Brian Garman, Abigail Rollins, Jonathon Loy, Photo credit: Andrea Yu | Classical Post

Abigail Rollins’ first year as Executive Director of Berkshire Opera Festival has not gone as expected. The company initially pivoted their Mainstage Don Giovanni to a concert version of the work and now finally to a digital performance featuring the original cast but different music entirely. Despite these tumultuous times, Rollins and the BOF team have prioritized supporting the artists.

Transferable Skills Across The Arts

Abigail (Abi) Rollins joined Berkshire Opera Festival (BOF) as Executive Director in September 2019. Prior to her work with BOF, she held positions with Trisha Brown Dance Company, the Arts Administration department at BU, Boston Ballet, The Lyric Stage Company of Boston, and the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company (CSC) as Managing Director. “It’s actually been my first year with BOF and it’s been quite the year, not the year I thought I was going to have,” says Rollins. “I love dance, theatre and am loving getting to know opera. I’ve attended some opera as a patron before but this is my first time working in opera, so that’s really exciting for me.”

Rollins grew up dancing and proceeded to get her undergraduate degree in dance. “I figured out pretty early on that I was not going to be a performer but I did love the field of arts management and arts administration. It was sort of an itch for me, to work in a field that I was really passionate about,” says Rollins. Her position with BOF is her first professional dive into the classical music world. “A lot of those (arts admin) skills are transferable across the different genres. So while I’m still learning about certain companies and composers, a lot of things are the same in my role in management.”

Berkshire Opera Festival Team

When one thinks of company founders, tech is usually the industry that pops into mind. However, the founder role is just as relevant in the arts. “I seem to always work with companies where the founders were still there, which is a very different way than the way that I approach my job when you’re working with a company where the founders are long gone,” says Rollins. “Everything is rooted in the vision of the founders and we have both of our co-founders with us. We really rely on each other. We’re a really tight team, there’s only five of us year round, and we all have our own departments and our own hats. My job is amplifying their vision and bringing it to fulfillment.” Co-founders Brian Garman and Jonathon Loy join CP a little later in this piece when discussing pivoting in 2020.

Berkshire Opera Festival is still quite a young company, the 2019-2020 season marks their fifth season. “When I came in, I saw my role as bringing the mission and vision of the company fully to scale. Prior to my arrival, they had made incredible progress growing the company and now, because of COVID, we're wondering what the trajectory of the company might be in the next year or two. Can we keep growing and expanding programming? BOF was on such an upward trend, everything was going really well. Now, like everyone else in opera and the arts, we're asking ourselves where we may need to scale back or pivot to ensure BOF's future.”

Original Plans For Don Giovanni

For their 2019-2020 season, Berkshire Opera Festival initially had big plans for a celebratory Don Giovanni Mainstage production. “When this all started in mid-March, we (and everyone who we spoke to) seemed to think that we had plenty of time. We have no reason to be concerned, our season isn’t until late August,” says Rollins. “At the time we believed there was no reason that we were going to lose our season. We told ourselves to be patient. So long as there was a reason to be hopeful that we could have in-person performances in August, that’s what we wanted to do.”

When concerts were cancelled in March, larger arts organizations began releasing archival footage to keep up engagement. “We did see a lot of other groups switch fully to virtual, and if they had a deep archive of performances to be able to do that, great! We were not in that position,” says Rollins. “We’re very young and have very little archival footage of our own work.”

Laying Out All Of The Paths

The BOF board had its last in-person meeting in March. When they reconvened over zoom in mid-May, they made the crucial decisions to cancel the Gala and pivot to a concert adaptation of Don Giovanni. To prepare for this board meeting, Rollins envisioned every possibility. “I went into that board meeting with six different paths of what might happen, ranging from moving forward as is under these new conditions and taking the financial hit to pulling the plug entirely,” says Rollins. “Even within each iteration, I had a best and worst case scenario financially of what might happen. Just to lay out all of the financial paths on paper and be able to dig into them and talk about them was a really important conversation. And as we consider how to move forward and pivot, to make sure that we weren’t just looking at the finances.”

“Every decision that we make has implications beyond just the numbers,” says Rollins. “Are we still fulfilling our mission with this choice? What will the artistic community feel if we make this choice? What will our constituents feel? Are we putting our company at financial risk? It’s complicated and multifaceted. You can’t just have the finances driving the decision.”

