The opening of the casino in 2018, though, proved not to affect performances. The discussions have continued without any clear resolution. Many local Native Americans saw the company as a manifestation of the westward expansion that had routinely ignored the rights and customs of indigenous populations. The company quickly learned that many community members nurtured long-simmering resentments, dating back to 1956 when John Crosby built his new opera house on land that the pueblo’s people had traditionally owned. SFO’s history of working with local Native Americans gave the dialogue “a place to start,” according to Andrea Fellows Walters, the company’s director of commmunity engagement. The pueblo’s land sits right at the foot of Opera Drive, and the opera company feared that the new development, with a casino at its center, might interfere with its own operations. The company’s discussions with the Tesuque Pueblo have been an entirely separate matter, although similarly showing the need for SFO to work with its indigenous neighbors. The dance served as a preamble to the opera later on, in Act II, the dancers reemerged, performing the Corn Dance to Adams’ music. Meanwhile, a group of indigenous dancers offered to perform the traditional sacred Corn Dance for opera audiences. Sellars invited members of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which seeks justice for people harmed by radiation, to appear onstage. Set at nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory, the opera details the detonation of the first atom bomb: an event that had a grave impact on the environment and the state’s native people. Atomic, his Manhattan Project-themed collaboration with John Adams. That long-standing connection morphed organically into an artistic partnership in 2018, when Peter Sellars mounted the Santa Fe production of Dr. Santa Fe’s Pueblo Opera Program (POP), in existence since 1973, invites families from 21 pueblos and reservations to dress rehearsals of three operas each season, with the dual aim of sharing culture and building audiences over multiple generations.
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