Winter 2025 Issue

by Stella Markou

Venturing into the extraordinary world of Peter Sellars, NOA's upcoming Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, I quickly became Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. I peered through a chaotic kaleidoscope of sounds, stories, ideas, and creative cohorts woven into a dazzling mosaic. With each turn, a vast artistic sphere emerged — one of a bold and boundless voice. Sellars’s voice has undeniably transformed theatrical history and laid a dynamic foundation for its future. I found myself lost in the countless facets of his work, each filled with inspired perspectives and worlds of endless possibility. As I lift my teacup to the Mad Hatter of the operatic world, I invite you to take a brief jaunt with me down this rabbit hole. 

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Sellars's decades-long career has been gilded with prestigious honors and collaborations with a juggernaut roster of revolutionary creatives and institutional titans. At the soul of his work, however, lies a deep commitment to exploring profound human issues: basic human rights, racism, inequality, war, identity, social justice, compassion, political oppression, marginalization, and universal humanity. Through innovative reinterpretations of classical works and new commissions, he creates powerful platforms to illuminate these themes.

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It's impossible to encapsulate the breadth of Sellars's creative output and contributions to the field. The following is a concise selection of artistic milestones that illustrate his remarkable scope and impact:

• Sellars brought radical, modernized stagings to Mozart's Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, and Così fan tutte, reimagining them within contemporary social and political contexts.

• He directed the world premiere of John Adams's Nixon in China, revolutionizing contemporary opera by integrating historical narrative with political commentary, and Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer, a bold exploration of complex political and human themes that sparked international dialogue. The two went on to collaborate extensively on numerous landmark works.

• He partnered with Sir Simon Rattle on major productions with leading orchestras and festivals, blending theatrical innovation with musical excellence.

• He commissioned and directed new works by composers including Tan Dun, Philip Glass, and Kaija Saariaho.

• He served as artistic director for major institutions and festivals, including the Boston Shakespeare Company, the American National Theater at the Kennedy Center, the Los Angeles Festival, the Adelaide Festival, New Crowned Hope, and the Ojai Music Festival.

One of Sellars's greatest legacies is the countless individuals and generations he has inspired, mentored, and advocated for. On collaboration — the essence of his theatrical existence — he remarked in a 2010 interview with Simon Halsey "...there's nothing more beautiful than collaborative work… we are all saved from our own ideas by the other people in the room or our own ideas get so much richer because somebody else adds something you would never have thought to add."

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Among Sellars's collaborative artists, I was fortunate to speak with acclaimed American tenor, director, and educator Carroll Freeman, who not only performed Don Ottavio in Sellars's groundbreaking production of Don Giovanni but also sat beside him at the premiere of Nixon in China. Listening to Freeman recount his experiences with Sellars was fascinating and brought me closer to this "enfant terrible" beyond my voyeuristic internet stalking. Speaking with Freeman also deepened my understanding of Sellars, allowing me to see him not only as theiconoclastic visionary but as a human being. Of the tea I am permitted to spill, Freeman offered the following insights on working with Sellars:

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"His face is a sunbeam – all the time. Just beaming, and I never saw anyone smile so genuinely. It was an openness – his eyes were so big, taking in every drop of inspiration. You couldn't believe that anyone could be that bright and that encouraging. He has the courage to do what’s needed to be done. It is because Sellars knew every word of everyone and could tell you what every instrument in the orchestra did, at exactly what time and how it related to the story and your character. He was incredible that way. Sellars would welcome you to do what you wanted as a performer; however, he had a remarkable way of convincing you to do what he fashioned. That said, he would always listen to you and would let you find your way. He had an incredible gift, and that was to give you the confidence to explore and to have permission to find something deeper as a performer and not just go to the first or easiest choice. He changed me as a performer and director. He was tireless and joyous, bouncing off the walls and was the most intelligent director I have ever worked with."

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Like the brilliant Mad Hatter, Sellars continues to transform the musical world into a radical playground where impossibilities become art. In Alice's Wonderland, such an irrepressible figure would be reason enough for a celebratory gathering. But “Bold Voices, Boundless Futures” — NOA's take on a tea party (fittingly in Boston) — would be "very unmerry" indeed without you. So don't be late for this very important date as we come together to celebrate, connect, and chart the path forward for our vibrant, boldly multifaceted community.

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À bientôt

We’re in a most amazing moment in the creation of new opera. It seems there’s a world premiere happening every weekend all around the globe! How exciting for new opera, and for the new voices creating these libretti and operatic scores.

Back in the day (meaning my formative years in the business in the 80s and 90s), this was not the case. I remember only a handful of new operas — Lee Hoiby’s The Tempest at DMMO in 1986, Judith Weir’s A Night at the Chinese Opera at Santa Fe in 1989, John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles at the Met in 1991, Carlisle Floyd’s Cold Sassy Tree in 2000 at HGO, and the BIG one — Mark Adamo’s Little Women in 1998 also at Houston Grand Opera. Now these are just a few, truth be told, of the many new operas that happened then. However, those two decades simply do not hold a candle to the renaissance of new opera that we find ourselves in. 

