Cal Performances at Home is much more than a series of great streamed performances. Fascinating behind-the-scenes artist interviews. Informative and entertaining public forums. The Cal Performances Reading Room, featuring books with interesting connections to our Fall 2020 programs. For all this and much more, keep checking this page for frequent updates and to journey far, far Beyond the Stage!
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Beyond the Stage
Artists and UC Berkeley Professors Discuss Illuminations: “Fractured History”
Artists and UC Berkeley Professors Discuss Illuminations: “Fractured History”
“History is always fractured. There’s a certain group that’s going to tell the story and, very likely, they’re going to tell their version of the story.”
Produced and directed by Mina Girgis, Cal Performances’ Director of Education, Campus and Community Engagement; Directed and edited by Maruf Noyoft. Full credits below.
Our understanding of history is neither static nor complete; rather, it is dynamic and ever-changing due to the malleability of our collective memory. Examining the evolutions in our historical narratives often entails re-evaluating our collective understanding of what is fact, and finding new sources and voices with the potential to add layers to our understanding. Through this year’s Illuminations theme of “Fractured History,” we aim to explore and expand our understanding of the past. Illuminations performances and public programs in partnership with campus thought leaders will investigate what gets lost in abridging complex events, how to “zoom out” to be more inclusive in historical perspective, and what role the arts might play in restoring valuable nuances in the way we view our past, present and future.
In this video, UC Berkeley professors and artists participating in Cal Performances’ presented season tease big ideas and considerations for engaging with the theme, and share learnings from their own work on the topic.
Learn more about Illuminations: “Fractured History.”
This video features Christine Philliou, PhD, UC Berkeley Professor of History; David Ono, journalist and filmmaker, Story Boldly (Story Boldly’s Defining Courage comes to Zellerbach Hall April 4, 2025); Martha Redbone, singer-songwriter (This Land is Our Land comes to Zellerbach Hall February 28, 2025); Beth Piatote, PhD, UC Berkeley Professor of Comparative Literature, Director of the Berkeley Arts Research Center; Debarati Sanyal, PhD, UC Berkeley Professor of French, Director of the Berkeley Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry; and William Kentridge, stage director, draughtsman, performer and filmmaker (William Kentridge’s The Great Yes, The Great No comes to Zellerbach Hall March 14–16, 2025).
Transcript
Christine Phillou:
History is a study of change over time, study of the past… and that we can tell from histories that are written, we can read much more about the time that the history’s being written than the time that it’s writing about.
David Ono:
History is always fractured. There’s a certain group that’s going to tell the story, and very likely they’re going to tell their version of the story.
Martha Redbone:
A lot of that story has been erased deliberately. As they always say, history is told by the victors.
Beth Piatote:
I think art is what makes it possible to enter into these histories that are so painful or unbearable otherwise.
Debarati Sanyal:
Let’s keep fracturing those histories, but also kind of recognizing in the breakages, all the ways in which histories connect and are entangled and have these long aftermaths.
William Kentridge:
We are on board a ship, the captain Paul Lemaire from Marseille bound for Martinique, June 1941, refugees escaping from Vichy, France. Communists André Breton, Claude Lévi-Strauss the anthropologist, and on board the ship also is the captain who in fact is Karen the Ferryman of the dead, who not only are transporting these people across the Atlantic, but is able to call up historical characters from the past and even some from the future to reflect on the shift between Europe and its colonial past.
Debarati Sanyal:
A figure that I thought was really interesting that Kentridge brings into this imagined exodus from occupied France is Frantz Fanon because this is someone who basically realized as a psycho analyst in colonized Algeria that the colonizers and the colonized both suffering from the violence of colonial occupation and from this position of quasi-statelessness, or exile at the very least, was combating and therefore entangling different histories of occupation and oppression, entangling them in the name of a transnational liberation struggle.
Martha Redbone:
I don’t like the stories of the past. They’re very painful stories, but they’re truth and it’s about the truth that has to come up, that people can talk about. When it comes to the work that I do, it’s not for me. It’s really sharing a little piece of something and the hope that it sparks conversation because that is what has been lacking and albeit painful, or they call it uncomfortable, truths.
Christine Phillou:
There are two different kinds of historical fractures. One is due to the fact that we’ve often had a dominant historical narrative, which leaves out important dimensions and perspectives, so that’s almost an intentional fracture versus the kind of fractures that are due to incomplete knowledge or incomplete evidence about a particular period.
David Ono:
Historically, our country at times has failed, sometimes catastrophically. And how we treated Japanese Americans during World War II was certainly one of those chapters. The beauty of this particular chapter is it does go back 80-something years, but it doesn’t go back too far to where all those people are gone. That’s how we can make up for it. There are still people who lived that era who can correct it, who can help us better understand it today as opposed to how we taught it immediately after in the decades to come. And this is a perfect example of how these guys are considered the greatest fighting unit in American military history, and yet they’re not in our history books. Why is that?
