Family Opera Initiative (FOI) is an American opera company based in New York City that commissions, develops, and premieres original works for cross-generational audiences. It was founded in 1995 by Grethe Barrett Holby, originally as part of American Opera Projects (also founded by Holby). Its mission was and remains to create new repertory for family audiences, to bring the experience of opera to a diverse audience, and to engage the community in the process and performance of their works.
Since its founding, Family Opera Initiative has developed a series of "opera-musicals" for family audiences: Flurry Tale (1999), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2001), Fireworks! (2002), and Animal Tales (2008). Past and present collaborators on their productions include Billy Aronson, George Plimpton, Kitty Brazelton, Rusty Magee, Franco Colavecchia, Richard Peaslee, and Eugenio Carmi. The company performs around the United States in partnership with other theaters, theater companies, and public or educational institutions. Their performances range from workshops to fully staged productions. Family Opera Initiative is a non-profit organization. Its commissions and productions have been supported by the Jaffe Family Foundation, the New York State Council for the Arts, and TADA! Youth Theater. Their development partners include the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Ardea Arts, and Montclair State University.
Read more about Family Opera Initiative: Works in Development, Gallery
Famous quotes containing the words family, opera and/or initiative:
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–120)