opera performance

improvisation

text scores & propositions

installation

recording

electronic production

performance as Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), specifically distress tolerance

performance as oddity, especially unconventional physicality for the immediate social context and/or physical environment

exteriorizing the singer’s inner monologue

fusing opera, pop, & experimental sound practices

alexander technique

collage

reiki

poetics

somatic strategies

Soprano, composer, and performance artist Nelle Anderson seeks the nexus of opera, pop, and improvised Happenings. She interprets pieces as Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), prioritizing unconventional physicality and externalizing the singer’s inner monologue, practice-room processes, and spiritual motivations. She has toured internationally as a baroque opera soloist with Ensemble Caprice, Bach Society of Minnesota, and Early Music Seattle and sung in masterclasses with Leon Botstein, Ari Pelto, and Dawn Upshaw. She has a BA in Classical Voice Performance with focuses in Written Arts and Literature from Bard College and is currently a Performer-Composer MFA candidate at CalArts. She is an alumna of the OperaWorks and Oberlin in Italy training programs and a certified Reiki Master, a practice which guides her voice teaching. She produces experimental pop as Soubrette, the operatic archetype of the flirty, mischievous girl-maid.

When my music history professor Christopher Gibbs affectionately referred to opera as an “unstoppable zombie”—supernatural and morbid at its core—he put to words what I had been struggling to explain since discovering my opera voice in my freshman year of college. Until then, I was a writer, pianist, alto saxophonist, actress, songwriter, jazz singer, and musical theater performer, a list that keeps growing and which I struggle to regulate, but I knew there was one thing I did not want to be: a classical singer. In college, I quickly found out that opera was not the parade of formalities I had assumed it was, but a monstrous breeding ground for my own intellectual and artistic potential.

As I fell in love with opera’s spider web of languages, histories, and challenges, my voice teacher lamented that I could be great if my singing technique didn’t fall apart when I engaged emotionally. I began chasing remedies. I sang in the college chapel late into almost every night. Surrounded by protein bars and progress notes scribbled on the backs of sheet music, I rested on the dark carpet in the vestibule, whisper-singing pop melody fragments into my laptop microphone. Looking back, it was in these nights that my freewheeling artistic philosophy was born. Those pop melodies inevitably inhaled and transmuted that night’s repertoire, and my hours of opera exercises came and went in intuitive acts, wild performances for an invisible congregation.

Now, as a performer and voice teacher whose holistic philosophy necessitates both roles, I know that what I’m ultimately teaching is flexibility of perception. I believe that voice should always be practiced as if we are performing— performing for the air in the chapel, for a memory projected on the wall—and never within an artificially-segmented body, but always in natural combination, handing the student different lenses to try on their inner eye. Breathing graciously into dark corners, singing invites audiences to go brightly and boldly into the world. But the singer must go first, and in order to be truly honest with others, they must be honest with themselves about the expectations, real or imagined, that might be stifling their unique perspective.

Given the harrowing mental health crisis in my familial background and throughout our society, singers and non-singers alike require rigorous training in self-trust and courage. This is not a metaphysical necessity; it is a neurological one. I believe the challenges and revelations of holistic opera training have universal application as urgently-needed empowerment remedies. As a white, cis-gendered, able-bodied American, I have many privileges that afford me the mental space and resources to develop these imaginative experiments. The ultimate art, no matter one’s field, is to respond to accidents of fate with new architectures of validation for others, like the college chapel I was lucky enough to inhabit as I discovered who I was. There is no more essential societal contribution than inspiring another person to re-view their own unique, ingenious reality, a singular vantage point that has never existed before and will never exist again.