Thank you, everybody, for attending this evening.

This is the uh meeting of the parks and recreation committee of the Indianapolis City County Council.

It is May 7th.

We're starting at 5 39 a.m.

I will start our meeting this evening by recognizing all of our members.

We'll start down there on the left, and Brown.

Good evening, everybody.

Thank you.

Mr.

Chair, Jesse Brown is a picture.

We have the leading district two.

Good evening, Mr.

Chairman.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman Charles Payne, Mr.

Flint.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Councillor Jared Evans representing district 17.

Thank you, folks.

I'm Councillor Dan Boots, District 3 Lawrence and Washington Township, and I have the pleasure of chairing this committee.

And tonight we have the pleasure, and I'm going to introduce the general director of the Indianapolis Opera Company.

Okay.

David Craig Starkey is going to open up our meeting tonight.

We have a fine pleasure of having a performance from the Indianapolis Opera Company this evening.

Mr.

Starkey, take it away.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Chairman Dan Moose and welcome to the Brazil Opera Center at the home of the Indianapolis Opera.

Little history lesson.

This is the second generation, formerly the second generation of the Greek Orthodox Church.

Anybody know where the first one was?

It is on Ohio Street where the Indiana Historical Society was.

They moved here in 1961.

This section here in is 1981, and you also might also recognize this place because in the back parking lot for 26 years was the Greek fest right over there.

So we uh were blessed with being able to begin to be in this building in 2010 after the Greek Orthodox Church went north into Carmel.

And with the support of Bill Austerly, founder of Angie's List that lived right over here.

Uh we were able to use this building in various uh applications and in December of combinate the people.

In December of 2019, Bill called me and said, basically, I need you to buy the building, sustain my legacy.

I am dying of ALS.

And so we did capital campaign in 2020, and we were able to successfully raise the money to buy the building, renovated 80%, and it is the home of the Indianapolis opera, and it's also a community center for midtown for offices of the farming arts organizations, education, dance, uh, youth orchestras.

We have chamber orchestra workers on here, the symphony, um, the chamber choir.

So this is one of the most used um community rooms uh in the northern part of the city here, and now it's being used for parking recuncil to showcase that our community centers can be public institutions of all kinds of success.

We are also going to feature two of our singers, two of our lead singers, because this is also the room where the Indianapolis Opera uh prepares all of its shows.

We just closed Mary Fido last weekend at the Tobyers Theater at Newfields, and they rehearsed the entire show in this room, full set, constant and everything, and um so this is where opera originates.

So you're going to hear music from the composer, the French operating composer, Bose.

Now, some of you might have heard about the recently, because well, you might have also heard that opera is not relevant anymore.

The actor Timothy Charme.

And you can tell how well that went because everybody around the world says you don't know what you're talking about, and he's right.

But then also recently we've had a new lieutenant governor that needs to be enlightened to understand that opera is not possessed.

And we're gonna sing your music from Carmen, and we're gonna do that because that's what the opera company does.

Because we are the Indianapolis Opera.

We are the biggest, the longest, and the most shining star of opera in the entire state of Indiana.

And we have two world-class singers.

They're gonna give you just a little snippet of carbon.

And we're gonna enlighten everybody on that opera.

It is truly a cultural institution of 600 years in the making and will never die.

This is what Album and Lindsay Moy and Allegra Surley singing selections from Carmen.

Helping them to recognize that uh an opera that's two hundred years old and can still speak today.