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 all 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 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
All of our productions are world-class collaborations with today’s most exciting and innovative composers, musicians, singers, and theater artists. Each one is created to enchant newcomers and seasoned opera fans alike. We carefully select and produce works that will delight today’s audiences, and live on well past their debuts to expand the genre over the long term.
CELEBRATing ALL VOICES
To challenge and reimagine the opera canon, we push past today’s musical and theatrical barriers by reviving some of music history's rarely performed operas and amplifying the voices of unique artists from around the world, many of whom have never been featured in mainstream opera.
See how we bring rare works and unique artists to the opera stage >
REACHING UNEXPECTED AUDIENCES
We collaborate with artists from across different 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 a vast global audience of opera fans.
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 by 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. Catapult is paving uncharted pathways in this new hybrid medium by creating an original body of work of uncompromising production quality and fresh ideas for delivery to both traditional and non-traditional audiences around the world.
Catapult Opera accomplishes this goal by providing grants to performers, musicians, and multimedia artists outside the classical realm to create short digital works at the intersection of their chosen genre and opera. These new works are sparking a global conversation about what opera can be in today’s world that is influencing the art form’s continued development in our current time and inspire future generations. As we look to the future of opera, we also engage with its past to find rare gems and overlooked masterpieces, producing live performances to expand the canon of accepted composers and librettists and bring a welcome freshness to the world’s opera houses.
Beyond the stage, we are committed to promoting a robust, sustainable future for opera by lifting up aspiring artists to reach for the highest artistic standards, and proliferating them across the opera community. This commitment includes interviews with influential leaders in the world of opera on topics such as artistry, personal and professional development, and marketability. Additionally, Catapult produces behind-the-scenes interviews with luminaries in the field of opera to deepen audience’s knowledge and appreciation of opera and its inner workings.
The question that animates all of this is: “What is opera?”
At Catapult, we are working to play a pivotal part in that question’s ever-evolving answer for today and for decades to come.
Our vision
A message from Neal Goren, Catapult’s Founder and Artistic Director
