Nina Draganic, “Lobbyist”
A night at the opera is often burnished into memory as somehow grander, more glamorous and opulent than any other night. Soaring melodies, impressive sets, ingenious costumes: the sheer spectacle tends to obscure the hundreds of hours of beavering and, more accurately, the years of preparation that made it all possible. Everyone conspires to make the magic happen. So in that moment when everything falls into place, it all somehow seems inevitable and we rarely, while caught up in the moment, stop to question it: to wonder about the science behind the magic, to speculate what might have happened instead, to ask “what if?” These are questions for the lobby after the curtain has fallen.
This month, our spotlight falls on an individual whose life is bound up with watering and feeding the beast that is opera, almost always out of the limelight and behind the scenes, indeed more often in the lobby than in the hall itself! But in terms of life’s twists and turns, for Nina Draganic, who is among other things the curator of the Canadian Opera Company’s lobby concert series, one could also ask “what if?”