During the first quarter of the 21st century, many new works were being created through much more involved, integrated, and interconnected workshops that became integral to the actual creative process. Opera companies discovered the theatre world’s dramaturg. No more did a composer and librettist create a new opera in a vacuum and then send off the score to a company that — hopefully — might put together a group of singers to “hear” how it went. (I won’t name titles but how many of us have sat in premieres and thought, ‘surely they needed a dramaturg to help wrestle this story into coherence?’) Luckily, the great and wondrous trend now is to Workshop pieces with a capital W!

This includes starting with the libretto and working a piece in miniature — either a portion of an act or even a few scenes. My training program, Opera McGill, at the Schulich School of Music in Montreal has been workshopping new pieces since 2018 both at McGill and across the pond at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, England. At last count, we’ve workshopped over twenty new pieces in the last eight years.  

We’ve partnered with a Montreal-based group, Musique 3 Femmes, who created a prize in 2018 for new opera created by women librettist and composer teams. Under their leadership, they’ve workshopped and brought to completion dozens of new Canadian operas telling stories about women, written by women specifically for sopranos and mezzos. My students have been quite lucky to be involved in this process, which brought together new creators who may, or may not have had, experience writing opera. The M3F team created a process to include multiple workshops over months. This allows new creators to digest the feedback from not just the leadership teams, but also the artists and students involved in these workshops. It led to many full-length operas being completed and then produced all around Canada and Europe.

At Opera McGill, we’ve also been workshopping new operas written by composers who have had more experience writing for voices and for the operatic genre. Recently, Luna Pearl Woolf’s The Limit of the Sun with a libretto by Andrea Stolowitz was given two years of mini workshops that concluded with a semi-staged performance of the completed Act One. Prolific Canadian composer Dean Burry’s Il giudizio di Pigmalione had a day-long libretto workshop so that he could refine ideas that resulted in our producing the world premiere of the complete opera in 2022. One of the Musique 3 Femmes workshop operas, Anna Pidgorna’s and Maria Reva’s Plaything was produced by Opera McGill on the same evening as Dean’s opera conducted by Jennifer Tung and directed by Sheree Spencer.

But the most interesting workshop I’ve ever been involved in happened a few years prior to the pandemic. A young English composer, James Garner, and I entered into a partnership to create an operatic version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. As the librettist, I wanted to make sure that I was adapting Shakespeare’s texts without adding words of my own, but that came with numerous challenges. James had written a number of one acts, (East o’ the Sun, West o’ the Moon which Opera McGill produced in 2018) but had not tackled a full-length two-act opera. I enlisted the help of McGill’s great Shakespeare scholar, Paul Yachnin, who had a brilliant idea: put the creators into a room with twenty-one other people and workshop the libretto and the score, but only one scene.​

Nicole Kenley-Miller and her colleague Rebecca Herrin will be presenting at NOA's 2026 Conference in Boston with a session titled, “Embodied Movement for Opera Singers.” I think this kind of collaboration is one of the things we do best at NOA, so I reached out to learn more.

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AWD: How did you meet your dance colleague, Rebecca Herrin?  How did you begin your collaboration?

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NKM: This is my third year at the University of Oklahoma as the Opera Stage Director. I met Rebecca Herrin my first year when we hired her as choreographer for The Merry Widow, otherwise known as, "that show where opera singers have to dance!” The first thing I noticed when I started at OU was that, like most university opera programs, the curriculum did not contain any movement or dance, and therefore the singers were not only challenged by dance steps and choreography, but they struggled to understand how to move their bodies on stage in general. To that end, we knew that we couldn't just dive into teaching them the waltz. We decided to hold a couple of movement workshops for the cast prior to the start of staging, so that we could assess their inherent level and style of movement and introduce them to some basic concepts about how to move through space, such as passive vs. active physicality. These workshops then progressed to the entire cast learning the waltz and a select group learning a Charleston routine for the opening of Act 3. Realizing that a couple of movement workshops was not the long-term solution to the problem, we have continued our collaboration to explore concepts created by Valerie Hunt in her Movement Behavior Analysis (and later adapted by Sally Fitt and Thomas Haygood) to address the unique needs of opera singers. This will be the topic of our presentation at the conference in Boston.

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AWD: How do you think the dance and movement training has benefited your students?

NKM: The challenge we face when training singers for the stage is that most of them arrive to the opera track via choir, which is very much a stand-and-sing discipline, unless they are involved in show choir or their high school's musical. Add to this the fact that the opera industry has gone through phases throughout its history of more highly valuing the execution of the music over the execution of the drama and movement (thankfully this is changing in recent decades), and you have a perfect storm of singers who arrive to the university with little to no background or resources for how to move on stage. This conversation becomes not just about dancing and choreography, but more importantly about how we are training our singers to move through space, how to shift their weight, and how to inhabit the physicality of the character while singing highly technical music. Also, how are we to accomplish that when singers arrive to our university programs in their late teens and early twenties with such little movement experience?

That said, even though this training arrives late on the scene for most of our students, it is extremely valuable in giving them the tools and confidence they need to realistically portray these characters. For our students, it has taken an area of performance that is often anxiety-inducing or confounding and made it seem more attainable, because it originates from what they already do naturally. It has given them an understanding of how much more energy they need to bring to the stage, and it has improved both their acting and their singing across the board.​