Jacobs School of Music alumna Anne Hiatt is the co-founder and general director of the international organization Opera on Tap, which has the mission of bringing opera to new audiences by taking it to places where people least expect. She is the executive producer of the world’s first VR opera, The Parksville Murders, which won ‘Best VR Video’ at the NYC Indie Film Festival in May 2017 and premiered online as featured content on SamsungVR, October 2017. Under Anne’s leadership, Opera on Tap has grown into a large national network of artist-entrepreneurs, performers, creators, supporters, and audiences. It has gained international recognition as an innovative force on the classical music scene with features in such media outlets as The NY Times, NPR All Things Considered, The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, the LA Times, among many others. Read a more complete bio of Anne Hiatt here > She recently took time away from his busy creative life to answer a few questions.
ENJOY WATCHING A VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH ANNE HIATT HERE >>
THE CONVERSATION
What were the origins of Opera on Tap?
Opera on Tap was conceived quite literally on a couple of bar stools in Brooklyn back in 2005. At the time, I was approaching my late twenties and had been spending the last several years freelancing as a singer in NYC – continuing to take voice lessons, running from audition to audition, and generally juggling 3 jobs at once to make it all work. I was growing increasingly disillusioned with my prospects and generally felt deep burnout. One of my 3 jobs included teaching voice lessons from my apartment in Brooklyn. One night, I attended one of my student’s country music shows at Freddy’s Bar and Backroom. I found myself lamenting to the bartender that opera singers had so little opportunity to just let their hair down and sing for the fun of it. It turned out the bartender was also the booker and he offered me an opportunity to put together a ‘diva night’ at the bar. I invited a bunch of performer friends to join me at the bar and we put on our first show in June of that year. It was clear from the start that not only was performing in this casual way a boon for our singers, but also our audiences. Clearly, folks were responding to the intimacy and comfortability we instilled into the performance. Today, these shows continue to flourish. We now have 36 Chapters of Opera on Tap performers and DIY artist entrepreneurs serving up opera to their local communities in alternative spaces to concert halls across the United States, Europe, and soon even in Africa!
From your perspective, how has opera changed so far in the 21st century? What do you think the future of opera is?
Opera on Tap is part of a movement that seeks to redefine the art form to be more inclusive and future-thinking in how it is created and produced. The opera sector has a lot of collective work to do to dismantle practices that have led to perceptions of the art form as being too exclusive and elitist. The most recent NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) People Participating in the Arts survey continues to rank opera as a form that struggles with the least amount of participation of all the performing arts in our country. The work is certainly not done! I believe opera’s future will rely on continued work towards building a more inclusive art form that seeks to build community and truly speaks to today’s audiences.
What is Playground Opera?
From the outset, we have really centered all our programming in community. Playground Opera is a natural extension of that. At its inception, we would send our opera-singing teaching artists into schools for a residency where they would work to transform our students into our production collaborators. At the end of the residency, there was a culminating performance in the schoolyard for all their peers, families, and neighbors.
Our students learned a variety of skill sets that go into the creation, production and performance of an opera. For the performances, students would wear costumes they made, sing a couple of chorus numbers alongside professional singers in the opera’s original language, and dance to a choreographed number. The schoolyard playsets were transformed into dynamic opera sets. We would even bring in a small chamber orchestra of professionals. One of my favorite moments of our early schoolyard performances was when the FedEx delivery man parked his truck and went on to watch the entirety of the performance from the street.
With the pandemic, came a need to pivot our programming onto a digital platform. We took all the same principles of interactivity, hands-on creation, community-building, and inclusion into the digital space. Our program is continuing to expand all over the country due to its scalable nature. We have an incredible education staff that drives the program and continues to bring it into new communities. We are continually developing new curricula to serve a broad range of students and building education into the development of the new operas we champion, develop, and produce. For me, that is the distinct thread that ties all our programming together, even though it is varied and seeks to engage a variety of people at different stages of life.
Opera on Tap is currently collaborating on an opera education project with IU faculty and students. Can you speak a bit about the ongoing Opera Maker Lab project?
