Jaime Martino — Building Access, Not Barriers: The Story Behind Toronto’s Newest Performance Space

A vacant sub-basement in an affordable housing building isn’t where most people expect a new theater to bloom — but that’s exactly what happened. In this episode, host Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman welcomes Jaime Martino, Executive Director of Toronto's Tapestry Opera, to share the story behind the new Nancy and Ed Jackman Performance Center, a flexible black box space that seats 100–150 and brings neighbors, artists, and first-timers together in one room.

Jaime walks us through how a modest rehearsal plan evolved into a full venue with a bar, box office, rehearsal studio, and shared offices — powered by community partnerships, city champions, and a clear mission: build access, not barriers.

We dive into the partnership with Nightwood Theatre and explore the decision-making culture that carried the project through three years of design choices, budget tradeoffs, and technical puzzles. Consensus wasn’t slow — it was strengthening. From tiered rental pricing and resident companies to opening traditionally “insider” events to the public, Jaime explains how a venue can become an ecosystem. Today, the space hosts indie rehearsals, mainstage runs, one-night concerts, and soon, commercial events that help subsidize artist use.

We also zoom out to confront the bigger questions facing opera and the arts today — shrinking corporate support, rising costs, and what belonging really means in a legacy-driven field. Jaime’s take is clear: small casts and chamber forces make intimate stories land; multidisciplinary curiosity keeps the form alive; and safety nets enable bold risks. Micro experiences — genuine welcomes, open rehearsals, human-scale venues — turn first visits into lasting relationships.

If you care about cultural infrastructure, community building, and the future of live performance, this conversation offers a practical, hopeful roadmap.

Come see the space, meet the people behind it, and help shape what happens next. 

All episodes are also available in video form on our YouTube Channel. All episodes are hosted by Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome Jaime Martino
• 1:40 Origin Story of The Nancy & Ed Jackman Performance Centre
• 5:18 Affordable Housing Partnership
• 8:14 Funding Boost And Design Shift
• 10:42 Nightwood Collaboration Model
• 14:15 Rethinking Funding And Corporate Support
• 19:25 Leadership Roots From Dance
• 21:46 Tapestry Opera's Old Space Vs New Space
• 26:05 Rental Tiers And Resident Companies
• 30:18 Galas, Conferences, And Community Use
• 32:36 Growing Tapestry And Taking Risks
• 36:16 The Case For Small-Scale Opera
• 39:40 Connection, Access, And Audience Care

Transcript

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 0:00

Hi, I'm Elizabeth Bowman and welcome to season two of The Scene Room. Today I have Jamie Martino in the room. She has been executive director of Tapestry Opera since 2016, having co-led two national initiatives, produced 14 world premieres, and opened a brand new theater in downtown Toronto, which is the focus of our conversation today. What it took to open that new space, the collaboration, partnerships, the community needed to make this dream a reality for Tapestry Opera. Jamie was a member of the 2019 Opera America Leadership Cohort. She was the recipient of a Rainbow Warriors Award for Global LGBT plus rights in 2015. And she received a Changemakers Ruby Award from Opera Canada in 2023, which happened to be the last Ruby Award ceremony that I was part of as editor-in-chief of that magazine. She is the Ginny Stolp Creative Fellow for 2024 to 2026. If you're enjoying the podcast, please like, share, review, do any of those small and free things to help get the word out. It helps me with my planning. I can organize guests that you're interested in hearing. I can do all the things to keep this community going strong. So thanks for all the listeners. Now, let's get to the conversation. Jamie, welcome to the scene room. Thanks so much for being here.

Jaime Martino: 1:38

It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 1:40

So you are currently on maternity leave from Tapestry Opera as their executive director. Can you tell our listeners a brief background about who you are, what you're doing, what you've been doing? In brief, just to catch us up.

