Like many artistic collaborations, this one began over yoga, solidified over pizza and blossomed over chicken cacciatore.

John Jarboe and his Philadelphia cabaret group, The Bearded Ladies, had an idea to create a performance piece on Andy Warhol. The idea intrigued David Devan, who was intent on rethinking the city’s opera company.

After running into each other at yoga, the two Knight Arts grantees shared a meal and decided to partner in producing “Andy: A Popera.”

Far from a Warhol biopic, the piece will explore a few essential questions: What is Warhol’s legacy, and how is his statement about everyone having 15 minutes of fame relevant today? Is immortality worth dying for?

This pairing of people and ideas may sound unusual, but so is the creative process behind it. With Knight funding, the piece will be written and composed, tested before audiences at neighborhood pop-up performances, reworked with feedback and finally staged next March. It’s a Popera in three acts, literally fueled by food and community.

Act I. Food – the potluck of ideas and sustenance begins

A workshop for creating the Popera looks like this: In front of a potluck meal of homemade soup and bread, the Bearded Ladies family gets to work. Composer Heath Allen is on the piano, brainstorming scenes and lyrics with cabaret and Opera Philadelphia members. A visual artist listens in, and reacts by creating pop-up book designs like the whimsical ones made for children books. These, though, are prototypes for set designs.

A one-dimensional door, for example, expands into a 3-D accordion-like hallway that – when created full scale – will become a hallway for the cast’s dramatic entrance.

Bearded Ladies Cabaret: Andy, a Popera from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

Using the devised theater method, a collaborative form for creating performance art, everyone is expected to throw in ideas for the show.

“We want everyone in the room involved as much as humanly possible,” Jarboe said.

How does it feel for those involved?

 “It is simultaneously terrifying  – the scariest thing you can do as an artist – and also freeing and invigorating,” said Kristen Bailey, a Bearded Ladies member since the group launched four years ago.

As a way to reach new audiences and push its art form, Opera Philadelphia has been aggressively experimenting – producing, for example, Random Acts of Culture in markets and train stations and a partnership with the local Fringe festival that presented a Balkan opera followed by a traditional meal and dance. Still this process pushes the envelope.

“We are used to getting a score, practicing it and performing it. That’s what we do. That’s what our singers do,” Devan said. “Even internally we need to just be present in the process to shake up our methodology.”

After several months of workshops and practices, the group did a sing-through for Opera Philadelphia executives, including Devan. They met in a Cabaret member’s backyard garden to sing and break bread. Devan brought his homemade chicken cacciatore to share.

The most remarkable thing about the night to Allen, the Bearded Ladies’ music director, was just how collaborative a typically hierarchical process had gotten.

The night gave the sense that  “their success is our success, and their failure is our failure,” Allen said. “It’s a real partnership.”

Act II. Community – Using the Audience to see what works

“The most important person in this play is the audience,” Jarboe, the playful Bearded Ladies founder said on a recent afternoon. “How can we develop new work that is meaningful without consulting them?”

Jarboe doesn’t mean surveys and focus groups. Instead, the cast will try out bits of the work  in front of regular people. They are looking for the heat – the scenes that light up audiences – and will rework or cut the rest.

“I can tell by the chemical reaction I have when I perform something, what’s hot and what’s not,” Jarboe said.

In coming months, cast members will do pop-up performances in neighborhoods – including dressing up as Warhol’s famed Campbell Soup cans and performing in supermarket aisles.

Most recently, they tried out a few pieces at the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Art After 5 event.

You can’t have a Warhol opera without some super soup cans. Mmm mmmm good! @KnowYourBeards @philamuseum pic.twitter.com/M5TazsUpDq — Opera Philadelphia (@OperaPhila) May 2, 2014

There, the Bearded Ladies handed out paper and crayons to the audience and told them: Here are a few pieces from our Popera. We don’t know what order they should be in. Can you help us and tell us what you think?

They got back some funny cat drawings, a few sketches of cast members, and some honest feedback, Jarboe said.  A spot on Warhol’s wig, for example, needs to be, ahem, trimmed.

These events allow the Bearded Ladies to  “create a whole community around the work,” Jarboe said.

Act III: What will ‘Andy: A Popera’ look like?

Next March, the Bearded Ladies and Opera Philadelphia will present this Popera on a stage in Philadelphia. The rest is a work in progress.

Once the bones of the piece are in place, the groups will perform this summer in the lobby of the Wilma Theater. At that point, the work will be more of a cabaret that is opera informed, Devan said. Opera Philadelphia will then provide an additional composer, so that in March, for the final staging, the piece will evolve into an opera that is cabaret informed.  The fluid piece never stops evolving.

“Outside of the opera, people are asking me, ‘What’s this going to be?’ When I say I don’t know yet, they look at me like I have nine heads,” Devan said. “I don’t know what it’s going to look like. I’m OK with that. I have to be!”

The uncertainty, the ambition of the project are what makes working on it so fun, said Allen, the composer, recalling a quote from existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard:

“To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” 

– Marika Lynch is a communications consultant for Knight Foundation