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MAKING IT PERSONAL – Opera as a tool for social change and inclusion

Edited text of the talk I gave yesterday at the Opera and politics

Symposium – Trinity Laban May 2019

 

It is very good to be here today to talk to you on a subject that – hard as it is to believe – I have been banging on about for thirty long years.

Let me begin at the beginning.

I work in what is widely regarded as the most mysterious, inaccessible, white, middle-aged, middle-class art form known to humankind – opera. Except, opera isn't itself any of those things. The audiences can be, although there is a huge misconception about the vast bulk of those who enjoy the art form.

I myself come from a  working class, immigrant background but I had the chance to attend what was called the 'poor man's Eton', a school called Woolverstone Hall, an ILEA school that took poor, bright inner city kids and gave them an Eton style boarding education. It also put culture and performing arts at the heart of its curriculum. I don't think I have to rehearse the arguments to this room about the value of cultural enrichment for young minds. But here is really why those audiences I referred to are so white and middle class – they often went to schools that had similar cultural curricula to mine. And so, exposure came early. And that is really all there is to it.

I am sure that many of you here today spend much of your time creating accessible arts, focusing on diversity, reaching out to audiences you want to try and attract. We do it at Opera Holland Park. We have pioneered free ticket schemes for young people and for older people, we sell thousands of seats at 20 quid. And the schemes work – in the cultural diversity realm, our free tickets for under 18s is remarkably successful – our general audience is 85% white British but for the free tickets scheme, the audience is 50% white British and 42% other ethnic minorities. Our 20 pound seats have an audience who for over 50% have household incomes of lower than 50k per annum. We are renowned as a relaxed, informal venue too. We have signed performances, audio described performances, we do huge amounts of work out in the community. We hold a schools matinee when 1,000 children sit through, rapt, for a three hour performance of a classical opera and whose reaction is the loudest we ever get. We are a true west London venue – I grew up there. We had a very powerful connection to the Grenfell disaster which continues to this day – we created a special piece of music that was performed by the community. The list goes on – we all do so much of this work. I would argue that the odds are especially stacked against us poor sods in the opera world! It seems that no sooner do we break down a barrier, a national newspaper will print another article about toffs and champagne, and about the rarified elitism of opera.  

 But a recent project made me realise that the greatest weapon opera has in our quest to encourage society's less privileged -and what I call culturally redacted population - to spread their cultural wings,  IS that very reputation for other-worldliness.

I think that ultimately, despite all of our work, if we continue to view this from the point of view of audience development alone – or first – we will only ever scratch the surface. We alone cannot change the entire foundation of how this nation appears to approach the arts these days. What the project I am going to talk about proved irrevocably to me is that we should switch our focus – we should not only tell people that they should like live performing arts, theatre, opera et al, but that they should explore it for other reasons of their own personal development.

For a couple of years, I have been a mentor at a school in Vauxhall, south London. Archbishop Tenisons is the school. I was working with the sixth form and took a very clear approach to the group, focusing on self-belief, self-improvement. I didn't set targets or goals – we just talked. And explored honestly their own perceptions of their futures and their potential.

One day, we had a very long and challenging discussion about self-belief and despite some bravado, it became clear that many of them, even though they would call themselves confident, were in fact very doubtful about their place in the world and the opportunities they had. Now teenagers, particularly in inner-city schools, are sceptical when teachers say things like 'you can do anything you set your mind to' or 'you have huge potential' etc. Young people who have had tough upbringings are very aware of the structural and social barriers they face and this sort of encouragement often falls on suspicious ears.  Except I am not a teacher and they had read my book which tells the story of my life – so they knew I spoke from a place of some experience. So I challenged them; I said that I bet I could take them to an opera, to the most famous opera house in the world – The Royal Opera House – and that a) they would probably like the opera and b) they would not feel out of place.

They laughed.

And then at the next session we spoke about it again and I asked for commitments from those who wanted to take part. None did. But then one signed up, then two and quickly 8 of them signed up. And the moment of change for them was not just that I said we were going to film it, but it was because we had a conversation during which I said that it didn't matter if they liked the opera or not – what mattered was that they would be stretching their horizons and exploring new things which in turn would help them understand that nothing is a barrier to them if they didn't want it to be. I didn't care if they never saw another opera in their lives, but I had a point to prove. That swung it for them. Plus I think they trusted me.

