Portland Opera

Portland Opera To Go, Portland Opera’s flagship education and engagement program is seeking singers to workshop our newest youth opera commission: Shizue: An American Story. This new opera is part of Portland Opera’s Our Oregon project that commissions original operas highlighting the stories and experiences of Oregonians in a variety of communities, including African-American, Asian and Pacific Islander, Native American, and Latinx communities. Shizue: An American Story represents the second of these youth operas with more to come, rolling out every other year.

Singers who are selected for the workshop will have enhanced consideration for the world premiere performance and the Fall 2024 education tour.

Portland Opera To Go is seeking Japanese American singers for the following roles:

- Elder Shizue, Coloratura mezzo: Japanese American. The role spans Shizue from middle age into her 70s. Reserved and dignified.

- Younger Shizue, Soubrette soprano: Japanese American. The role represents the youthful bride and the early years in Hood River as well as Elder Shizue’s students. Brave, determined.

- Kamegoro, Light-lyric tenor: Japanese American. This role spans from late 20s to mid-60s. Hard-working, sincere, determined, loving.

For the role of The Man, we are looking for a Euro-American singer to represent a variety of characters.

- The Man, Lyric Bass: The Man plays a variety of characters that represent the attitudes of White society in a number of time periods, from shopkeepers to soldiers to the Mayor of Hood River. NOTE: There are NO racial slurs in this piece.

This 50-minute youth opera with a libretto by Dmae Lo Roberts and a score by Kenji Oh, tells the story of real-life Japanese American Oregonian, Shizue Iwatsuki.

Shizue Iwatsuki lived for most of her life in Hood River, Oregon. Along the Columbia River with a backdrop of Mt. Hood that reminded them of Mount Fuji, many Issei, first generation Japanese Americans, immigrated from Japan, including Shizue who came to America with her newlywed husband. As farmers, their lives were so difficult at first that Shizue stifled her sobbing under the kitchen table. But then she would look up at the stars into the vast Hood River sky and reminded herself these were the same stars that shone for her family in Japan.

A poet, a master of ikebana flower arrangement, a Japanese tea ceremony teacher, an orchardist with her husband and a survivor of WWII Incarceration, Shizue always demonstrated gaman, a Japanese term for “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” Shizue faced forced removal to two different WWII concentration camps plus a temporary center during a dark period of US history when people who were once friends and neighbors turned against Japanese Americans, many of whom lost their homes and property.

Shizue: An American Story illuminates Shizue’s quiet heroism throughout her life making extensive use of her beautiful tanka poems and through the lessons she took from Ikebana.

Shizue Iwatsuki lived her life as a tanka poem, a complex unbroken line of beauty, endurance and strength.

Workshop dates are April 9, 10, and 11, 2024 and will be held at the Hampton Opera Center in Portland Oregon. The compensation for the workshop is $500 plus hotel and per diem. The Portland Opera To Go contract for the education tour of Shizue: An American Story, will begin September 18, 2024 and run through December 10, 2024 with world premiere performance on TBD at the Hampton Opera Center. Compensation for the education and community engagement tour is $750 per week, with a travel reimbursement of $500 and housing stipend of $1500 (total) for singers more than 50 miles from the Portland Metro Area.

To apply, please send your headshot, resume and recent recordings (within the last six months) of three contrasting selections, one of which should be in English to Alexis Hamilton, Manager of Education and Community Engagement at ahamilton@portlandopera.org. The deadline to apply is December 1, 2023.