we have an ensemble we have like it's gonna be beautiful we have a costume designer I mean but historically I haven't had anything and you can make work with nothing I mean you can even be a grand idea in a basement you can have a very grand like big idea with nothing we sort of slowly started using like I guess PowerPoint things to do visuals and then you know and then it sort of grew with Isadora and grew into Resilum and all these other kinds of programs I mean so in terms of trying to sort of stage a thing like we were trying to make sets with video projections and that sort of thing you don't really need anything to make it happen you need a voice and an idea and a room you know somewhere and in the festival we have the smallest venues a 70 seat and the largest venues a 900 seat so Christian what or the street or the street I was gonna mention that but I thought I'd let you mention it so why don't you mention it I'm gonna be making some pieces in the street you also come out in general I'm super into like the DIY vibe with like with sort of classical music or whatever or new music even like jazz I was interested in Wagner's I mean Cecil Taylor or like Colman I'm very interested in like you know I'm interested in those transcendent like black high modernist people as much as I'm interested in like anything from the European tradition so yeah it's just it's super open you know you can do anything wherever you like you know there's so many small opera companies in New York now like it's really astounding there's over 50 I think and each of them are doing these different things so you know BNP we do productions on all scales it's tending towards larger these days we have been around long enough to be able to have larger budgets which is lovely but there's also these amazing small opera companies that are doing productions in people's living rooms or in a warehouse in Brooklyn you know where you pay and you watch you know La Traviata right so there's I think that there's so much work happening on so many different scales and that's one of the things which is which is really sort of giving opera a moment right now especially in New York I mean I guess I think I'm noticing just the conversation around scale and there's so many different kinds of scale like there's scales of theaters that you're playing in there's the scale of the production there's the scale of the budget and I think I think about that a lot experimenting opera just thinking about how we can stretch that to the further limits so can it be an opera if it's 10 minutes long and it has one character in it absolutely yes I mean there's no reason why it shouldn't be and there's no one that holds the patent on what that word means and what it should encompass but I think that that conversation around scale feels to me like a not necessarily unique opera experience but certainly sort of where you land on that dial and any number of these parameters really contributes to the kind of work that you're making now what the question that I have then is so we have these large opera houses the new work that's being made will it break in there you said that you're collaborating with LA Opera so what's happening is there like sort of an overlap it is happening it really is there's a few opera companies around the country that I think are leading the way you know LA Opera has so we work with them as part of what's called their off-ground initiative they present chamber opera works in outside of the main stage so all of our presentations with them so far have been at Redcat which is a 230 seat black box they have done presentations at the Ace Hotel which is you know live scoring with Dracula so they're trying all sorts of things we're going to be working with them to do a production in a warehouse space in downtown LA and this is their way our productions are nowhere close to the budget that they need to do a main stage production and so for them it's a way to be able to you know bring new audiences find those people who are hungry for something which is not main stage opera and without having to take the risk of a main stage production you know in our we've been doing this for two seasons now and the most interesting statistic for me is that 70% of the audiences that come to our shows that we do with LA Opera are unknown to LA Opera so it really is finding new people who maybe want something more theatrical or you know the piece that we just did out there was premiered it was called The Source by Ted Hearn it was premiered at BAM in 2014 it is a very avant-garde piece it is an oratorio it is an installation piece it is 200 people sitting on chairs in a room surrounded by four projection screens looking at each other looking at each other looking at each other, yes it is literally facing one another and they are confronted with with these faces staring down at them from all sides and for performers you know and there's a lot of electronics a lot of vocal manipulation that's being presented by LA Opera and San Francisco Opera this season so I think that there is you know part of it is a changing of the guard it's you know younger general directors of opera companies coming in and also them really trying to find the new audiences and I think because of that you know the more multimedia work, the more theatrical work is appealing to younger audiences and that's what they're trying to achieve one of the reasons that we started prototype was because during January the festival season this work wasn't being seen and all these presenters and at that time it was just presenters were coming to town and we were wanting to show that this work could tour too and so the prototype was meant to be a place where you could see