Funding for "From Page to Stage: The Lord of Cries" series provided by the Bank of Albuquerque.

Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Foundation New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund at the Albuquerque Community Foundation New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs with supplemental funding by the New Mexico CARES Act and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

and Viewers Like You.

THIS TIME, ON COLORES!

IN THE FIRST OF OUR FROM PAGE-TO-STAGE SERIES...

THE SANTA FE OPERA IS RETURNING TO THE STAGE AFTER NEARLY TWO YEARS.

GENERAL DIRECTOR ROBERT K. MEYA SHARES THE CHALLENGES OF PRODUCING A WORLD PREMIERE OPERA IN THE TIME OF COVID-19.

IN A HOMAGE TO HER MOTHER, MICKALENE THOMAS' EXHIBITION "BETTER NIGHTS" WAS INSPIRED BY A SINGLE PHOTOGRAPH.

PAINTING HELPED VETERAN RUSSELL NELSON THROUGH HARDSHIP AND PUT HIM "BACK ON TRACK."

IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES!

PRODUCING A WORLD PREMIERE OPERA DURING A PANDEMIC.

>>>Megan Kamerick: Thank you so much for joining us, Robert.

>>>Robert K. Meya: Thank you for having me.

I think it's a pleasure to be here.

>>>Kamerick: After almost two years you are reopening.

We want to talk about the challenges you face to get to this point.

You had to cancel your sixty-fourth season.

It was the first summer in the company's history without How difficult was that for you?

>>Meya: It was clearly the most difficult thing that I've ever uh had to face in my professional life and I think the same could be said for all of our staff members it was truly devastating, and I think at first it all felt surreal.

None of us really knew what was happening and so it was taking it day by day by day.

I'm thinking back now to sort of mid-March of 2020 and by the time we got to mid-April it became pretty clear that the likelihood of having a season as much as we didn't want to believe it was was very very very low and so by the first week of May we made the decision to announce the cancellation of the season and I think the only thing that made it easier was that it was inevitable, there was really no other way and perhaps also that we knew we were going through this together with just about everybody else in the world, at the same time.

>>Kamerick: What was the financial impact and how did you deal with that?

>>Meya: Well, it was devastating.

Our annual operating budget would have been last year probably in the neighborhood of twenty-five or twenty-six million dollars and when we closed the year at the end of September, our fiscal year we came in at about fifteen million, so we saw a reduction in our operating expenses as well as our ticket revenue of about ten million dollars.

We had sold about half of our ticket inventory by that time, so out of the ten million dollars in ticket sales we would of sold, we had sold five.

>>Kamerick: Mhmm.

>>Meya: And we launched a campaign to ask our ticket buyers to consider donating those tickets back to us or taking a credit for this year and we were very fortunate about two in a half million dollars came back to us in the form of either donations or credits for future years, so we refunded about half of the tickets that had been purchased.

That was a huge help and then as you know the the federal government stepped in pretty quickly with the PPP Program which we applied for right away and were approved pretty quickly for.

For the first PPP loan which we did receive we got about two million dollars and that really helped us not only to retain the vast majority of our employees but also to provide some compensation for the seasonal employees who were just about to start arriving on campus our employee base goes from a year round of about seventy to eighty in the summers we have about seven hundred to eight hundred employees on campus in order to produce our seasons.

>>Kamerick: How did you stay engaged with your audiences during this time?

>>Meya: Our PR department Media and PR department and and others on staff came up with a really fabulous idea, it was called "Songs from the Santa Fe Opera" and it was meant to take place and it did on the opening night of each of the performances, so all five operas received a special episode there was a host for each program, there was musical performance and sometimes an interview as well as some wonderful new footage of the theatre and the grounds that people had never seen before and it was such a successful initiative that people want us to do it again or to do other forms of that.

Our normal audience base in the course of a regular season is about eighty thousand individuals and over the course of last summer with the "Songs from the Santa Fe Opera" we had over a hundred thousand viewers.

So, just goes to show you can find ways to reach audiences and build them in spite of having to cancel live performances.

>>Kamerick: How are you fostering trust with your staff and the performers in the audience?

What steps have you taken?

>>Meya: We made sure that we got the resources together, the financial resources and the human resources to really focus in on how to reopen safely and that has been our mantra.

