Nautilus Music-Theater

Help make the world safe for new opera and music-theater!

We know there are so many worthy non-profit organizations in Minnesota to support, so we are honored that you might be considering a tax-deductible contribution to Nautilus.

Any contributions we receive will be dedicated exclusively to pay artists' fees, creating spectacular productions like our productions of MOONLIT WALK HOME and STATIONS OF THE HEART.

This year, your contributions will help support artists working in our ROUGH CUTS works-in-progress series, our Wesley Balk Opera/Music-Theater Institute, and our 70th Minnesota Composer-Librettist Studio (pictured below).

Our artists eagerly await the opportunity to once again provide our community with the stimulation and solace you have come to expect from us. Thank you for any support you can give, and we hope to see you at a live Nautilus event soon!

Dear friend:

Perhaps you've already contributed to Nautilus this year, and if that's the case, we are truly grateful for your support! 

If not, we hope you'll consider a donation, as reinvigorating our artists and our community is crucial for our collective well-being.

Listen to what some of the artists with whom we have worked say:

• "Nautilus serves as an oasis, a place of creative nourishment, empowerment, and respite. It gave me heart; I felt valued and taken seriously as an artist at a new and higher level. The support I felt from the staff was phenomenal!”
• “Nautilus’ COMPOSER-LIBRETTIST STUDIO has proven time and time again to be a successful incubator for writers, composers, and performers. The community, creativity, and hard work that comes out of it is amazing!”
• "The WESLEY BALK OPERA/MUSIC-THEATER INSTITUTE validated my work as an artist, giving me varied and valuable perspectives into the craft. I was able to discover new tools to integrate into my performance. I learned more in three weeks than I learned in two decades as a performer.”
• "Thank you to the whole staff for the invigorating, supportive, creative environment you created as a workspace for artists. You obviously have such respect for the work and the artists who create it.”
• “The next morning, we began our three day Collaboration Principles workshop at Lincoln Center with Ben Krywosz, the Artistic Director of Nautilus. He looks like Santa Claus, and made me believe in the Spirit of Christmas again”.

And our fully-staged, award-winning PRODUCTIONS, as rare as they are, have provoked critics to offer praise:

• "Beautiful voices, a powerful story, and great characterization"
• "Breath-taking; heart-wrenching; quietly powerful; beautifully staged"
• "Gorgeous and evocative libretto and score"
• "Knock-out singing that touches your soul"
• "Nautilus takes away the extraneous, and the heart reveals itself onstage"
• "This is a company with a unique vision, doing important, unusual, fresh and entertaining work... an absolute must see!”
• "It's exactly what I've come to expect from Nautilus -- innovative, modern yet connected to a long tradition, and musically gorgeous... There's nothing better.”

Of course, this kind of exciting work is only possible with the support of patrons such as you. We are grateful for your support in the past, and if we are to continue offering this kind of work to the Twin Cities (and beyond), we have to raise money from arts patrons such as yourself. Good citizens appreciate the arts, but great ones are visionary enough to know that the kind of behind-the-scenes arts understructure in which Nautilus works is absolutely crucial to a healthy and creative social environment.

In this time of divisive politics, the arts are an especially powerful place where we can come together to laugh at our foibles, weep for our griefs, and feed our souls with the tender mercies for which we all yearn.

So please, give what you can so that our artists can continue providing you with new operas and other forms of music-theater that are emotionally expansive, dramatically engaging, and spiritually stimulating!

Thank you for your support!