About
Founded in 2019 by Creative Producer, Arts Administrator, & Operatic Soprano Leah Podzimek, Luster Productions is a creative consultancy and production company that curates innovative performance experiences rooted in opera that embrace the artform’s core characteristic of storytelling.
Luster’s mission is to use music theater and opera to tell stories that contemporary audiences can relate to, embracing the diverse array of lived experiences of both composers and artists to create innovative musical experiences that connect audiences to each other and to art.
Leah Podzimek, Owner & Founder
Leah Podzimek is a freelance arts administrator, independent creative producer, and operatic soprano based in Denver. She founded Luster in 2019 as a way to house and market her myriad activities as a multi-faceted creative artist.
Through Luster, Leah works with non-profit arts organizations across the nation, providing contracted services in fundraising, project management, event planning, operations, and more. Her clients include The Playground Ensemble, Opera Steamboat, Northglenn Arts, and the Chicano Humanities and Arts Council among others. She has held leadership roles with Boulder Symphony, Meow Wolf Denver, and Curious Theatre, and supporting positions with PROTOTYPE and Opera Colorado. She also consults on various art initiatives and currently serves on the boards of Junkyard Social Club and Control Group Productions. Leah also performs regularly on stages of her own creation through Luster as well as a soloist with orchestras, opera companies & arts organizations nationwide. More information on her performing career and availability can be found at www.leahpodzimek.com.
Recent Projects
ZOTTO is a continuation of the original 2020 COVID-era experience, and is an immersive and multi-sensory supernatural Japanese folktale and theatrical journey. Audiences meet three generations of Japanese American women and learn of their relationship to Denver’s rich yet sordid history as they encounter yokai and obake (Japanese spirits and demons), discover hidden secrets within forgotten spaces, and engage with interactive elements that ask them to consider relationships between intention and impact.
Produced collaboratively with the Japanese Arts Network and Theatre Artibus. Originally premiered November 2022 with encore runs in March and July 2023.
In the summer of 2021, artists at BRDG Project in Denver gathered to hear solos and ensembles performed by Kira Dills-DeSurra (Mezzo-Soprano), Leah Podzimek (Soprano), and Jessica Nilles Kressin (Piano). They not only listened to the music, but heard about the context of the pieces within their full operatic works, the background of the operas and the composers, and more. One month later, these artists delivered completed, new works of visual art to the gallery. Over 30 individuals, working in their chosen medium and style, had internalized the emotion of the performance and expressed it in a piece of visual art.
The project, dubbed Interplay, was so successful that it has since been touring throughout the state of Colorado. It has so far gone to Telluride, Basalt, and Steamboat Springs with other cities on the horizon.
Missed Connection was a limited-run, outdoor immersive experience in downtown Denver’s Commons Park where attendees took part in the adventure. They met a Seeker who asked them to help find a recent missed connection by using a provided map to find four characters stationed throughout the park and getting to know them. Through this journey, they would gather clues to help The Seeker find their love. Performers utilized devised theatre, improvisation, operatic storytelling, musical theatre, performance art, and instrumental music to convey clues and engage audiences in interactive activities. At the end, audiences voted for who they thought was the missed connection, which in turn built the final scene.
Produced solely by Luster Productions and premiered in September 2023.
Unbound is a kink opera about searching for a sexual fantasy--the one you think you want, and the one that may change you. Set in a darkened gay fetish club, a main character meets men who offer him scenarios of desire, but no emotional connection. Then a stranger offers something new and different- a bondage experience. Over the evening they build a relationship that builds to a sensual climax. The opera ultimately is about loving oneself, trusting someone else, and exploring feelings that are all too often relegated to the shadows.
Unbound is a 60-minute chamber opera in one act written by Nathan Hall with libretto by Alan Olejniczak, with no live instruments besides voices and an “orchestra” of electronic sounds. Premiered August 2021 in Denver’s Studio Friction.
The Japanese Arts Network, Stories of Solidarity, Western Sound Alliance, Filmmaker Bruce Tetsuya, and Luster created a chilling, or ‘ZOTTO’ in Japanese, supernatural immersive and multi-sensorial journey. A complex and twisting audio-visual and tactile journey took audiences on a journey to 7 locations in the LoDo, historic Five Points, and Capitol Hill neighborhoods of Denver while following a main character who meets different supernatural spirits from Japanese folklore. They listened to tracks and videos while driving/traveling and at each location, and were mailed a packet of physical items to interact with at each stop.
The project educated audiences about Denver’s rich yet sordid history and dynamics through a storytelling and artistic lens, providing historical context for the lived experiences of cultural communities in Denver and touching upon social issues including neighborhood redlining and segregation, Japanese American resettlement in Colorado following WWII, the Anti-Chinese Race Riots and terror caused by the KKK, transient life on East Colfax, and displacement of indigenous peoples.
Originally produced in October 2020.