this type of work and think about bringing it and around the time that we started it Opera America which is the service agency for the opera companies across the country started a new works forum because they were trying to think about how to encourage people to make new work and they did the first one it was like in November or something but then they decided to January during prototype because it was a way for the general directors to also see other work besides what they put together for the forum there was the seven shows and prototype that they could come check out and then other people started doing opera and music theater work at that time like under the radar I used to have no music work but now they're programming that too so it's become like a way to think about this work and it being transportable and repeatable in other contexts and to help the presenters think differently about the tourability of opera and to think about oh well you can work with local ensembles in many cases and so it isn't as many people as you're thinking on the road or to say to general directors look you could have a production of this quality as a presentation which you didn't use to do but now you could start to think about how you expand your season by including presentations that other people have premiered in other places so that's actually starting to happen in the field we've just seen that grow a lot just in these last five years this will be the fifth one this year but it's been really encouraging to see that there's like an energy and a movement that's thinking about how this work can be seen in other contexts one of my long term goals over the next two years is I'm sort of writing an oratorio or sort of this thing called the lynching suite that I want to not sing myself I want to have other there's a tenor that I want to sing it and also counter tenors so there's a tenor and a counter tenor that I'd like to perform the piece so I would love for a symphony orchestra you don't just find orchestras like full orchestras so that would be some kind of move if that happens to a bigger kind of venue kind of thing for me but it's ironic because everything has been so focused on my own kind of performance because it's sort of I need it it's like an habitual addictive kind of thing when you're a performer and a singer you just have to but in terms of what my sort of legacy is as a composer, as a person who sort of writes music is I want to write this stuff for other people to sing ultimately so or at least this one piece, maybe there's everything else I do for the rest of my life will be for me but I'm hoping that big orchestras would like want to do this piece around the world this one tenor is kind of famous I feel like he could just because he's kind of like sort of has stardness in Europe especially he could maybe, if he's into it enough could like make that happen and maybe record it I have a question for you Kristen because I'm really interested in what you guys are talking about or you and I guess Taka kind of talking about in terms of what does it mean to sort of start having conversations with larger institutions about sharing responsibility for work that does to the work not to say I don't know what it does really but when you're thinking about a work that's being developed over the course of several years and then it's touring and it's going to these different venues and you start to think about that from the very beginning of the process how does that like impact on what the work looks like well I mean we've always done partnerships because at here like I said I have like 12 artists in residence and I don't have enough resources for 12 artists so I've always worked in partnership with other companies to do residencies for one week developmental workshop or to do like when Taylor Mack was in residence with us making Lily's Revenge we partnered with the Sundance Institute we partnered with New Dramatists we partnered with NACL and we partnered with Vassar so we had like four different partnerships to make that piece and it took that many people to help make that piece and I think that as long as what is kept paramount at all times is what the artist's vision is and you protect that like crazy then I don't think it changes the texture of the work I think that you just are having the resources that you need to make the work be the best that it can be but I do think it can be a concern if it's a larger institution that is going to try to take away from what the integrity of what the artist's vision is I think that could be a problem I think it's interesting the partnership thing I mean the only way that we can make Virio because it's not a form that an institution can present like an opera people often ask me could it be done as a production and my first question is why? I mean we're making this other thing this is what we're doing I mean it's at this point this is the form but didn't you see what we actually did? that's what we did there's a marching band in it and it's outside and it's at Alcatraz and there's like parched instruments and like you know whatever I mean how would that possibly be on a stage you know so when you're talking about scale in a way the question of scale is intimately related to this to this concept of partnerships right here you know you have these partnerships we've had to do the same thing Virio is massive I mean it's this huge project and I but I don't really know what kind of entity there would be that could actually produce it as it is so what that means is that we formed an LLC and you know we've done grant writing and fundraising through the non-profits who are the actual musical ensembles for example in some cases and we have I'm an