Beth Piatote:
For artists and to be able to enter into the fracture and be able to actually simultaneously heal and make it bigger or make it something else. There’s this transformative possibility of the fracture.
Christine Phillou:
Taking as many different kinds of evidence and perspectives to heal the fracture, right? To include the different versions and to address the power relations that went into making the dominant version, and then these sort of subversive or these competing versions or these new layers of history that were not perceived, let alone valued in the past and trying to arrive at some sort of fair and inclusive story.
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Transfixing Art: Julia Bullock Launches Her Cal Performances Artist Residency
Transfixing Art: Julia Bullock Launches Her Cal Performances Artist Residency
Collaborative Creativity and the Expansion of Harawi
By Thomas May, Cal Performances-commissioned writer, critic, educator, and translator
The first time Julia Bullock heard Harawi, Olivier Messiaen’s song cycle from 1945, she recalls that both the poetry and the music “shook me to a fundamental core … even though I didn’t fully grasp the depths of the content and the references on first listen.”
The internationally acclaimed classical singer collaborated with her colleagues in the American Modern Opera Company (also known as AMOC*, of which she is a founding member) to create a boldly original staged production of Messiaen’s work, which was premiered in the summer of 2022 at the Festival Aix-en-Provence and subsequently toured across Europe.
Cal Performances presents the United States premiere of this production to launch its 2024–25 season of performing arts (September 27, Zellerbach Hall). At the same time, the event inaugurates Julia Bullock’s season-long artist residency at Cal Performances. She will return for a second engagement to perform a very different program when she joins the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, one of the world’s pre-eminent period-instrument ensembles, early in the new year (January 19, 2025, also at Zellerbach Hall). Her presence as artist-in-residence additionally includes interactions with the UC Berkeley campus and broader community during two campus visits. These will involve a series of conversations and public and private programs in conjunction with her performances.
Committed to Musical Meaning
It was more than a decade ago that Bullock first fell in love with Harawi. The work so captivated her that she spent a day immersed in “the poetry and also all of the various recordings that I could find of this 50-minute song cycle that Messiaen wrote for voice and piano,” Bullock says.
Determined to develop a program around Harawi, she envisioned various configurations to bring it to life onstage. It took five years “to find the team and the time to gather the forces together to support this iteration of the piece.” Bullock is especially proud of what she and her AMOC* colleagues—director Zack Winokur, pianist Conor Hanick, and choreographers/dancers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber—have been able to achieve: “The dedication is fierce from everyone involved, and I do feel it radiates off of all aspects of this work.”
The intensity of her response to the potential of Messiaen’s song cycle strikes a familiar note to anyone who has experienced Bullock’s artistry. The expressive warmth and luminosity of her soprano envelope the listener but have an edge: her voice is “shot through with steel,” as Musical America put it when naming Bullock one of its 2021 Artists of the Year. The arresting beauty of her singing would in itself be enough to make her one of the great singers of our time.
Yet this is merely the outer layer of her deeply thoughtful, deeply informed approach to conveying the meaning embodied in a piece of music. Much as Bullock herself was affected by her Messiaen discovery, her ability to forge powerful emotional connections with whatever she chooses to sing in turn makes an indelible impact on her audience.
“In addition to having a beautiful instrument and all of the technical resources that a great singer needs, there are an indescribable magnetism and curiosity to Julia Bullock that transfix everyone who hears her,” says Jeremy Geffen, Executive and Artistic Director of Cal Performances.
Geffen recalls that the first time he heard Bullock sing was when she was still a student at the Juilliard School and had been selected as an alternate for a master class led by Jessye Norman at Carnegie Hall. “Since master class singers never really get to hear each other, Ms. Norman had the unusual idea of asking them all to sing for each other the night before. I heard Julia sing ‘Résurrection’ from Messiaen’s Chants de Terre et de ciel [“Songs of Earth and Heaven”].” What followed was “a moment of deafening silence—that moment where you hear the proverbial pin drop.”
Redefining the Singer’s Role
Over the past decade, Bullock, who was born in 1986 in St. Louis, has not only established herself as a leading performer of her generation but has become widely admired as a thought leader in the field. Her innovative programs, advocacy for historically marginalized voices, engagement with new music, activism, and commitment to making the arts more equitable for all reflect a far more encompassing understanding of what being a 21st-century singer means. For Geffen, “Julia Bullock is a perfect example of what an artist-citizen can look like today.”
In the Bay Area alone, for example, Bullock has been showing the astonishing range of her interests through appearances in multiple venues. She first sang at UC Berkeley in 2016 as a featured performer in the Ojai at Berkeley festival (in Kaijo Saariaho’s La passion de Simone and Josephine Baker: A Portrait, with music by Tyshawn Sorey).
