Lucky Penny's 48-Hour Opera Project makes the impossible possible at #IndieFest
The upstart opera company’s event brings together artists from different disciplines and cities
Lucky Penny Opera cofounders Sarah Pelzer (above) and Caitlin Fysh.
Lucky Penny Opera and Loose Tea Music Theatre present the 48 Hour Opera Watch Party online and at the Fox Cabaret on November 3 from 5:30 to 7 pm as part of #IndieFest. the 48 Hour Opera Digital Creation Hacks online seminar (open to the public) is October 29 from 2 to 3:30 pm.
ON THE EVENING of October 29, teams of artists from across the country, and in some cases the world, will combine forces to do the impossible: they will not only create a new opera, but rehearse it, perform it, and then film and edit it—all within two (possibly sleepless) days.
Sarah Pelzer, cofounder and co-artistic director of Lucky Penny Opera, says the 48-Hour Opera Project came to her about three years ago when she saw similar speed-creation events happening in other art forms, from playwriting to filmmaking and rock music.
“That’s what excited me most about this project: these opportunities for play and discovery exist much more in other genres—and I think we don’t find the idea that you could put together a play or a full rock band set in a short amount of time as crazy as we find the idea of putting together an opera,” says Pelzer, whose work as an opera director has taken her from the Vancouver Opera to Kelowna Opera to Boston’s New England Conservatory (where we’ve reached her by phone). “But there’s actually no reason for that. It’s the same mechanism—and I think it’s a problem, actually, that we think it’s so impossible.”
Pelzer launched the 48 Hour Opera project about three years ago here, before she and theatre artist Caitlin Fysh founded Lucky Penny Opera in January 2021 and brought the event under its wing.
Drawing on similar reasons to the ones that motivated them to launch their indie-opera company, they wanted to build an event that could bring artists from different disciplines together to expand the definitions of opera.
Presented at re:Naissance Opera's #IndieFest and produced in collaboration with Loose Tea Music Theatre in Toronto, 48 Hour Opera hosts teams that bring together experts in areas spanning puppetry, virtual reality, illustration, poetry, and drag. And, thanks to our now Zoom-connected world, the participants come together from not just around the city, but the country and the world; one prerequisite for this year’s teams was that at least one creator live in a different city. (Pelzer reports almost 100 applications to take part, from as far away as New Zealand, Austria, and England, as well as across Canada and the U.S. In all, there were enough artists to create 19 teams, but Lucky Penny Opera could only pick five.) Some came as pre-made teams, and Pelzer and Fysh played matchmakers to form other groups from the singletons who applied.)
But the other goal, counterintuitively, is to “take the pressure off” of the creation process, according to Pelzer. It’s one thing to bring a grand opera to its full, multifaceted fruition on a formal stage, where the emphasis is on the final performance; it’s quite another to plunge yourself into an event that celebrates the process of creation.
“That was something really important to me in my development: when I was in school for music, I was really frustrated by the lack of opportunities to play—and especially to play with other people,” she relates. “Classical musicians don’t often get the chance to do that, except in rehearsal—and then it’s often very regimented and very hierarchical.”
For all its fun and wild creativity, 48 Hour Opera Project, subtitled the Fernweh edition (fern as in “far” and weh as in “pain”, as in a longing for far away people and places), will have some structure around it. One of the most exciting developments this year is a Talk One: Digital Creation Hacks digital seminar (open to the wider public) where participants can learn fresh ways to express themselves on video.
Then, when they dive into creating an opera later that evening, teams will receive a prompt package. It contains a random sound, a piece of text, and an object. (At the last event, for instance, those were, respectively, a gong, “Avoid providing material for the drama”, and a rainbow; see the demo reel below for an idea of how varied the results were.)
What will the five short operas that come out of the two-day process look like? That’s impossible to predict—and the element of surprise is part of the fun. Audiences will find out at a hybrid live and online event on November 3, with two simultaneous live watch parties happening at the Fox Cabaret in Vancouver and the Bar Cathedral in Toronto, as well as a livestream. Viewers can vote for the Audience Favourite award, for which the winning team receives $500.
And for those audiences, these world premieres are also a chance to see what opera can be beyond tradition. It's opera without limitations—almost. "Our rules are 'Don't say no, say yes' and 'Trust your instincts,'" Pelzer says.
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