Jaime Martino: 1:57

So I have been a tapestry since 2016. I'm just coming up on my nine-year anniversary. Before that, I was director of operations for Pride Toronto for four festivals, including World Pride 2014, which was a whole trip. Before that, I ran the Fringe Festival in Dunedin, New Zealand, where I lived for a bunch of years. I went there to do a master's. I started a dance company while I was there. And I had gone there sort of to recover from my uh commercial dance career. So I grew up as a dancer and a choreographer and went on a whole journey where I was auditioning for other people's things and very unhappy about all of it. And then went to a place where there was a very, very strong indie DIY culture because it was a fairly isolated town on the south coast of the South Island of New Zealand. Um and so if you wanted something to happen, you made it yourself. And I grew up outside of Toronto, so I hadn't really experienced that before, and it was really life-changing. And so in my early 20s, I completely changed my approach to art and art making, and I don't think I've ever gone back.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 2:57

So, how long have you been taking for your maternity leave, just in terms of the context of when you're coming back to work at Tapestry?

Jaime Martino: 3:05

Yeah, my leave started July 1st, and I'll come back at the beginning of January when the office comes back from holidays. So six months.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 3:11

Well, it's been really exciting to watch Tapestry Opera, especially recently with the new space that you have. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about the new space and how it came to be?

Jaime Martino: 3:23

I would love nothing more than to talk endlessly about this space, which has been such a labor of love by so, so many people. So the space that you're referring to is the Nancy and Ed Jackman Performance Center. It is at the corner of Davenport and Young, more or less, which is for those of you not in Toronto, that is very centrally located in the city of Toronto. And the space is the bottom floor, the sub-basement of an affordable housing building, which was built in 1982 as a retirement home. And so the assumption was that the people who lived there, one, were going to have mobility issues. So the whole building is very accessible. We didn't have to build an elevator or anything like that. The assumption was that the people who lived there would need all of their amenities to be in-house. And so the sub-basement was a series of amenities features, like a community hall where they would do movie nights and games and big lunches and things like that. There was a hair salon that still had these like beautiful pink ceramic sinks for the residents. And there was a shuffleboard floor. It was just this kind of mix of if you couldn't leave regularly or reliably, what would you need for entertainment inside your building? And when it changed hands from a retirement building to an affordable housing building, it was kind of rescued by the city of Toronto from being flipped a bunch of times in in 2019. Suddenly those people didn't need everything in-house. They moved around the city. There was no requirement for all of their amenities to be in their building. And so these spaces were sitting unused. And when we lost our space in the distillery in 2022, when the Artscape leases all expired and many artists lost their homes, we were among that group of reshuffling. And Aubrey Reeves, the executive director of Business for the Arts, read our, we kind of threw a little tantrum in the press, uh, which I think is important to do from time to time. Um, and she read it and introduced us to Andrea Adams, who is the executive director of St. Clair's Housing Society. They operate 14, I think, affordable housing buildings across the city. And she said, I know exactly the place for you. So this is an affordable housing building on the south edge of Rosedale. Rosedale is a very wealthy neighborhood in Toronto. And what she was looking to do was bridge the gap, sort of permeate the membrane between the residents of Rosedale and the residents of this affordable housing building. And her philosophy with all of her buildings is to make the case for affordable housing as an addition to a neighborhood, as an integral part of a thriving community, not as something to be tolerated or something to be hidden away or something that should go anywhere else but in my neighborhood, that actually these are really important elements of a neighborhood that will thrive into the future. And so she was looking for a way to bring the residents of Rosedale into the building and cross-pollinate and build relationships between those people. And honestly, what better way to do that than performing arts? It brings all kinds of people into a space that they may never have may never have been in before. And you're sitting next to someone who may or may not come from the same kind of place as you. And then the thing that you're watching on stage at its best will introduce you to ideas you have never encountered before. And what a recipe for building community in a place that needs it so much. So this has been in the works for uh three years. It was quite an empty space. Um, it needed a lot of work, but it wasn't a full build. And so we were quite lucky. Initially, our plan was to basically recreate the rehearsal space that we had had in the distillery. We had been producing without a home for a number of years, and it is a nightmare out there in this city, probably in every major city uh in the continent, but certainly in Toronto, it's very challenging to find good quality, affordable, accessible creative space. And so that was what we were setting out to do. We're just gonna trim it up, make the acoustics not quite so boomy. Uh, we're just gonna make it usable as a rehearsal space. And then the city of Toronto came in with a million and a half dollars, unbeknownst to us, uh sort of engineered by our city counselor, Diane Sachs, and the residents association of the Rosedale neighborhood, who got really on board and saw Andrea's vision immediately, uh, totally agreed that this would be an incredible way to build community around this new space and with these new neighbors, and they helped us make it happen. And so that really changed the scope of what we were trying to do. And what we ended up being able to do was a just over $4 million project to turn this previously unused amenities space into a flexible black box theater that can seat between 100 and 150 people, depending on the configuration. There is a box office and a bar. There is a rehearsal studio that can also be used as a dressing room or as a performance space. We actually just did a performance in there, and shared offices for the Nightwood and Tapestry staff. It has become one of my greatest prides, I think, in my entire career that this space came to life.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 8:17

