Tenor Victor Ryan Robertson Premieres Salt & Spirit in San Francisco

Opera Parallèle opens its 17th season with the world premiere of Salt & Spirit, a one-man operatic journey through the music of the Gullah Geechee, running November 14–21 at Z Space in San Francisco. The piece stars tenor Victor Ryan Robertson, who co-created it with Opera Parallèle Creative Director Brian Staufenbiel.

The project traces back to a single dusty book. In 2016, while singing Sportin' Life in Porgy and Bess at Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, Robertson met a patron who went down to a cellar and retrieved a volume of sheet music for 100 spiritual songs of the Gullah Geechee. The patron handed it over with a simple instruction: "Check this out. I really think you should do something with them."

"Literally from the second I opened that book I was transfixed," Robertson recalled. "Because I thought I had sung just about every hymn or spiritual in church. But these were different."

That moment launched years of intensive research. Robertson grew up in upstate South Carolina, but he had no knowledge of the Gullah Geechee — descendants of enslaved Africans brought to the South Carolina coast and Sea Islands who, isolated in those regions, developed a distinctive language, crafts, food, spirituality, and music. Many people have never heard of the Gullah Geechee, yet plenty know a work drawn from their world: George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, based on Porgy, the 1925 novel by Charleston-born author DuBose Heyward, who was inspired by the local Black working-class and Gullah residents he observed.

What does the show actually look like?

Salt & Spirit has no ensemble cast. It's just Robertson, singing and speaking about his journey of discovery, with pianist, conductor, and music director Clinton Smith onstage alongside him. Smith collaborated extensively with Robertson to create the music.

"I speak a good bit through it — about my journey — and how I discovered these songs," said Robertson. "They had praise houses which I visited, where people would go to gather and worship. The culture has been alive and beautiful, but my journey has been just finding out more, and how it's affected me and changed me musically, which has just been amazing."

The design surrounds Robertson with recorded voices and shifting imagery. "We talked together about creating an actual operatic experience with quotes, sound design, projections and sets, and just with piano, so he could take it all over the country," Staufenbiel explained. The production layers recorded quotes from Gullah Geechee elders between the songs, set against an interstitial soundscape, projections, lighting, and sets — all built around Robertson's journey rather than a conventional operatic script with recitatives.

Staufenbiel's set is based on a real place: the Chapel of Ease, an 18th-century church on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, built by slave labor. "It was reclaimed after the Civil War by the Gullah Geechee people, who were using it after that. So we are using it as a kind of form of resilience," said Staufenbiel, who photographed the roofless ruins and created a section of the building to project onto. The projections place Robertson in a forest, by the ocean, and inside the sky.

Robertson discovered the church on a visit to South Carolina and thought it would suit the show perfectly. "It is a historic site of the old ruins of a church that is made by former slaves with shells from the ocean and is so spectacular," he said. Water anchors the whole evening: "'The water brought us and the water kept us' is what we read from a Gullah elder, so we used that to start the show and to end the show."

How was the music built?

The sheet music contained only melodies and words — no chords. Smith, a pianist of almost 40 years who had never written or arranged music before, had to create the harmonic world. "But we're both from the South so there's this gospely kind of churchy music that was part of me and part of him," Smith said.

Robertson, whose repertoire spans opera, jazz, spirituals, and blues, told Smith what he wanted for each song: a "lush, thick and nuanced sound — more of what I want as an opera singer, to be able to sing longer lines and stronger melodies." The two worked through the songs one by one, spending an hour or more on each.

"He would sing the melody by himself, and I would imagine the harmony and the rhythm around it. And in some cases, he would say, 'This needs to be more rhythmic, or needs to be sharper,' so it was an extremely collaborative and creative process," Smith explained. He reacted to Robertson's fully formed melodic images — "Sometimes you hear levity, sometimes you hear celebrations, sometimes you hear weight and struggle."

Smith's verdict on the finished production: "It's very simple, direct and stripped down to absolute emotion. I think it's really going to touch people."

Where did the collaboration come from?

The creative team's history runs deep. Robertson made his Opera Parallèle debut in 2016 in Terence Blanchard's Champion, where he first met Staufenbiel. They reunited in 2023 in Atlanta for The Shining, an Opera Parallèle co-production that Staufenbiel directed for The Atlanta Opera. When Staufenbiel asked about future projects, Robertson mentioned the discovered songs; a follow-up phone call about a small operatic experience clinched the deal. Smith and Robertson go back further still, to an opera around 2009 at Minnesota Opera, and both eventually landed in Atlanta, working on many musical projects together.

Robertson plans to expand and tour Salt & Spirit, building the instrumentation show by show toward a full orchestra, he hopes, by next year. "I want to be able to tour it worldwide," he said. "I want to get it out there so people can really hear how beautiful this unheard music is."