The following year marked Bullock’s debut at San Francisco Opera, where she created the role of Dame Shirley in the world premiere of Girls of the Golden West by John Adams—one of several leading contemporary composers who have been inspired to write for Bullock’s unique combination of vocal and theatrical presence. (She also sings on the work’s debut recording, made with the Los Angeles Philharmonic made with the Los Angeles Philharmonic with Adams conducting, which was released this past spring and selected as an editor’s choice by Gramophone magazine.)
Bullock is also widely in demand in concert halls, as exemplified by her close association with the San Francisco Symphony. She served as a collaborative partner with Esa-Pekka Salonen following her residency there during the 2019–20 season. Bullock has also held residencies with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra and Guildhall School and was even chosen to be artist-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2018-19.
The past season has been replete with fresh career landmarks. Bullock made her Metropolitan Opera debut in a lauded new staging of John Adams’ El Niño directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz and conducted by Marin Alsop. Bullock’s close connection to that work is evident in a related project with which she has toured: El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered, a distilled, chamber orchestra version of the original arranged by her husband, the conductor and pianist Christian Reif.
“Over the course of my life, there have been only a few musicians whose material had me transfixed to such an intense degree after having listened to it for only a few minutes,” Bullock writes in her “note” to Nonesuch’s 2022 edition of the Collected Works of John Adams. “Messiaen’s music certainly did that for me … and after listening to El Niño, I could say the same about John Adams.”
Bullock also made her debut at Barcelona’s fabled Gran Teatre del Liceu in the European premiere of another Adams opera, Antony and Cleopatra, singing the role of the Egyptian queen that was written with her voice in mind. (She had had to withdraw from the world premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2022 while expecting her first child.) Meanwhile, Bullock won the 2024 Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for her solo debut album, Walking in the Dark, made in collaboration with Reif.
A Two-Way Street
“One of the things I especially admire about Julia is her artistic restlessness,” says Geffen. “She has never wanted to simply be plugged into a grid of roles—although, obviously, she can sing the standard repertoire extremely convincingly, and that has its place in her career. For Julia, creation is a two-way street.”
Along with portraying familiar characters by composers like Mozart, Massenet, and Janáček, Bullock shapes lesser-known roles in collaboration with contemporary artists. Sometimes this involves a radical reconsideration of material written centuries ago, as
with her much-noticed interpretation of the title role in Henry Purcell’s 1695 “semi-opera” The Indian Queen. That production, which critiqued issues of colonization in the original, was directed by Peter Sellars, who has been an important mentor for Bullock.
Bullock has also reimagined Handel’s Theodora in a probing, modern-day staging at the Royal Opera House directed by Katie Mitchell. A previous collaboration with Mitchell in 2019, Zauberland (“Magic Land”), was prompted by the plight of Syrian refugees and interwove lieder by Robert Schumann with new songs by the composers Bernard Foccroulle and Martin Crimp to address issues of grief and displacement.
Embodying Duality in Harawi
Messiaen’s Harawi exemplifies the layered approach to existing sources that has become a signature of Bullock’s work. A relatively early piece, Harawi is the last of three song cycles the French composer wrote for voice and piano. The title comes from an ancient Andean tradition—known as yaraví to Spanish speakers and nowadays particularly linked with Peru—that combines Quechua poetry, music, and ritual. Harawi songs typically express the pangs of lost love but can also address other types of sorrow; meditation on death is likewise an important feature.
Messiaen wrote not only the music but his own texts for this cycle of a dozen songs, imbuing each poem with his dreamlike, spiritually tinged brand of Surrealism. He amalgamated traditional harawi imagery of love and death with his interpretation of the European myth of Tristan and Isolde—though these figures make no explicit appearance in the cycle: the Isolde prototype is called Piroutcha, while her lover is never named.
The dramatic soprano Marcelle Bunlet, whose “flexible voice and extended tessitura” Messiaen admired, inspired the extraordinarily difficult vocal part he composed. “I’ve preserved only the idea of a fatal and irresistible love, which, as a rule, leads to death and which, to an extent, invokes death,” Messiaen wrote, “for it is a love that transcends the body, transcends even the limitations of the mind, and grows to a cosmic scale.”
“The piece deals with duality and actually dichotomies in pretty extreme ways,” says Bullock. “So, the love relationship, life and loss; spirituality and sensuality; feeling connected or in communion with oneself and those around, and then dismissed or forgotten; and the embodiment, or—maybe better—the full expansions of being a man and a woman.” Visualizing and making concrete this duality and, with it, the physical, human aspects of Messiaen’s songs became a priority.