artist in residence at Grand Central Art Center it's John Speak and you know that is one of our producers and then there's the TV station and they're supporting the post production and so there are all of these partners that sort of come together around the project that does protect the integrity of it because everybody has skin in the game you know and everybody's and it helps keep it innovative it helps make it something else you know the fact that it's sort of too big for one organization to do it anyway I applaud the fact that you're the size that you are doing things the way that you're doing it because it actually means that it keeps the work in the community of sort of freeson you know that this is how the form is going to evolve is with these kinds of exchanges between institutions and that's what doesn't happen with large institutions is the exchange between institutions you know and I think it works both ways so you know for us we know that any piece that we're commissioning we are going to plan a tour that and so you know we're partnering with these large institutions but you know the only rule that we say is you know for the designers we say okay remember we want this to tour so you know whether and that can mean a million things it can mean you know you have to be able to carry everything that you need in five suitcases it can mean you know it's no bigger than a 50 foot truck right so it can mean different things but I think the same thing goes for us partnering with the institutions in the opposite way so for breaking the waves that we're doing in prototype this year and that that BMP co-commissioned it's an opera Philadelphia production but you know we went into this knowing they went into it knowing that they wanted to tour the piece and they wanted it to be in prototype and so you know part of that was as they built the set you know it has to fit into two 26 foot trucks you know so it can come to New York so I think it works both ways that was a pretty big set for a huge set it's a huge set but it does fit into 26 foot trucks having a heavy video show helps too because you just got hard drives and there were computers that you have to if that's your set if that's been sort of my deal for like a long time it's like the primary sort of thing happening with sets or even other characters because no one else should really be on stage with me except us except of course you know what I'm singing I mean what I'm singing but you know this is a joke this is a stupid diva opera joke but I think is the other thing that I think is really interesting that comes into it obviously every project is different but there is such a thirst for this and something else that happens I've worked on a number of projects where time is a real factor and the tourability but you kind of have I think the most extreme case so far was like putting like teching and opening a show in Beijing in eight hours and like we knew we had like four days to build it in a 3000 seat theater in Handan and then like eight hours to put it back up in a 400 seat theater in Beijing and like we knew that going into it which meant that we were crazy for saying yes but I really wanted to see the Great Wall of China so but it also meant that like we really took that into the into factoring it into the design and what's great about it is then you can expand on that idea so that same projection designer who did this design that we were able to like throw up really fast and it was a great piece also don't worry then we get a working relationship going then he's the guy who designed the piece for ThingNY where we had like it was a 50,000 square foot factory space and we had like 13 projection designs so there is, it's interesting how the whole thing can kind of expand and contract but I think that part of it is just is A, having a lot of, I mean and that same designer and that lighting designer who worked on the China project, we're doing a piece at MPAC next week actually if you want to come up to MPAC and see a piece and that also what's interesting is the people who are kind of coming to at least to me and asking to work on projects so these these are composer performers also and so it's interesting to see like who is interested in making this type of work and who is reaching out to what type of what group of people to make it but also kind of it's like this thing of taking something that is traditionally kind of just a performance like a traditional music performance and then adding other elements to it and what does that mean and then what does that mean for time and the development of the piece and everybody is kind of like learning new things about like their art and how to make art with other friends you know so one of the things that I feel like I think we have to talk about is sort of the operatic voice and why I mean like in a way why I think that so much of why the world thinks that opera is this antiquated sort of not modern thing is that particular kind of vocal production that you hear in what we call opera and for some reason I was just drawn to it the first time I heard an operatic voice was I was 9 maybe on the radio and it was a tenor not even a soprano which is really my obsession and I was just drawn to it and I think that I mean I say all this to say that is there something uniquely emotional that an operatic voice can do that other kinds of singing other kinds of sound making can't do I mean for me and what I'm trying to do in my work is in the question I'm sort of constantly asking is there an emotional landscape that in an interior landscape that the operatic voice can speak to that other kinds of singing can't speak to and so I that's one of the sort of primary forces driving