We hired an individual who is solely dedicated to covid safety and compliance, full-time individual who oversaw the whole program.

We implemented a rigorous and comprehensive testing program which is ongoing today, where all employees are separated into three categories and are tested either three times, twice, or once weekly in spite of a ninety plus percent vaccination rate among our employees.

We continue to do the testing.

We have some pretty stringent safety measures in place, hand sanitizing stations throughout, masks need to be worn on campus, with regard to the audience, we've made some significant investments in the theatre.

We've retrofitted about a hundred restrooms with touchless faucets and other facilities.

We've invested in air filtration systems for all small, enclosed spaces, elevators, you name it.

We measure the CO2 turnover rate in every space and determine exactly how many individuals can be in which space and how much time in-between the use of those spaces whether it just needs to be empty in order to air it out.

We've invested in a ticketless entry system where you basically get your ticket on your mobile phone, or you could print it at home everything will be scanned using a barcode scanner upon entry at the theatre, so it's to minimize any interaction with staff.

So really, we've we've put together about a two million dollar reopening budget just in terms of covid compliance and safety and it has been our absolute number one priority and will continue to be.

>>Kamerick: You are having a world premiere, "Lord of Cries" on July seventeenth so given all that, what can the audience expect?

>>Meya:: We will be doing some social distancing even in, you know in in spite of the fact that we could seat the theatre at a hundred percent, we're going to keep one seat empty between groups we really feel it's important because we're not requiring proof of vaccination and we really feel that it's important to protect those who are unvaccinated for whatever reason that they're unvaccinated we would like all of our audience members to observe the mask requirement in the theatre throughout the performance but there will also be some interesting adaptations on the stage and that is inevitable in order to keep our singers, and our musicians, and our actors all safe and so that is the surprise I'm not going to give away too much but there will be some interesting twists and adaptations that are required in some instances because of the union regulations in some instances because of our own preference to do things as safely as possible.

>>Kamerick: You will also for the first time be doing Tell me about that.

>>Meya: Yes indeed, indeed.

So that was another, if you will, innovation that came out of the very likely prospect as it seemed to us this spring that we would only be able to seat in the neighborhood of twenty-five or thirty percent of our theatre, that was the expectation only about four or five months ago due to the social distancing requirements, so we felt it was really important to continue serve our audience and to do it in a safe way and so we made some investments in the audio visual capture technology, we've installed cameras throughout the theatre uh and we've rented two large LED walls, that about three hundred square feet each which will be installed in the lower parking lot at the Santa Fe Opera with beautiful views of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

It's kind of like a drive-in movie theater style experience and as you know we are famous for our tailgating picnics; people love to come a few hours before performances.

They bring their candelabras and their finest linens and chairs and beautiful picnic spreads.

So, we're encouraging everybody to do that.

And they'll be able to tune in to their FM radios in order to get the audio feed.

>>Kamerick:: After several years as director of external affairs you moved into the role of general director in 2018 and you had really just one season before the pandemic hit.

What did you learn over this last year?

>>Meya: Oh there were so so many lessons learned this last year, I think we touched a little bit on the reality of sort of underinvestment in certain areas, another area that I think has really come to light is just investing in people, investing in human resources, really making sure that people are appreciated and making sure that the staff has the resources that it needs to do their jobs well and also to have a good work-life balance, I think this has been such an extraordinarily stressful time for everyone.

We're trying as best as we can to provide extra resources to our staff.

Mental health resources, for example.

It's an absolute top priority for me and for my colleagues who work in management at the opera.

>>Kamerick: You've touched on this but were there innovations that you created in response to the pandemic that will help the opera, as it continues into the future?

>>Meya: The learning curve was remarkably a short one.

You know mother is an uh- >>Kamerick: Necessity.

>>Meya: Necessity!

Is another invention and so I think we've all just gotten a lot more adept utilizing technology, particularly for communication and interaction and I think that means you know which is a positive, less getting on airplanes for people.

>>Kamerick: What would you do differently?

What lessons did you take away from the year?

>>Meya: Well, how much time do you have?

I think that once we get through this season, I think we'll have more room for retrospect.

I think we're still learning how to do things differently in the everyday, in real time.

