The Boulder Opera is committed to making opera accessible, inspiring and engaging to the community. Their goal is to develop new audiences for this old art form, enrich the lives of their community, and provide opportunities to local musicians.

I got to chat with founder and Executive Artistic Director Dianela Acosta about her vision, her passion, and the great work Boulder Opera is doing in their community.

Women are drastically underrepresented in leadership roles in the world of Opera (one study indicates 90% of operatic productions are directed by men), meaning you’re a pioneer in this field. Tell me about your experience as a female founder and artistic director of an opera company.

You're right in the fact that 90% of the leadership roles are male. I feel very honored to be able to be in this position and I think it allows me to promote gender diversity. Because of that, I tend to surround myself with women so a lot of our staff are women, the board is mostly women, and we have hired female conductors and stage directors as well including Madeline Snow and Dana Kinney. I do make an effort to diversify all of the positions here at the Boulder Opera, specifically because I'm a woman and it comes naturally to me to surround myself with powerful women. I’m trying to set this example in the industry to have representation in all of our positions, so it has been a conscious effort of mine to always diversify our platforms.

Founding, growing, and sustaining an arts organization takes an incredible amount of passion and energy. What drives you?

Well, it all has to do with our mission statement, it all started with the family series and for me it's been a passion of mine to bring this art form to younger audiences, to cultivate new audiences. This younger generation is the future of the arts so cultivating and making specific programs for students is something that I feel passionate about. It is fun to perform for them and to see how they react and interact with the art, they are the future, so that's what motivates me.

Tell us about your background, and your history with opera.

I lived in New York as a young professional artist and I did a couple of programs and residencies with small companies. These companies tailored productions to younger audiences and brought kids to the theater for field trips. Working with those companies was so rewarding; those younger audiences were so appreciative and they understand more than you think. That’s what led to the founding of Boulder Opera. I started with the family series and it developed into other programs. I wanted a program that would introduce younger audiences to opera.

For me personally, I didn't have any background in opera, it wasn’t something my family introduced me to, but the more I knew about it the more that I fell in love with it. I started singing and learning more about the different operas and I became obsessed. It's such a unique art form with so many different periods, and now you have contemporary opera with so much to sing it's never-ending! It would take many lifetimes to learn the whole repertoire that’s out there.

In an interview with the Center for Musical Arts, you mentioned that you founded Boulder Opera Company out of a desire to bring family performances to the stage. How has your mission of vision changed or evolved over the past 12 years, and how are you bringing that to life?

We started with the focus on elevating the opera for younger audiences and we continue to do that. This past season we reached about 3000 students with all of our programs. Part of our outreach involves going into classrooms and talking about opera to prepare kids to see a show. We tour a performance called Xochitl and the Flowers (pronounced “soh-chee”), a bilingual opera by a temporary composer, Chris Pratorius Gómez. This past season we've been bringing these shows to schools specifically bilingual schools. This outreach is a huge component that still is part of our programming in addition to the mainstage productions, and the Opera in the Park. We keep adding programs, and one that we do that is super fun and accessible is the dinner opera. It's nice to be enjoying dinner and drinks while having an opera performed right in front of you.

We're also exploring new works and at the moment we've been workshopping a new opera and it's the 20-minute opera for one soprano and a string quartet. That is something that we want to do every year, explore a new opera. So in addition to all of the other programs, we're trying to be in tune with what's going on in the rest of the country with lots of new compositions being brought to life. We're trying to be part of this and highlight these new compositions and composers.

What have been the most significant challenges or barriers you’ve faced over the past 12 years?

We're always challenging ourselves to present opera in an accessible way, so we're always thinking about how to adapt a work to make it compelling to people. We're constantly thinking about the elements we might add to the production and what elements we might cut to keep people engaged. We’re always considering how to market these operas to let people know that they need to come and see what they're missing out on. I feel like marketing is always a challenge; how do we convey that it’s not just another opera? It’s a constant effort to keep people coming to our productions, and those are the really exciting challenges that push us to be innovative and to improve on what we're doing.