I met Professor Adam Maltese (School of Education) at a Computer Science and Maker Education-focused conference last year sponsored by Infosys Foundation USA, one of our shared funding partners. Adam leads the Mill Maker Space in the Department of Education. At Opera on Tap, we have been working on developing robust, scalable and national education programs for K-12 students. Our current flagship education program being Playground Opera. We have had some success pitching foundations – and not necessarily arts-focused ones – with the idea that theatre and opera production can be a wonderful way to engage students with hands-on STEM-focused learning while also building community, creative thinking, and social-emotional learning in a project-based environment. Production work requires a diverse array of skill sets to come together to make something beautiful. Our goal with our programs for this age group is to invite them into the world of opera and ensure they leave with knowledge as to how they might find themselves within that world. Whether they want to be in front of or behind the curtain, in film production, marketing, or otherwise. Professor Kim Carballo (Jacobs School of Music) who works with Reimagining Opera for Kids (ROK) has been such an incredible advisor on the project. Together, we are working on a ‘make your own opera’ program for middle school-aged students and will be piloting the program over the course of 2024 in Bloomington. Our curriculum designer Perri Smith (currently completing her MS in Music Education) is building out a wide-ranging curriculum that covers everything from composition, design, engineering, fabrication, and performance. While Adam, Kim, and I met each other through outside networks, IU is clearly the glue that is allowing us to work together and develop a program that I believe will impact so many students across the country in future.
Which of Opera on Tap’s projects is nearest and dearest to your heart?
I’m not lying when I say that I really love all our projects. I do have a passion for emerging technologies and how they can integrate into our work in the performing arts sector. We actually produced the first cinematic VR opera in 2016. Since then, I have had a major crush on future tech, not to mention the creative technologists and artists I have met over the years that are dreaming up its wild unknown future. I see a world where we can utilize these technologies not only for storytelling purposes but also for educational purposes.
One current passion project is a new opera that Opera on Tap is producing/developing with composer Kamala Sankaram and director Kristin Marting. JOAN OF THE CITY focuses its lens on issues of the unhoused in our country. The opera takes a Joan of Arc archetype and places it on 5 different women who are experiencing homelessness. Through Augmented Reality (AR), audiences are invited into the Joans’ worlds and are able to experience the Joans’ visions as they follow them through city streets and learn more about the systemic issues that are causing such a crisis in our country.
As part of the development of the opera, we partnered with shelters in Omaha and Seattle to present writing workshops for their clients. The text of the opera is written entirely by women who participated in the workshops. They have been paid a fee for their work and are a part of our royalty structure. Once the opera premieres and begins to tour to other locations, the creators have built in interstitial moments in the work which will allow for the insertion of content created by women experiencing homelessness living in the locales where the production is being performed. We are also developing an educational curriculum around the work specifically for middle school to high school-aged students which highlights the importance of civic engagement in modern times. This project to me represents the possibility for opera to emerge as an art form that speaks to audiences of today and educates the public on a variety of topics that are relevant to their lives. Community and innovation can be tied together through a multi-sensory art form like opera. The world is full of possibilities.
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How do you feel your time at IU helped to create or foster the intrepid spirit you have regarding the innovative projects that you have taken on since graduating?
While I was working on my undergraduate degree at IU (BSoF/ Voice and English), I was able to connect with such a wide range of creative people who were working across genres. Some of my closest friends were made during that time, and so many of them are musicians, visual artists and writers that are still working in creative industries across a wide range of styles. As much time as I spent attending classical music concerts, I probably spent equal parts time attending jazz concerts and basement parties with live bands from Bloomington’s incredible indie music scene. The IU and Bloomington community was seminal in forming how I approach my work in opera. It created a microcosm of a world for me to experience a diverse array of artistic practice that left me thinking bigger about the many different directions that artists can take opera. I think I really benefited from attending a big university like IU at that time in my life as opposed to heading right to a conservatory. In addition to all the creative folks I met at IU, I crossed paths with scientists, historians, and computer programmers. Dialoguing across different sectors is key to my work now and that training began at IU.
What advice can you offer to artists of today who are embarking on careers after graduation? Is there anything that you wish someone would have shared with you?
I would say, keep an open mind and an open heart. My career path has taken a lot of weird twists and turns, but I wouldn’t have it any other way at this point in my life. When I left graduate school, I thought I was on a typical young-artist-to-fest-contract-to-singing-on-stages-like-the-Met career path. Who knew that singing in a dive bar in Brooklyn would eventually lead to my having a salaried position at a national organization of which I am a co-founder!
The various people I have met along the way that have contributed to building Opera on Tap into what it is today did not all come from the classical music world. Having many unique perspectives contributing to our growth gives me such hope for the future of this organization and the future of opera.
We are heading into unknown territories as a global community. The world is changing in so many ways. The performing arts must evolve to meet humanity where it is. As a young artist embarking on a career in this new terrain, I think it will be more important than ever to keep your eyes and ears open to innovation and any opportunities to build community through art making. People will always need the arts. I hope that every artist steps into their career with the knowledge that the work they do is important and necessary. Because a lot of people will tell you it’s not. Tying artistic work to the needs of our communities is paramount. As artists we should always endeavor to serve our communities through our work.
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