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 and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

...and Viewers Like You.

THIS TIME, ON COLORES!

PERFORMING IN THE VERY FIRST OPERA, WORKING WITH IGOR STRAVINSKY AND JOHN CROSBY - REGINA SARFATY RICKLESS SHARES A REMARKABLE STORY OF HER EARLY DAYS AT THE SANTA FE OPERA.

MODERNGRAM GENERATES INSPIRATIONAL STORIES COMBINING DANCE AND FILM.

MURALIST EBONY IMAN DALLAS IMAGINES A WORLD IN WHICH THE 1921 TULSA RACE MASSACRE NEVER HAPPENED.

ILLUMINATING THE NIGHT SKY, "HATCHED: BREAKING THROUGH THE SILENCE" IS A MULTI-SENSORY EXPERIENCE.

IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES!

THE VOICE IS A UNITING FORCE.

>>Regina Sarfaty: How does it feel to be part of an icon?

I'll tell you.

The Santa Fe Opera.

Over 60 years, and I was on the first performance.

When I started here, it had 480 seats.

But it was as grand for us as this is today.

>>Regina Sarfaty: There were only 13 singers.

We each did a part in each opera.

Serious.

Funny.

Humorous.

High.

Low.

It didn't matter.

We were a family.

And the Santa Fe Opera is still a family.

Opening night, Madame Butterfly, 1957, felt otherworldly.

I didn't feel I was on a stage doing an opera.

I felt I was doing what I loved to do and what I was trained to do at The Juilliard.

My teacher always said to me "You know what to do, Regina.

Now go out and do it".

And that was the attitude we all had.

By the third act we knew we had a winner.

The humming chorus of "Butterfly", you could hear a pin drop in the house.

>>Regina Sarfaty: I think the first question you have "Am I willing to be unafraid?

To be another character?

Am I willing to take myself, Regina Sarfaty, and put her aside and become Suzuki, or Baba the Turk, or Dryad?"

Whoever.

You have to be uninhibited.

I had never been outside of New York State before.

And when John Crosby approached me at The Juilliard, he was the piano player for the opera department, and said he was starting an opera company in Santa Fe, I had never done anything professionally before.

Nothing.

And I said, "Regina, you're nuts."

But if he has faith in you, you have to have faith in you.

John, he was unique.

He was quiet but not inside.

He was turbulent inside.

He absolutely loved Richard Strauss.

And we did a Richard Strauss opera the first season, and every season after that for many years.

The first year we did Ariadne.

Now that was a really interesting choice.

Ariadne was gorgeous here, visually.

The breezes just blew our chiffon gowns back and forth.

It was just stunning.

And John, he had so many talents.

He chose these singers in New York, and everyone was a hit.

Just a hit.

How is that possible?

He knew.

He just knew.

It is hard for me to believe that that was 64 years ago that I walked out on the stage and did Suzuki.

Really hard.

Because to me, I remember it as if it were yesterday.

But it wasn't.

It was a long time ago.

And the Santa Fe Opera has developed a great deal since However, there is something to be said for the camaraderie that we had in the first years.

We stayed at the ranch, right here.

We ate together.

We cleaned the pool out together.

John said, "If you want to swim, you have to help clean the pool out."

We said "fine."

So we did.

What did it feel like?

I use the words again.

Otherworldly.

It was as if we were in another world in the southwest of the United States.

We were opening an opera house.

Cuckoo, but not cuckoo.

John Crosby was right.

It was not cuckoo.

It was a very smart decision.

>>Regina Sarfaty: The maestro.

Dapper.

Elegant.

Cordial.

Always polite.

A gentleman.

It was a pleasure working with him.

My second performance was The Rake's Progress.

The Rake's Progress is a deceivingly difficult score.

And my part of Baba the Turk was low, high, medium coloratura.

And I was just graduated.

I said "What do I do?"

Okay, you start from the beginning, note by note by note.

And the fact that the maestro was going to be sitting at every rehearsal made me work even harder, but more diligently.

Every note of the coloratura had to be perfect.

Every note of the high and the low had to be perfect.

I wasn't perfect perfect, but I was almost perfect.

In the score that I have, he wrote "Sarfaty."

He always called me "Sarfaty."

He never called me by my first name.

"Sarfaty."

All three performances were wonderful.

And it stayed with me for 64 years.

Maestro Stravinsky was here for my first Carmen.

And he was sitting in the first row with his beret.

And I finished the Habañera, my first aria.

And I hear, "Olé!"

Mr. Stravinsky shouted it out and I said to myself, "Who else would do that?"

