‘It’s an occult-mystery film opera.’ This is how Michel van der Aa describes his new opera, which opened last Friday at the Barbican (and is reviewed here). I had similar difficulties in describing the nature of many of the shows that I produced at Mica Moca, a performance and exhibition venue in Berlin. Over the course of five months, we produced more than 350 different shows of every genre you could think of and some I’d never heard of (check out Japanese free noise) and yet, by the end, I felt that what we’d actually produced was one huge opera.
We’re living in very interesting and exciting times for the world of performance — when boundaries between art forms are breaking down and audience’s expectations are shifting. And opera has the opportunity to benefit most. As the most multimedia of art forms, it has the right to roam across this changing cultural landscape, collecting from others and so continually reinventing itself. Indeed, the way performance is going, and when taken to its logical conclusion, perhaps everything is opera.
Opera is becoming far harder to pigeonhole. Young classical composers are just as likely to quote Beyoncé as they are Beethoven. You’re more likely to see a young opera company perform in a warehouse or pub than in a theatre. Creators of opera are using their own surroundings and experiences to create work that consequently feels more alive and engaging to audiences. And audiences are becoming more unpredictable, too, going to an increasing variety of events and places. Their tastes are dictated more by the nature of the performance or the particular artists involved than by loyalty to a venue or genre.
The digital revolution of the past ten years has given rise to the counterculture of immersive and site-specific theatre that caters for audiences craving more visceral experiences. After a long day with our heads in a computer, we don’t want to sit in a warm, dark auditorium 30 feet away from the stage. We want to be able to touch our performers, discover them in the next room, create the music ourselves. And yet the digital revolution has also made us able to absorb huge and varied amounts of information simultaneously. We expect our performances to be rich audiovisual experiences. Live performance has responded to this by engaging technology in many various and brilliant ways but also by making work that is unique. In other words, by making something that can’t simply be replicated on a computer or by a West End show with a large budget. Audiences are drawn to something that they think is going to be a special experience and, as a result, they will take more risks with what they go to see. From my own perspective, I know that doing an opera by Harrison Birtwistle in a forest last year with The Opera Group brought in audiences that would never have come to see the same show in a theatre. They came to experience the ‘opera in a forest’. It is this mentality that Punchdrunk, Secret Cinema and You Me Bum Bum Train are tapping into so successfully.
Opera is by no means trailing behind in this field. There is an underground current of opera in the UK, and particularly in London at the moment, that is challenging established methods and expectations. Small, fleet-of-foot companies are offering experiences that the bigger companies can’t hope to replicate — though ENO tried with The Duchess of Malfi. Silent Opera, Size Zero Opera, Mahogany Opera, Opera Up Close, Opera in Space have all pushed the physical and conceptual boundaries of what and where opera is and can be. It seems to me only a matter of time before the next exciting, radical company (in the mould of Complicite or Cheek by Jowl) is actually an opera company.
And at the risk of sounding like a naïve optimist, I believe the UK is a particularly good place for a company of this nature to flourish. This sort of work is also more economical than the traditional ways of creating opera and therefore stands more chance of survival in the current financial climate. In fact, economic markets rarely affect the quality of ideas in a negative way. Instead, financial downturns make artists more savvy, inventive and bold. Furthermore, the lack of large institutionalised opera houses in the UK allows for the emergence of these small, independent companies.
In Germany, the arts are funded entirely through state subsidy. This enables experimental and well-supported work, but engenders a laziness, particularly towards audiences, where the commercial edge is lacking. Conversely in the US, where arts are funded by private patronage, the work itself tends to be more traditional because the bejewelled old dowagers who pay want to see pretty frocks on stage. This is of course a gross generalisation, but it is useful to note that the UK sits between these two extremes and, with diverse income streams, could have the best of everything: guaranteed support from the state, the trust and passion of individual patrons and the sharpening commercial pressure of selling a show to an audience.
The danger of course is that the UK falls between these stools. And the question that needs asking more generally here is: whose responsibility is it to pay for the arts? Jeremy Hunt set the tone of this government’s approach when he suggested rather glibly that the arts needed to find more private patronage. This may be true but it was said without any meaningful suggestion as to how to implement such a major and time-consuming change of mindset.
Before thrusting responsibility on one or the other, however, I believe we need to recognise the role that opera can and does play in society. If we regard it as merely a bourgeois add-on, then, when considering government cuts, there’s clearly going to be no discussion when opera is held up against, say, health. Opera companies are getting better at arguing the economic and social benefits of their work but it is not helpful or fair to compare the worth of the arts with health or education. Rather, they should be seen as complementary. Not enough is made of the huge contribution that all opera companies, both large and small, make towards providing opportunities for outreach and education across the country, often supplementing the lack of provision in schools. But how much more exciting if opera can ride the wave of the current developments in society and performance and through its inherent qualities become the art form that best represents our multimedia age. Given that opera has such potential to play a prominent role in defining our cultural identity, one would hope that everyone would want to be responsible for paying for it.
Comments