We are having to adapt and be adaptable and flexible at every twist and turn of this journey I look forward to that day when I can sort of sit back and sort of reminisce over the last sixteen, you know or eighteen months, when we get to that point and to really understand what could have been done better, what we did right, what we did wrong, what are the lessons going forward?

But right now, I feel like we're still in the trenches.

>>Kamerick: What are you most looking forward to with the new >>Meya: Well!

>>Kamerick:: Given all that's happened.

>>Meya: I'm looking forward to all of it, but of course you know the world premiere of "The Lord of Cries," I mean we have a tremendous track record of doing new works at the Santa Fe Opera.

We've done, this will be our seventeenth world premiere and world premieres are so interesting because the audience just doesn't know what to expect, none of us do.

I mean we've seen the score; we've done some readings, we've done some demo recordings but truly it is a new experience for all of us and so we're in that shared place together this year we're so excited John Corigliano has written the opera, Mark Adamo has written the libretto and it features one of the most famous countertenors in the world today, Anthony Roth Costanzo and it's based loosely on Bram Stoker's "Dracula" and "The Bacchae" of Euripides it's got a wonderful concept of a production by James Darrah, it will feature some really interesting innovations in terms of projection.

>>Kamerick: Hm.

>>Meya: That is the one to keep your eye on and the kind of experience you will not get anywhere else.

>>Kamerick: Robert thank you so much for talking with us about this and good luck on the new season.

>>Meya: Well, thank you so much for having me!

It's always a pleasure to see you and to be here and look forward to welcoming you to the opera.

AN IMMERSIVE MEMORY.

Are you in the 80's, are you in the 70's or is this fantasy or is it both?

Mickalene Thomas was inspired by one single Polaroid that she found that belonged to her mother.

And the Polaroid referenced parties that she would have in the late 70's and beginning of the 80s it was almost like a timestamp.

She was looking at the 70's and 80's style, but also looking at a very specific history that belonged to the artist.

Better Nights very directly refers to her mother and memories of her mother in a very personal way.

Her mother was doing the parties to raise money for sickle cell anemia.

It's this metaphor of a community coming together for a good cause and I think that really the, the exhibition is an homage to her mother and how that happened and now Mickalene is bringing together the community for a good cause as well.

I'm Silvia Karman Cubiñá, I'm executive director and chief curator of The Bass.

I like to say that better nights really is like walking into one of Mickalene Thomas' paintings.

The Bass is recently looking for immersive experiences and artists that are willing to work with the public and bring them into their works of art and sort of make it whole that way.

Mickalene Thomas, when she presented this to me, she said it's a social space.

It's a space that not only other artists show in, it's a space where I want the public to come in and interact and share moments and sort of activate the space.

Better Nights kind of opens up to us with this collage, which is called Jet Blue Number 13, but it picks up sort of her very characteristic, um, way of creating collages and also paintings.

But even Better Nights as you can see, the wallpaper seems to sort of pick itself off the wall and continue on to the work of art.

But also you can see sort of wooden areas that I see sort of in there.

And it also picks up the floor.

So with all this patterns and you can see, Mickalene Thomas' very characteristic women of color.

So black women in her work and posing sort of like I am beautiful and I am bold and here I am and all those wonderful qualities.

Then you walk into the gallery where she's invited all her friends, most of these works - and we realized it as we were installing - are figurative works.

So a lot of them are portraits or self portraits of people and many of them people of color.

That's something that is very, very present in her work.

So this is almost like a 3D rendition of a painting with the portraits, with the textures and with the, the different spaces.

The video selection room is also many different works of art.

The bar area with the six different Mickalene Thomas works of art, it functions as a whole, but it also functions in different little parts.

It's very multidisciplinary.

Not only did she invite artists to participate, she also invited musicians and performers to be part of this whole adventure.

Interactive art.

It is wonderful once it's being done, but it presents lots of challenges for museums.

We are museum professionals and we're trained to receive objects and take care of them and almost put them on a shelf or on a pedestal literally.

And bringing in interactive art, you have to accept a public...which you don't know if they're going to sit on the furniture stand, stand on a furniture.

You really don't know what is going to happen.

And that is a little bit of the beauty and the challenge of it.

So all through our planning, this project, we kept saying, okay, this is an art exhibition.

We have to do condition reports on the works of art and put them on the wall.

Oh, but wait, this is also a bar.

