Welcome to the Madness Screening in Steamboat Springs

For one night only, Welcome to the Madness, the site-specific opera that composer Leanna Kirchoff and I wrote for Opera Steamboat, returns to Colorado on the big screen. Well, a big screen: the aptly named Wild Horse Cinema & Arts, to be exact. Get right up close to our cast, human and equine, during the capture of last summer’s roving world premiere musical experience, this time without heat, rain, or bugs! It’s a faithful representation of the piece that captures the uniqueness of the natural setting as not just our backdrop but as an integral character, and it’s lovely to see some details in the singers’ performances that I had missed due to the ongoing 360-degree activity.

Charlotte Perry’s and Portia Mansfield’s colossal achievement—building this singular environment for artistic experimentation that has lasted over 100 years—may feel counterintuitive in this era of hypervigilance, hyperproductivity, and prioritizing quantity over quality. And though these women were never idle for a moment, they instilled in their students the notion that anything worth doing well takes a lot of time, and that there are no shortcuts or substitutes for dedication. Leanna and I were just musing on the fact that operas take so very long to write only to dissolve into the ether after just a few performances, (usually, unless your name is Bizet or Mozart). My biggest takeaway from studying P-M’s evolution was that Portia and Charlotte insisted on the dignity of art’s ephemerality, demonstrating clearly that crucial difference between ephemeral and disposable. Whatever you expect of art, it’s worth sitting with that idea in an air-conditioned movie theatre for an evening. Leanna and our filmmaker, Austin Asher, will be there to chat about the experience with our audience. We are happy to have another chance to share the beauty of Perry-Mansfield’s history with its neighbors, supporters, and curious passersby this Wednesday evening at 7:00 p.m.