“We’re asking what would make this more relevant, what events would make your theater-going experience connected to a sense of belonging?”īut it’s not only about bringing in a more diverse audience. “Instead of just handing out tickets to an Asian audience to go to an Asian production, you’re engaged in dialogue,” McNeal said. In advance of the production, San Francisco Opera created an Asian Advisory Committee, whose work will continue. A recent highlight was Dream of the Red Chamber, based on one of the most famous Chinese works of fiction and staged with an all-Asian cast. Opera isn’t mysterious a lot of the time, it’s Days of Our Lives with period gowns.Ĭultivating new opera fans has been a top priority. But translated supertitles and the text’s raw emotional content can make it accessible to wider audiences. Opera’s reputation for incomprehensibility will probably never die. San Francisco Opera hired McNeal in 2019-two years before the Metropolitan Opera made a similar move and well before the racial reckoning that swept America in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, which spurred many high-profile American cultural organizations to reconsider their practices. McNeal’s efforts to humanize the art form go far beyond the lip service that so many hidebound institutions pay to avoid criticism or cancellation. “That’s what we do so that people don’t think of the opera as being elitist or separate or esoteric,” he said. “On any given weekend, my staff and I are out in the community at events, whether there’s a street fair in the Tenderloin or a family event at Bayview Hunters Point,” said Charles Chip McNeal, the opera’s director of diversity, equity and community.
That means structural changes that impact every decision the organization makes-from casting to production, hiring to events. Integral to the company’s push for new audiences in its second century is a full-throttled embrace of diversity. The centennial season includes eight mainstage operas, including two new works, as well as an array of free special events. San Francisco Opera turns 100 this year, and it’s using the opportunity to look forward, not back, through operatic scavenger hunts, performances inside shipping containers and memoir-writing workshops.
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