About fifteen years ago, Yuval Sharon arrived in L.A. with a big idea. Coming from the New York City Opera, where he directed the VOX program from 2006 to 2009, he had an insider’s view of elitist tradition-bound institutions and thinkers that define opera, trapping it in amber.
His new company, The Industry, was going to change that by taking a ‘holistic approach to creation, integrating artistic ideas, production, audience experience and civic engagement,’ according to its website. Directed by Sharon, The Industry has staged operas in a train station, a warehouse and even in cars taxiing audiences to destinations throughout the city.
Today, The Industry is undergoing a changing of the guard as Sharon hands the baton to Tim Griffin, former executive director and chief curator of The Kitchen.
“When I told the board I was stepping down, everyone was like, ‘we’re not done,” Sharon tells Observer about the transition. “I did conceive of and direct much of what we did, but I wanted The Industry to be much more than my little playground. I wanted it to be as broad and open-minded as what opera can be. I’m glad the board felt we still have a long way to go.”
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Taking over for Sharon, Griffin had a successful nine-year run at The Kitchen, working with artists like Charles Atlas, Chantal Akerman and Gretchen Bender. “Yuval has sought to expand the art form of opera,” he says, calling The Industry “a great platform to reimagine what an opera is, what a collective audience is, to present new voices on stage but also to think through how people across communities can be brought together, and to engage the cultural and geographical history of that place.”
A look back at The Industry’s major curtain raisers includes its inaugural production of Anne LeBaron’s Crescent City, staged in a warehouse in Atwater Village. Set in a swampy, apocalyptic, voodoo-frenzied New Orleans, it was billed as a “hyper-opera,” a collaboration among a wide range of artists, a company hallmark.
“We were figuring things out,” Sharon recalls. “It actually felt like this was the beginning of something, not just one noble experiment. I knew we’d have to follow up Crescent City pretty quickly if we wanted to make some inroads into L.A.’s cultural scene.”
They followed with composer Christopher Cerrone’s Invisible Cities, an adaptation of Italo Calvino’s experimental 1972 novel. Collaborating with the LA Dance Project, they staged the new opera in the city’s art-modern Union Station, placing the orchestra in an isolated room and distributing dancers and singers among everyday commuters. Audience members, who wore headphones to hear, were often shocked when some rando broke into an aria.
“The biggest challenge was the sound design, figuring out how to make it work in a train station,” shrugs Sharon. “We were just trying things out, and that, to me, is so in the spirit of Los Angeles. That’s why L.A. was really the right home for this. Their openness and curiosity, they’re a really engaged audience for work that pushes people into uncomfortable situations.”
Their next hyper-opera, Hopscotch, was staged in twenty-four cars that took viewers to various locations throughout the downtown area to watch scenes play out in public. Inside each car was a cast member or musician, engaging viewers between locations. Some audiences would see one storyline, others another, all of it broadcast to a hub in the arts district where paths converged for the finale.
Sharon recalls a prospective project manager who told them they needed a feasibility study before undertaking the ambitious production. “I remember thinking there’s no point in doing a feasibility study. Of course, this cannot be done. We already know that. Why spend time and energy on a study of it when we can just do it? The right kind of people who want to do this work are not interested in feasibility studies, even though it’s a perfectly normal question.”
Sweet Land, staged in Los Angeles State Historic Park near Chinatown, was another hyper-opera with multiple librettists and composers, including Pulitzer Prize winners Du Yun and Ellen Reid, who also worked on Hopscotch. It was a bifurcated look at Thanksgiving in which the audience experienced the first meeting between pilgrims and Native Americans before half would walk through the park following one story dramatizing the Native American view, and the other would follow another path dramatizing the pilgrim view.
“It became impossible to talk about Sweet Land without foregrounding our individual experience of it—a fitting metaphor for the humility we need in order to talk about our national identity,” Sharon says in his book, A New Philosophy of Opera.
It was a large and expensive production, a big swing, but the pandemic forced its closure two weeks ahead of schedule. Financially, The Industry took a bath. Their future focus was on smaller but no less daring works like Star Choir by Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade, staged at the Mount Wilson Observatory.
In the meantime, Sharon became a star, directing Meredith Monk’s ATLAS at the LA Phil in 2019, serving as artistic director for the Detroit Opera, and becoming the first American to direct at Bayreuth (Lohengrin). He returned to The Industry last year for Comet/Poppea, a mashup of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea and Comet, a short story by W.E.B. Du Bois, with a score by George lewis.
“The whole experience of The Industry has been one leap into the unknown after another, and realizing that was the whole point. Every single step of the way, the option was not to do what is certain to work. It’s tiring, it’s a lot of work and it’s expensive,” Sharon says of their method. “The line I’m trying to walk with narrative and opera—narrative is a very useful structural tool, but people will often confuse it for the opera. There are many operas where the story is illogical or worse, and yet we still do them. Opera is not subservient to the story.”
To mark their anniversary, Sharon, Griffin and the rest of The Industry joined dozens of their closest friends for a party last month at downtown L.A.’s landmark Bradbury Building where just a few years earlier, part of Hopscotch was staged. It was staged again for the party, along with highlights from some of their other productions as guests sipped cocktails in the elegant 1890s atrium.
“What you’ll see are programs developed around individual works,” offers Griffin on what the future holds for The Industry. “Smaller-scale opportunities to see the idea in development, salons and listening parties to engage opera and its creation from different vantages over time.”
What’s next for Sharon is no big deal, just his Met debut. He will direct Tristan und Isolde in 2026, followed by the Ring cycle in 2028 through 2030, the Wagner epic on which he was assistant to German director Achim Freyer on L.A. Opera’s 2010 production.
“You don’t want to pander to the audience, but you need to know where they’re coming from. The Met is a different audience,” he says of the most tradition-bound opera institution in North America. “I will do it in a way that is meaningful to me and hopefully the audience. That’s going to be the constant challenge with the Ring in a theater as regimented as the Met. It’s hard for me to imagine doing the horns and the 19th-century German romanticism paintings. The Ring was always meant to be oppositional to that kind of institutional thinking. So, I have to be an oppositional force. That’s not negative; it’s not destructive. It’s in the ethos of the piece. Hopefully, there’s an appetite for fresh ideas.”
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