It’s been over seven years since Joynt was on season 18 of The Bachelor (a popular American dating and relationship reality television series) where her presence caused two sets of stereotypes to collide.
Bachelor viewers and media praised her for bringing “sophistication” to the show—that’s opera reduced to its affiliation with wealth, like the way movie villains are always interrupted while listening to an aria—while the opera world didn’t know what to do with her. She was getting famous for the wrong thing, dabbling in the low arts, and demonstrating that musical artists could have other lives by choice. And that’s opera, and the performing arts in general, perpetuating the exclusionary myth that great artists are fundamentally all the same.
“I was not taken seriously for a while,” she says about her career since, over the phone from New York. She’d been working in Germany for several years before the show and she didn’t even have an agent in North America at the time. Now she’s regularly singing here today. Recently she completed a run as Gilda in at Opera Colorado, she’s starring in the upcoming Joel Ivany-directed at Edmonton Opera, and she’s and Cunegonde in (Ravinia, Tanglewood, Orlando, Anchorage), and plenty of new opera including a well-received turn as Controller in Jonathan Dove’s for Seattle Opera, and Winnie in Lembit Beecher’s for Opera Philadelphia.
