Opera for Everyone

Opera for Everyone: The Industrys Experiments with American Opera in the Digital Age draws on seven years of multi-sited ethnography to examine the acclaimed experimental productions of Los Angeles-based opera company The Industry. Steigerwald Ille understands The Industrys productions as part of an emerging wave of U.S. operas that integrate new media and interactive performance through means such as site-specificity and simulcast video, and then traces the companys path from Crescent City (2012), the companys first production, to Sweet Land (2020), the companys final production before switching to a new production model. Steigerwald Ille argues that by moving opera outside of the opera house, The Industrys productions expose the economic and aesthetic structures key to the circulation of operatic performance at the same time that they deploy opera as a tool for digital listening, community engagement, popular entertainment, and commentary on systemic racism and settler colonialism. Through ethnographic work with The Industrys creators and performers, and close examination of the companys first decade of work, this book reveals how The Industry paradoxically provides both a roadmap and boundary line for experimental and traditional companies trying to find new ways to approach operatic performance in the twenty-first century United States.