July 23, 2009 | Read Time: 4 minutes
When the curtain rises on the Seattle Opera’s production of the Ring Cycle next month, Cassidy Quinn Brettler will have a slightly different perspective than other audience members — one that she gained some 10 feet off the ground.
The 19-year-old college student is the host of a video and blogging project called Confessions of a First-Time Operagoer, and this summer, Ms. Brettler has had a hands-on introduction to what goes into staging Richard Wagner’s masterworks, a series of four operas based on German and Norse mythology.
The first opera opens with the three Rhinemaidens swimming at the bottom of the river. To simulate swimming, the singers are suspended and flown across the stage in harnesses. So, on Ms. Brettler’s first visit to the opera company, the crew put her up in a harness to give her a sense of what the performers experience.
“The harness has two little, tiny hooks on each side of your hips, and that is what is holding your entire body weight, so I was a little nervous,” she says. “But once I was up in the air, they taught me how to do flips, and eventually I didn’t want to come back down.”
Confessions of a First-Time Operagoer is a chance for the Seattle Opera to learn more about how to use online social networks and to present itself from the perspective of a young person just getting acquainted with the art form, says Kelly Tweeddale, the organization’s executive director.
Ms. Brettler was one of 49 hopefuls who submitted videos saying why they should be the host. From that pool, the opera selected five finalists, and then left the ultimate decision to an online poll that drew more than 6,500 votes.
The project includes blog and Twitter postings and will culminate in a reality-style video that will be released in September.
In her weekly video shoots, Ms. Brettler has interviewed singers, visited with the prop master, tried on one of the Valkyries’ costumes, and even run the pyrotechnics system. The company has also set up a “confession booth” where Ms. Brettler records her impressions after each opera adventure.
The opera is excited about the project, but Ms. Tweeddale admits that the organization’s decision to do it was not made without some trepidation. Letting someone else tell the story, she says, “with all of the foibles and warts,” isn’t easy.
“As organizations we’ve all been taught to control our messaging and control the focus of what we put out there,” says Ms. Tweeddale. But to reach young people, she says, a new, more authentic kind of communication is necessary. “They are used to being marketed to and advertised to, and they just ignore those messages, ‘Of course you’re going say, It’s going to be the greatest thing.’”
In November, the Seattle Opera won a four-year, $750,000 grant from the Wallace Foundation, in New York, to explore how to use technology to build its ties to audience members and to attract new ones.
“We have always been a leader in what we do on stage with technology,” says Ms. Tweeddale. “So we asked ourselves, Why aren’t we using it in how we interface with our audiences?”
This year’s efforts, including Confessions, focus on storytelling. Other projects will include an online forum to let operagoers — especially those who have traveled to Seattle from other states and countries to see the Ring cycle — talk to one another.
Later, the organization will look at ways that technology can be used to put performances in nontraditional spaces and to encourage dialogue about the issues raised by a new opera it has commissioned about the Vietnam War.
People in the world of opera like to refer to it as the first multimedia art form, bringing together music, theater, and dance, says Ms. Tweeddale.
“For a lot of the new audiences that are used to having a lot of stimulation, opera makes a lot of sense,” she says. “But we haven’t been first in line to really take that and bring it to younger audiences.”
Ms. Brettler agrees. Opera, she says, isn’t something that she and other people her age have really been exposed to, but she hopes that Confessions of a First-Time Operagoer will help spread the word.
“I hope that young people will see my videos and see the blogs that I post and learn about it,” she says. “Even if they don’t decide that they love opera, too, then they’ll at least know about it.”