For Bullock, this called for a multiplication of performers beyond the original duo specified (singer and pianist) by the composer. “Because the performance arts practice of harawi also incorporates dance, I thought, ‘Okay. Well, what if we added dancers into the mix?’” Thus this production of Harawi evolved into its expanded cast featuring additional members of the company along with Conor Hanick as the pianist. The husband-wife team Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber participate as choreographers/dancers in a staging that matches the music with eloquent movement.
For his vision as director, AMOC* cofounder Zack Winokur suggested a link between Harawi’s mythic, archetypal aspects and Messiaen’s personal experience of loss as his first wife, violinist Claire Delbos, suffered a degenerative mental illness. Regarding the performance originally scheduled for the 2022 Ojai Festival, for which AMOC* served as curator (cancelled at the last minute when Bullock tested positive for COVID), he said: “What is it to maintain connection with someone who is losing their memory and, as they’re moving through time with you, to realize all of the things that you’ve created with them are going away?”
Illuminations: “Fractured History”
Harawi also launches Cal Performances’ new theme for this season’s focus in the ongoing Illuminations series, an initiative intended to grapple with pressing issues of our time through the lens of the performing arts.
The theme, “Fractured History,” is about the dynamic reality of history (in contrast to commonplace perceptions of the past as a static “given”). That dynamic character is inextricably connected to and reflected by how we perceive, examine, and narrate history. “Our understanding of ourselves, the culture in which we live, grows based on new information or influences that come to us,” as Geffen puts it.
With respect to Messiaen’s Harawi, the perspective of “fractured history” means interrogating the relationship between a French composer in mid-20th-century Europe and his allusions to an ancient Andean tradition of singing and folklore.
“In addition to the Andean tradition, you also have to take into account Messiaen’s fascination with the Tristan myth, for example,” says Geffen. “So you’re getting impressions of impressions. What does revisiting a source material at a specific time—nearly 80 years after Harawi was created—reveal to us about the culture in which that reflection was made?” He adds that Harawi was not originally intended to be staged. Thus, with the doubling of singer-pianist through the dancer-couple, “you’re getting a reflection through this staging that is reflective of the piece. So it’s a reflection of a reflection of a reflection.”
For Bullock, the “fractured history” angle is closely related to questions of appropriation, which are “big and important.” Messiaen’s knowledge of the authentic Andean tradition seems to have been limited to a folk song collection published in 1925 by a French ethnomusicologist and her husband. Bullock decided to seek out present-day practitioners of harawi and came across two women who danced and sang traditions that had been passed down. They lived in Germany, where the singer and her family also make their home (in Munich).“We just had a bunch of conversations,” she says. “With fractures in our consciousness, part of the joy—at least I feel as a musician, and I guess an anthropologist in some maybe amateur way—[is that] I’m healing some of those fractures, or at least trying to rebuild some things.”
“I deal with classic art and the classics. All that means really is that we are returning to the material again and again, hoping that it will become more illuminated or we will somehow become more illuminated in the process and learn something. As long as we are responsibly engaging with material—and that means looking at history closely—then the cycle of appropriation and the erasure that sometimes or often accompanies it can be halted and potentially healed.”
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Berkeley Front Row Music & Arts Festival Giveaway
Berkeley Front Row Music & Arts Festival Giveaway
Aug 24, 2024
We’re thrilled to announce a giveaway for 6 pairs of tickets to our 2024–25 season for those of you participating in Berkeley’s Front Row Music & Arts Festival! Our new season includes nearly 80 events ranging everything from cutting-edge dance, including Twyla Tharp Dance, to family-friendly performances like Disney’s Encanto: The Sing-Along Film Concert, to incredible classical music by ensembles such as the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra!
Entries accepted until Aug 24, 2024 at 11:59pm PT.
To enter, please submit your information below. Good luck!
Giveaway Rules
Entries accepted until Aug 24, 2024 at 11:59pm PT. Maximum one (1) entry per person. Winners will be selected randomly and notified by Sept 7, 2024, via the email with which they entered. Winners will have 24 hours after notification to accept their prize, after which time it will be offered to another entrant. Cal Performances staff is not eligible to enter. The winnings of this prize cannot be sold or redeemed for cash.
Explore the 2024–25 Single Tickets Brochure!
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Fun Facts About Our 5 Most Popular Performances
Fun Facts About Our 5 Most Popular Performances
Our Most Anticipated Performances, as Chosen by You!
By Krista Thomas, Cal Performances’ Associate Director of Communications
Tuesday, August 6 marks the day that tickets to all events on our 2024–25 season go on sale individually to the general public. But these won’t be the first tickets sold! Over the past three months, subscription sales have been thriving, and we’ve been crunching the data…
As single ticket on-sale approaches, we know it can be hard to decide which events to prioritize. In this article, we’re sharing a handful of our top-selling events on subscription should you want to take inspiration from your fellow arts lovers on what events are must-sees. Read on to learn fun facts about five of our most popular performances—so far!
