The future of opera

‘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.