By Emily Moffitt
Pictured from left to right COLab members, Christopher Lopez-Moore, Jennifer Mitchell, Jerryana Birch-Bibiloni, Joseph Birch, and Bradley Fuller
July welcomed a new Artist in Residence at the Richland Library—or rather, 5 of them! Columbia Operatic Laboratory (COLab) is a 501(c)(3) organization that started in 2015, initially created as a project through Spark, a music leadership initiative at the University of South Carolina’s School of Music. The group will serve as Artist-in-Residence at the Library from July to December; this is the group’s first artist residency. We spoke to board members Joseph Birch, Jerryana Birch-Bibiloni and Jennifer Mitchell about their goals for the rest of the year, what they will offer and life at the library.
The first couple weeks were dedicated to getting acclimated to life at the library, but COLab immediately felt welcome among the staff. The board noted that many of the librarians held an appreciation for opera. “It is encouraging to know that there’s already a love for the art form held here,” Birch-Bibiloni said. “We really want to connect with the other departments here and have a lot of big ideas on how to achieve that.” Their rehearsals make the guests walking around the second level stop in their tracks and tilt their head towards their meeting room, and strangers stop by their office hours to ask questions about their passion for opera. The board has taken this as an extremely good omen, giving them the platform to prove that opera is in fact, the complete opposite of a boring art form.
As part of the expectations for Artists in Residence, the group has created a curriculum of free workshops that caters to all the age groups that the library aims to work with. Mitchell will host a prop making workshop in the children’s area where kids will get to create their own props inspired by The Pirates of Penzance, which they will get to take home with them. For both younger audiences and parents, Mitchell states that she is extremely excited about their group story time event in November. “We’re hosting an aria and story time event where we read stories to young kids and listen to arias that correlate with the content of the story,” Mitchell said. “This provides early exposure to the world of opera for the young audiences while also helping defeat the stigma around the genre for adults, too.” COLab continues to look for more vocalists to support and welcome to their family, and they have an open audition day as part of their library schedule on August 28. “We always want to make sure that we have a safe and welcoming space for all of our performers,” Birch-Bibiloni said. “We hope that this invitation to audition expands our reach to audiences we do not always connect to as well.”
The desire to disperse the stigmas surrounding opera and to foster support for the library motivates COLab to make the absolute most of their residency. Mitchell has made note of the immense number of “statement questions” they have received and takes the opportunity to reiterate that all one needs to get into opera or to learn how to sing, is to simply want to learn. “We get a lot of questions asking about how we got into the field, and people are always surprised to hear just how much work is involved with opera outside of just singing and performing. Singing is not just a skill that someone is born with; if you want to be able to sing, you can absolutely learn how to do it!” The drive that the COLab board harbors to help develop the cultural landscape of Columbia is palpable; Birch made a poignant point about COLab in relation to the greater city limits: “COLab is a very communal project and mission for a misunderstood art form. We’re a small part of the change it always goes through and sharing it through a direct line of communication to the cultural scene of Columbia is meaningful. It is also an opportunity to marry the missions of both us and the Richland Library, which we have always been big supporters of as a system.” There are many moving parts behind an opera and putting one together. COLab has managed this challenge with aplomb as they continue to perform at venues of all kinds around Columbia, from churches to local dive bars, with the same effervescence and care. Their end-of-year performance of The Pirates of Penzance is a big production of theirs that the board decided to bring back, and it also functions as a sing-along for the audience to participate in. The production has always focused on community, but with their library residency in full swing, the board is able to make it even more community oriented from the beginning, incorporating rehearsals and opportunities to learn the lyrics into their outreach curriculum. COLab is filled with hard workers and catalysts for cultural change, and it’s a beautiful thing to witness.
The full schedule of COLab’s educational events can be found on their Facebook page as well as the Richland Library’s calendar of events. Their next event is an informational session where audiences can learn more about COLab’s mission on August 24, from 6-7 p.m. They will also have a percent day at Sweetwater’s Coffee and Tea on Park Street on August 25. There is a plethora of educational resources available on behalf of the Richland Library and COLab about the art of opera for any interested audiences, including a “summer reading list” of books related to the field available for checking out.