Can you tell us a little bit about how you partnered with Nightwood?

Jaime Martino: 8:21

How did that come to So Nightwood and Tapestry have been partners for years, for 25 years, I think, on our distillery studio. And our relationship so it just made sense for us to continue to partner. We both are mid-sized companies who are used to co-producing uh and and pooling resources. And our approach was always that we could do much more together than we could do on our own. And I think that is very common in theater, and it is less common in opera, although I do see that changing. And so it made sense for us to go out and look together, to work together, to pool our resources and make something really incredible. And I will say that Nightwood Theater, for those of you who don't know, is a 45-year-old company. It is Canada's pre-eminent feminist theater. They do work by women and gender-expansive people. And they have launched some incredible careers, including but not limited to Anne-Marie McDonald. So it made sense for us to continue our partnership. And Nightwood has a co-leadership model. There are two leaders, and Tapestry has a co-leadership model. We are two leaders. And so every decision we made for three solid years and into the future, into the foreseeable future, was made by consensus with at least four people. And sometimes the architects would be involved and then it would be six people. And sometimes our theatrical project designer would be involved and then it would be seven people. And the number of conversations we had about the most minute details, I will say this: we could not have gotten where we got without the level of trust and communication that we practiced every single day with one another. And when you're refurbishing a space, you don't get to have everything that you want. So we had to make a number of decisions about well, do we want this or do we want this? And while people coming into the space may or may not agree with the decision we made, I can tell you why we made it. We did it on purpose and we talked about every possible permutation of basically every possible decision. And so I think that, I mean, I always have thought that our way forward is in partnership, not just with other companies who do the same thing as us, but other companies who do other things, who have other skills to bring, who have other networks to bring and other resources to pool. And in that way, we work to surmount the challenges which in fact we are all facing. It's all the same challenge affordability crisis, housing crisis. It's all the same. We're all facing the same things. It's just showing up in slightly different ways. And so we can show up in slightly different ways together and work on them as a team.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 10:53

Yeah. The art of collaboration, I mean, it better us in any industry, whether that be the performing arts or in the medical field or in uh in sports or anything. Different perspectives help us grow. So it makes sense that your partnership with Nightwood would expand your overall vision and thought process and result in a better outcome, I think. And I think that a lot of cities could benefit from looking at your model. For instance, you see a lot of chamber ensembles and then or small orchestras and small opera companies, and then you know, you wonder whether or not there could be some shared operating budget between some of those organizations and what they're doing, because what they're doing is complementary to what the other is doing, and then the collaboration could could help. Obviously, it's it's complicated with the granting structure. I think that's sometimes arts organizations, as far as I can understand, they feel like they're going to have their granting cut if they partner with another organization. When, you know, in fact it might result in more corporate support or more patron support, you know, if you have, like you say, you expand your network and expand in other ways. What what are your thoughts on that?

