RUTA
2009-2011
Santa Fe, NM

Molly Sturges, Core Creative Team, Artistic Director/Composer
Valerie Martinez, Core Creative Team, Librettist
Acushla Bastible, Core Create Team, Stage Director
Chris Jonas, Artistic Consultant

Research and Development Funding:
Multi-Arts Production Fund Award, 2009

Littleglobe, in collaboration with Santa Fe residents who live along the city bus routes, will create an interactive, inter-media new opera that will premiere on active city bus lines. This immersive opera created within the complex and often contentious cultural fabric of Santa Fe, RUTA will delve into real and imagined stories, dreams, interactions, and personal thoughts of bus riders and people who live along the bus routes. Performed in the intimate, multi-lingual, diverse context of city buses, RUTA will employ live vocalists and musicians, recorded instrumental audio played over the radio, text/poetry (delivered as casual conversation pieces with audience riders), video (transfer station interactions), and movement.

The full opera will span two different bus routes taking riders to various parts of the city and introducing them to riders whose interwoven stories are revealed, in full, over the course of the three routes. The libretto will be created from interviews with riders and people who live along the routes and performers will be dressed as bus riders. The audience will be able to experiences the opera in segments or one continuous piece made of small chapters. Riders will end where they started and then be directed to a location where they can share food and facilitated dialogue.
RUTA takes the audience into a web of relations that express the uniqueness of place and the multiplicity of community life. It explores public and private selves. It allows audiences to move more deeply and boldly into the range of issues that shape Santa Fe’s cultural landscape and offers the audience a high level of multi-sensorial and community engagement. Like other Littleglobe Common Ground projects, RUTA promotes the integration of art and daily life, fosters and restores connections within and across communities, creates meaningful dialogue, and manifests real collaboration between artists and community residents.