On Site Opera to Receive $15,000 Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts

National Endowment for the Arts Acting Chairman Mary Anne Carter has approved more than $27 million in grants as part of the Arts Endowment's first major funding announcement for fiscal year 2019. Included in this announcement is an Art Works grant of a $15,000 grant to On Site Opera to support the commission ofStay, a new, immersive opera composed by John Glover with libretto by Kelly Rourke. The site-specific opera is being devised for a 19th-century house on Governors Island just south of Manhattan.

This is the second grant that the National Endowment for the Arts has awarded to On Site Opera (the first was for the 2017 production of Milhaud's The Guilty Mother.). Stay is On Site Opera's third commission of new work, preceded by Rhoda and the Fossil Huntwhich premiered in 2017 at the American Museum of Natural History, and Murasaki's Moon, which will premiere this May at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Piper Gunnarson, Executive Director of On Site Opera, said, "We are incredibly grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for their support towards our new commission of Stay. This project is not only an opportunity to support the creation of new work by imaginative and bold artists, but also to experiment with what opera is and can be. Governors Island is a fascinating pocket of NYC, and the invitation to produce work there invites and inspires so many exciting opportunities to explore how space, music, story, and audience interact with one another."

To advance On Site Opera's mission to produce site-specific opera, engage new audiences, and push the boundaries of the operatic art form, Stay will be an immersive opera experience, inviting audiences to move throughout the 2-story, multi-room venue and interact with performers in a manner not typical within traditional opera productions. The opera's composition will incorporate distinct acoustic and dramaturgical elements inspired by the house itself. On Site Opera will present workshop performances of the new opera in September 2019.

For more information on this National Endowment for the Arts grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news.

About On Site Opera
On Site Opera produces site-specific operas in non-traditional venues throughout New York City (and beyond!). By staging each opera in an environment specific to the piece, OSO surrounds the audience and artists in the music and drama of the story, amplifying the connection between the world of the opera and the reality of the audience. To date, OSO has produced operas in more than a dozen unique venues, including Ricky Ian Gordon's Morning Star at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, Shostakovich's The Tale of The Silly Baby Mouse using large-scale puppets in performances for families at the Bronx Zoo; Gershwin's Blue Monday in the historic Cotton Club of Harlem; and Rameau's Pygmalion in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum which explored new technology in opera through the use of Google Glass supertitles.