Jaime Martino: 12:14

Yeah, I mean, I think that I think that's right on. I think our funding models are deeply imperfect. I think that corporate funding is increasingly out of reach for many of us. The cor corporate funding is sort of turning away from the arts. And so I think like any way that we can find to increase our impact is going to help us. And I I do think that we're sort of coming out of a period of proliferation where there was a really rich like indie scene and lots of small companies coming up. And I think that has been really, really fruitful and productive. And I do wonder if one of our sectoral responses to a decrease in funding and an increase in costs, things are ends are just further away. It's harder to make them meet. We're all feeling that. And I do wonder if one of the ways that we will respond to that is by rather than starting your own company, doing a project with somebody else or partnering instead of do trying to do a piece on your own. Or I wonder if touring will suffer because of the costs. And maybe that's an argument for more things happening locally and less, less sort of grand-scale things touring across the country. Anyway, I'm that that's just me spitballing. But I I think that you're right that the more we work together, together is the only way. It's the only way forward, it really is.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 13:31

When we talk about this whole corporate sponsorship becoming out of reach for small organizations, I just find it astounding because there is absolute evidence that the money that you put into an arts project, well, number one, it benefits the community. Number two, it helps tourism. Number three, it educates the surrounding area as well. It just results in everything better. So, for instance, for your space, you're benefiting the community around you in so many ways. That and and also in 2020, um, there was there's this rise of uh social impact directors in corporations. So they this role I kept seeing on LinkedIn, it was like now we have a social impact department and all this stuff. But they're only looking at direct impact, they're not actually looking at the impact beyond that. So if you pitch an opera company to them, they're just like, Well, why would we this is an elitist art form or this is this is an art form? Like, how does this benefit anyone? I don't s see that. Even if you're telling stories that need to be told, it's really hard to penetrate that corporate mindset. But when you look at it from an investment in your community standpoint, in in terms of the the area, the the the the living, the lifestyle that it encourages the crime rates that might be improved, right? By because there are people going to the theater and enjoying you know, it's just like a more populated, more um invested area, right? Because the coffee shops pop up and the restaurants pop up to benefit from the theater and all these things. Anyway, I just don't I I don't understand. It's the same thing like arts being cut from schools, the first thing being cut, like it makes no sense to me.

Jaime Martino: 15:57

Yeah, yeah. I would agree that short-sightedness is something of a hallmark of our times.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 16:02

Yeah. Um, anyway, let's get back to you for a moment because I'm interviewing you. Can you tell me, because you come from a dance background and like I'm fascinated by dancers, I I love watching dance. But how has this influenced your leadership style? Like how it in terms of your administrative work?

Jaime Martino: 16:21

I'll tell you the first answer that came to my head, which is that I have been bossy for a long time. I started, I started teaching dance when I was. This was very common in dance where you'd have like a very young assistant teacher. So I was maybe 10 or 11 when I first started leading dance classes with little kids. I taught my whole life. I am accustomed to being responsible for the kind of space that is happening in the room, like the vibes, and that that really is a collaborative project. And I think the older that I get and the more experience I have, the more central the shared project of creating that space, the vibes and the feeling in the room, the culture in the room, that becomes my primary project. And the art or the marketing or the finances or the organizational, whatever that that is being done is almost secondary to the project of creating that space. Because I think if you have a good container, any project you are working on inside that container is going to be better for it. I think that if you don't have a good container, it doesn't matter how good you are at the other things. The product will suffer. I would say that is probably the most fundamental thing about me and what what I bring in from dance.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 17:37

In terms of the company culture, I'm gathering that that is very important to accomplishing your vision as an executive director.

Jaime Martino: 17:47

Yeah, I mean, we don't really sit still at tapestry, which is mostly great and can be really tiring. And so if people don't feel like they are, it's not even that if people don't feel like they're valued, if people are not actually valued for what they bring, we just can't do it all. And we will lose people and the projects will suffer. And if we wish to be ambitious, that ambition has to extend not just to the work that we're trying to do, but how we are trying to do it. And this is, I think, where Michael, uh, my co-executive, artistic and general director Michael Morey, Michael and I, our pinpoint focuses are overlapping but distinct when mine is how we do the work and his is the work that we do. And that I think is part of what makes us a really effective leadership team.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 18:35

Circling back to the new space, comparing it to the old space, what are the what is it like to work in this new space with the comparison?

