For 17 years I’ve been documenting the work of San Diego Opera with the San Diego Opera Spotlight series, so the recent announcement of the intent to close SDO at the end of the 2014 season, following Massanet’s Don Quixote, is a blow. The surprise announcement unleashed a storm of coverage and commentary in the traditional and social media, and while writing this blog I’m wondering what, if anything, I can contribute. I don’t have the wit for stirring aphorisms or clever analogies suitable to this fraught occasion, but I can offer some personal reflections on what may prove to be the final Spotlight episode.
Michelangelo believed that the statue already lay within the block of stone, and his task was simply to liberate it. In a similar fashion I believe that the finished program lies within the mass of raw footage, and if I pay attention it will reveal its desired shape. I also hold that all art, whether individual or collaborative, is a process, and that Spotlight exists to document the process of creating opera. That’s an accurate statement as far as it goes, but it’s woefully incomplete: The administrators, production staff, volunteers, stagehands, costumers, make-up artists, choreographers, musicians, stage directors, and of course, the performers who have paraded across the screen for the past 17 years have always been the program’s true focus and its reason for being. It’s those people – usually inspiring, often delightfully quirky, sometimes exasperating, occasionally exhausted, but always committed and thoroughly professional – who animate the words and music and propel the Spotlight series. They embody their art form, and I am their humble chronicler.
When constructing something as potentially complex as a television series, a format is a useful structural tool, and a necessary one when time is very short (the Spotlight programs are largely edited in two days). After watching the Spotlight: Don Quixote a friend commented that she noticed a departure in this episode; less intercutting and rehearsal footage, longer scenes of performance, and more emphasis on the interview subjects. Editing is as much intuitive as rational, and I can’t always explain my decisions, but I felt a different approach was needed: something less frantic, less technical, perhaps a bit more contemplative? I was responding to a singular set of circumstances and following the dictates of the material, and in some ways the result surprised me as much as anyone.
During her interview, Stage Director Keturah Stickann asserted that the news about the closure “changes everything, and it changes nothing.” A concerted effort is underway to save San Diego Opera, and as the company’s fate hangs in the balance, so too the future of San Diego Opera Spotlight (and its companion series, San Diego OperaTalk) is uncertain.
Another friend (yes, it seems that all of my viewers are friends) remarked that the show had an “elegiac air.” I appreciated the sentiment, but I hope that when we look back at San Diego Opera Spotlight: Don Quixote it will serve, not as an elegy, but as a reverie and a prologue.
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written by Arts & Humanities Producer John Menier
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