Opera creatives face the perennial challenge of pushing the art form forward and making it resonate with new audiences. Companies can approach this challenge using three different strategies. The first and most common strategy is to present European canonic operas but change the original setting. This challenges the original form and simultaneously brings new truths inherent in the work that might be more relevant to a contemporary audience. Examples include Calixto Bieito’s Carmen set in late 1970s Spain and the Metropolitan Opera’s recent Rigoletto, set in 1940s Las Vegas. Shakespeare’s plays, written over 400 years ago, are often set in contemporary times, so this isn’t a shocking or blasphemous concept for audiences.

There are two additional strategies that are important to consider given how American audiences are increasingly multiracial and culturally diverse. It’s important to include stories from other cultures and to bring in collaborators of all cultural backgrounds to work together to create new stories in opera. Even as these strategies are often overlooked, in order to build new audiences, they must be considered.

Opera Maker and activist, Cerise Lim Jacobs is one of the trailblazers in opera, based in Boston, who is widening these creative paths. Jacobs grew up absorbing the disparate cultural and artistic influences of Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Western cultures in Singapore before moving to the United States as a young adult to attend the University of Pittsburgh and subsequently, Harvard Law School. Highlights of her decades-long career included being a trial lawyer in one of the largest law firms in New England and spending five years as a federal prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston.

Upon retirement, Jacobs brought renewed focus to her creative voice in opera, music, art, and food—life-long loves. For her husband Charles, she conceived and wrote the libretti for her first large-scale opera project, Ouroboros Trilogy, which became the genesis of her “activist opera company,” White Snake Projects. In 2016, Jacobs transformed the couple’s fundraising charity, The Friends of Madame White Snake into White Snake Projects, whose mission is to commission, develop, and produce original opera committed both to the highest production values and to social activism.

I spoke with Cerise about her creative process, to help guide and think more broadly about producing new operas for a contemporary and multiracial audience. This interview is edited for clarity and brevity:

Phil Chan: Tell me about your background— how were you first introduced to music?

Cerise Jacobs: I grew up in Singapore during British colonial rule. I was originally in a Chinese school, but then my parents were afraid that I would be converted to communism and that they could never unconvert me. They believed that they had a better chance of unconverting me from religion. So, they put me into a Methodist missionary school where I’d be safe from communism, but open to God.

There, I was in the choir, and we sang every week. The choir sang all sorts of American Methodist and American secular songs. I was musically active in my school years.

My father began his love for the traditional European opera canon during his graduate studies in England. When he returned home, we listened to operas on vinyl records.

PC: And so that was your introduction to European opera as well?

CJ: Yes. Yes, side-by-side with Chinese opera, which I got from my grandmother, the nannies, and everybody else. Every weekend we would sit in front of the TV and watch Chinese opera. Or we would go to sit on the roadside, eat hawker food, and watch the traveling Chinese troupes.

PC: What appeals to you about European opera as an expressive art form? Why did you choose to work in this genre, opposed to another performing art?

CJ: The voice, I just love the voice. It’s the trained voice—the power of it and the athleticism. I view opera singers as athletes. They have to be physically, mentally, and emotionally in tip-top shape to get the best out of their instrument. I love what the human voice can do, the timbre, the resonance, the sound.

PC: What was the genesis of White Snake Projects? How did it all start?

CJ: I always say that there were many factors, but the White Snake Projects that I envisioned would never have come about if I were a white American-born man.

Because of my background, I have a different perspective, a unique artistic voice. It became clear to me that I would never be invited to “their” table—the table of the establishment. So, I decided to make my own table and invite people who looked like me, sounded like me, and had a similar artistic vision. That’s how White Snake Projects came to be.

We’re five years old now, and we are now able to broaden our umbrella and embrace so many diverse artists. We are nurturing them, cultivating them, and launching their careers. In addition to producing our own works, mentoring is a key component of who the company is.

PC: Another key is reimagining old stories and telling them in new ways. What does your creative practice look like? What’s your approach when you’re thinking about reaching new audiences? How do you present new material to audiences on something they might know about already?

CJ: At White Snake Projects, we have a two-step process in approaching old stories and making them new. The first step is to be disruptive in content. In A Survivor’s Odyssey, we focus on two of Homer’s women, Penelope and Circe. Penelope, the faithful, is a paradigm of wifely virtue waiting 20 years for Odysseus to come back to her. We look at Penelope through her eyes and see a woman who’s very different from this idealized version.

She is a woman in midst of a terrific psychotic break because of all the pressure that is on her. Nobody sees the pressure through the male gaze, but giving her her own voice, the audience is able to see this which allows us to tell that story anew. We are able to reimagine Penelope with a new reality, as she discovers her new identity as a woman, and not as somebody that is glossed over by Homer, historians, and others.

In our second step, we then marry that disruptive content with new technology, and the result is powerful storytelling. When you have new technology combined with disruptive content, it becomes explosive.

When I look at the story, I am not trying to convey the values of the story, instead I want to convey the values as they would have to be modified for the 21st century to uplift groups that are traditionally oppressed in our culture, like women for instance. I look at the values that are espoused in these stories, and I try to make sense of them within the modern context.

PC: What are some of the challenges to re-imagining old stories that an audience might be familiar with? What’s the challenge in that for you as an artist?