Jaime Martino: 18:46

It's a dream. It's a dream. For context, our old space was in a building in the distillery district, which is a historic district in Toronto's cobblestone streets. It's it's old distilleries. So big, high brick ceilings, big, huge windows, and we had a beautiful space. The space was beautiful, and everything else about it was very challenging. It was not even a little bit soundproof, like not even like we could drop a straw through the floor and it would enter the office below. And then we're gonna bring in 12 Sopranos to audition in a day, and it was very challenging. We were up three flights of stairs in a door that was like kind of unmarked. It was very challenging to get there. That there wasn't very good transit. There a streetcar came, but it wasn't there when I started. There is very little parking. When the Christmas market happens, good luck doing literally anything. There's no grocery store nearby. The restaurants are geared to tourists, so it's very expensive. It was just a difficult place to live in day in and day out. And we always had a hard time with the first time people were coming to the space with getting them to find it. Signage was always a problem. And our landlord was, our sub-landlord was Artscape, and their landlord was Dream, who is a development company that that owns the distillery space. And so it was really hard to get anything done. It was hard to get anyone's attention. It was hard to improve anything really. And the space got more and more expensive over time until eventually we were we were all kicked out. All the submarket rates, tenants were kicked out. And I always felt like we were something that both Artscape and Dream just put up with because we were there before anything was there, before the Christmas market, before the before the distillery was the distillery, tapestry was in there. We were one of the art the anchor organizations in a vision of that district, which had not at all come to fruition. And now it has, and they didn't need us anymore. They didn't need us to bring people in. And so we were kind of a nuisance to them. And it could not be more different with St. Clairs as our landlords. And we really disrupted them. They said to us, come on in and make a little rehearsal space and you guys can have this space at a really low rate because we're subsidized by the city, so we'll subsidize you, so you can subsidize artists. And then we turned it into a two-year complete rebuild. We're gonna bring audiences in. And they were delighted at every single step. And they have asked what else they can do to help at every single step, and they are as bought into our vision as we are, and we are as bought into their vision as they are. And there is just no substitute, honestly, for good faith.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 21:19

Are you able to diversify your revenue stream by renting out your space as well?

Jaime Martino: 21:25

Yeah, totally. That was that's a big part of the model. And we get to do it at very affordable rates because, as I said, everyone's subsidized. And so one of our growth goals for the space is to develop a sort of commercial rental arm for parties and film shoots and things like that. The space is so beautiful, it's really beautiful. And so that'll be sort of our next push, and that too will help further subsidize artists' access to space.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 21:49

Can you give us? I know you just gave us some examples with the film idea and parties and that kind of stuff. What other examples of rentals have you had so far in this space?

Jaime Martino: 22:00

There's a couple tiers. The first tier is our artists in residence, Tapestry and Nightwood each have a company in residence. Right now, Tapestry has two. We have Culturaland, which is run by Afrin Mansuri, who's an Iranian composer, and we have Opera Q, which is a queer and trans-focused indie opera company run by Camille Rogers and Ryan McDonald. And those two organizations are in residency with us. And so they get a certain number of days in the space, they get a certain number of tech help, uh, hours of tech time. We will help them run a production, we will do handle their box office, all the sort of messy things that you don't really need to think about when you are focused on making your art. And it includes mentorship with myself and Michael, as they need grant help, that kind of thing. So that's that's the first tier. And those companies get the space for free. Then we have a tier for indie companies, which is a super low rate, which I do not have in my head at this moment because I'm on parental leave. I think it's $20, $25 an hour, for uh a fully equipped turnkey space that they could rehearse a show with one technician in. And then there's mid-sized companies and large companies and then commercial. And so what we've done is tier the rental rates to the size of the organization asking for the rental, in addition to what they're doing in the space and where. So we've had, let's see, while we've had Smile Theater, we have had Outside the March, we had a Bad Hats workshop, I think, that Nightwood did. Both Nightwood and Tapestry have had mainstage productions, which has taken up honestly a ton of the rehearsal time. Toronto City Opera is rehearsing right now. Dance Makers was in to rehearse for their Fall for Dance North piece, which is coming up. We're in talks with Fall for Dance North to become one of the venues, and a ton of like one-off concerts. So there's a whole bunch of like small ensembles throughout the city that need a space to do two hours of rehearsal in the afternoon and then a concert that night, and then they're out by midnight. And that is a wonderful use of this space. It's perfectly set up for something like that. So basically, everything from a solo singer and a piano to a fully staged production with a cast of eight so far. And what about conferences and that kind of stuff? Oh, we haven't had oh no, we have had one. Yes, we had a something in partnership with the Toronto Reference Library that happened while I was on leave. We are about to host the Rubies, which are Opera Canada's annual award ceremony that's coming up next Monday. And that will be our first kind of gala in the space. So I'm really excited to see how things come together for that.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 24:27

