WHAT WE DO
Welcome to barrier-breaking opera.
The American opera industry, as we have known it, is no longer sustainable. For opera to survive, it must evolve, harnessing the genre’s unparalleled emotive power to connect with new audiences, tell new stories, and amplify new voices.
Catapult was created to do just that.
Our mission
Catapult’s mission is to create a dynamic and secure future for opera. We seek to broaden both the art form and its audience by launching innovative productions that expand the diversity of the genre and celebrate the power of the classically trained voice.
Our passion
Expanding minds (and the operatic canon while we’re at it).
CREATING NEW CLASSICS
Our productions are world-class collaborations with today’s most exciting composers, musicians, singers, and theater artists. Each one is created or curated to enchant the newcomer and the seasoned opera fan alike. We select and produce works that will delight audiences today, and live on well past their debuts to impact the genre over the long term.
CELEBRATing DIVERSE VOICES
To challenge and reimagine the opera canon, we are not only committed to pushing past today’s musical and theatrical barriers. We also revive historically underappreciated operas and amplify the work of people who have been historically excluded from mainstream opera, including women, BIPOC, and non-western artists.
REACHING UNEXPECTED AUDIENCES
We collaborate with artists from across genres to bring their talent—and their fans—into the world of opera. With them, we produce digital operas that can be viewed anywhere in the world, cultivating audiences who are diverse in age, geography, style, and background.
From its inception, opera was conceived as the ultimate multi-media art from—enticing the ear, the eye, the intellect, and the heart equally. At Catapult, we are reinvigorating that tradition, engaging in new visual and digital media with the goal of delivering the emotional vitality of the classically-trained voice, supported by a range of both unconventional and traditional instrumentation, and complemented by arresting visuals. This new hybrid medium will involve the creation of an original repertoire of uncompromising quality, with fresh ideas for production and delivery to both traditional and non-traditional audiences.
Catapult Opera innovates to accomplish this goal by providing grants to performers, musicians, and multimedia artists outside the classical realm to create short works at the intersection of their chosen musical and artistic genre and opera. We expect that these dialogues and new works will spark conversation about what opera can be in today’s world, and will influence its development as an art form for our time. As we look to the future of opera, we also engage in its past to find forgotten gems and overlooked masterpieces, producing them in live performance to expand the canon of accepted composers and librettists and bring a welcome freshness to the world’s opera houses.
Beyond the stage, we commit to promoting a robust, sustainable future for opera by identifying highest artistic standards for aspiring artists, and encourage these standards across the opera community. This exploration includes interviews with influential leaders in the world of opera on such subjects as artistry, personal development, and marketability. Additionally, Catapult produces behind-the-scenes interviews with luminaries in the field of opera to deepen audience knowledge and appreciation of opera and its workings.
The question that animates all of this is: “What is opera?” At Catapult, we hope to be part of the ever-expanding answer today, and for decades to come.
Our vision
A message from Neal Goren, Catapult’s Founder and Artistic Director