In mid-May, BOF decided to pivot from the Mainstage production of Don Giovanni to a semi-staged concert version in order to accommodate anticipated health and safety protocols, including social distancing for all vocalists and orchestra members. At one point, BOF was even exploring the possibility of performing the concert to an empty house and then streaming the performance to one of the many temporary drive-in movie theaters that began popping up all over Berkshire County this summer. “When we made the pivot to the concert model instead of the full mainstage production, we were acknowledging the reality of the situation,” says Rollins.

Berkshire Opera Festival Co-Founders July 2020 Message

Supporting Artists

At the beginning of July, it became clear due to the decisions made by the state of Massachusetts that any in-person performance would not be possible. In this moment, BOF made the conscious decision that supporting their artists was a priority for the company. “To the best of our ability, we want to be able to provide financial support to our company members,” says Rollins. “We dug into our company budget and figured out where we could cut, pull back and scrape together a number that we felt that we could financially afford. We turned that into a fundraising campaign to make sure that we could actually afford to make those payments. And on top of that, in addition to supporting our company members, we have to make sure that we aren’t completely draining our bank account to zero at the end of the year. We have to have a little gas in the tank to get us into next season, because we still don’t know what next year is going to look like.”

Everyone on the team felt that supporting their artists was crucial. “As an artist who has suffered the loss of approximately a years’ worth of income, I can tell you how important it was to me personally to pay our artists everything we could without risking financial stress to the company,” says Co-founder and Director of Production Jonathon Loy. “When Brian and I started the company, one of the founding principals was to pay artists a fee that was fair and competitive. Dignity and respect is everything in this business and it goes both ways.”

The company dug into their own pockets and has launched their Artist Relief and Recovery Campaign to reach their goal of providing honorariums to everyone who was contracted with them this summer, including singers, orchestra members, dancers, designers, choreographers, singers, and production and music staffs. “It’s a choice. It just felt like the right thing to do, to dig in and do the work,” says Rollins. “We reached out to our constituents to see if they might be able to help and knock on wood, everyone agrees that it’s an important thing to do and have been pitching in. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re getting there.”

Pivoting To Digital

As a company, Berkshire Opera Festival’s focus is on in-person performances. But given the current circumstances, they decided to once again pivot, this time to a digital performance. BOF will be presenting From Stage to Screen: The Show Must Go On(line) on August 28 and will be available for viewing through September 4. Tickets are $20 per device. The digital concert will feature performances from the internationally-renowned cast of BOF’s (now canceled) 2020 production of Don Giovanni.

Co-founder and Artistic Director Brian Garman confirmed that the singers are very much looking forward to singing in this upcoming performance. “Everyone is disappointed that we're not able to produce a full opera this year, and obviously, there's no real substitute for live performance,” says Garman. “But making music is what motivates and inspires all of us, even if it has to be through a computer screen.”

Berkshire Opera Festival Interview With Tenor Joshua Blue

Monetization Of Digital Content

When discussing this season with Abi Rollins, it struck me that this is a unique moment when small arts organizations are in relatively similar positions. I asked if there was some forum for arts executives to brainstorm and share experiences. “Here in the Berkshires there is the nonprofit center of the Berkshires. It basically brings together all of the nonprofits in the region and they’ve been doing Executive Leadership Zoom style meetings every couple of weeks. So on the local level, other leaders are talking to each other,” says Rollins. “On top of that, Opera America switched their conference online and that was awesome to hear what other industry leaders were thinking. On a personal level, arts management is what I went to school for and so a lot of my friends are friend/professional hybrids. What we love to do is talk shop. Having that moral support from other people going through the exact same thing has been really wonderful.”

I did not observe the Opera America conference, so I asked if there were any particularly engaging discussions or presentations. “The most interesting one was on the topic of monetizing digital content. That’s been one of the things that we’ve been watching and observing,” says Rollins. “There’s this impulse to throw out all this content for free online just to keep engagement up. There’s absolutely validity to that. But our concern is what that will do in the long term to the field. When we produce work, it has value. Over time if all of the content that we put online is free, that is going to be the expectation of our constituents. That if it’s online, it must be free and the only thing you pay for is what you do in person. There’s a lot of uncertainty about what the next year will look like. I certainly hope that we can host in-person events soon. But if that doesn’t happen the financial model will fall apart for the industry if we don’t start positively asserting that the work that we do, even if it’s in a digital format, still has value. This is not a music specific issue. Across all performing arts people are figuring out how to adapt.”