Opera Columbus Announces Its 2022-23 Crane Directing Fellow: Sarah Dahnke

The Crane Directing Fellowship, inaugurated for the 2021-2022 season, was created explicitly to advance the careers of BIPOC stage directors by creating early-career opportunities to gain hands-on experience assisting and directing mainstage productions.

"As the opera industry continues to work toward greater equity and diversity, we at Opera Columbus knew that our greatest potential for impact was to create direct opportunities to support and train BIPOC stage directors," says Julia Noulin-Mérat, General Director + CEO of Opera Columbus. "This fellowship provides a paid opportunity for these artists to gain direct experience working on mainstage productions, and we couldn't be more fortunate in our second year than to welcome the brilliant Sarah Dahnke to the company."

An experienced choreographer, Dahnke is eager to observe and assist in the operatic process as an emerging director. "I'm viewing this as a very immersive experience, and really value the opportunity to witness others' creative processes. I'm looking forward to calling on my background as a choreographer and using movement to tell stories to help inform the work happening in the room as these productions are staged."

"We want to make sure that as we provide opportunities for artists of color," continued Noulin-Mérat, "we aren't limiting the work they're offered solely based on their identities." An Arab-American transracial adoptee, Dahnke has experienced that same push to interpret stories that would rely on her bringing cultural context to the process. "Talking about our ethnicity or our cultural heritage are not the only stories we have, and the assumption sometimes is that those are the only stories we should be telling. We all contain multitudes and are more expansive as humans and artists than what someone might assume based on our appearance or heritage."

The Crane Directing Fellowship, sponsored by The Crane Group, seeks to increase the number of creative leaders from diverse backgrounds in the opera industry by advancing and supporting talented individuals who will have an impact beyond Opera Columbus. This season, Dahnke will assist on mainstage productions La Cenerentola (October 28 & 30, The Southern Theatre), Maria de Buenos Aires (February 24 & 26, The Southern Theatre), and Rigoletto (March 31 & April 1, The Ohio Theatre), and direct the education tour. Dahnke will return to Opera Columbus in the 2023-2024 season to helm a mainstage production.

Opera Columbus launched its inaugural Crane Directing Fellowship in the 2021-22 season during the celebration of its 40th Anniversary. The Directing Fellowship, designed specifically to create early career opportunities for BIPOC stage directors welcomed Luther Lewis III, a multidisciplinary artist, singer, teacher, and director. Lewis' residency included assistant directing for the 2021-2022 season's mainstage productions of Tosca and Fellow Travelers, staging OC's touring education productions with the OCCU Resident Artists, and closing the season as the stage director for Vanqui. Following the Opera Columbus residency, Lewis joined Opera Saratoga as the assistant director for Sweeney Todd. Lewis continues his artistic development, beginning a new directing residency at Lyric Opera of Chicago's, Ryan Opera Center as part of the 2022-2023 Ensemble.

Sarah Dahnke is a choreographer, dance artist and arts educator deeply committed to empowering communities to use movement to reclaim narratives stripped away by colonialism. She's a MAP Fund awardee, an NEA Our Town-funded resident artist, and a former awardee of fellowships from Gibney's Moving Toward Justice, Target Margin Institute, New Victory LabWorks, and Culture Push. Dahnke has received commissions from PEN America and A Studio in the Woods and has been in residence at Abrons Arts Center and Brooklyn Studios for Dance. As a practitioner, Dahnke specializes in devised performance and site-specific dance film. Her dance film work has been screened through the Dance Films Association, Tiny Dance Film Festival, DanceBarn Collective, BRIC, and Movies By Movers. Dahnke is the artistic director of Dances for Solidarity, a project that co-creates choreography with people who are incarcerated in solitary confinement and creates live performances as advocacy toward prison abolition.