Arts This Week: Victory Hall Opera Documentary
By Ben Larsen
Ben Larsen:
Victory Hall Opera’s new documentary, YAPs, will be screening Saturday, December 6, at the WTJU stage. For Arts This Week, we spoke with Director Miriam Gordon-Stewart.
Miriam Gordon-Stewart:
My name is Miriam Gordon-Stewart, and I’m the director of yaps, which is a documentary film about five young opera singers as they sort of struggle through a year of life at trying to make it into the into the big, wide industry of opera.
Ben Larsen:
How did this film come to be?
Miriam Gordon-Stewart:
So for the past 10 years, I’ve been the artistic director of victory Hall opera here in Charlottesville, and a lot of our projects have been based around trying to investigate the question of what a singer is and what our role is in society, basically, and to sort of let people into the world of opera from the singer’s perspective. So what does it take? What does the training involve? What is the kind of Yeah, the role we play as artists in the in the broader classical landscape? So we had released a couple of other documentary films before, but we had never focused on the very, beginning of the process. So YAPs is a term that is kind of an opera industry term, which refers to young artist programs, and it describes artists who are right at the beginning after graduating conservatory and trying to make it into further training programs or trying to get hired by major companies to sing roles. We thought that a lot of a lot of interesting stuff is happening in the world of opera in that generation. So in Gen Z, a lot of reinvention is happening, and this incoming generation now sees opera very differently to how, for example, my generation did 20 years ago, when I was in their position. So yeah, I think that it’s kind of an exploration of that in general, of Gen Z entering the classical arts and sort of having just as much passion for it as anybody else ever has, but also having to adapt to a shrinking industry in terms of opera and and really wanting to bring more of their identity to the process.
Ben Larsen:
Was there anything about this film that surprised you?
Miriam Gordon-Stewart:
Yeah, I think that a lot of the time that there has been a bit of a myth about both millennials and Gen Z generations, that they’re not willing to work as hard as perhaps Gen X and Boomer generations did, and they’re not willing to make as many sacrifices. I was quite surprised by how wrong that is as a as a myth, and how absolutely passionate this incoming generation is, but how some of those ladders to them succeeding, or the pathways that used to exist don’t anymore. And so there is a lot of sitting around wondering what they can do, whilst being willing to do just about anything to succeed or to get in the door even.
Ben Larsen:
Well, on that topic, can you tell us a little more about those who are involved in this film?
Miriam Gordon-Stewart:
Yeah, we follow five young singers. They’re from all over America. One of them is based here in Charlottesville. His name is Chuanyuan Liu. He’s a counter tenor, which is an unusual voice type in the classical world. He’s a he’s a male artist who sings in a traditionally female register. So he’s got a really interesting story as a Chinese immigrant to America and as a gay artist as well. So we follow him as well as a tenor from Texas, a soprano from Colorado, another soprano from Michigan, and a mezzo soprano from Connecticut, so I did a lot of the filming myself. And I traveled all over America, following them through their audition process, some of the lessons that they were having, some training programs they attended, and their home lives as well. So we looked, we met their parents, and sort of saw where they came from and what led them, in some really kind of unusual settings, to be attracted to opera, not necessarily what you would imagine when you think of an opera singer.
Ben Larsen:
So, you’ve mentioned you have the opera background, and now you’ve mentioned that you’ve done some of the filmmaking. Are you a filmmaker as well?
Miriam Gordon-Stewart:
I am now. I had a big career as an opera singer in Australia and Europe and Asia, and little bit here in America. And when I started victory Hall opera, I stepped a little bit back from performing. I still do perform, but I do more directing now, and creative directing, and so in the filmmaking, part of it came during the pandemic, actually, when we had planned a production of La Traviata and we didn’t want to cancel it. And so we tried to find a way to still give some kind of creative outlet to the five singers who were cast in that original production of La Traviata. And so we decided, how about. We use the soundtrack to that opera. We’ll have them record, under strict conditions, a new soundtrack, and we use that as the sort of the backdrop to a documentary which is about artists questioning their their role and their identity during the pandemic. So that film was it was me making it by necessity, I guess. And I loved doing it as a as a stage director. I think there are a certain set of skills involved in that. But then, once you are directing people to to create, remotely, a documentary, which is also the way we the way we made YAPs, it’s sort of a different time frame of imagining. You’re kind of having to imagine what a future film might look like, but then you get the film, the footage back, and you kind of have to work with that too. So in that way, sort of similar to stage direction, always looking at the artists themselves and what they are bringing to it and trying to adapt according to the way they see the world.
Ben Larsen:
Do you have any future plans for directorial projects?
Miriam Gordon-Stewart:
I would like to do more filmmaking. I would like to I would probably not do it this way again, having explored the remote the remote footage gathering twice now, it is a huge undertaking and is tricky, so I guess I would, I would do more of a traditional style documentary in the future, and just direct it and have the experts make it. I’m definitely interested in doing more stage directing. Yeah.
Ben Larsen:
And what will the event this weekend look like?
Miriam Gordon-Stewart:
So from what I understand, we’re going to gather here at WTJU and screen the film in the venue that we have here. It’ll be just an intimate pre dinner gathering on Saturday night, and afterwards, I’ll be speaking to Nathan Moore about the film and what it took to make it, and a little bit of the backstory. So we’ll have a Q&A for the audience after the film.
Ben Larsen:
The screening and Q&A will take place at the WTJU stage, December 6th at 5pm. More information about the film can be found at victoryhallopera.org. Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance music theater and visual arts programming. Learn more at pvcc.edu
For WTJU I’m Ben Larsen.