my work like the voice and like what it can do like that kind of sound like emotionally and is that uniquely different than any other kind of sound and I believe that it is and I think that I sort of really believe in that being beyond like some sort of like bougie uptown kind of like petty bourgeois or ruling class like sensibility but like something that is deeply emotional and deeply moving and profound that sound and depending on who is enacting that sound and what they're using it for like the all these tools can be used for good or evil like what is the deep profound thing that you were using that kind of sound that kind of technique for is always my question well I would actually love to also open it up to the audience so if there's a question from the audience audience expectations I mean I think it changes with every piece because the needs of every piece are different and and as you expand the definition of what opera is and what it can be the needs of those pieces changes too so I think that there are moments of where like the true traditional operatic voice is the perfect thing for that moment I also think that Lauren Washington's voice in dog days is the perfect thing for that moment and it's not an opera voice and I also think that a bunch of our team is in Miami right now with Kansas City Choir Boy which was premiered at prototype and Courtney Love's voice is perfect for something in that moment Courtney Love's voice is perfect for that and it is perfect for anything her row of a thousand cigarettes is like the perfect thing for that piece I want to say that I'm in love with not her voice but many rock voices that aren't like that thing but I was never very good at making other kinds of sounds besides like a very kind of very particular kind of Bel canto sound and so my question is always because I'm not interested in just making sort of opera work I do shows in DIY, noise spaces and I open for bands and stuff so I mean I'm always like what is the thing that's going to make anyone care in these very strange contexts I perform all kinds of places I'm not just performing in concert halls or cathedrals or whatever why is anyone going to care about this and so it's like about the emotional life that I give to the text into these particular kinds of stories I'm singing and yeah the political cultural social dimension of what's going on I think from my experience it really depends on where the project is coming from who's instigating it and you know if you're working with a company where they have singers in a company those singers need to sing the piece so it better be a piece that works well for their voice I think there are some cases where there are companies that don't have any singers and they choose singers for the project and in that case I think you can work with your friends or whatever voice you really feel comfortable with and that's a really beautiful thing about the way that opera is being made now that it's not necessarily just being made with a specific company in mind but the community and the way that you identify like you may identify as someone who sings with a Belcanto's voice and that's the identity of the piece that you want to create but you know I have two separate activities professionally because I'm also a singer and I've sung an enormous amount of contemporary opera so much and the composers who need me need the kind of thing I do as a singer they need the particular kinds of skill sets that I bring but sometimes when I'm working as a composer let's say I have a commission for a concert piece we're talking about this in the green room a lot of times producers or commissioners will get excited about the fact because they know my work as a singer and they'd like me to be in my own piece so they're like yeah and then you could be in your own piece but for me I'm really obliged and I've made some good work you know that has myself in it and I can I'm doing a whole evening of singing my music at National Saudast in April but there's always part of me that it's kind of grudging because I see my work as an opera composer as a vocal composer I see that work as an opportunity to collaborate with to sing with a voice that I do not have and to reach out and be able to use another's voice I know a lot about using my voice because I do it a lot and so I know exactly what it does well and what it doesn't do and there are all kinds of things that I can't do what you can do you know I so I always want that first of all and second of all I also like the you know this partnership thing I like the interaction so when I'm writing for myself you know it's like not that's a collaboration that gets old pretty fast I'm completely in love with myself as a collaborator I'm thrilled with my own company I'm thrilled with writing for my voice I'm just completely in love with we have a question over there Hi through the course of this discussion you all is a pretty heterogeneous group I take some of you more seriously than others what but there's a necessary sense of amity here to what extent do you think it's important to close ranks and to say all this new stuff is worth doing it's all very important or is critical response how does critical response figure into your own sense of evaluating the work that's out there that's new that's avant garde and is it right to say sometimes that some of it isn't good yeah sure there's tons of sucky work there's tons of sucky work there always is I mean I go out to see work like four or five nights a week and I'm lucky if I see one amazing thing a week that's a gift if that happens but you keep going because you're looking for exciting work I mean we're talking about the work that we're excited about but that's