San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
S.F. Opera singers needed to rehearse together safely. This doctor figured out how.
fitted in a single act, to cut down the need for bathroom breaks.
The path to the production, though, relied on Roman’s invention, which grew out of a nearly yearlong collaboration between company members and a team of infectious disease specialists at UCSF.
“Being a surgeon means you’re always tinkering and trying to figure out how to make things with your hands,” Roman said.
So like amateur inventors throughout time, she set to work on her kitchen table, using shears and tape and a basketful of old clothes. After a series of cobbledtogether prototypes and months of finetuning, the result turned out better than she could have hoped. She dubbed her invention VOXCV — combining the Latin word for “voice” and the Roman numerals for 95 — and has already submitted a patent application for it.
The twoply structure, a combination of cotton muslin and corset boning, provides protection against infectious aerosols while allowing a singer a full range of motion in their face and jaw, said Galen Till, the company’s senior costume production supervisor. The costume shop has already produced more than 100 of the masks — enough for each singer to cycle through several of them without waiting for laundry day, she said.
“The cotton itself is something we use for petticoats,” Till explained. “The boning is a flexible lightweight polyester, used primarily in wedding dresses, which creates a little cage around the singer’s face.”
The mask is free enough for a singer to let loose a full operatic stream of sound and be heard at medium volume. There’s even a hanging pouch — resembling a horse’s feedbag — that allows for a drink of water between phrases.
How did Roman know so well what an opera singer’s requirements would be? Because she’s a trained singer herself.
“I was a voice student at Cornell,”
“The Barber of Seville”: April 23-May 15. $5$250. Marin Center, San Rafael. 415-8643330. www.sf opera.com
Roman said. “But I come from an immigrant family, which meant my parents were super practical — like, ‘Sure, you can be an opera singer. But you also have to be a doctor because
.’”
That was good advice, Roman concedes, that led to a nearly 20year surgical career at Yale before she moved to San Francisco in 2018 — and found the opportunity to sing again during operatic karaoke nights in the Castro.
Roman is one of a team of UCSF scientists that has been meeting weekly since early 2020 with members of the Opera staff, consulting on whatever safety issues arise as the company plans for an eventual reopening. Also on the team is Dr. Mark Almond, the associate principal of the San Francisco Symphony’s French horn section who moonlights as a virology researcher.
For Erik Walstad, the Opera’s technical and safety director, the group’s agenda has been a combination of the usual risk assessments facing any production — how steep is the stage design? are there liquid effects involved? — together with the new considerations brought on by the COVID19 outbreak.
“During the first couple of months it became particularly complex, because the rules kept changing,” Walstad recalled. “At first the CDC guidelines were all about surface contact, not aerosol transmission, and then as that became clearer we had to rethink.” The UCSF brain trust was assembled by Dr. George Rutherford, the infectious disease specialist who has
emerged as a leading local authority on the pandemic. He was brought in through social connections (his neighbor is the daughter of a former Opera board president), and he gathered a team of colleagues that includes laryngeal surgeon Clark Rosen and occupational and environmental specialist Robert Harrison.
“The Opera may not think of it this way, but we approached this as a problem in occupational medicine,” Rutherford said. “The question is how to get an employer back into a workspace safely.”
That put the task in line with analogous projects that Rutherford has worked on for the Golden State Warriors and for the chicken processor Foster Farms. He said the weekly confabs were reminiscent of doctors doing hospital rounds. “There’s an agenda, and we tick through the problems: No. 1: ventilators. No. 2: costumes. No. 3: screening. It’s just like what you do with patients in a pediatrics ward.”
For Roman, the analogies between surgery and opera are even closer.
“I work in the she said, stressing both verbal overlaps with a laugh. “A lot of what we’ve learned from going through COVID — about ventilation, about small rehearsal spaces where many people might be gathering — is amenable to borrowing by the opera.”
For the upcoming “Barber” production, most of these concerns will apply only to the rehearsal process. But even after the company returns to the War Memorial Opera House, many lessons of this period are apt to carry over.
Even the use of the new rehearsal mask, which Till predicts will become a standard part of the company’s arsenal.
“In normal times, if someone gets a cold or a sore throat, that has had the potential to travel through an entire cast very quickly, and create havoc,” she said. “But now that we have these masks, someone can have a scratchy throat and still be able to come to rehearsal.”
Fyzika, about what happens to our sense of corporeal self when we live our lives online, and “Are:era” by drag artist Pseuda, which imagines a lone protagonist surrounded by cameras in a dystopian universe run by machines.
In person April 1418. Live stream 5 p.m. April 16. Free$69.99. 4156262060. https://counterpulse.org
“Brilliant Mind”: This winter, Mill Valley theater artist Denmo Ibrahim and her brother finally learned more about their father — after he died.
He was absent for most of her life, and with the news of his death, she got the chance to sketch a picture of his life, going through his home, his belongings. Now, under the aegis of Marin Theatre Company and Storykrapht (a new company that Ibrahim and Marti Wigder Grimminck run), she’s writing a play that traces a similar narrative.
In “Brilliant Mind,” worldshifting family secrets come to light as two siblings try to figure out how to mark the loss of a person they never knew to begin with.
May 1123. $30. 4153885208. www.marintheatre.org