Backstage with Matthew:
A Blank Canvas Awaits
I hope that you are enjoying a happy and healthy start to 2025 and that the year ahead will be filled with beautiful experiences. For our friends, colleagues and patrons in Los Angeles, this has sadly been a harrowing start to the year, and we send the collective support of San Francisco Opera to all those at LA Opera and all those whose lives have been upended in Los Angeles over the last two weeks. If you are affected by the fires and looking for resources, or if you are interested in supporting relief efforts focused on cultural workers, OPERA America has compiled a helpful list of resources here. Our prayers are with all those impacted, and with the first responders battling the flames and helping those affected to rebuild their lives.
On February 4 we unveil San Francisco Opera’s 103rd season and I cannot wait to share it with you. Season announcements are very special moments where years of preparation suddenly move from internal planning into a brochure, a website, ticket sales and the creative process of bringing it all to life.
We have already announced that the 2025-26 season will include our next world premiere, The Monkey King by Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang. We will have more information on that on February 4th, including a pre-release of a beautiful aria. We’ve also hinted that we’ll be bringing a new production of Wagner’s Parsifal to life and I’m very excited to share more about the creative team behind that and their vision for what this will be.
These two new productions next season are thrilling creative moments for us all. New productions are expressions of our creative DNA as a company and a community: they speak to our aesthetic, our values, our capabilities, our mark on the world. Over the course of the next six months our scene shop in Burlingame and our costume shop on the War Memorial campus will be vibrant hubs of creative activity as first Parsifal and then The Monkey King move from page to stage.
I thought you might enjoy this photo taken on Monday by our Managing Director: Production, Jen Good, down at our scene shop. You see the vast expanse of a 64-ft wide piece of canvas on our paint floor, being prepared for one of the Parsifal drops. The material here has been hemmed from a 72’ wide piece, and starched before painting begins. A blank canvas is, quite literally being readied!
The blank Canvas of a scenic drop ready to begin the Parsifal construction process. Scenic artist Jennifer Bennes is in the foreground gives a sense of scale.
In the costume shop last weekend, my eyes caught a few early indications of prototypes for the Parsifal costumes and fabrics. We’ll share much more about the designs with you on February 4, but you can see the costume equivalent of the blank canvas here—a natural cotton prototype that allows the team to refine the shape and form of the actual costumes to be built.
One of the prototype costumes for Parsifal
I thought it might be interesting to share where we’ve been and where we’re heading as these two new productions come into reality.
Back in November we had design presentations for both these productions, with the director and designers sharing their concepts, model renderings, costume sketches and plans for the work. These design presentations are ideally codifications of in-depth discussions that have already been happening between designers and company about the aesthetic of the concept and the practicality of the designs. Hopefully we’ve worked out a lot of the thorny questions before we even get to this stage, but there’s still always a great deal that we learn new in these design presentations. They are exciting moments in which you feel the finished project begin to emerge.
From there the set and costume designs move to our production team where they are translated into specific plans, both technical and budgetary. There’s often a certain amount of value engineering that goes on between designer and company as we transform designs into technical drawings ready for the scene shop to build. There’s also clarification about exactly who will be on stage at what point—that informs how many costumes will be needed to built.
Over the course of just the last few weeks we’ve had designers in town for a number of onsite explorations including a prototype of the hanging silks for The Monkey King which we were able to hang on a pipe upstage for a couple of days while the Ballet was preparing the stage for their season, for which we are very grateful to our friends at SFB!
A prototype silk drop for The Monkey King hanging upstage at the start of January.
Both of our costumes designers for the new productions were also in town over the last two weeks: Anita Yavich for The Monkey King and Jessica Jahn for Parsifal. They were working with our Costume Shop Director, Daniele McCartan and her team picking fabric swatches, planning how the more complex costumes will be built (and there are quite a few in each production), discussing questions of construction, technique, timeline, etc. Chorus fittings for both shows will begin in the spring when the Chorus comes back onto contract, and so construction needs to begin soon.
Some of the fabric swatches being considered for The Monkey King
This is a time of exciting preparation for both scenery and costumes as we finalize details, confirm assumptions, explore construction techniques and develop prototypes. It’s always amazing to me how quickly things begin to move from this point. By the time you’re reading this, that blank canvas we saw earlier will likely be well underway as a painted drop. Fabric swatches will have given way to bolts of fabric, sourced, ordered and ready to turn into costumes. The whole company begins to reverberate with the vital energy of makers at work – craftspeople and artisans bringing all their unique wisdom, skills and experience to bear.
I feel extraordinarily proud that we are a city and a region that still has these talents right here as part of our cultural community; that we can take beautiful models and drawings and turn them into theatrical sets and costumes within a 20-mile radius, no matter the complexity, the hurdles, the unique approaches required. It is vitally important that a cultural capital like San Francisco and a great opera company like San Francisco Opera support the full range of artistic, musical, technical, and artisanal disciplines that makes possible great productions. “Made in the Bay Area” is a badge our new productions wear with pride.
They are a part of how we tell the stories of this great part of the world we call home.
I cannot wait to unveil much more about the upcoming season with you on February 4, and to share with you the creative processes that begin with these very early glimpses of what is about to emerge. There are some very exciting things on the horizon!
PS—literally in the process of putting this email together, that blank canvas has begun to come to life! I can’t share what they’re painting – that will be revealed on February 4—but our scenic artists create an outline of the design on paper, which they then perforate around the edges, using a “pounce table” and a “pounce tool”. The next step is to lay the paper on top of the canvas you saw and to “pounce” the lines with fine-ground charcoal powder which transfers the outline of the shapes to the drop, ready to be painted.
Pouncing in action on our ready-to-paint canvas drop of Parsifal. Fine ground charcoal is applied to perforated paper on top of the fabric. The paper is removed and the outline is ready for painting.