So people are going to be dancing on the dance floor and they're going to get scratched up, but we want it to get scratched up.

So it's a little bit of a tug of war and it really puts museums at a tension point, good tension point where you're, you're always examining, okay, why do we exist?

Do we exist for the objects?

Yes, but we also exist for the guests.

And how do we balance that out?

The beauty of interactive work is that you get a different work of art every time you open your door.

THE WORLD GIVES, YOU GIVE BACK.

I take life one day at a time.

I learned that the hard way, and never take for granted what's given to you.

Always be grateful, and humble about it, and make the most of what you do get, and work with it, and make it your own.

When I do wake up in the morning, and I look around, I am just astonished of where I was, where I am now, and as I said, just to be grateful for what I have, and the opportunities that's coming my way, it's overwhelming sometimes.

I just lay there in bed sometimes and wow.

I really had no direction.

I went to the Army.

I started talking to the recruiter there, and I went ahead and they talked me into doing the Chemical Corps, and they told me that all I'd be doing is just showing people how to wear their gas masks, and work in a company level, and have my own office, whatnot, and just train people in chemical warfare.

So I was like, oh cool.

I ended up in a really bad situation.

I went to Europe after schooling, and I ended up it's kind of classified, but it was not what they told me it was gonna be.

I spent three years in the military, mostly in Europe and Germany, and when my time was up, I just went ahead and got out.

(CARS PASSING BY) the transition from military to civilian life, it was kind of hard.

I had to go back home to mom and dad's for a while.

I took mediocre jobs here and there, and I started drinking heavy.

It's more or less a chore, you know, to where I wouldn't even get drunk anymore.

For the most part, the happy go lucky drunk, you know you have your faculties about you, but it got to the point where I would drink, and I would black out.

Then I finally realized, hey look, this is starting to be a problem.

As older as I got, I drank more.

Then a few times, it did become a problem.

So that's when I found myself homeless.

That's the worst feeling in the world.

To end up with the clothes on your back and a little duffle bag, that's it, what the hell am I gonna do?

I was staying at the Goodwill out in the Tri-County area, Springfield.

I was drinking there and the director, Lee, he pretty much put his foot down.

He was like, "Look, Russ, you're a nice guy and everything, but you're headed in the wrong direction, again.

We can see it.

I'm gonna call somebody and have you go to this place I know", he was an alumni, he went there.

I said, "Okay, that's fine."

That's when Joseph House came into play.

The Joseph House, the staff, the counselors, everyone there really and truly wanna help you.

I got to the Joseph House and started going to the painting classes with Sarah, the art therapist there, where I actually started sitting down and got warmed up to painting again.

I try to make my art, my painting my own.

It's my style.

I got it down now to a science where I can do a painting in one day, no problem.

It's just the knowing.

Also, it's a natural gift.

Art, for me, is basically my life.

It is.

To me, I believe this with all my heart, that it's what I'm supposed to do.

Being able to do what I do, and having other people enjoy what I do, that's ...

I don't want to make it sound like it's self-serving, but in a way it is.

In my own mind, in the dark recesses of my studio, I'm happy.

The world gives, you give back.

Not only in what you do in life, but you personally as a person.

You have to be able to love people ... First, you go to love yourself, but you have to give back to humanity and this world, be fully whole, and to be kind.

I'm fortunate enough my art and my art therapy helped me.

It got me back on track, and got me to where I'm going now, but you have to find what you're looking for.

You can't find it in a bottle.

You can't find it in a needle, in a crack pipe, whatever.

That's not you.

That's just an outside influence that's holding you back.

If you care enough about yourself, you will not have an outside force dictating how you live.

You just can't do it.

In order to be a contributing factor in society.

Nowadays, it's sink or swim.

The choice is up to you, but you have to make that choice.

TO VIEW THIS AND OTHER COLORES PROGRAMS GO TO: New Mexico PBS dot org and look for COLORES under What We Do and Local Productions.

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"UNTIL NEXT WEEK, THANK YOU FOR WATCHING."

Funding for "From Page to Stage: The Lord of Cries" series provided by the Bank of Albuquerque.

Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Foundation... New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund at the Albuquerque Community Foundation New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs with supplemental funding by the New Mexico CARES Act and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

and Viewers Like You (CLOSED CAPTIONING BY KNME-TV)