IN-DEPTH SERIES /// THE FOUNDRY PROJECT
Institutional Memory, Digital Archiving, and Building an Alumni Association from Scratch
An 87-year-old opera company. Fading memories from a national and international diaspora of former artists and employees. Untapped nostalgia, affection, and passion. A company with limited resources for all but essential production, education, and fundraising.
What more can be done?
The Teller House, Central City, CO.
IN DEPTH #1 / BACKGROUND
In the late summer of 2018 Emily Pulley and I sat together on the patio of a large, historic building in a small, unusual town nestled high in the Rocky Mountains, sipping our drinks and mulling the perils of time.
Central City, Colorado, founded as a mining camp in 1859 as the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush reached a fever pitch, was in its mining heydey described as “The Richest Square Mile on Earth.” The mines have long since gone, now invisible save for some artfully left piles of dirt and rusting equipment pocking the forested hillsides that rise on all sides from the town.
Gambling came to the area in the early 90’s. And though there are indeed casinos in Central City, they are dwarfed by the outsized, Vegas-scale towers looming somewhat garishly in the neighboring town of Black Hawk.
Situated about 45 miles west and 4,000 feet up from Denver, Central City also has an opera company — the fifth-oldest continuously running opera company in the United States, in fact — and one with a long, storied history.
Sitting on an upper patio of the Teller House, an historic hotel, Emily and I considered the rich past of the opera company, weighed present opportunities being missed, and worried deeply about its future. Not necessarily because of its present circumstances — though one should by all rights always be worried about opera companies, which one of my mentors in music school years ago had colorfully described as “held together by scotch tape and bubble gum.”
And certainly for Central City Opera, time and money are always a concern; there’s almost never really enough of either.
But as challenging as the present may be, we worried more about its past and its future: an historic institution at risk of losing its memory, an intensely unique place crying out for help to buttress the decades of foundational work that had brought it thus far, and a company perhaps needing more creative resources beyond its immediate reach, as well.
We paused to take in our surroundings on a mild, summer Colorado afternoon on the sunny patio of The Teller House, which loomed regally over and behind us.
This grand, illustrious gem of an edifice, with its dignified period detailing, its rich history, and countless stories — some recorded, most lost to history — was for a moment a useful stand-in for the opera company as a whole: a creation whose accomplishments can be measured not just in years but decades, a gloriously beautiful, unwieldy beast of a shared human endeavor, and one undoubtedly deserving of sustained care and loving attention.
However, while the enthusiasm of Central City Opera’s staunchest supporters may be limitless, its resources are certainly not.