Vienna Philharmonic with Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin (March 5–7, 2025)
Our top seller, the Vienna Philharmonic comes to us with star conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin for three days as part of the Maria Manetti Shrem and Elizabeth Segerstrom California Orchestra Residency, and also serves as the centerpiece of our annual gala! Each evening features a distinct program, with pianist Yefim Bronfman joining on March 7. See the full program.
Did you know?
- Nézet-Séguin recently served as actor Bradley Cooper’s conducting coach as Cooper prepared to play music legend Leonard Bernstein in the 2023 film Maestro.
- The orchestra’s three-night run opens with Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551, commonly referred to as Jupiter. The last and longest of Mozart’s symphony compositions, Jupiter is a masterful work that, in its final movement, integrates five different melodies simultaneously.
- The orchestra’s second performance features Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, From the New World. One of the most popular symphonies performed today, this work’s influence has expanded even beyond our own planet: in 1969, it is believed that astronaut Neil Armstrong took a recording of From the New World with him during the first moon landing.
Mummenschanz, 50 Years (October 26–27, 2024)
Famed Swiss mime troupe Mummenschanz returns with a program celebrating the company’s five decades of groundbreaking performance. In a program that is sure to engage the entire family, Mummenschanz resurrects some of its most notable larger-than-life creatures, including Clay Masks, Toilet Paper Faces, and the air-filled Giants (more on these below!). See more on the program.
Did you know?
- Mummenschanz officially formed in 1972 and garnered international attention very quickly. By the end of that decade, they’d had a successful US tour and a multi-year run in Broadway, and were even featured on the popular children’s TV program, The Muppet Show.
- One of the group’s most striking creations, Toilet Paper Faces was debuted as part of the group’s Evolution program in the 1970s. At that time, the piece was actually a spoken sketch, and it wasn’t until later on when Mummenschanz decided to “convert all spoken numbers into mask play” (according to one of their founding members) that the piece transformed into a dramatic love story. (As a bonus fun fact, the group has attested that toilet paper in the US is too delicate to perform this piece, so they have to bring their own toilet paper over from Europe when they perform since it is heavier duty!)
- The air-filled Giants/inflatable faces sketch (as seen in the image above) was first developed with a special material procured in Italy. As the creators were developing the sketch, they noticed how air flow caused the faces to come together and, when the air stopped or changed, break contact with one another, which inspired the emotional milieu that underpins the work.
Dorrance Dance, The Nutcracker Suite (December 14–15, 2024)
Just in time for the holidays, tap dance meets hot jazz rhythms in Dorrance Dance’s explosive production of The Nutcracker Suite, danced to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s inventive reinterpretation of the classic Tchaikovsky score. See more on the program.
Did you know?
- Developed in 1960, The Nutcracker Suite album was conceived by Strayhorn and represented Ellington’s first album that takes up the work of another composer. In 2018, Penguin Random House published a children’s book that tells the story of the music’s creation.
- One of the co-creators of the work, Josette Wiggan, has expressed that the entire production—set design, costumes, and choreography itself—is all designed to “pay homage to the movers and shakers/creators of [jazz in] the early to mid-1900s.”
- The vibrant, eye-catching costumes for The Nutcracker Suite were designed by New York artist Andrew Jordan, who has worked on sculptural costumes for a wide range of clients: from Broadway shows to fashion brands such as Ralph Lauren and Marc Jacobs, and even celebrity commissions for the likes of Madonna and Heidi Klum.
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment with Soprano Julia Bullock (January 19, 2025)
For her second engagement of the season, Cal Performances Artist in Residence Julia Bullock is joined by the famed period-instrument ensemble the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment to perform Baroque classics by Handel, Lully, Vivaldi, and Bach, among many others. See the full program.
Did you know?
- Bullock has described this program as “Baroque greatest hits,” and has shared that, rather than treating these works as “clichés,” she is looking forward to “lay[ing] them out boldly and without apology side by side, [to] let audiences enjoy them.”
- As a period ensemble, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is committed to performing works for modern audiences as closely as possible to how they would have been performed at the time the works were created. While you might expect that this would require the use of some instruments whose names you wouldn’t recognize, you might be surprised to learn how many instruments commonly played today were configured differently during the Baroque era. On their website, the orchestra breaks down a variety of period instruments, including the 19th century horn, Baroque clarinet, and Baroque flute.
- Since its creation, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment has had an expressed focus on “equality and inclusiveness.” The group was founded without a music director or conductor, and instead enforces a structure through which the players themselves get to manage the group.