That's exciting. I'm obviously with my history with Opera Canada, I think uh I think that's wonderful. And obviously, you were honored at the last rubies I I uh I was part of.

Jaime Martino: 24:39

Two rubies ago, actually.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 24:40

But the last yeah, my last rubies. Yeah. So well, that'll be exciting. I can't wait to see the pictures and and all that stuff. But I mean, I think that must be a great avenue also to connect with those corporations, like in terms of these partnerships and how you know forge those relationships. That's obviously on your radar. So you've helped double Tapestry's operating budget and obviously launch major national initiatives. Is this part of your has this always been part of your sort of operational structure and leadership in terms of that doubling or or what's your how did you make that happen?

Jaime Martino: 25:19

I hmm, what a great question. So when I joined Tapestry in 2016, Michael Morey had been artistic director for about a year and a half. And what I didn't know when I came on was that early in his tenure, there was a real question about whether or not the organization was going to continue at all. Um, Michael has great vision, and he could see that it would take, at that time the company was 35 years old, and he could see that it would take 35 more years to build up the kind of reputation and connections that tapestry already had. And so it was worth it to invest with something splashy and interesting to bring people back in. And so out of that ethos came the first one was Medea Undone, which we did at the Brickworks, and that was something totally different than Tapestry had done before, and that made a really big splash. And then the introduction of Tapestry Explorations, which or TapEx, we call it, which is what if we brought other very different art forms into opera? What if we brought in a turntablist? What if we partnered with the punk band? Fucked up. What if we brought in a uh physical theater performer? Like, how does that change what opera can be? And those two things really, I think, set the stage for what tapestry could become. And it needed us both. It needed Michael with his understanding of opera. Michael's a stage director, and so he is a working artist himself. And it needed me to build structure. I really love, I really love building structure, systems, and processes because for me, that is where a lot of the work of social justice actually lives. That is how, I mean, this is the thing I was saying before. It's it's what the work is, and then there's how we do it. And both of those things need to be working in tandem to make something really great. That was the partnership that Michael and I were building even before we kind of knew that that's what we were doing. We were both still so young, just 30, 33, I think, when we started together. Uh, neither of us had children. Now we both have multiple children, and we've just been on this long, long journey together where it never has felt like we were we were trying to get to a place where we could rest. There was always sort of the next thing, and then there's eventually. So when I first started, there was the next thing and then the next thing, and then eventually there was the next thing and this thing, and then the next thing, and this thing, and this thing. And in that way, we just kind of grew pretty organically over time, just by doing really good work in really good ways. I just in this economy, I would be remiss to mention that there was a turning point in 2020, just before the pandemic, when we had a long time donor pass away and we were bequeathed a fairly significant sum. And so we didn't spend a lot of it, but it it is in reserve, which allows us to take risks that we wouldn't be able to take if we didn't have a safety net. Everyone needs a safety net. Safety nets allow you to take risks, and that is why we should have very strong social safety nets so that artists can take incredible risks and push all of us to think in ways that we have never thought before and make society generally better every single day.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 28:31

Yeah, I was gonna ask you, but you've already answered it, how you balance artistic innovation and with financial responsibility and stability, but you just basically answered that just now.

