A daring new opera commissioning model is being piloted at Opera Theatre St. Louis over the next three years, one that puts local community curators at the helm of its artistic decision making.
It was in January, as the Omicron variant surged across the country, that the opera theatre first brought the New Works Collective, comprising 10 local producing artists, academics, activists and writers, together online.
Their charge? To build an equitable commissioning process that accounted for disparities in representation at the level of musical composition and narrative.