Unlike our colleagues at the Ballet, we don’t typically see tutus on the opera stage, and so our costume shop had a crash course in tutu-making, leading to one of our assistant cutters, Kristen Eiden, developing this new skill and creating an exquisite tutu for us. The tutu that arrived from Lithuania did not work size-wise and so a new tutu had to be built. An example this year was in our production of Manonin which you may recall a tutu’d ballerina in the gambling scene. New productions yield new challenges and the Opera’s employees rise to those challenges with gusto and enthusiasm. The Opera is a place of continual exploration, learning, research and development. Barcoding the library’s holdings and the new app-based library software. The cataloguing and barcoding of the collection began in 2015 and is still ongoing under the supervision of DeAnna Sherer and Michael Bragg, but the system is already active and revolutionizing the way we work with musical materials in the company. This year we moved to a digitized library management system, allowing company members to browse and request materials right from their desktops. On the fifth floor of the Opera House is our music library with vocal scores, recordings and many other resources available to members of the Company and visiting artists. After six months of preparation and hundreds of hours work, including checking more than 4,000 historic payroll records, the switch was flipped and, thanks to the collective talents of our Finances, IS and HR teams under CFO Michael Simpson, the first payroll run was a complete success! With a large variety of different contracts and work-rules, our payroll runs are multi-layered and fiendishly complex. First we changed our payroll system from a thirteen-year old program to UltiPro, a much more nimble and responsive program better equipped to handle the complexities of our payroll. On the administrative side we saw major upgrades this fall in two support systems. The glorious colors and fabrics of Turandot , Scenic damage to our Turandot production before a major restoration effort. They lovingly researched and recreated the stunning painted drops, giving us a bold and vital new look at this iconic David Hockney production. We are in the process of rehousing our scenery, but the refurbishment of Turandot was a major triumph for the production department, including our scenic facility in Burlingame.
Our productions are currently stored in shipping containers on Treasure Island, and the combination of rust, salt water, and sweating inside the containers has led to major problems in our scenic storage. In April this year, we discovered with horror that our legendary Turandot production had sustained major water damage and had to be drastically remediated and, in part, rebuilt, during the summer. Artists from SFO’s productions of Girls of the Golden West and TurandotĮngage in a talkback with correctional inmates at San Quentin recently. It was a moving experience both for the San Quentin community and the artists, and we hope to build and develop this into a more regular program.Īrtists from SFO’s productions of Girls of the Golden West and Turandot engage in a talkback with correctional inmates at San Quentin recently. The artists then engaged in a talkback session, exploring the impact of opera as a story-telling art-form, and its ability to connect people to their deeper emotions. Recently, a number of mainstage artists took a trip to San Quentin prison to present a concert of arias, ensembles and spirituals, shared with a mesmerized audience of inmates, correctional officers and staff.
This is by no means a comprehensive list, rather a sampling of the diverse activities that make us the company we are. In this last backstage email of 2017, I wanted to share with you a few of the stories you may not have been aware of this year-aspects of our work and art that took place behind the scenes, or that were new ventures for us.
0 kommentar(er)