Jaime Martino: 28:41

So And I and I think like we have a really good practice because we are a mid-sized company, we can't do everything. And so we have a really good practice of being like, what actually is the thing that matters? And that is the thing we will resource, and then the rest of it we can either let go or we can do a smaller version of, but what is the thing that we are actually trying to do? And that's what we will do. I see this with artists all the time. Uh Owen Pallett is such a perfect example of this. Where when it was just him in his room with his MIDI and his violin, he made incredible music, and then he got famous and could write for orchestras, and he didn't have to make any editorial decisions, and everything sounds like mush. And I do think there is value to having a box that your art is constrained by. I think constraints breed creativity to a point. Uh, and we've always had those cre constraints and we've always approached them with creativity.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 29:35

Yeah. What kind of news stories or forms of opera do you feel are most urgent right now with your work at Tapestry?

Jaime Martino: 29:44

I mean, I think on a practical level, I mean, I'm gonna say this, and it's what it's what tapestry does, and it's not because I'm here to show for tapestry. Actually, this is why I'm at tapestry, which is smaller casts, smaller orchestras. Things that fit in smaller spaces, things that tell immediate, intimate stories, scores, and libretti that are informed beyond opera, uh, that are curious about the world. Gosh, my kingdom for some curiosity from some places. But where there is a ton of it is in the indie scene. Like we always go to conferences, and you'll have heard this before. The question is always, how do we save opera? How do we save opera? Well, opera has always been saving itself. It's just that we're not looking in the right places. There is such a such a huge abundance of creativity and artist-led collectives, tons of singers that are remaking themselves as creators in order to do the work that they wish to do and would never be able to do if they were singers alone, particularly if they're the kinds of singers that are going to audition for other things. The repertoire is limited. I really think that acknowledging that this genre is multidisciplinary and really embracing that and embracing the conventions that come from other places and being a little less rigid in our determination of what we consider opera and therefore what gets to be seen on main stages. I think that is already happening. I think it's been happening for a long time. And I think that that is the way that opera will continue into the future. And I don't know if that looks like a major opera house with an orchestra of 100 and a chorus of 50 all the time.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 31:25

Yeah, we were talking before I pressed record on this episode, and I was saying that I feel like the most important component of opera is the same most important component for any type of uh performing art, and that is connection. And therefore community, which is why season two of this podcast is devoted entirely to community, because really in in any problem-solving endeavor, you think like that question, how do we save opera? You know what I mean? You take it down to the lowest common denominator, and what is it is it that we are all craving, and that is connection. And so also I like the the the pointing out of all of the different facets within opera because it it it is about this multidisciplinary expression about the connection of all these things coming together and then expressing a main thing. And we need to be celebrating all of those things because we don't know we're all different people and we all connect to different facets of it. So it's like, how can we forge those relationships between the audience and those all those different bits? And it's like creating access points, and it's easier to do with a smaller environment because you obviously have less people. So I think that the bigger companies the thing that is that they're struggling with is how to treat their audience members one to one. Like, how do you get that that same connection?

Jaime Martino: 33:02

Yeah, it's it's a real that's a real challenge. Like that is, and I see, I see the way that people are trying to address it. And there is just maybe something about scale because after a certain point, you can't control the way that your guests behave towards one another. And I what I hear a lot from people who don't normally go to the opera and who who go, they're gonna get dressed up and go see Carmen kind of thing. And people are often made to feel like they do not belong there. And that is not necessarily I mean, some of that is, you know, the structure of the building. Like you're gonna walk into the four seasons, and that feels like you need to be a certain kind of person or dressed a certain way in order to be there. So there's some basic, there's a baseline there. But there's also all of the other patrons, and some of them have been going to the opera for 50 years and they have those same seats since the four seasons opened, and and they don't want change and they don't want things to be new. And and the more people that you are trying to create an experience for, the less, less control you have over what that experience is. And that can lead to some really bad experiences. That can lead to people being made to feel like they do not belong in a place, and people don't always remember the thing that you said, but they do remember how it made them feel. And I think that is a pretty key way that we lose people all the time and not just in opera, but in in sort of these venerable art forms, these venerable institutions across all art forms. And I think about that a lot. I I'm very happy with the size of our space because it means that we have a lot of opportunity for one-to-one interaction with people. And when we have new folks, I mean, we're in this new neighborhood, we have built a great relationship with the residents association. So we're slowly bringing all of those people in and the tenants upstairs, and we're slowly bringing them in. And then because there are so few of us, there's eight staff, and there's maybe 150 guests, we generally can see when someone's never been there before, and then we can make a point of going to meet them, and then they've had this interaction with someone that's one-to-one. And that is really hard to replicate or automate or do at scale. And so I don't envy, I don't envy these big institutions the problems they're trying to solve. That's for sure.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 35:16