What better experience could anybody have as a young person?

I'm very grateful.

>>Regina Sarfaty: There's something about the human voice that touches people.

Whenever I attend a performance, an operatic performance, I always look around me and I'm always impressed by people's awe of how sounds can come out of two little cords that are here in your throat that can fill a huge opera house.

I've sung for 8 000 people.

The human voice is a uniting feature.

It can bring all cultures together.

A live performance cannot be compared to anything you see on the television side.

Nothing.

It just gets you.

The sound of the voice gets you.

And every voice category is different.

So, my advice is, go to the opera!

DANCING WITH THE DANCER.

So Moderngram is something I started with Shaila Emerson and it is a collaborative group of people and artists that I found and love and I consider family that we do different dance for camera projects.

I met Erica a few years ago.

We just started talking about dance because we both had that connection and then she was like I'd love to do some dance films if you ever would want to.

It completely peaked my interest obviously, but we made our first dance film together, it's called Ravendoe.

It was more of just an idea from what we were both going through at that time.

It was really spur of the moment.

We planned it in a week and we just went out into the woods and dressed up as animals.

It ended up being like super inspirational to continuing doing dance films together.

A dance film is cinematography catered towards choreography or choreography for cinematography.

So you would approach how you would film something differently than you would like a short film or like acting or a narrative because it's movement based.

The videography would be used to help shift what the audience can then be looking at, so it gives the choreographer or the producer more control over what their intention is and what they're trying to communicate.

The camera gets to move with the dancer and in a way get in their face, get in their movement and then you can see more of the details of what's going on.

Things that are smaller that humans can, or the audience can relate to.

At a performance you can only see them so far.

In a dance film you're right there where their breathing or looking at you and you can see the color of their eyes and this way we're able to add music and sound effects and different kinds of shots that are very intimate and it describes dance and story telling in a different way.

My inspiration for anything that I do that's creative comes from a deep seeded desire to unearth things that are stuck inside that I don't know how to process or talk about and then the concept of moving past those things.

What is the strength involved in that challenge that I can find in my body, and in myself.

I mean that's what art is, you express the inexpressible.

We have a lot of oxymoron ideas or conflicting ideas in our dance films.

Visually, I think it comes from the moment, it's very spontaneous and most of our stuff isn't really planned out, so it's just kind of fun to bounce ideas off of one another when we're working through our personal emotional things and just our life and kind of adding that into the dance films.

I think it just helps bring out like raw emotion within the dance film.

I really enjoy leading or guiding another dancer through movement while she or he is being filmed.

And then I get to be the one kind of helping them flow through the movement and helping them find what's honest in their movement and what's beautiful or real.

For Shaila, she has to be very much in tune with how the movers are moving and a lot of the times with some of the locations that we're in they can't stick with the choreography, they have to improvise.

She doesn't know what's coming next.

Being a dancer and shooting dance, it's just like a whole new level.

I take the camera and I dance with the dancer and so it's almost like for the viewer you get to be dancing with the dancer and it's like a whole new emotion you get to experience within the dance film.

I think what I want people to take away from what they watch is that they can relate in some way to what I created or get something out of it, even if my intention is not the same as what they interpret.

It's just a way to connect us all especially when filming things in life can be chaotic and unrelatable.

I love that ability to connect with people through something like that and just share and I think vulnerability is one of the most valuable things as humans as far as connecting each other.

IMAGINING A BETTER WORLD.

My biological father came from, you know, from Somaliland.

And literally like when the civil war broke out, bombs are being dropped on your house by the government.

So it reminded me of what happened in Greenwood.

One minute, everything is fine, and then the next moment it's all gone.

My name's Ebony Iman Dallas, and I'm an artist.

I love to tell stories through my work.

I would definitely say a lot of my choices are influenced by my background.

In 2008, I went to visit my family in Somaliland.

We were getting Henna done and my art just kind of lent itself to, to that.

My art since then has definitely become a lot more free.

Close to a year and a half ago, Tony Brinkley, got in touch with me because he had this idea called Greenwood Imagine Tony, he's a poet -- amazing, phenomenal award-winning poet.

And, um, his grandson, Derek Tinsley is a filmmaker.

And so they were looking for a painter to create a series of murals that would go along with the poem.

And so I just proposed to him that I create the murals solely out of wood.

This is where you have to make sure you don't cut your hand (BUZZ FROM THE SAW) So the very first scene is like the past.

So it's like, let's show what Greenwood was like before the destruction.

