“Can you catch your creativity and swing it forward, without fear, hesitation, or restraint?”

During my last semester at Arizona State, as I was furiously writing and trying to finish my DMA, I got to be in the DBR lab. It’s an interdisciplinary creative lab, curated at the time by composer/activist Daniel Bernard Roumain and Jeff McMahon, where students develop and showcase a new creative idea that’s informed by feedback from Daniel, Jeff, and the other students in the lab. I saw it as an opportunity to get out of my comfort zone, to get out of the “opera bubble” I had been stuck in for so long.

At the end of the semester, when I got feedback from my final project (a choreographed interpretation of Offenbach’s “The Doll Song” aria) Daniel asked me an open ended question, a question that has guided me through many uncertain times:

“Your career began long ago. Can you catch it now and swing it forward, without fear, hesitation, or restraint?”

Those words always make me smile, because they’ve always served me well. In particular, they helped me develop O Zittre Nicht, one of the first dance/opera pieces I created when I moved to New York. So today, let’s take a deep dive into how that piece came to be, because it ultimately sparked many of the ideas I’m currently working on with MANX.

Moving to New York

I moved to New York in February 2022 in what was a whirlwind of a move. At the time, I was living in the Midwest, in the idyllic, artsy small town of Decorah, Iowa, with its small time vibes and affordable rent. On a whim, I applied to the Teaching Artist Training Program with Mark Morris Dance Group, and got accepted. At the time, I had a remote admin job, and now, I had just been given an opportunity to get a backstage pass to one of the world’s most prestigious modern dance companies. I quickly realized that it was never going to be more possible for me to move to New York than it was in that moment. So I took a deep breath, and jumped.

I look back and it was one of the best and hardest things I ever did - it felt like jumping into an abyss and not knowing what was below, and wanting to vomit the entire way down. A good friend gave me some honest advice at the time: the first six months in New York will suck, and then it will slowly get better. They could not have been more right.

In theory, for a struggling artist just moving to New York, I hit the jackpot in many ways. The Mark Morris program was great: I got to take about a zillion dance classes, I was being pushed and challenged in good ways, and I was meeting some incredible people. I was able to keep my remote admin job that paid the bills. I had found an apartment with nice roommates, and a great landlord. I knew I was lucky.

But the truth was, most days were a struggle.

To start, the remote admin job had become a nightmare. I was working in operations for a travel agency specializing in group tours, and in the wake of the post-Covid travel boom, the company was overwhelmed. Business was booming, but it was booming too quickly for us to keep up. Pre-Covid, the company would start planning a group tour about 6-9 months in advance. In 2022, I was asked to plan multiple tours in 4-8 weeks. The day before I officially moved to New York, I remember being screamed at on the phone by a customer for something that was completely beyond my control, and just wanting to cry. That admin job had carried me through Covid, allowed me to pay my bills while I finished school, and kept me afloat when a lot of other artists were really struggling during the pandemic. But now, no matter what I did, I could never put out all the fires, and it felt like I was failing everyday, with no way out.

On top of that, adjusting to New York was a struggle. Gone was the peaceful tranquility of Decorah. Instead, it was honking cars and sirens at all hours of the day, mixed chaos, hustle, and with the fun smells of New York public transit. But worst of all was the deep ache of loneliness, of being amidst a sea of people, yet knowing almost no one. It was like living in the middle of a collective group anxiety attack and having no close friends or family there to help make things better. By June of that year, I was spent.

A Blank Studio Space

It was from this context, full of exhaustion and overwhelm, that I found myself staring at the four walls of a studio in the Mark Morris Dance Center on a Friday evening in June 2022. I can’t tell you why I booked the space. Maybe I had a goal in mind. Maybe I knew I needed some unstructured creative time. But there I was, in my leotard and leggings, with no idea what to do.

I had been working on the aria “O Zittre Nicht,” and it had been going decently well. It’s the entrance aria for the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. This aria is different from the flashy “Der Hölle Rache,” which is the famous aria everyone knows from commercials and TV talent shows. In reality, “O Zittre Nicht” is the harder of the two arias. It’s longer, and the first part of the aria sits in the middle part of the soprano voice - if you don’t have a well developed lower/middle register, you won’t be heard over an orchestra. Then, in the second part, the aria explodes into a coloratura fury that ends on a high F. In short, “O Zittre Nicht” requires a singer to use every single part of the voice well.

Because it was so hard, I didn’t initially think it could be fused with dance successfully. After all, it’s the Queen of the Night, one of the most iconic and high pressure roles in the soprano repertoire. I’d been steeped in the opera world, where women are told from an early age that they cannot make mistakes. Why would I dare to experiment and take a risk?

And then, I remember having this sudden realization…

A snake.

The Queen of the Night is a snake.

She’s ruthless, cunning, sexy, slinky, slippery, fierce, regal, complex, calculating. She’s a snake!

That was the tie in.

What if I approached the Queen of the Night through primal, animalistic movement inspired by a snake? What would happen?

It was around this point when I vividly remember hearing that question from Daniel:

Before I could think too hard, I turned the camera on, and decided to film myself singing the aria, following every single movement instinct I had. I didn’t care if it was messy. I didn’t care if the coloratura was clean. I just wanted to see what would happen.

The resulting video was raw, it was visceral. It had about 80 different tempi. But I knew I was onto something. It wasn’t “opera perfect.” But, it was me. It was my vision for how I wanted to merge these two disciplines together. It was scary, raw, and thrilling, all at once.

That video is what got me into my first choreographic showcases in New York. It took me into new creative territory. It helped show me what was possible. It pushed me to tackle new challenging repertoire, and keep learning and growing. It also, through one of the companies that showcased my work, led me to meet my partner Carl, who is by far and away one of the best things to ever happen to me (I happen to be writing this on Valentine’s Day, and I can’t help but smile, knowing that it was creativity that led me to this wonderful man who makes my life more vibrant and more fulfilling every single day).

One video.

One idea.

One experiment in following every creative impulse without fear or judgement.

One idea that opened many doors.

What would following your creative impulses without fear or judgement look like?

Can you catch your creativity and swing it forward, without fear, hesitation, or restraint?

I believe we all can.

I hope this blog inspires you to do just that :)

-Melanie, MANX Artistic Director