Grethe Barrett Holby

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Grethe Barrett Holby (born April 26, 1948) is an American producer, stage director, choreographer, and dramaturge best known for her opera roles.

Holby is best known as the creator of American Opera Projects, where she served as Artistic Director from 1988 to 2001.

She currently works as Executive Artistic Director of Family Opera Initiative, which she founded in 1995, and Ardea Arts, Inc., which she founded in 2006.

Holby was given a 2006 Creative Arts Residency by the Rockefeller Foundation. The Bellagio Center was an Italian arts center.

Early life and education

Holby was born in New Rochelle, New York, and grew up in Larchmont, New York, the daughter of Aase-Greth (Hall) and Warren Barrett Holby, a founding partner of Merritt & Holby, a housing development firm. During World War II, she was Norwegian and fighting for the resistance and the Norwegian government-in-exile, as well as saving Jews in Norway. She was detained at a concentration camp due to these activities. Her father was of German and English descent.

Holby attended Interlochen Arts Camp in 1963 and graduated from Mamaroneck High School in 1966. She later enrolled at Bryn Mawr College. Holby then enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in art and design in 1971. The Theatrical Experience yielded a Master of Architecture from MIT with a thesis titled, The Relationship of Theater and Architecture in the Theatrical Experience. She and Franco Colavecchia were also registered at Harvard to research set layout with Franco Colavecchia.

Personal life

Holby and her partner, photographer Arthur Elgort, live in New York City. Sophie Elgort, filmmaker Warren Elgort, and actor and singer Ansel Elgort are among their children.

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Career

She appeared as a dancer with Laura Dean and Dance Company in New York, Washington, D.C., and Connecticut in 1974, and two years later, as a performer, actor, and dancer for Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach in Berlin, Paris, Rotterdam, where the production was first presented in November 1976. "Beta Hookups" by Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music was a performance at Merce Cunningham Studio, followed by additional performances of the work at The Kitchen. Dancers, a dance performance piece, premiered at the Dance Theater Workshop in 1977, and her four abstracts, Ode, String Out, Steady State Turning and Cycles, were performed at The Kitchen in 1979, garnering a rave review in The New York Times, followed by her dance company, Grethe Holby and Dancers, which were followed by performances throughout the New York area.

Holby served as Assistant Designer to Franco Colavecchia's opera performances at the Wexford Festival and Broadway, where he was set designer for Scott Joplin's Treemonisha in 1975. Holby began choreographing for opera companies in 1976, first with Michigan Opera Theater (Summer Snow, Regina), then with Houston Grand Opera, where she served as both assistant director and choreographer as well as a member of the Opera Studio during the 1982/83 season. She worked in Houston as choreographer under director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle for Pagliacci, under Götz Friedrich for Wozzeck, and as Choreographer/Assistant Director to Nathaniel Merrill for The Tales of Hoffmann (first published as a double-bill with Trouble in Tahiti and later updated to include both works). At La Scala, the complete version of A Quiet Place was on view, followed by the Washington Opera in 1984, with Holby being retained as Assistant Director and Choreographer. She choreographed the 1983 world premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti's A Bride from Pluto, as well as assistant director and choreographer for Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann (directed by Frank Corsaro and starring Plácido Domingo) at the Los Angeles Music Center Opera.

She began directing standard opera repertory for many opera companies, including Faust for Opera Company of Philadelphia (broadcast on National Public Television), Opera Memphis and Gretel), Opera Co. of North Carolina (Daughter of the Regiment), Wolf Trap Opera Company (with her own translation, translation, and staging of Haydn's The Apothecary), the world premiere of Vincent Persichetti's The Sibyl, a representative of the Minnesota Opera Company (Desca Holby supervised the Centre for Contemporary Opera in New York's Symphony Space in 2007 as Eric Salzman and Valeria Vasilevski's True Last Words of Dutch Schultz. In a double-bill with Cage's Europera V, she directed Erik Satie's Socrate at The Flea Theater, incorporating John Cage's Cheap Imitation).

Holby, the founder and Artistic Director of American Opera Projects, was instrumental in commissioning, constructing, and directing more than twenty-five new opera performances. Eve Beglarian, Kitty Brazelton, Lisa Bie law, and Elaine Kaplinsky's debut at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (TADA! ), Richard Peaslee (2001). & Orlando Shakespeare Company, (London) and Fireworks! Billy Aronson, a librettist and brazelton, was a writer who wrote (2002) (Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, NY).

Holby established the Family Opera Initiative in 1995 as part of American Opera Projects' initiative to produce opera theater performances for multi-generational, family audiences. After AOP's withdrawal in 2001, the American Opera Projects and Family Opera Initiative split, with Holby leaving AOP as the head of FOI as an independent group. Holby founded Ardea Arts, Inc., a not-for-profit firm dedicated to commissioning, designing, and presenting new American opera and music theater performances, at the time when Family Opera Initiative became a program under Ardea Arts and a full-company member of Opera America.

Several AOP works were produced by Holby under the Family Opera Initiative umbrella, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Fireworks! A Flurry Tale and a Flurry Tale. Animal Tales, a full-length musical-opera based on two acts devised by Kitty Brazelton, with a libretto by George Plimpton, was created in workshops at the Atlantic Center for the Performing Arts (Act I, 2005) and Montclair State University Peak Performances (Act II, July 2006), as well as industry readings/recording at Chelsea Studios/Theatreworks USA (complete work, 2008). Holby created the project and spent time as a dramaturge and facilitator in workshops. On March 25, 2017, Animal Tales will premiere with the Garden State Philharmonic. At the Central Park Zoo in 2010, Holby premiered Cat, a one-act opera-musical by Brazelton and Plimpton (originally part of Animal Tales), as part of the Family Opera Initiative, followed by performances at Infinity Music Hall in Connecticut.

Holby and Ardea Arts are currently working on The Three Astronauts, a space opera based on Umberto Eco and Eugenio Carmi's children's picture book. Yusef Komunyakaaa, Dmitry Glukhovsky, Liu Sola, Ye Xiaogang, Daniel Everett, Alexander Tchaykovsky, and Holby were among writers and composers from Russia, China, and the United States, which includes Yusef Komunyakaa, Dmitry Glukhovsky, Liu Sola, Ye Xiaogang, Daniel Everett, Alexander Tchaya

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