2017 MacArthur Fellow Yuval Sharon and his experimental opera company The Industry represent one of the best-known alternative opera companies of the past ten years. Footnote 4 Alternative opera companies might perform new or canonic works, produce site-specific or digitally mediated productions, and feature the work of established or little-known performers and directors. Footnote 2 Does the use of experimental techniques borrowed from smaller companies disrupt social narratives of opera as an elitist or obsolete genre of performance in the twenty-first century in the United States, as the SFO suggests? Footnote 3 Or do these strategies signal towards rather than fulfill the promise of change?Īrtist-driven, experimental, indie, or guerilla-style opera typically originates from the work of performers and directors who establish small companies with the goal of creating performance opportunities and pushing stylistic boundaries while introducing new audiences to opera. Recent programming interventions draw from performance and marketing techniques from the world of artist-driven experimental opera companies such as Los Angeles’ The Industry, Toronto's Against the Grain, and larger companies like Beth Morrison Projects. Footnote 1 These changes have taken place beyond the walls of the War Memorial Opera house, in nightclubs in the Bay Area as well as in the SFO's new performance space in the nearby Veterans Building. The San Francisco Opera (SFO) is one such case in point. Twenty-first-century North American opera houses have attempted to bring in new audiences to make up for a declining and aging population of subscribers through means both traditional and unorthodox. More broadly, this application of experimental performativity contributes to discourses about Pan-American experimentalism(s) and demonstrates the ways in which a focus on local encounters can yield broad applications for genres and/or scenes beyond opera in the United States. Based on a populist vision of operatic access, the SF Opera Lab re-contextualized rather than eliminated class and intellectual hierarchies. Using interviews with company members and analysis of advertising and reception of the events, I examine the SFO Lab programming as a site of negotiation between operatic convention and experimentation. While scholars have explored the creation and funding of contemporary operatic productions in the United States, little attention has been given to forms of programming beyond the operatic mainstage. Alternative forms of programming, which I categorize as auxiliary programming, have gained traction as a marketing and aesthetic strategy in recent years, and ultimately signal a dramatic shift in approaches to regional opera production in the United States. The San Francisco Opera's SF Lab Initiative (2015–2018) was created with such goals in mind.
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