Yeah, it's almost like they have to create the art of the micro experience. Yeah. And they really do focus, I mean, as they need to to some degree on obviously the high-end donor base. But then I think I was mentioning on the first podcast of season two, talking about how there are often arts patrons who are patrons in different ways, like they always they they are always there, but they buy the cheap seats in the in the upper range or the always bring a friend, they always bring someone new with them, and they're all they're like evangelizing for you and they're advocating for you out in the world.

Jaime Martino: 35:56

And that you can't you can't buy that.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 35:58

Yeah, and so uh a way to recognize those people because there isn't necessarily a way to recognize them in the programs, because you have this list of of people who have given dollars and cents, and then but there's you don't recognize Roberta, who's been a thousand times and brought six thousand people with them. So, how do we we get that balance or how do we recognize those people? And I think that that is so important to recognize those types of people, and and we should be able to see that with all the statistics that we have access to these days.

Jaime Martino: 36:34

Yeah, you know, we just since we're talking about donors, this has been something that we talk about a lot, particularly in the sense of there's a number of things. One one question we asked ourselves is what well how do we make a VIP experience for those, for the very, you know, the people who really are instrumental and our ability to operate? How do we make a VIP experience for them that is based on community rather than exclusivity, which is a tricky one? I mean, we we ask ourselves that question all the time. What is this grounded in? Is this is this furthering their community or is this about them having something that other people can't have? And and for me, that that just doesn't, I don't think that fits with our ethos. And I also don't think it works in the long term. The other question we ask is so not only how much people donate, but also how often. So we've got a $50 a year donor, but they've been donating since 1982, you know, and and that means something. That means as much as someone who comes in one year with $10,000. Being able to see those patterns, I think, is really important also. So we've just sort of added that layer onto our how we parse out benefits and things like that. So the other question that we ask ourselves is who would put their hands up for this experience that we just don't know about. So one of the things we started doing, we've we have played around with all kinds of different models for subscribers and members and donors. And one of the things that we one thing that we have kept since 20, I think it was 2020, we were in the a Metcalf strategic change process. And uh we decided that we would, you know, for every open rehearsal or there's a backstage tour or there's a post-reception, or there's cute, whatever. Those, those kinds of things that tend to be offered to donors as as a perk of their donation, we would hold, you know, we would offer it to them first, and then we would open it up to anybody else who wanted to come. And we had a capacity limit, but it would go out to our entire list. We have an open workshop, we have a workshop presentation of this show that will be done in three years. Who wants to come? And we met people that way that we would never have met before. And people said to us, Yes, I wish to be a bigger part of your company. Yes, I wish to come in closer. Thank you for asking. And if we if we hadn't opened it up, we would never have met them and we would never have known. And so I think think moving away from the ways that donors and subscribers and ticket buyers and moves management and we got them to this level and now we get them to this level. And, you know, like we all gotta, we all have to meet our fundraising goals. And I think there is a way to do that that doesn't treat people like transactions, and it helps if you're small.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 39:04

Yeah, all great things. I mean, it it helps to think about all these things if you're a big organization too. I mean, just having these questions is a good, good exercise for any fundraising team and any organization as a whole to think in terms of these micro experiences within your organization. Anyway, that's I think all we have time for on this episode. Do you have anything to add that that you would like to express in this episode?

Jaime Martino: 39:31

We have an incredible second half of the 25-26 season coming up. It is very full on from January until June. If you haven't been to the space yet, please come check something out or like send us an email and ask to come see it. We would love, we would love to show it off. It's a really beautiful space, and we're really proud of it. So come see the show.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman: 39:51

You can check them out at tapestryopera.com. All right, thanks for being here.