The Hop is back with (some indoor!) summer programming.

And Dartmouth Opera Lab presents The Medium on YouTube

The Hopkins Center for the Arts is back, with summer plans that include some indoor performances. Promising a more detailed announcement of its summer programming on June 1, Director Mary Lou Aleskie wrote in a widely-circulated email:

We will lean into the abundant beauty of the outdoors with dance and music set in the natural landscapes we love. We will share artistic explorations and works in progress in small-scale and amply distanced indoor events. And we will team up with our vital cultural partners to bring the arts out beyond the campus to parks and studios around the Upper Valley. 

The Hop is not alone. As reported on May 19 in BroadwayWorld.com, 45 New Hampshire performing arts companies and venues held a press conference to announce that they will start to schedule indoor events throughout the state. The article quoted Nicki Clarke of Concord’s Capitol Center for the Arts, Beth Falconer of 3S ArtSpace in Portsmouth, and the Upper Valley’s own Maria Laskaris of Opera North about the financial and other difficulties experienced by performing art venues during the past year.

Are we finished with Zoom and virtual performances? Not quite and maybe not ever. On Monday, May 24, 2021, at 8:00 pm EST, the Hopkins Center will launch The Medium, an opera noir performed by Dartmouth students with professional input via Dartmouth’s Opera Lab, a collaborative incubator program of the Hop and Dartmouth College’s Department of Music. It is the Opera Lab’s first full production and will be available for viewing on the Hop’s YouTube channel for a period of one year. Click here for more information.

The 59-minute performance in English by the fabled American-Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti is the culmination of a year-long effort by 11 students led by visiting artists Mezzo Soprano Ana Mora of the New England Conservatory, and Soprano Isabelle Brick, ’20, a recent Dartmouth and Opera Lab Graduate . . .

Opera Star Erma Mellinger prepared the singers via Zoom calls as they entered the worlds of opera, noir and vocal magic. The vocal track, a pristine piano score by [Filippo] Ciabatti, was recorded in the darkened space of Dartmouth’s acoustically superb Faulkner and Spaulding auditoriums. Director Peter M. Webster’s creatively ingenious direction saw identical set-elements mailed to students in all locations in an effort to create a cohesive environment. (from Hopkins Center’s press release).

A personal note: Approximately 15 months ago, I had the unenviable task of reporting (not to mention keeping up with) the closing of beloved Upper Valley theatres, galleries, performance venues, and restaurants. Today’s task is now the opposite, and joyous. It is a pleasure to bring news of a reopening cultural scene that feels if not entirely post-Covid, headed in that direction. Keep an eye on Artful as, once again, I try to keep up.

(Photo of the Hopkins Center, with work of artist Ellsworth Kelly, via WikiCommons)

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Welcome! You’re reading Artful, a blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley, and I hope you’ll subscribe and then share this with your friends and on your social media. 

And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.