The Purgatory of Pitching Projects
The problem with being a non-agented artist outside the academy (the kind of artist I’ve tried to define within the Artists on the Verge podcast ), is that life becomes a purgatory of pitching projects, a never-resolving tremolo of describing what you would like to do if you had the institutional and/or monetary support. You describe the same project again and again and again to politely blinking coordinators and bureaucrats, or compose descriptions in form after form and email after email, scrambling to adjust your pitch based on various blasé reactions, until the idea you had once been so excited about sounds completely stupid. At best, you’re in an endless Spectacular! Spectacular! shimmy, at worst you’re stuck waiting for emails that never arrive. When I started this blog three years ago in the distant pre-pandemic days, I wanted it to be a place to express freely the actual, somewhat unflattering, reality of being an aspiring opera singer. I’ve grown past that particular concern,
