Have you ever wondered what it’s like to move 30 years of opera history? Short answer: NOT easy.

I’m not talking about moving piles of yellowing scrapbooks or boxes of photographs. Our 30 years of opera history includes entire sets, a huge paint deck, and an abundance of props, costumes, set pieces and tools. This is an entire warehouse. We are moving a WAREHOUSE.

This endeavor does not involve promising your burliest friends free beer and pizza in exchange for a day of lifting and transporting. This is an eight-week planned operation, my friends.

It’s tempting to rely heavily on the dumpster when doing a move, and, unfortunately, there are items that just have no other destiny or way to be recycled. But we’re accessing everything and finding uses and homes for things that would otherwise share the remainder of their life with dirty diapers and banana peels.

One of the things Kish is doing is inviting her theater cronies over to loot adopt from our prop and set pieces we no longer need. (Theater storage is like GoodWill–but with an abundance of fake food and daggers.)

As we ready our new warehouse space, we’re salvaging old sets for building materials. Our walls have had former lives as pieces of Hansel and Gretel or Fidelio.

(see the outline of the stove from Hansel and Gretel?)

Reusing sets is really nothing new in the theater world, but it was a great starting point for our Green Opera Initiative. With the philosophy or re-use already in place, it’s easier to expand it to other areas and see how creative we can get.

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