William Kentridge’s The Great Yes, The Great No (March 14–16, 2025)
Internationally acclaimed for his visual art and theater productions, South African artist William Kentridge returns to campus with his latest creation for the stage, the chamber opera The Great Yes, The Great No. The production reimagines a voyage of WWII refugees with a passenger list of iconic historical figures as a way to discuss complex ideas, including cultural exchange and colonization. See more on the program.
Did you know?
- William Kentridge is known for his talent in a wide range of artistic mediums, including drawings (especially charcoal drawings), projections, and sculpture, as well as theater. In this production, Kentridge’s artwork will be on full display on stage, adding a rich visual landscape to the acting and music-making.
- Choral composer Nhlanhla Mahlangu shared that it was important for Kentridge that each performer sings in their native language, since it is a more direct form of expression. At the time of the world premiere, the production featured a beautiful blend of seven different languages: English; French; and South African Isiswati, Isizulu, Isixhosa, Setswana, and Xitsonga! (Don’t worry, there will be subtitles when needed!)
- Contrary to what you might expect, when developing the opera, Kentridge and his team started with the visual and theatrical components, and then evolved a theme secondarily. In a lecture, Kentridge shared that he knew he wanted to utilize large masks and an all-woman chorus, and he even envisioned the ferryman character (who was an iteration of a previous character from The Head & The Load) before the greater message took shape. Once he had collected some of the key visual and performative elements he knew he wanted a stage for, he and his team asked, with these tools, what story can we effectively tell? It wasn’t until Kentridge came across an academic article about the real life journey that would become the backdrop of the opera that the theme began to reveal itself and was expounded upon.
You can learn more about these performances as well as the many others on our season at our season calendar. Can’t wait for single ticket on-sale on August 6, or already know you want to attend multiple performances? Subscriptions are still on sale!
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Director of Artistic Planning Explains: What Is a Performing Arts Presenter?
Director of Artistic Planning Explains: What Is a Performing Arts Presenter?
Katy Tucker draws on her experience working at an orchestra, as an agent, and now as Director of Artistic Planning at a performing arts presenter to overview these distinct avenues for bringing the arts to life!
Interview of Katy Tucker, Cal Performances’ Director of Artistic Planning, by Krista Thomas, Cal Performances’ Associate Director of Communications
Katy Tucker joined Cal Performances in 2019 and leads the organization’s Artistic Planning team, which (in collaboration with Executive and Artistic Director Jeremy Geffen) manages everything from what goes on the season and when, to what each artist’s contract looks like. A classically trained vocalist, Tucker has served in a variety of roles across the industry. In this Q&A, she draws on her own experience at different types of organizations to explain what a performing arts presenter is, how an organization like Cal Performances hires artists, and the types of choices presenters make/how they work with artists on the type of repertoire/range of styles they can put on stage, among other notable distinctions.
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What is the difference between a performing arts presenter (like Cal Performances) and a resident company (e.g., the Metropolitan Opera, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, San Francisco Symphony)?
The two represent different business models, and a different way of programming. A resident company, such as an orchestra or an opera company or a ballet company, employs not only a core staff of professional administrative employees, but also full-time and part-time artists. So, the number of employees is significantly greater, and payroll constitutes a very large part of their annual budget as a result.
As a performing arts presenter, Cal Performances employs a large number of mostly full-time administrative staff, but we do not employ artists full time. Rather, we have short-term contracts that span one or a few days (ranging from one to at most seven performances in that window) with a greater number of artists throughout our season. The variety of our presentations requires a skilled administrative staff focused on education, production, marketing, fundraising, and other business infrastructure necessary to provide our artists with a fertile creative environment in which to deliver world-class performances for our audiences.
How does this difference in business models impact when an arts organization can schedule and what they can program?
If you take orchestras or opera companies for example, most have contracts with their artists that guarantee employment for a certain number of weeks per season. For a large orchestra like my former employer, that’s a 52-week per year contract. This guarantees a certain number of “services” per week, with services being either rehearsals or performances. So, from a programming perspective, resident companies are looking to satisfy their services per week, which causes most opera companies and particularly orchestras to have a very standard schedule of rehearsal days, performance days, and off days each week. Because we as a presenter do not have these types of parameters within which we must schedule, we have far greater flexibility when it comes to the actual calendaring of performances.
And from a programming standpoint, it opens us up to so many different possibilities. Because an orchestra employs a large number of musicians and focuses on orchestral repertoire, they tend to perform programs that feature the majority of their ensemble; it often does not make economic sense to program for a smaller number of musicians. Since we do not have a resident company, we may employ any combination of artists we desire while keeping an eye on finding the right mix of large- and smaller-scale projects.
How does the audience experience differ when regularly attending a repertory company versus a presenter?
