On Saturday, November 3 at 7:30 PM, Opera Cabal performs operaSHOP III at the University of Chicago’s Fulton Recital Hall.  Last month, you had a sneak preview of this work in Brooklyn, NY.  Can you tell me a little bit about the concept behind this piece? How has the performance been reworked since its preview?

When I originally commissioned Phyllis Chen and Robert Dietz to develop this new piece, “The Slumber Thief,” one thing that was unclear was whether Phyllis, who is a pianist and composer, or her husband, who is a video and sound designer, would be singing, or whether they would use prerecorded material, etc. As it turns out–spoiler alert–Phyllis does sing in this piece. But the last time I saw them perform it they had started doing things with and to her voice that I had not expected, and that started a whole discussion with our dramaturg, Joseph Cermatori, about the impact of audibility and inaudibility in the stakes of the work itself. “The Slumber Thief” is about sleep and nightmares, and one of the questions we will have to resolve before November 1st is whether Phyllis’s voice and the words she speaks should ever be comprehensible or, as in a dream, should be constantly subjected to various processes of distortion.

When you were first establishing Opera Cabal in Hyde Park in 2006, what were your primary goals?  Have your goals changed at all in recent years?

When I founded Opera Cabal it was a forum for doing the kind of genre-crossing, smart and edgy theater and new music I knew I wanted to be doing, but couldn’t find elsewhere. But as my work at the University of Chicago deepened, my goals with Opera Cabal changed in parallel. Theory and practice is such a central part of what the U of C is. And in the arts generally, there is still a pretty gaping divide between aesthetic theory and practice. Opera Cabal today seeks to narrow that gap. It is a laboratory for putting theory into practice, and especially for realizing opera criticism (which is what I do) in the form of creative practice.

What is the role of your organization, as you see it, in today’s opera world?

Opera is probably the media that most resists experimentation and change. Our goal is to offer up opera that is technologically savvy, artistically cutting-edge and worthy of reflection — we want to produce things you can really sink your teeth into. In order to do this, I go to people who are primarily *not* in the opera world. Right now, for instance, I’m working with a toy piano/video duo that uses tiny pianos, puppets and video projection, and does things like cooking eggs in the theater. I commissioned them to write an opera devoted to the notion of “scale,” and they basically said: “When can we start?” I can’t go to people who already are in the opera world and get them excited about this; I don’t think they would even understand. But I can go to people who do film, and experimental theater, and new music and they immediately say “Yes; this is exactly what I want to spend the next 6 months of my life doing.”

How important is audience feedback to your work?  How do your monthly Salon Series factor into this process?

A huge component of what we do involves the audience. We try as much as possible to program in intimate settings where the audience is close–even uncomfortably close–to the performance. And following performances, we engage dramaturgs to lead discussions with the audience that have historically lasted even longer than the productions themselves. So, in general, we produce about 45 minutes of artistic content and then we talk about it for at least another 45. It’s a little bit like a seminar, and audiences get extremely excited about this. Opera becomes a classroom. They don’t leave feeling confused–or if they do, at least they have a chance to voice their reactions in the company of other audience members. This is something we originally developed at the salons. We had these extremely smart people in the audience, and it turned out they were bursting with incredibly sharp things to say.

What exciting, new, innovative projects can audiences expect to see in the coming months and years from Opera Cabal?  Will any of these upcoming projects involve collaboration with the University of Chicago?  

Right now, there is a very big project in the works that may or may not be built at the University of Chicago, but this is still top secret. In the meantime, we’re developing two separate projects with Princeton composers. In my academic life I’m increasingly focused on opera and dance, so one project is a dance-opera with choreographer Rebecca Lazier and composer Caroline Shaw. The other is a Hecuba opera that is simultaneously an audio recording project; so this is something that engages questions of fidelity, digital reproduction, sampling, and so on. I’m hoping to bring both of these projects to Chicago within the next year to two years, and as much as they want us there, I would love to perform in the Logan Center. We have our Logan Center debut November 2nd in the Performance Penthouse as part of a conference with Robert Bird on scale.

Majel Connery is the co-founder and Executive Director of Opera Cabal, a Chicago-based collective of scholars and artists dedicated to realizing opera criticism in the form of creative practice. She received an A.B. in music composition from Princeton University (magna cum laude, 2001), and an M. A. in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago (2004).

Interview by Julia Tobiska, Performance Program Assistant