OUR COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY, EQUITY, & INCLUSION

TSOC believes that we have a duty to advocate for inclusion and correct injustices in our art form. Historically, opera has been controlled by white, cishet, male creators and performers, and tends to privilege able-bodied audiences with disposable income, creating a feedback loop of programming which caters to rich white donors. 

As a queer-led organization, we are personally familiar with experiences of discrimination in the operatic space, both implicitly and explicitly. Since our founding, we have been committed to making TSOC a safe, supportive place for LGBTQ+ artists, and we still have much to learn. As a primarily white-led organization, TSOC acknowledges that we have benefitted from white supremacy. The opera community specifically, as well as the arts and culture community at large, has perpetuated white supremacy through appropriation, tokenization, exclusion, paternalism, patriarchy, and power hoarding as opposed to transparency, empathy, and inclusion of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPoC), and queer voices into leadership. We are committed to the ongoing learning and unlearning necessary to be better and more inclusive of our BIPoC community. Since 2020, TSOC has been working more intentionally towards equity in both outcome and process. In the spring of 2020, we formed an Equity Committee, with a majority BIPoC membership, which analyzes our programming, casting, policies, and processes of work. In 2021, the committee created a company handbook detailing anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies, a conflict resolution policy modeled on principles of Restorative Justice, and setting a clear standard for company culture at both an artistic and administrative level. In 2022, we changed the way we choose repertoire in order to support the prioritization of works by artists in historically excluded groups. We have also increased the number of artists of color who we work with in the last several years, including both performers and people in positions of leadership, such as conductors and stage directors. 

TSOC commits to continuing this work through:

• prioritizing intentional recruitment and hiring practices by expanding recruitment outside our existing networks

• prioritizing programming works by BIPoC, queer, and disabled composers, as well as composers of other marginalized identities

• specifically prioritizing inclusion of individuals who are committed to the decolonization of organizational practices and art music, as opposed to recruiting in a tokenizing way that does not further our organizational values

• continuing to analyze our company practices and documents through an anti-racist and equity-based lens

• maintaining an ongoing practice of anti-racism and anti-discrimination through both individual and organizational actions, and remaining receptive to feedback and continued learning

• maintaining our budgetary focus on increasing artist stipends as a way to lessen the structural burdens of participating in opera

Since our founding TSOC has produced a total of 40 works by living composers. Of those composers:

• 23% were BIPoC

• 40% were LGBTQ+ 

• 33% were women or non-binary people

In the last three seasons, we’ve hired nearly 100 individual artists. Of those artists:

• 32% were BIPoC

• 50% were LGBTQ+

• 61% were women or non-binary people

We are also committed to learning and changing our policies to be more inclusive to disabled artists and audiences. We accept auditions both in-person and recorded, and require all artists who work with us to provide proof of covid vaccination and at least one booster. Since 2018 we have performed all our works with projected English supertitles, regardless of the language of the work. We rehearse and perform in spaces which are wheelchair accessible, and the theaters we work in have flexible seating so that wheelchair users are not relegated to the edges of the space. As a company run by neurodivergent people, we also strive to make our processes supportive and accessible for people with varying learning, processing, and communication styles. 

Above all, our commitment is: as we learn better, we will do better.