Arts Learning

We have defined our community as including creators, performers, and audience, with a common interest in innovative high-quality music-theater experiences. For the Composer-Librettist Studio, the primary community served includes writers, composers, and performers. Although the selection process is rigorous and participants must have demonstrable skills in writing or composition, no experience in creating for music-theater is necessary. Indeed, part of the Studio’s success in the past has been to introduce the artform to artists who would otherwise not consider it a viable outlet for theatrical or musical expression. The Studio is designed to include both emerging and established artists, who tend to interact with each other with gusto: the emerging artists learn from the established artists, and the established artists gain access to “beginner’s mind”. We cast a wide net across the Twin Cities’ arts community, and since we are especially interested in nurturing artists who may not think of themselves as traditional writers or composers, we contact a wide variety of performing arts organizations for suggestions for possible participants. In this case, we successfully reached our target community. We had 5 established artists, and 10 emerging artists; 2 artists of color, 5 female artists, and 1 transgender artist. Our selection process is rigorous, as the evaluation panel consists of previous participants who know the program, and the two directors. We were very pleased with the mix of participants. Five writers, five composers, and five performers learned the basics of collaborative techniques and music-theater principles. The group created 25 short operatic/music-theater pieces; all 25 pieces were performed for the general public, and in addition, 14 pieces were selected by the group for our Rough Cuts program.