The Yellowstone Center for Faith, Adventure, and the Arts is a wonderful supporter and partner of Opera Montana. We are aligned in our missions to serve our community through art, education, and collaboration. The Yellowstone Center has become our regular venue for outreach events surrounding our mainstage productions, where we aim to facilitate conversation, investigation, and curiosity.
For each of our operas and musical theater performances, we partner with local organizations to explore relevant topics to those shows. For 2025’s Sweeney Todd, we explored the legacy of revenge tragedy in a lecture entitled “Razor Sharp Justice” featuring Shakespeare scholar Gretchen Minton and Crystal Alegria, Executive Director of The Extreme History Project. The following winter, we produced Flaherty & Ahrens Ragtime, and held a politically relevant panel discussion about different experiences of the American Dream, featuring speakers from Montana State University’s Black Student Union, Congregation Beth Shalom, and Bienvenidos A Gallatin Valley. Most recently, around our production of Puccini’s Tosca, we facilitated a presentation by MSU professors Paul Lachapelle, Sara Rushing, and Peter Schweppe on “Democracy At Risk”, exploring Rome in 1800 and how the political unrest is reflected in our current world.
Throughout all of these educational efforts, The Yellowstone Center has been an enthusiastic supporter and advocate. They are firmly committed to the power of dialogue, open-mindedness and using art as a means to find common ground. Opera Montana is grateful for the welcoming space to encourage these important conversations.
The Yellowstone Center is also a key partner in the realization of our longtime dream to create a year-round youth opera program. Starting in Fall of 2026 under the direction of Youth Chorus Director Jessica Graf, the Opera Montana Youth Chorus will meet weekly at The Yellowstone Center to learn repertoire, work on musicianship, and receive professional vocal training. The young artists will get to participate in masterclasses with the professional opera artists who travel to Bozeman for Opera Montana performances. Ultimately, the year-round program will culminate in the creation of a summer youth opera where they will experience working with professional directors, set designers, and other production artists. Having a consistent, comfortable, and welcoming environment for the youth opera program to grow is so valuable, and we are so grateful to The Yellowstone Center for their partnership in this effort to bring professional opera and musical theater education to our local youth.
We look forward to many years of partnership to continue engaging community members of all ages in music, theater, discussion, and shared experiences that can bring us together to find appreciation of our shared humanity.