Obviously, the biggest challenge was the pandemic, which put a hold on all of our productions and it took a little while but I'm grateful that we are back to pre-pandemic numbers and we're building from there. The pandemic required us to be resilient and to adapt. The biggest challenge right now is space. For us to become more sustainable as a company and to be able to grow we need to centralize all of our operations and we really need an opera house. I'm dreaming big, but we want to have our own space to be able to offer after-school programs. Right now, we're all over the place with storage in three different places. I call meetings out of my dining room, coffee shops, etc.; we just need to be in one place.

It's also very hard for performing arts organizations to secure venues so the biggest challenge is that we don't have our own home. It's a long road but we're working on how we're going to make this a reality.

As a performer, what was your most life-changing role, and what teachers, directors, or leaders have had a significant impact on your work?

It's hard to pinpoint one person because there are so many people who have been great mentors to me, like my current voice teacher. I study with mezzo-soprano Julie Simpson; it's great working with her, she knows my voice really well. When I started my journey I studied with Doris Yarik- Cross in New York, she always met me where I was. I think I'm a slow learner so she had really the patience to stay with me and teach me the technique.

Carmen was a huge role for me. Vocally it looks deceivingly easy, but dramatically it is a very difficult role. To portray a character of this complex and empowered woman, that's something you just keep learning, adding layers of interpretation over the years.

Are there any projects or productions you have been particularly proud of?

It's a great question, I feel like so many of the productions have been amazing, and I've been really proud of them. How can I choose one? The most recent outreach production that we did of Xochitl and the Flowers has an interactive component; the students make a paper tissue flower that we use in the performance. They love to see that there's something that they've made that we then use on the stage. And then going to the classrooms there's the preparation for the performance, walking through the different steps getting the kids involved in the product, and learning about opera. We read the story of the opera and some of the kids identified with it and felt like it resonated with their own story. One student came up and said “I felt like the story was about me,” and those kinds of stories where students find they identify with something in the opera that makes it all worth it.

What do you want your legacy to be? What is the mark you hope to leave on this world?

Boulder Opera Company is not just for audiences, but also for the singers and the creative people that partner with us. I want singers to say “I sang for the Boulder Opera, I was part of that.” I don't want it to be just about me, it’s about the singers, pianists, instrumentalists, and creative directors that have been involved. That's why I called it the Boulder Opera “Company.”

I want people to say - I sang for the opera and it was a great experience, it was something that helped me get to the next level. I want this to be a place for emerging and established singers, I want them to feel like they've come here and worked on their craft and gotten something valuable out of it. I want the same thing for our audiences; I want them to come to Boulder Opera and say well I saw my first opera with Boulder Opera Company!
With all of the outreach we’ve been doing, when we invite kids to come to see a production and they come to the theater one of the questions that we ask is “Who has seen an opera before?” so many hands go up, and I’m so proud of the fact that we've been able to provide this art form to so many of the children here in Boulder county.

What is on the horizon for Boulder Opera Company? What can people look forward to in the coming year?

We're really excited, we just made our season announcement and we start with the Opera in the Park on August 3rd. We are exploring themes of royalty, so there's a lot of Baroque Operas, you’ll see arias by Cleopatra and Julius Caesar and we're doing works by Verdi, Macbeth, and Don Carlo. Then in December, we're doing our family series at e-Town where we're gonna do a short opera by a contemporary composer, his name is Jonathan Dove and we're doing Pinocchio. For the family series, we try to look for themes that are well-known as a way to introduce younger audiences to opera. Then in February of 2025, we're doing our mainstage performance, it’s a double bill by Puccini, Gianni Schicchi" and "Il Tabarro." Two operatic gems are part of the repertoire but maybe not done as much. It’s going to be an exciting season!

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Making Opera Accessible with Dianela Acosta | Boulder Opera