New Directors Join Vancouver Opera Board

 

Annual General Meeting highlighted financial and artistic successes in 2015-2016 and excitement for the 2016-2017 Season & Festival

Two highly esteemed community leaders were elected to the VO Board of Directors at the company’s Annual General Meeting on September 17, 2016, joining a group of 24 members chaired by Pascal Spothelfer. The meeting also reviewed the company’s artistic and financial successes in 2015-2016 and looked ahead to the exciting 2016-2017 Season and Festival.

 

New Directors

Nika Collison (Jisgang) belongs to the Ts’aahl clan of the Haida Nation. She has worked in the field of arts and heritage for almost 20 years, specializing in historic and contemporary Haida art and culture.

Serving as curator of the Haida Gwaii Museum at Kay Llnagaay since 2000, she also works as an independent consultant. Throughout her career, Nika has worked with institutions in the creation of major exhibitions and publications. She is a senior negotiator for Haida repatriation initiatives and works on a global scale to build relationships between the Haida Nation, museums, other institutions, and the public.

Together with her husband, Nika Collison owns two Haida Gwaii-based businesses: Highwater House, a high-end accommodation; and Highlander Marine Services, specializing in marine-based transport and project management. She is also a partner in North Pacific Timber Corp., which specializes in sustainable logging practices.

Ms. Collison is the principal singer for Hltaaxuulang Guud Ad K’aajuu, Friends Together Singing, a traditional Haida dance group she has led for the past 20 years.

Dr. Judy Halbert has extensive experience in K-12 education. She has served as a teacher, principal, district leader and policy advisor with the Ministry of Education in the areas of innovative leadership, accountability and Aboriginal education.
She is a co-founder of the British Columbia Networks of Inquiry and Innovation and the Aboriginal Enhancement Schools Network and recently served as a Canadian representative to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s international research program on Innovative Learning Environments. She is a faculty member at the University of British Columbia where she has helped develop the Transformative Educational Leadership Program for system level leaders. In 2015, she was honoured as one of the 100 notable graduates of the UBC Faculty of Education.

With Dr. Linda Kaser, Dr. Halbert co-authored Spirals of Inquiry for Equity and Quality (2013), Leadership Mindsets: Innovation and Learning in the Transformation of Schools (2009) and, with Helen Timperley, A Framework for Transforming Learning in Schools: Innovation and the Spiral of Inquiry (2014). She has worked extensively with leadership groups in British Columbia as well as in Australia, New Zealand and England.

Departing as board members after several years of dedicated service are Lis Welch, Yoshiko Karasawa, and Bill Sirett.

Pascal Spothelfer, chair of VO’s board of directors, says, “I am delighted to welcome Nika Collison and Judy Halbert to the board. They join a passionate group of community leaders, from diverse backgrounds and cultures, who are committed to supporting arts and culture in general and opera in particular. Working with our new General Director Kim Gaynor, Vancouver Opera’s Board of Directors is enthusiastically looking forward to our exciting season anchored by the Vancouver Opera Festival in April and May 2017, which is central to our mission of making opera accessible and exciting.”

Financial Achievement

In audited financial statements presented at the meeting, Vancouver Opera reported a surplus of $134,663 on an operating budget of $9.75 million, for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2016. This is the second consecutive year of operating surpluses; VO now has a manageable accumulated deficit of $657,266.

 

Bold programming and box office success
Vancouver Opera continues to achieve artistic success with imaginative productions that create excitement throughout the community. The 2015-2016 season began in the fall with Verdi’s Rigoletto, featuring Canadian soprano Simone Osborne. A new production – and the Canadian and company premiere – of Nico Muhly’s hauntingly scored Dark Sisters (2011) connected strongly with audiences on an important social issue. Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, beautifully staged and beautifully sung by alternating principal casts, was followed by a new production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita. Astute casting of top-tier Broadway stars, together with stunning design and expressive playing by the VO Orchestra, under the baton of music director Jonathan Darlington, resulted in record-setting ticket revenues, capping a season of box office achievement. At the O’Brian Centre for Vancouver Opera and in community venues, “Opera Tales”, VO’s beguiling fairytale-and-opera mash-up, delighted audiences of all ages.

 

Stickboy on tour
VO’s fifth originally-commissioned opera, by composer Neil Weisensel and librettist Shane Koyczan, which had its world premiere in 2014, was subsequently adapted for Spring 2016 touring. The work played to nearly 20,000 high school students throughout B.C., producing profound responses and eliciting meaningful discussion on the timely issue of bullying.

 

Looking ahead
Vancouver Opera’s 2016-2017 season begins November 24 at the Vancouver Playhouse with a new production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. Featuring a cast comprised of the cream of up-and-coming opera singers, the production is designed by the internationally acclaimed Calgary-based Old Trout Puppet Workshop. Members of the VO Orchestra will be conducted by the phenomenal young Scottish-born Alexander Prior, using a special new arrangement of Humperdinck’s familiar score commissioned by Vancouver Opera.

In January, VO joins PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and Il Centro | Italian Cultural Centre in presenting the Canadian premiere of a radical take on Verdi’s Macbeth by the South African performance company Third World Bunfight. This vibrant, dark and visceral interpretation sets Shakespeare’s story of greed, tyranny and remorse in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In the spring of 2017, three dazzling new opera productions are at the core of the inaugural Vancouver Opera Festival, April 28 to May 13, 2017.

Full-scale productions of Giuseppe Verdi’s late-career masterpiece Otello, featuring powerful tenor Clifton Forbis in the title role, and Jake Heggie’s modern classic Dead Man Walking, with charismatic bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch as Joseph De Rocher, will be presented in the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Award-winning set designer Erhard Rom, who created VO’s internationally renowned 2010 production of Nixon in China, is the scenic designer for both productions.

Mozart’s incomparable The Marriage of Figaro, at the Vancouver Playhouse, will feature a terrific cast of emerging stars, sets designed by Vancouver’s multi-Jessie-Award-winning Drew Facey and contemporary costumes by Canadian fashion designer Sid Neigum, who is receiving international attention for his bold geometric creations.

In addition to the core opera productions, the 16-day Vancouver Opera Festival will offer a new VO-commissioned visual art installation by Paul Wong, performances by superb vocal artists such as Ute Lemper and Tanya Tagaq, new collaborations with other Vancouver arts organizations, a massive choral extravaganza, and engaging, immersive experiences for people of all ages.

 

Vancouver Opera Board of Directors 2016-2017
Pascal Spothelfer – Chair

Jill Bodkin – Vice-Chair

Mary Jordan – Treasurer

Susan Van der Flier – Secretary

Roberta Lando Beiser

Nika Collison

Mo Dhaliwal

Reema Faris

Divyesh Gadhia

Deborah Graystone

Judy Halbert

Sherry Killam

Julia Kim

Bill Levine

Jessica Yan Macintosh

Bill Maclagan

Marilyn Loewen Mauritz

Paul McEwen

Mary McNeil

Lisa Payne

Blaize Horner Reich

Michael Stevenson

Jeffrey Wilhoit

Margaret Imrie, President, Vancouver Opera Guild

 

Distinguished Honorary Members

Martha Lou Henley, C.M.

Kenneth W. Mahon