CJ: There always are risks. When I wrote Madame White Snake, I based the libretto from my childhood memories of the story. I did not research the material because I wanted my memories to be the guiding artistic force. I did watch the old Shaw Brothers Lin Dai movie, the TV series, and the Chinese opera after I wrote the libretto… I was shocked that my Madame White Snake and Green Snake characters were not what I had seen 30-40 years ago. They were totally new and different characters.

When we had our Asian premiere in Beijing, the Chinese audience didn’t recognize the characters either. Our portrayal of White Snake was far from their traditional understanding of the legend. Zhou Long, the composer who won the Pulitzer Prize for this piece, fought me all the way—especially in my characterization of the Green Snake—because my interpretation of the legend deviated so much from the traditional concept of these two iconic characters.

As with all folk tales, these two iconic characters are ciphers. White Snake is a beautiful woman and Green Snake is a beautiful servant. She is desperately in love with the scholar, and the abbot comes to disrupt by revealing that she’s really a snake. Poor victim, lost love, almost Romeo-and-Juliet-like. The establishment is against them, and love is doomed from the beginning.

My interpretation of White Snake is of a woman warrior. She is decisive in what she wants and gets it. She has vulnerabilities because as an immortal snake, she has never experienced love, so when she feels that sentiment, she doesn’t know what to do, and is frightened and defensive. To protect herself, she gets aggressive, and becomes a very complex character, capable of anything. With this power, she’s no longer a submissive little thing destroyed by an abbot. In fact, she’s greater than the abbot. That’s who my White Snake is.

In Chinese opera, when a male sings the role of a young female, they are known as dan roles. I envisioned Green Snake to be androgynous. There are stories that say Green Snake was a man in his prior life. He falls in love with White Snake (a woman in her prior life), but it was unrequited. When they died, they were reincarnated as snakes because of their evilness, as the lowest of the low, cold-blooded reptiles that slither through the earth. Ultimately, the Gods take pity on this man and turn him into a female snake to be the White Snake’s companion. Drawing on that inspiration, I cast Green Snake as a countertenor to heighten the androgyny and have it parallel the male dan role. Male soprano Michael Mariachi premiered the role of Green Snake. It was so far from the Chinese idea of who this pair is thought to be.

The Chinese audience was perplexed by our version, but the Chinese scholars have been enthralled by it. Madame White Snake has been the subject of at least two doctoral theses, and it occupies a chapter in a book called The Global White Snake. The chapter, “The White Snake Legend in the United States in the 21st Century” discusses and analyzes my libretto of Madame White Snake.

PC: That highlights some of the challenges of a cultural insider versus a cultural outsider telling the story. Even as a cultural insider, if we push the envelope too far, we end up alienating other cultural insiders from that same story, especially if the perspective is perceived as too radical. As opposed to, if you’re a white person telling the White Snake story—you don’t get the whole point of the story. Also, the other extreme is if someone is so consumed by the culture that they want to push it forward, the original story then becomes almost unrecognizable.

CJ: Right. The Beijing Music Festival is giving Madame White Snake a second chance and a new co-production with Paris’ Opera Comique is in the works now. It will first premiere in Paris, then in Beijing. We’ll see what the reaction of the Chinese audience is going to be the second time around. Like the American audience, the French audiences probably won’t be too familiar with the story, so they won’t be perplexed by it.

PC: Your work has expanded outside of Chinese folk tales, how have you generally avoided cultural appropriation in your creative process?

CJ: I partner with people who have lived experiences. I currently am working very closely with many Indigenous creators, and they lead the creative process. At White Snake Projects, we are driven by the story. We separate the storyteller from the craft of making the story and begin the process by finding a compelling storyteller and a story that needs to be told.

For example, Death by Life is our operatic response to the murder of George Floyd. A group of activists, artists, writers, and concerned citizens got together and brainstormed what would be an appropriate response for an opera company. We didn’t believe that writing a statement of solidarity was enough, so we came up with the idea of making an opera that explored mass and long-term incarceration and delved into the subject of racialized policing. That’s what killed George Floyd.

To gather these stories, we went to the storytellers with lived experiences. We were able to identify several people in the prison system who wrote about their experiences. We didn’t care that they weren’t trained writers—we were able to take their raw materials and turn it into a libretto.

We found many composers of color who were passionate about the subject matter and resonated with the stories. They took the draft libretto and they reworked it as well. As a team effort, we came up with an authentic story with compelling text and music.

PC: Can you talk about the advantages and disadvantages of creating your own process if the established system doesn’t fit yours?

CJ: I’m a petite, Asian, immigrant woman. All of these factors play into stereotypes, so it’s hard for anybody to take me seriously because I don’t look like somebody who really knows anything or even speaks English, for that matter. I’m never going to be invited to join the establishment at their table, so I’m going to create my own table and invite people just like me. And together we’ll become a force.

The disadvantages to making your own table is that you are resource poor and credibility-poor. You have to really believe in your mission to keep going. It took five years for White Snake Projects to be recognized for our work. The advantages are that you get to do what you want the way you want to. There are no boundaries you have to conform to and no limitations on your imagination.

PC: What is your advice for other creatives who don’t feel like they have a place in the art form, or they don’t feel represented?

CJ: For people like us who are not given a place, we have to continue to create new works and be entrepreneurial. It is key for all Asian American and BIPOC creators to have entrepreneurship in order to make our own space, especially if the system is stacked against us. If it weren’t stacked against us, we would just be going down the normal path as other white people. But we can’t. To make that space, you have to have sharp elbows or else you’re going to be crushed. We constantly have to think innovatively.