WELCOME TO SANTA FE OPERA: Charles Gamble & Amy Owens on community engagement

Pulling into the carpark of the Santa Fe Opera is a surreal experience. In Australia, it’s the kind of place we’d put a look-out, with cumbersome treated pine railings and a daggy signboard alerting you to distant landmarks.

Instead, in Santa Fe, John Crosby built an opera house. The first one in 1957, the second (after the first one burnt to the ground) in 1968, and the current one, with the benefit of a full roof, in 1998.

The mesa rolls out for miles in ochre, turquoise-grey and juniper green, with distant mountains and a hazy blue sky. Santa Fe Opera blends into its surrounds, its curving walls toning in as it spills down the hillside.

I’m here to meet the Director of Community Engagement, Charles Gamble, but first I’ve been booked on a docent-led backstage tour. Our docent Beth is clearly a passionate opera buff herself and is full of the requisite stories and information. The biggest surprise to me is the garden. Apparently conceived by Crosby himself, the grounds would rival the best-kept heritage homes in Australia, and are maintained in large part by a team of volunteers who I will come to see often, roaming the ground with snips and trugs.
 
We can’t go in to the opera theatre itself but that’s no problem - as the most surprising element to this theatre is that it’s open on the sides and back. There’s a wall behind the audience, a roof, and sliding flats behind the stage which can close for effect, or for the weather. I had thought the cheap seats on the sides were due to partial views, but I’ve learned it’s also partial drenching if the rain and wind really hit their stride.

After the tour, Maddie Adams (Community Engagement Assistant) takes me to meet Charles, who is with Amy Owens, Director of the Young Voices Program and an old colleague of mine from The Dallas Opera. Music pours from all directions; the rehearsal venues are dotted around the gardens, all with the fourth wall open to the air, so the sonic landscape includes Britten, Wagner, Mozart, Puccini and Verdi, as well as vocalises and warm-ups.

Both Charles and Amy are effervescent with enthusiasm for their work in Community Engagement. We begin with an overview of the Pueblo Opera Program, bound up in SFO founder John Crosby’s original vision: an opera company of high artistic merit, a training ground for young American singers, and a place that respected and acknowledged the surrounding Pueblo peoples. The Pueblo Opera Program (affectionately referred to as POP) was founded in 1973; neither Charles nor Amy are aware of any other classical music organisation that has a fifty year engagement with First Peoples, and nor am I.

In fact it was in part SFO’s continued relationship with the eight Northern Pueblos that drew Charles, whose background is in improvisatory theatre, to the company as a teaching artist in the first place. For him and for Amy, First Peoples’ involvement in the SFO is important as a clear acknowledgment that the opera house stands on native lands. But he also finds the “rich, vibrant and obviously contemporary current native tradition of storytelling” energising.

“The part of opera that I’m most interested in is honestly the future of opera, and so to find inspiration and connection with contemporary Native culture to me feels like an obvious connection,” he says. “I feel additionally that, in looking at the future of opera, part of the way forward is creating work that elevates the voices that aren’t part of the traditional canon.” He sees this as part of the role of the SFO’s Opera For All Voices program, which co-commissions and co-produces operas committed to social impact and diversity.

Amy identifies being part of an Opera For All Voices production, Sweet Potato Kicks The Sun, as one of her two most important experiences, along with Doctor Atomic. This 2018 production brought Adams’ opera back to ‘where it began’ (Los Alamos is forty minutes’ drive from Santa Fe). Director Peter Sellars involved Pueblo communities in the production, as well as downwinders, as an acknowledgement of the ongoing effects of nuclear testing - but the Pueblo peoples’ participation also symbolised their resilience and continued presence on the land.

As Charles points out, including a corn dance was both an acknowledgment of culture and an acknowledgement of ‘what we did’. The corn dance brought together people from three different Pueblos: San Ildefonso, Santa Clara and Tesuque, on whose lands the opera house stands. While each Pueblo nation has a corn dance, they all differ in details, so three Pueblos performing together in the same dance was new.

The dance was part of the opera, but also appeared before the opera began. Without the benefit of a pre-show announcement asking for audience’s attention, however, there wasn’t the respectful silence in which corn dances are traditionally performed - a learning, Amy says, for the future, and a chance to educate the audience beforehand. Some of the Pueblo dancers would go on to form the Pueblo Opera Cultural Council (POCC), who I will meet later in the week, and to whom Charles directs my questions about how this new corn dance came to be.

I am momentarily distracted by a flash of movement in the garden - I’ve just seen my first hummingbird - before we continue discussing how the Pueblo Opera Program developed. SFO currently arranges and pays for buses from all the Pueblos, which has been the case since the program was piloted. The opera offers the kids and their families dinner curated in consultation with POCC, and an interactive pre-concert talk called 3,2,1 Opera! presented by Oliver Prezant, before watching a dress rehearsal.

“In Community Engagement, opera is not the point, it’s the vehicle,” says Amy. “Because opera has so many art forms coming together, there are so many entry points.” She points out that when Young Artists are asked ‘why opera?’, they usually talk about having been part of a production, and that’s what’s key: “for me, opera is more interesting because I do it, not just because I watch it.” This is also why 3,2,1 Opera!’s presenter Oliver’s strategy is so effective, allowing kids to get on stage, put on costumes, and experience life from within an opera.

One of the main focuses in Community Engagement is in providing pipelines into opera for children. There’s the Opera Storytellers program, while a high school apprentice-style program - Young Voices - offers completely free singing training, from which students often move on to major in music at the university level. 2023 was the first year a Young Voices graduate had been selected into the highly competitive SFO Apprentice Program.

There’s also Active Learning Through Opera Arts (ALTO), which brings teaching artists into local schools in a program that uses aspects of opera to inform aspects of the school curriculum. Amy highlights her love of Charles’ description of the program as ‘making learning more sticky’. Combining academic learning with art (and often therefore emotion) helps retention. And as Amy says, ‘it’s hard to argue with sticky academic learning’, either from a board and funding perspective, or from a teaching perspective. Charles acknowledges the work of Andrea Fellows-Walters in founding Community Engagement, and she’s on my list of folk to meet.

A volunteer gardener wanders past with a pink trug, somehow managing to find a few remaining weeds in the immaculate garden. We discuss funding, as well as the thorny question which plagues many of us artists: opera is an expensive art form, so are we justified in accepting funds which could perhaps be channeled into direct aid instead? Amy speaks up, noting she’s sharing her personal views and that this is a question she asks herself all the time. Having met donors, she said, everyone has their own reasons for choosing to donate to a particular cause. “You’re now a steward over money that’s for a vision,” she says. “Take the ‘could this be used in a better way’ out of the equation, and just be a good steward for the vision that you’ve already advocated for.” She signs off there, having to dash to another meeting.

Charles and I are left to contemplate one of my favourite questions as Verdi’s Rigoletto floods the warm Santa Fe summer air: how do you sustain yourself in this work, which can be difficult and demands long hours? 

“A lot of it honestly is the opportunity to continue to reconnect with my own work as an artist, a theatre artist,” Charles responds. “The people I get to work with I find inspiring. To be part of a small, curious team from a range of backgrounds, I love that. I love that collaborative place, to be vulnerable and take risks together, I find that very sustaining. That feels good. Being able to do some artistic work that just feeds me. That, and then you know, being surrounded by this.”

Hummingbirds, clematis and smokebush, distant clouds over sprawling mesas, the occasional splash from the onsite swimming pool, and everywhere, opera.

Mel Penicka-Smith talks to Charles Gamble at the Santa Fe Opera’s stall, Santa Fe Pride 2025