the case in every discipline it's in theater it's in dance it's in all disciplines but I mean I just think it's a really exciting time right now in this particular field because there's a lot of new things happening that weren't happening as broadly in the field before so it's feeling like it's very alive and very explosive right now and that doesn't mean that all of it's good but there's a lot of energy right now and in terms of press I'll just say that and I'll shut up in terms of press I feel like the music press is way more open-minded than the theater press for sure and they're way more receptive to the kind of experimentation that's going on than most of the theater presses in the city and there's people come like in January during prototype because so many people are here for all the other festivals we had over 75 papers covered the festival last year so it was literally like all over the world was the coverage so I think that there's a real interest that's happening and it's bringing a different conversation to the fore as a result of extensive coverage which is awesome and also it's subjective you know it's we have no expectation that everybody is going to like every piece that we produce because we produce a very wide variety of pieces and so if somebody is really a traditional opera we definitely have some pieces that you're probably going to like but you're definitely not going to like all of our pieces and the same goes for somebody who really only wants to see avant-garde work so there's I think part of trying to push boundaries and expand the form is knowing that you're not going to please everyone the other thing though is I'm totally shocked by your comment about the press the theater press and the music press I mean it's amazing just to see that conversation from a different perspective because I find that music press kind of stodgy and you know whether they come to your show they might come with like higher or different expectations and not as open of a mind that's my experience but I think it also has to do with what your measures of success are because certainly press is a great measure of success and the critical reception in that regard but in a certain level I've always felt like success is the ability to keep making work and like if you can iterate on an idea or let a piece go and then sort of a new piece and really find and build structures and kind of continue to process that to me feels like success and as a result that does mean that there are some pieces that don't work and they're not great but sort of the longer game is a little bit more interesting but I think the thing about being an artist is that you have to be that is not important in terms of making things I don't really give a shit if someone writes about it or if they don't or if they like it or if they don't I mean I know it sounds like I'm trying to be badass or something but I really just don't give a shit about what the reception is and most of the press I've gotten hasn't been music press but it's been art world press because I do exhibitions too I'm always like oh that's interesting like someone's writing about me and it's helpful sometimes but it's like most press people who don't know anything anyway I'm sorry if you're a press person they're just like sort of parasites and so I think that I'm much more interested in making things and continuing like you said to continue to make something and to be motivated by the next idea the next like oh I want to do this historical piece this time or I have this new idea where I want to combine Nietzsche and Hegel and Sun Ra's ideas for this new libretto I just continue to be motivated by this thing and I'm just like fuck I don't really it helps with careers certainly if you get press but I don't really think that an artist can worry about that and I know that we have producers but from the artist's point of view we have to just make our work and that's all Your question is about discernment and I think one of the things that I feel I was talking to my boyfriend on the way here and I was saying because at the moment I'm within an opera that's taking me years to write and so the fact that I came out of my apartment at all is like huge I've been in my jammies for weeks you know and so now here I am with these people I seem to be functioning You're functioning very well Thank you but the great thing about the field right now I feel now that I've learned in the last hour and a half is that there's vitality in the field in this other arena I'm being reminded that there are producers there are people who are working there's not just vitality in the field because there are a lot of people making work like those of us who are making work there is also vitality in the field right now because there are people who have made it their life's work and to immerse themselves I am even worse than someone who is not discerning I don't even go outside I don't even know what else is out there right now I'm just just making work but it makes me feel really good to know that there are people in the field who are just as dedicated in their way to the field because they're immersing themselves in what's out there and I have to sort of just trust the field that is also healthy I don't know if that is interesting or helpful at all but I do think it's true that we have different roles up here some of us are more I just want to comment on the press question I guess it's just maybe saying it might happen is to have that it breaks down into the music critics who come and then they kind of are reviewing basically the music of an opera or they're maybe theater critics sometimes who come and review the theater part of an opera it would be really exciting