So here is the opening section of the film when we meet the students. I should say at this point that the school is predominantly attended by Black and Asian kids. This group were self-selecting and the film is not about attracting black or diverse audiences – it is a social comment about working class, inner city kids. The other important point is the aesthetic – I was very clear with them that we aimed to play with our audiences prejudices, to show that how they are perceived is a superficial thing that they themselves could, and would, by the end of the film, demolish. They also chose the film title.

FILM EXTRACT 

So already we start to get an idea of what these young people are about, their personalities. Just after this first filming session it became clear to me that this was not a film about opera. We can see that there are bright, outwardly confident people here, but the camera has begun to tease out insecurities, issues with their personal lives that we don't really explore but which are nevertheless there. We make these films in a pretty unstructured way and they take us where they take us. Which is part of my point – we like to depict our art forms to people in particular ways but actually, what we ought to be doing is allowing them to determine what they will extract from the experience. 

So over the next couple of weeks, we talked about the opera they were going to see – Tosca – and they listened to some of it but we mostly talked about the visit to the opera house, the physical nature of the theatre, the environment there and I think it was this that most concerned them – it was a mysterious culture for sure but I sensed them going through stages of alarm, then, after discussions, being more ready for what they saw as a social challenge. So we went to the opera house for a day just to tour it backstage and they listened, for the very first time, to an opera singer up close. Their reaction to that was shared on social media by the BBC who were broadcasting the film on iPlayer. The clip had over 400k views and was very moving. The following day they attended the performance itself. I want to play you the final section of the film when the students give their reactions.

FILM EXTRACT

I have to tell you that whilst I waited for them to leave the auditorium to give those reactions,  I was very nervous! You can see straight away that they engaged with the opera but most importantly, for me, the impression I find most profound is the way in which they are entirely shocked by how much they engaged with it. And emotionally, they seemed completely sideswiped – this was not how it was meant to be. A lot of what was said and which didn't make the edit focused on how it had made them realise how much of the world they believed was now accessible to them.

The final credits shot was also a big moment when I showed them the final film for the first time; it is the same shot from the opening credits, but now, they realised, the viewing audience had an entirely different perception of them as a group of young people.

My final speech to camera really sums up what this talk today tries to get across. And there is an epilogue; a couple of months later, they all came to Opera Holland Park for our opening night of La Traviata;

They still love their own cultural activities but they talk about how they now try different things – their world-view has expanded. And one lovely moment was when Mayowa and Bakary were chatting to a wealthy elderly lady and at the end she asked them if they worked for the bank who were the sponsors.

The film won some awards, including two at the Milan International Film Festival and we took them all to Milan for a great four day trip. All of them are now at university – half of them had never really believed they would get there and this makes me so proud of them.

You see, I am not proposing that going to the opera is what validates these young people. I am saying that whilst we obsess about getting more young people into theatres and concert halls, we should in fact use our art forms to encourage young people to re-evaluate their self-image, to challenge them to spread their wings and to walk boldly and confidently into environments where they may even be aware that others are looking askance at them. It isn't really enough to tell them only that theatre is good, or opera is good and that cultural enrichment is good. We have an opportunity to really create a vehicle for self-discovery. It is a sad reality of our society how people look at young people like this and perhaps it is also a little sad that the elderly lady only thought that two young black men were bankers because she had met them at the opera.

But I believe that we as an industry should insert ourselves into the effort for social inclusion and progression by demonstrating to young people that extreme – to them – cultural challenges go a long way to helping us see our lives and our potential differently. Obviously there are other critical methodologies and work going on in this realm but we can be a part of it.  I know that is how my school affected me. Our art should perhaps come second in this process – we use it as a tool – we should subordinate our art form to the effort to create confident, broad-minded young people. It seems self evident to me that should opera engage in this way, rather than just merely as audience development, we will reap the rewards as a by-product. I don't yet fully know how we can do this or how we can do it on a large scale – but at OHP, we will certainly be exploring partnerships with various organisations. Some have approached us – those who deal in particular with disaffected young men – and they want to create projects that help them build confidence or to explore their emotional difficulties. We know that music is very powerful in this realm. It may well be that we can only do this on a small scale but look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves. I think schools will be an important partner and other government services and in time, maybe we will reach a critical mass.

 https://youtu.be/coz6CUlXi38

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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