Cerise Lim Jacobs
interviewed by Elena Araoz
Elena Araoz: Since the Covid pandemic shut down gatherings, White Snake Projects has already produced a virtual new music concert “Sing Out Strong: DeColonized Voices,” and now you are in pre-production for a 60-minute virtual world-premiere opera Alice in the Pandemic. What are your guiding principles for making these two productions distinctly live performance?
Cerise Lim Jacobs: While theaters and opera houses are dark, I’m grateful that the performing arts are not “dark” as arts organizations turn to digital platforms to share music and opera. As much as I love viewing the world’s greatest opera productions online, I miss, very much, the feeling that opera and theater are shared activities. I miss the fellowship of the audience, our collective exhalations, and the magic of live performance, its risks, its flaws, its glitches.
I have tried to recreate the feeling of being in a theater or concert hall by focusing on the audience experience. In the “old” days, a producer focused on what’s on stage, on creating high production values, soaring artistry etc. It most opera, the audience experience was what they heard and saw coming from the stage. It’s different now, when the “stage” is your computer or TV screen. We have to relearn live performance, and focus on the audience as a critical element in our production values. The questions I ask myself are: How do I fully engage my audience when their dishwasher is running and the kids are arguing? How do I make them feel they’re in a shared experience with others? How do I recreate the fellowship of the audience, something audiences yearn for at the deepest level, maybe without even knowing it?
These questions inform how I produce music and opera in the age of pandemic. For our first live concert, “Sing Out Strong: DeColonized Voices,” the White Snake team debated the pros and cons of streaming on robust systems made for performance, like YouTube or Facebook Live. We would get better sound and video quality on these platforms. I finally opted to sacrifice the better sound/video quality for audience engagement, choosing Zoom, a videoconferencing platform not created for performance, to host our concert. What Zoom provided was the ability for our artists and audience to see each other, creating the illusion of being in the same room. After each song, we unmuted the audience so they could clap and cheer. The digital distance among the audience was bridged by those audience sounds and by an active chat stream where people commented in real time on the experience they were having. The clapping was important for me as it echoed the nightly clapping in some cities for our essential workers. The feedback we received after the performance validated this choice. Our audience loved the engagement with others and the shared experience.
EA: Do you imagine your virtual productions may interest and draw an audience different than your opera house audience?
CLJ: I think we have a good chance of getting a different audience from the usual opera audience. Access is a problem with opera: high ticket prices, venues perceived to be “elitist”, singing in foreign languages, predominantly white and Eurocentric stories and singers, outdated, sometimes downright misogynistic and racist plots, etc. White Snake Projects’ virtual productions overcome many of these barriers: Virtual ticket prices are lower, cyberspace is a great leveler, diverse casts singing in English, and socially relevant stories will speak to those who may never want to enter an opera house. We also have a chance of attracting a national audience as music lovers hunger for live performance and the internet is accessible from your living room couch.
EA: Will producing virtual productions change how you make live opera when we are able to gather in a theatre again?
CLJ: Yes, indeed it will. We’ve always invested in cutting edge technology (e.g., live facial motion capture, CG animations, etc) by building relationships with area colleges, like Becker College, Rhode Island School of Design, and Lesley Art+Design. Without these partners, we would not be able to afford to experiment and incorporate new technology into our productions. This investment has enabled us to pivot to produce on digital platforms once theaters closed. We’ve assembled a super team in audio, projections, CGI, digital networking – everything we need to produce high quality work virtually. Going forward, we hope to include one virtual performance a season, even after we’re allowed back in the theater.
EA: You used Zoom Video Webinar to stage “Sing Out Strong: DeColonized Voices” and also live-streamed it on Facebook. What platforms and tools are you using in the opera?
CLJ: Our tech team is assessing all the platforms currently available as source/production, streaming and ticketing platforms. We’re looking for a production platform that can support the sophisticated video cuts, audio streams and live facial motion capture that are built into the show. In addition to established platforms, we’re also looking at a specially modified version of Zoom to control camera cuts and integrate with the media server pipeline.
EA: Live music has been a huge challenge for virtual performance. How are you meeting that challenge?
CLJ: From the beginning, we understood that lag or latency is a huge challenge for live performance on a digital platform. Lag requires that any audio streams originate from a single source thus precluding simultaneous performance by multiple instrumentalists or singers. That’s why there’s so much prerecording in “live performance.” We’ve invested in solving this problem, and I’m proud to report that our audio engineer has solved latency, at least for 3-4 musicians, who are now able to perform synchronously from remote locations.
EA: How did you find the right collaborators with the advanced technical expertise required for this opera? What behind the scenes staff positions are necessary for such a production?
CLJ: I have been scouring the internet for technical collaborators. Theater is much more advanced than opera in using innovative technology. So much of my research on new technology is by following what’s happening in theater. As soon as I see a technique that I may want to use in our productions, I reach out to the technologist, and if there’s a good fit, I hire them. Producing virtually has given an outsized role to the tech team. Without a crack team, it’s simply not possible to produce at the level I want to. The technologists we need are experts in building audio, video, projection, and CG systems, even to the point of creating a solution where none existed before.
EA: White Snake Projects is an activist arts organization, and Alice in the Pandemic features a nurse, an essential worker, and speaks directly to the time. Can you let us know about what inspired the story?
CLJ: I’ve been so moved by the sacrifice and heroism of our essential workers, from our supermarket workers, delivery people, my postman, to our medical personnel, and those who work to keep our hospitals clean and open. It was natural, then to write about what was consuming us all – the pandemic. I wanted to explore the stress of losing our daily anchors, the elasticity of time, the feelings of dislocation, depression and alienation, and the fear of losing loved ones. When death is a topic, I always go back to the most significant deaths I’ve experienced – my husband, Charles’, and my parents’. Charles’ death taught me what loss is; my parents’ deaths what regret is. I’ve always had a troubled relationship with my father and mother, and it’s no different in death. As a writer, I’m trying to explore these unresolved feelings. And of course, I’m reliving the joy of being able to spend one precious month with Charles before his death, knowing that that may be all the time left to us, and the devastation that he died without me by his side.
EA: Is there anything else you would like us to know?
CLJ: Composer Jorge Sosa and I created this opera in two months. It must be a record! I wrote the first working draft of the libretto in a week before handing it over to Jorge. We’ve revised it almost every other day as he composed. He was a wild man for several weeks, getting up at 4am every morning to write before he had to look after his li’l guy and do other work. It takes nerves of steel to believe that we can write an original opera in two months. It speaks to the trust between Jorge and me. We wrote I Am A Dreamer Who No Longer Dreams, An Immigrant Story, which premiered in Fall 2019, in one year, and we thought that was fast! As a commissioner of new opera, I want to destroy the “preciousness” associated with opera, the belief that it's super special, super hard and that therefore, only a select few can write it. That belief is a vestige of opera’s Eurocentrism and colonialism. It erects unnecessary barriers. It drives up the price of creating new opera, and increases the risks of creation and production. I want to show that it’s possible to create new opera of the highest production values, on new and old platforms, without angst I invite everyone to try.
