CALGARY -- The Cowtown Opera, Calgary's alternate opera company, is closing its doors after 10 years.
That was the word Tuesday from the innovative arts company when its founder, Michelle Minke, announced in a press release that following its world premiere presentation of Does Not Compute in April, the company will be closing its doors after 10 years of producing accessible, local, community-driven opera in some of the unlikeliest venues imaginable.
"It has been my great honour to serve our community and our artists as the founder of Cowtown Opera and our Summer Academy," Minke said. "We had a vision and we accomplished it. And instead of planning into the future, we realized that it is time to stop and celebrate.
"With our mission complete, we believe that the absence of Cowtown Opera may be a wonderful opportunity that makes space for others to step up to the plate to create something new."
In 2011, after graduating from the Royal Academy of Music in London, and the University of Toronto, Minke, working with partner Carrie Kalmykov, created Cowtown Opera — a company of musical artists dedicated to reinventing the art form for 21st century audiences.
That included producing sing-along operas at places such as the Lantern Church and Festival Hall in Inglewood, and many other uncoventional venues, as they took opera out to neighbourhoods and performed it for audiences that included all ages and income levels.
"We've been at the Ship (and Anchor Pub) for open mic night," she said in a 2018 story on the Calgary Arts Development website. "We've been singing on sidewalks in our early days, for sure. We did a lot of flash mobs when those things were hot."
Over the course of its decade-long history, Cowtown produced 25 shows, showcased more than 500 local musical artists, performed over 800 community performances and trained hundreds of emerging artists in their summer program.
Minke has won a 2013 Enbridge Award for the Arts as the city's top emerging artist, as well as being named an Avenue Magazine Top 40 Under 40. She released an album that blended jazz, Queen songs and Wagner's Ring Cycle, and energized a 400 year old art form and, along with other smaller, more indie opera companies such as Toronto's Against the Grain theatre, gave opera a kick in the pants -- because she wanted opera to thrive for another four centuries.
"As much as a lot of people in my art form don't want to say opera is dying, I really do think it is," she said,
"People don't want to sit for four hours, doing anything, anymore -- let alone watching an opera (sung) in another language."
Does Not Compute will be performed April 17-19 at C Space. Minke said it came from a call for new operas called Opera Disrupted, which the company received 40 submissions for. It explores the theme of "technology versus the human heart" and was chosen as the audience favourite by Cowtown patrons.
"It's full of fun and ridiculousness," she said.
