Jennifer Williams / Director

“It’s great to reach so many people and audiences are starting to come back to the theatres. Many companies are reorienting themselves and thinking about the future of opera, so it’s really important to meet the audience at their venues and truly involve them in the performance. It’s really nice to make my location-specific productions and now with a traveling installation. They are very connected in my head. As a director, I am not very attracted to traditional scenographic performances. I don’t like sets and I am a true interdisciplinary artist and inspired by inclusive experiences where I embrace the unique topography and architecture of a space. I believe it’s important the audience gets its own role in the performance and is not just an anonymous group of spectators. I think audiences like unique experiences.

... In the trio, the conflict must first be resolved before love wins. Hopefully, I will also give the audience the idea that you first have to overcome obstacles in order to find hope. Probably years ago, with all that has happened in the world, I would have seen this scene differently, but now I believe it is very important that we, as artists, show the way to hope, to optimism, for the public. We need to see it as a social project where we start a new chapter together. A new way of looking at love, at hope, concepts that are really very important for a movement for new social justice. That’s the beauty of opera and theatre. We don’t have to solve it in the theatre, but we can talk about it further.”

“It hardly represents the potential that stage director Jennifer Williams sees for ditching the damsel in distress act and tapping into these female characters’ inner bad asses with a fresh approach, all the while staying true to the context of the story. Williams has become regarded for bringing a contemporary feminist flair to both new and traditional operatic repertoire.”

“Critically-acclaimed director Jennifer Williams (Washington National Opera, Aspen Music Festival, Pittsburgh Opera) will direct this exciting new production. ‘My team and I are building the world of P.T. Barnum and Jenny Lind that brings immersive theater to the next level,’ says Williams. ‘We are reimagining every aspect of the audience’s experience, from the moment they approach the theater.... Barnum’s world was a sensory overload, and the production reimagines how opera and theater can engage the senses.’”

“Even when the story and music are new, audiences often bring certain expectations and associations with opera more generally – and a world premiere can be an opportunity to upend those expectations. The power of new work is in its immediacy, and in directing a world premiere I want to find ways to harness that immediacy so that it resonates at every level of the performance. This often means looking to alternative modes of storytelling to find the expressive vocabulary that best serves the story. Immersive theater, site-specific performance, video design, Viewpoints, and circus are all techniques I have used in my past work. While the performance history of a new work begins with its premiere, a new work is still part of the fabric of performance history more broadly and allows both artists and audiences to enter an ongoing conversation about music theater’s history and to draw connections between different musical and dramatic traditions.”

“Though the operas reflect different historical moments and geographies,” adds director Jennifer Williams, “the themes of the fragility of life and the resilience of love tie them together. The stories are photonegatives of each other: Venus and Adonis reveals life to be a fragile artifice, and Savitri reveals death to be an illusion.” Williams plans to evoke these themes in an immersive production. Venus and Adonis will be performed as “modern-day court entertainment, where we see all the mechanics of theater, through a Baroque-meets-MTV lens.” Savitri poses some unique challenges in that Holst created his own adaptation of the episode from the Mahabharata. “It’s a very problematic approach to storytelling — which means we need to be thoughtful about how we engage with the adaptation and bring the story to life onstage. I want to make this story inclusive.”

“In terms of bringing in new audiences, it’s critical now to shift the conversation away from making opera accessible towards making opera inclusive. Making an opera production “accessible” implies that new audience members lack the ability to grasp the story without a director simplifying it for them, and this is the very attitude that pushes potential audience members away. To my mind, an inclusive production is one that reflects and engages with the diverse perspectives present in our world. Such as better representation in casting and storytelling as well as meaningful engagement with global politics and cultural conversations. I want every person in the audience to feel connected with the characters and see a piece of themselves in the story being told. A director’s job is to distill drama to its most dynamic conflict, put the story in conversation with our world and leave the audience asking questions they were not asking before. That is the transformative power of opera: the possible encounters the impossible, challenging our assumptions about what our reality could be like. That is the gateway to change – empathy and imagination.”

“I am a storyteller who puts opera in conversation with our contemporary world. When I am preparing a new production, I begin with the questions: why this story; why now? My concept focuses in on a central conflict that resonates with our world today – abuses of power, gender politics, class conflict, for example. These conflicts are very much at the center of both new works and the standard repertoire; to my mind, it is a director’s job to illuminate them and start a conversation about them. In addition to that, what makes a story compelling is empathy. For a moment, an audience can experience the world through another’s eyes and experience emotions different from their own. Opera offers a uniquely intense experience of empathy because it allows an audience to connect with characters on many levels – experiencing the music, text and visual world all at once gives us access to many layers of meaning as well as an unparalleled depth of emotional experience. And in our modern world, empathy is becoming an increasingly revolutionary act.”

“Director Jennifer Williams says she brings a feminist perspective and an interest in new technology to the productions she directs. When she first came to opera, she didn’t like how women were nearly always victims, so she works to dig deeper into the music and underlying story elements to present women as empowered and in control of their own destinies.”

“At first glance, the conflict is between the unnamed woman, who is the main character of the opera, and her lost spouse. I started digging deeper and took the world premiere production in a different direction. While the relationship is an important part of the story, it is her story – and the conflict is between this woman and her grief. Her own grief is her adversary, and I wanted to see her wrestle with it, try to excise it, come to terms with it onstage. In Douglas Knehans’ score, the electric cellist repeats fragments of her text the interludes, which follow each season like an echo, or like its shadow. It’s fascinating, beautiful and surreal. I see the electric cellist less as the literal embodiment of her deceased spouse and rather as the voice of her grief. I wanted to put the female lead and this central conflict between her and her grief at the forefront by bringing the audience into the world of her memory – in an immersive way. ”

“The experience of working in the international scene enabled me to understand differences. I’m a better collaborator and a better colleague. In addition, it also pushed the boundaries of my imagination, as being in a place where opera is part of the zeitgeist, part of the language, and part of the culture helped me understand that art is truly a conversation.”

“DC Public Opera is molding the way opera is experienced by taking every element of their production to the next level ... In addition to the site-specific aspect and updating the story to reflect our contemporary world, in each of these productions we explored the role of the audience in the story and how to include them in each scene. Immersive opera means the audience is completely integrated into the world of the opera. I collaborate with the artists in our design and rehearsal process to make the most immediate experience of opera possible.”

“The intimacy of the space and the immersive approach allow for an immediate — and sometimes inescapable — experience of the story. The characters are only inches away from the audience — seated within them, appearing behind them and from unexpected corners. The Governess confides in the audience and brings them into her story. We can explore the ambiguity essential to Henry James’s story three-dimensionally in a way even the most intimate traditional theater cannot.”

“My design team and I were very interested in the idea of Gertrude Stein’s salon as a space that is a confluence of all of these artistic voices. It has been said that artists came to Gertrude Stein’s salon not merely to find themselves but to reinvent themselves as artists.”

“As for the future of opera, apprentice stage director Jennifer Williams says, ‘This is a very resilient art form.’”

“I’ve tried to take a page from Bach’s book to make the story relevant and immediate for our audience ... Bach was really writing for a German-speaking audience that was wrestling with the relationship between individual faith and religious institutions. And I think that’s just as much a relevant concern for Cincinnati audiences in 2011.”