Making some generalizations here, if you’re buying a subscription to a residency company, you will mostly see the same performers on stage and/or a similar style of performance. For example, with an orchestra, you’d see the same orchestra week after week, and while the soloists and conductor and the repertoire will change, it will all be within a defined spectrum. With theater, while there will be new productions, you know you’re always going to see straight plays or musicals when going to the same company. This is a great way to deepen your relationship with certain artists as well as to dive deeply into a particular style of performance and all the nuance that comes with it.
The excitement of Cal Performances and other presenters is that, on any given season, you could come a handful of times and experience something incredibly different with each visit. You can truly get a little bit of everything. For example, you can attend an intimate recital and have a really personal and contemplative experience with a single artist; and then the next evening you can see an internationally renowned ballet company and have 50 dancers on stage and as many musicians in the pit, and it’s just spectacle and unbelievable raw talent and discipline. I think one of Cal Performances’ greatest strengths is our commitment to quality, so even if you aren’t entirely certain what it is you’re going to see, you can be assured it has been selected and brought to our stages because it represents excellence, and the very best of what we can put on the stage at that time.
While this question is about audience experience, I do think it’s interesting to briefly talk about how the creative experience differs for the artists, because that can shape your appreciation for what you see on stage. With repertory companies, particularly in dance and theater, those performers may be putting on the same show for 10, 15, 20 performances, and it’s a particular skill set to be able to keep a character fresh and vital during that time—to deliver something night after night that is cohesive and within the general expectation of the production, and yet still find ways to grow the character, to respond to feedback and make new choices and inflections as the run progresses. This process is very different than that of a touring musician, for example, who is in a different hall, a different city, dealing with a different set of energies to adjust to day over day. Variability is built into that performance style, and so it leans more heavily on one’s adaptability to respond to a greater spectrum of variables.
With each artist/company having a different agent and different space and scheduling needs, how do you fit all the pieces together to start building a season at Cal Performances?
On the whole, I’d say that the cycle is as follows for us: when we are two to three seasons out, there are some long-term partners and major artistic investments we know will be on the season in question, but most is still to be determined. It’s around this time that we invest time into talking with agents and listening to artists and others in the industry about what programs might be available during that time frame. We compile all this information and it leaves us with a large pool of projects we could potentially fit together into a season, and then we consider things like the artistic balance of each combination, what our Illuminations theme will be that year, what budget we have to allocate. We also consider what types of performances were on the seasons before and might be on the seasons after so we can represent a wider range of genres across multiple seasons. It’s not generally until fall the season before that the budgeting has been done and enough artists have signed on that I feel much more sure of the general shape of the season, and then it goes from a theoretical plan to something that has to be put into action.
In terms of when each genre of performance is scheduled, every season at Cal Performances is unique. That said, there are a handful of artists, companies, and organizations who we have annual or biannual relationships with, and those traditions provide a great place to start—they lend a certain contour to the season before we fully dive into programming.
In terms of scheduling, typically we start with orchestras and dance companies, often a number of seasons in advance. These performances tend to have a large impact on our budget and require a lot of space and time for both the performance and days of rehearsals. As mentioned previously, orchestras in particular have a lot of structure in their scheduling, so they tend to plan their travel with a lot of lead time. With dance companies, a company is more likely to visit if we can route a west coast tour together with other presenters, so we do the work of coordinating with other presenting colleagues to see if we can collectively entice the dance groups with a rough outline of a tour.
Theater and interdisciplinary projects come a bit later. They seem like they would have a long throw in programming, but because they are often either incredibly ambitious new creations or a reimagining of a work, there tends to be a lot of iteration on their end, especially when it is a premiere. This means that we have a better chance of securing a solid event description and date as well as an understanding of spatial/logistic needs as we get closer to the relevant season. With theater in particular, it can be challenging to find the right kind of performance for Cal Performances because we aren’t built to create a huge infrastructure that would stand for 10 or 20 performances of a piece, which is what most theater companies are used to, so it takes a lot of communication with agents and artists to figure out whether or not the project is a good fit.
Then once we have the more serious artistic pieces determined, we try to add in some more lighthearted entertaining performances to provide a balance. We also schedule our recital series much later in the game. Thankfully, Jeremy Geffen’s intimate knowledge of classical music and his relationship with classical musicians makes the recital series pretty easy to plan, and it just becomes a matter of juggling individual people’s availability, making sure we don’t have the exact same repertoire or style of performance many weekends in a row, etc.
What are the specific things that challenge you and those that excite you in programming in a presenter environment?
The two are the same for me—the specific challenges are the things that I enjoy. The entire process is very complicated, because it’s portfolio management on so many x and y axes that all have to come together at once—the size of the venue, the abilities of the venue you have at your disposal, when the artists are available… Sometimes there are projects we can’t live without, but all the other presenters in our area who want to book it and make up the tour can only schedule around a time that is really challenging for us, and so we have to find ways to make that work. Perhaps the hardest thing for me is accepting when a plan isn’t perfect, but we still need to move forward because it is so important to us to make a commitment to that particular artist, creator, or production.