So it's this beautiful scene of the little girl with her father walking through town, with an ice cream cone.

The second scene is, was pretty much created after reading through a series of interviews.

But this one specifically talked about, you know, it was a survivor.

I believe she was about five years old when the massacre And she talked about these reoccurring dreams that she And to me it sounded like PTSD.

Like she talked about the smoke and she talked about the smells and she talked about the fire and it was just so vivid, her description, like I immediately was able to create a sketch for it.

(SOUNDS OF FIRE AND GUNFIRE) I guess in some ways I may have went that direction because my father was murdered by police officers.

And so, um, so that, that idea of this father-daughter relationship and loss, like resonated with me.

And then reading these stories about people who lost parents and Greenwood definitely resonated.

The third scene is let's imagine what it could have been like, like what would it be like if, you know, had the massacre never occurred.

There'll be some puzzle pieces missing.

And so then we'll have someone from the audience come up and place it into the piece.

Let's imagine, a what it.

What if, the massacre never happened?

What if Tulsa residents had free reign to flourish into the future, and Greenwood never lost that "yes we can" mindset?

Can you imagine this?

But basically it's like we have the power to recreate, you know, like a new Greenwood.

We just need to believe in it and, and just go for it.

A MULTI-SENSORY EXPERIENCE.

On a very cold January afternoon, a group of women is at work at Boston's Hatch Shell.

In the dead of winter, the 80-year-old Art Deco landmark is, well, a shell of itself.

A far cry from the crowds who flock to the Charles River Esplanade every summer when the amphitheater is home to concerts and, of course, the Boston Pops 4th of July celebration.

But now, for the first time in recent memory, the Hatch Shell will host a winter performance called Hatched-a show of music and illumination.

"It is so exciting to be working here, I think.

It is, um a place that's so special in Boston.

It is beautiful."

Multimedia artist Maria Finkelmeier conceived the show-composing the music and designing the video projections that play nightly in 15 minute intervals.

We met the team as they literally mapped out the projections square by Hatch Shell square.

"When creating the work I really tried to think about the Hatch Shell itself, and think about its 80 year history.

And thinking about a bird's eye view on all of these incredible musicians playing in the shell.

What is it look like to see a violin bow, or a drum, or a marimba?

And I wondered what those shapes would actually look like in the shell.

So I really want you to feel like the shell is making music for us, as opposed to us making music under the shell."

A composer and percussionist who has branched out into visual realms, Finkelmeier wrote the music which her team of musicians recorded earlier this winter.

(SWELL OF VIOLIN) She wanted her composition to capture the sense of breaking through difficult times.

"Really thinking about what does it mean to break through?

What does it mean to like, exude joy?

What is it going to feel like to hug my aunt I haven't seen in 18 months?"

"Upwards of half a million Americans are losing their lives through covid-19, we wanted something that was measured.

Somewhat somber at times, but also celebratory."

Michael Nichols is Executive Director of the Esplanade Association, a non-profit group celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.

It works with the state to care for the park and in recent years has shored up its mission to establish art on The Esplanade-like Hatched.

"We started thinking, "wow, it's this dark expanse in the winter.

There's a real opportunity to bring light, beauty, something of public interest to the shell in the wintertime."

Outside of Hatched, the Esplanade Association's public art program features a series of murals lining the park-moments of joy for many people with barely anywhere else to go during the pandemic lockdown.

"You actually can have this really tranquil experience of walking through the park and experiencing art, you know, as you go along the park.

Hatched can also be enjoyed with social distancing.

Visitors are invited to experience the performance from anywhere in the park by scanning QR codes and listening to its music on their phones.

"I hope that people will pick a date, in the next four weeks and put it on the calendar.

And I hope they will have anticipation.

Like do you remember anticipation?!?

Of going to something?!?

Right?!?

What visitor's won't hear though, is the all-female-identifying team who led this effort.

Creating it in a matter of months, executing it deep into cold winter nights and, as Maria Finkelemeier says, working free of male interference.

In the past, when working with a group of men in-in similar leadership roles, there's a lot of assumptions made about what I do.

(Like what?)

Like.

they would assume that I was kind of in the background, or I, I didn't create the idea or the plan, or it didn't come from my brain, or I didn't figure out how to do it all.

And I think for me, this is this really big emergence - this is a hatching.

This is a, like breaking through something for all of us on the team and we just want to create a moment of joy."

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"UNTIL NEXT WEEK, THANK YOU FOR WATCHING."

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, and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

...and Viewers Like You.

(CLOSED CAPTIONING BY KNME-TV)