if there were some critics who came out and kind of were able to see the whole the oboe like the piece and I find that really interesting just as a kind of and again it's where the form is really exciting is I think that there is success when it's more recognized that to say is that an opera is just a completely a complete question and I think that if we have critics who are thinking in the same way who are art critics who are seeing it or just parasites in bottom theaters but polyglots of that so that would be really great so way beyond our 90 minutes I think we have maybe time for one more question I really have a two part question the first thing I'd like to ask about is that there's you've mentioned that there's 50 small companies in town is there a central clearing house for that the New York Opera Alliance I'm a Facebook member of that and I don't get very many postings so I'm wondering if there's a more central one that's why I asked the question and my second part of the question is no one's talked about the money and clearly well clearly you have to have somebody to be able to put up a show so where is the funding coming from for 50 companies I think partnerships was as close as we got to hitting that question straight on and I know that there's absolutely no way that we could make Virio without just a lot of different people showing up in a lot of different ways and also a high risk tolerance which I am blessed to have I think there is there have to be a lot of arts organizations in general in the music field and in the arts more broadly are starting to do this are starting to partner collaborate co-produce as a way to be able to make work that has ambition but handle some of the greater and greater risks and challenges that organizations have yeah I mean for our festival it's a mix just like it is for my organization it's a mix of foundation corporate government individuals and box office and we have a mission with the festival and adhere of low ticket prices so our ticket prices are $30 and lower and we have a protopack where you can see all seven shows for like $150 so we're doing everything we can to make it as accessible as possible so tickets are not a big source of income for our festival so we raise all the rest of it and that's been a challenge and it's been harder than we thought we thought that because there is a moneyed group we would go to opera that we would attract those individual donors but frankly the work that we're doing is pretty weird in most cases and so those donors haven't you know even with the demise of city opera we're like well maybe those people will be like oh here's a contemporary opera place we should check this out now but not really because the work that we're doing is so different in texture we haven't picked up very many of those individual donors so it's I mean just every year we are like it's not as much as we can but we wouldn't have been able to start the festival without the Mellon Foundation they gave us a leadership multi-year grant that helped us get it started and having them on board also gave other people confidence in us before the festival really had gotten underway yeah I mean the grants is like that's the last two years I basically I tour and I make a little money tour very little but yeah grants have been a huge thing for me yeah Charone Foundation or Knifer all those different places so yeah you have to apply for a lot of things a lot of grants I'm mostly an independent person working with prototype this year but I've been doing this for years myself and it's most of my time because I don't have a day job anymore I probably should get one but anyway is writing grants grant writing finding out where they are lots of grants and the partnership is that we are fundraising to raise money for the commissioning costs but then we're going out and if we're finding developmental partners so it could be a university that's going to host a workshop there's a number of places around the country that will help develop new work and then we're getting fees for us because we're an itinerant company without our own venue we're getting fees for the presentation so I would say for a new work we are fundraising through grants and individuals probably about half of the creation budget and then the other half will come from developmental partners and I think you'll be able to buy some ThingNY merch a bit later so you can help fund their next project I was actually just going to answer that question on behalf of ThingNY which I think leads to a lot of points that we were saying definitely what Aaron is working in definitely what Kristen is talking about we do the version of the project that we're working on at the time to suit the space in the budget we have so tonight you guys saw the $0 version of a thing that we worked on that had a production that Ashley did that we did the $15,000 version of we did a $400 version of it in Edmonton so we just did what we had to do to put on the piece and we worked about we worried about making the work and making the version that we could afford to make if anyone in live stream land or here in the room would like to go to Imlamar.com to buy music or you could go to Amazon or iTunes also buy albums that will help to continue the work happening tomorrow is Giving Tuesday so you could purchase any of these things Imlamar.com, Amazon, iTunes tomorrow well thank you all so much it's so that conversation was extremely interesting to me and hopefully to all of you as well and we have a little reception here afterwards so you can stay and talk with our artists a little bit further thank you so much for really inspiring even thank you this is for prototype festival so come get a little thing