The fun of programming at Cal Performances is that we have a portfolio of venues that can do nearly anything, and so you have the freedom to do the best of whatever is out there. Many presenter colleagues of mine don’t have that flexibility in their programming—they may have to rent a theater for a specific project, which can be costly, or they may only have the option to use a venue during specific dates. The fact that we can present such an incredible range of performances 365 days a year is really amazing and makes my job that much more exciting.
What is the unique benefit of having a performing arts presenter on the UC Berkeley campus?
The unique benefit of having a presenter in any town is that that presenter is bringing a curatorial perspective on international artists to your city, and bringing along with it a variety of perspectives, traditions, and disciplines to enrich the cultural life of anyone who experiences those artists. In terms of why this is incredible for us in particular, the population of Berkeley is not that large, and so it’s hard to imagine that a city of this size could support a presenter at Cal Performances’ level without the infrastructure of UC Berkeley, without the energy of UC Berkeley, and without the public focus on UC Berkeley that can direct attention to what we are doing.
I grew up in a relatively small town, population of about 30,000, and I had to drive nearly two hours to see anything even close to the level of artistry that Cal Performances is presenting. And that’s life in most places. Having a major university in your town makes it possible for you to have a science museum for kids, fun sports teams to go see on weekends, presenting organizations… It brings an infrastructure and vitality to a city that a small town without a university just cannot support.
There’s also no denying that the curiosity and accumulated energy that result from a large group of people coming together to learn collectively is absolute rocket fuel on the fire of creativity, and it’s wonderful.
Now that we’ve provided an explanation of how all these facets of the performing arts work objectively, could you describe how they have played a role in your own journey working in the performing arts?
I grew up singing and went to NYU to continue my studies in the performing arts, but I had already decided before I enrolled that I didn’t want to pursue a career as a performer. As I was looking for my place in the performing arts, I took a role in the public relations department at the New York Philharmonic, which is where I met Jeremy Geffen, who was a (very young) VP of Artistic Planning at the time. After I had been around the orchestra for a bit, I knew I had an interest in the programming side of things and asked Jeremy if I could be his intern. I began an internship in artistic programming at age 19, which turned into a full-time job after I graduated.
I loved working for an orchestra because—this sounds like something that would be easy to take for granted, but I never did—I had a speaker in my office and I could turn it on and hear the New York Philharmonic rehearsing or performing onstage in Avery Fisher Hall [now David Geffen Hall—no relation to Jeremy Geffen] while I was sitting there doing my emails and writing my contracts, and there was just this immediacy of music-making that is really unbelievable. Just four stories down from me while I was twiddling away at my paperwork , there was an incredibly talented group of people performing at an intensely high level. Jeremy always encouraged me to go down and watch rehearsals, which was really interesting because there were a number of conductors who would come through, each with different styles and interpretations, and layered on top of that you have orchestra members navigating their own way of playing their part or their own interpretation on the music.
So, I loved working at the New York Phil, but after a few years, I realized that I never got to hear any other ensembles perform because I was always in Avery Fisher Hall, and I wanted to branch out. There were two women who represented composers whom I had worked with because the New York Phil had been commissioners on projects they were representing. I was really fascinated by what they did, and through a series of conversations with them, they offered me a job at their publishing firm where I was able to represent artistic creators. In many ways, it was kind of the exact opposite of my job at the Phil: I had no band, I wasn’t connected to any performing arts organization; instead I was connected to composers, I was learning about compositional language and perspectives, and the history that each of those composers carried with them. That role scratched the itch I had to see a range of musicians. I ended up traveling to see orchestras, operas, and chamber music all over the US and Europe. I heard so much new music and I really worked on my listening skills in that job more than anything else, and my ability to think critically about what I had just heard aside from “that was really lovely.”
I did that job for a long time and loved it, although I did get a little burnt out on the travel eventually. When I moved to California, I ventured into this new role at Cal Performances and it turned out, unbeknownst to me, that a presenting organization actually marries these two things that I loved so perfectly: there’s music and art on the stage all the time, and I get to see all kinds of different art. It’s truly the best of the best of both worlds. And from a programming perspective, the sky is the limit, and from an audience perspective, the sky is the limit. I never get bored of what happens at Cal Performances because it’s never the same.
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Quiz: Name That Tune!
Quiz: Name That Tune!
From classical compositions to spirituals, to jazz and even Disney hits, our upcoming 2024–25 season is filled with music of every genre, style, and expression! Do you have a keen ear and eclectic taste? Take the quiz to hear 10 musical samples from across our season and see if you can identify the titles of each song/composition!
Make sure to keep track of your answers so you can score yourself at the end, at which point you’ll also have the opportunity to learn more about each piece. Best of luck!