Fort Worth Opera’s nod to Black excellence with livestream event an inspiring success

The Fort Worth Opera celebrated Black Excellence with an all-Black production.

The pandemic canceled the Fort Worth Opera’s festival last spring and live performances at Bass Performance Hall will not resume until next fall. But in the last year the company has still managed to make real progress toward increasing inclusivity and diversity, two of the opera’s biggest shortcomings.

Back in September, Afton Battle became the first Black general director in FWO’s history. She is also the first female to hold the position since the company started in 1946. Battle immediately recognized virtual streaming as a way to make opera more inclusive by reaching new audiences. She also decided to bring outdoor performances to public parks and food banks.

Her latest passion project was another first in Fort Worth. “A Night of Black Excellence: Past, Present, & Future” was a prerecorded livestream featuring an all-Black cast and production crew. A benefit for FWO, the show was streamed for one day only on Sunday, Feb. 21 at 2 p.m. to mimic the commitment of buying a ticket to a concert. As referenced in the title, this Black History Month celebration put more of a focus on Black excellence.

The program was digitally stitched together like a virtual variety show made up of short segments. A format that requires less of an attention span made sense for a company that is increasingly trying to gain a wider audience. But this show was an inspiring success that never seemed dumbed-down, even with a string quartet playing a Kanye West song and a soprano singing a children’s hymn like “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

With a run time of over two hours, the concert featured a mix of local and internationally acclaimed artists like Patrice P. Eaton, Nicole Heaston, Latonia Moore, Kenneth Overton, Karen Slack, Russell Thomas, Kevin Thompson, and NaGuanda Nobles. Hosted by Tashara Parker, anchor of WFAA Channel 8’s “Daybreak,” most of the segments featured opera singers accompanied by piano, but the program also included dance, spoken word performances, spirituals, African drums, even stilt walkers.

“It is important to me that Fort Worth knows the amount of creative excellence that lives in our city,” Battle said on Saturday. “And everyone associated with this is Black.”

She went further in her remarks during the broadcast: “This country was built on the backs of Blacks. Black arts and culture were taboo until it became mainstream. But even then, only bits and pieces were considered popular. Even in our genre of classical music, Black music is boxed into a spiritual song set. But we are so much more than that. We are prolific composers, directors, creatives, everything and anything we want to be.”

A television cannot fully capture the intensity of a live performance. But with live music on hiatus indefinitely, FWO easily created one of the best virtual events from North Texas in the past year with impressive sound and production.

With artists selecting a wide variety of songs, the program featured opera stars like Slack singing classics like “Un bel di” from “Madame Butterfly” and more recent songs like “Free at Last” from Roger Miller’s “Big River” by Keron Jackson. Kevin Thompson performed “I Dream a World” from “Troubled Island,” which features text from Langston Hughes.

From Houston, Amp’d String Quartet offered an innovative arrangement of “Try Jesus” from hip-hop artist Tobe Nwigwe and appeared again later with another imaginative take on Kanye West’s “Closed On Sunday.” Accompanied by the Mondo Drummers, local poet and activist Leslie Polk added a spoken word piece, “Trinity River.” Russell Thomas’ masterful rendition of “Strange Fruit” in the style of Billie Holiday was contemplative and utterly devastating. For the finale, Keron Jackson sang “Ol’ Man River” accompanied by pianist Charlene Lotz, an African drums and dance ensemble, and stilt walkers from Amphibian Stage.

Heaston, a star soprano who has performed at opera houses all over the world, had two segments recorded at a rehearsal room in the Houston Grand Opera. One was “Air du Miroir Dis moi que je suis belle,” the “mirror aria” from the French opera, “Thaïs,” by Jules Massenet. The other was a spiritual, “Jesus Loves Me,” arranged by John Cornelius.

Reached by phone on Saturday, Heaston swiftly summed up the need for diversity in opera: “I always hear from people, ‘I didn’t know Black people sang opera.’” This is less surprising when Heaston describes a typical job: “I’m the only person of color, not only in the cast but in the orchestra, people behind the stage, and people in the administration.”

Most of the segments in “A Night of Black Excellence” featured a singer accompanied by piano recorded on a stage, in a home, or churches. An all-Black cast and crew made the show more cohesive by adding a sense of community that could easily be detected by viewers, particularly those who might be seeing themselves represented in opera for the first time.

“People in general, common people who don’t follow opera, don’t think we exist,” Heaston said. “That’s why a performance like this is so important, so people can see that it’s more than the one or two people you may know of who sing at the Met.”