A 10-minute opera hits a rolling boil right before the timer goes off. “We believe in pressure; it does something to creativity,” says Tomer Zvulun, regarding the company’s second annual 96-Hour Opera Project. “The enemy of art is unlimited resources and time,” he says.
Zvulun is executive producer of The 96-Hour Opera Project and its documentary series, as well as general and artistic director of The Atlanta Opera.
Credit: Courtesy of Atlanta Opera
Credit: Courtesy of Atlanta Opera
“We also find that people begin thinking faster when there’s a time limit involved,” he points out. “[It] lets us get to know people as human beings — we find out how they collaborate as teams and how they respond to other artists, singers, musicians and the public.”
The competition, which takes place in early June, results in a showcase of 10-minute operas created by six teams of composers and librettists who have four days to stage completely new works. The subject of their miniature operas must center around true stories provided by Atlanta-area story-partner organizations. For 2023, that partner is the Atlanta History Center.
“We want stories that will reflect Atlanta, its rich diversity, the people who live here and also its history,” Zvulun notes.
Felipe Barral is filmmaker and director of Spotlight Media, Atlanta Opera’s film studio responsible for creating The 96-Hour Opera Project’s documentary series. The series will be streamed, and Barral says competition partnerships — with groups such as the We Love Buford Highway nonprofit organization, which is focused on preserving the area’s multicultural identity — help fund filmmaking efforts.
Credit: Courtesy of Atlanta Opera
Credit: Courtesy of Atlanta Opera
“It takes months of work before we come to the crunch time of the competition,” Barral says. He adds that the goal is to make the documentary process compelling for audiences and give as much rich backstory to the competitors as possible.
“The composer-librettist teams we choose for the competition really get a chance to open up, and we get to explore the human story, not just opera,” he says.
The series also takes viewers through a look back at the previous year’s winners, who are now in the process of composing full-length operas to be commissioned by Atlanta Opera. All the way around, the element of film adds an especially compelling aspect to each year’s competition.
“People respond differently to the framework of being filmed,” Zvulun says.
Iranian-Canadian composer Saman Shahi can speak to the experience firsthand. The Toronto native took part in the first 96-Hour Opera Project this past June.
“I was paired with a librettist based in Minneapolis [Isabella Dawis] last year,” Shahi says. “We met by phone before we met in Atlanta in June 2022 for the competition.”
Even though they didn’t take home the top prize, Shahi and Dawis were finalists, receiving a $1,000 honorarium each, and became good friends.
“We have a good working relationship, and I’m still working with her today on other projects,” Shahi says.
Shahi graduated from the composition program at the University of Toronto in 2012 and now works as a conductor and composer with the Canadian Opera Company. He describes a favorable artistic experience in 2022′s 96-Hour Opera Project. “It really helps when you get a chance to work on a piece of music with a creative partner like Isabella. To bounce ideas off each other. To show her my musical score . . . her notes came to such an informed place. Then we had a couple of days to sit with the musicians and singers in a room and change things.”
He adds that both The 96-Hour Opera Project and the Juno Awards in 2022 — Canada’s version of the Grammys — were early pinnacles of his career, at a time young artists often need reassurance and recognition.
“It’s always important for up-and-coming artists to be instilled with the idea that we are good, and that if given the opportunity, we can create good art,” he says. “Because of the struggles of being an artist, it’s very meaningful when opportunities come that let us freely create and showcase our creative potential.”
The winners of the 2022 competition — composer Marcus Norris and librettist Adamma Ebo (a married couple, in an interesting twist, who received the $10,000 cash prize) — were announced in June 2022 at an awards ceremony at the Ray Charles Arts Center at Morehouse College. Their winning work, “Go On With That Wind,” used dark humor to imagine the reaction of a Morehouse Glee Club singer invited to sing at the 1939 premiere of “Gone With the Wind.” The documentary of the 2022 competition aired on Georgia Public Television in July.
Zvulun and Barral say the competition itself and its documentary series will only improve this year.
“For its first year, we did the competition as we do all our innovations, in a boot-strapping way,” Zvulun says. “This year, we’ve assigned a music director, a director of marketing and other key roles, and we’ve hired a new works coordinator who will allow us to professionalize the competition even more.”
For the 2023 documentary series, the production team will approach the process of telling the story quite differently.
“The work of filming in four days was insane,” Barral says. “We’re trying to make it easier this year, bringing in more points of view, approaching it from a different angle to give ourselves time to bring in new elements and going for the big, overarching themes about the performance.”
For both Barral and Zvulun, 2023 will be about showing viewers that opera is a living, breathing art form — not simply one from the time of Mozart, Puccini and Wagner.
“Contemporary opera is for people with very diverse backgrounds, like us, from all over the world,” Zvulun says. “And we’re showing the audience and the public that the composers and librettists are just like them — every race, gender and economic background. And the stories they tell are specifically about diversity.”
The deadline to apply to compete in the Atlanta Opera’s 2023 96-Hour Opera Project is Feb. 1.
MEET OUR PARTNER
ArtsATL (www.artsatl.org), is a nonprofit organization that plays a critical role in educating and informing audiences about metro Atlanta’s arts and culture. Founded in 2009, ArtsATL’s goal is to help build a sustainable arts community contributing to the economic and cultural health of the city.
If you have any questions about this partnership or others, please contact Senior Manager of Partnerships Nicole Williams at nicole.williams@ajc.com.
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