Disrupting ritual with community opera Bill Bankes-Jones Ronald Samm and Anna Patalong in Pagliacci. Scottish Opera 2018. (Photo James Glossop, courtesy Scottish Opera) The world over, opera audiences dress up to come together and scrutinise one another, in buildings designed to encourage this: to venerate the art and to flatter its audience. The public has to master and collude in all the arcane secrets of opera-going — When do I cough, when do I clap? Everything exists to enshrine and elevate these rituals for their very [...]

Live Performance and Virtual Reality By Terry Madigan, Camille Donegan and Aisling Phelan of Virtual Reality Ireland The arena of live performance and VR is nascent but extremely fast moving with technology evolving at a rapid pace which is only increasing in speed to keep up with new Covid-specific demands. At a time when most theatre, opera houses and other cultural institutions are closed or capacities are extremely curtailed, the cultural sector is suffering through an unprecedented time of crisis. Prior to Covid, explorations of remote performance were [...]

O Jakson e o Fábio Jackson, RAP Don Giovanni ‘Freedom’: Prisão de Leiria, Portugal © SAMPOs jovens reclusos de Leiria conhecem bem o logro e a morte, na vida, mas também nos palcos. A tragédia humana é o seu dia-a-dia, e a Ópera é uma palavra que lhes é familiar. Em 2015 já lhes morreu a seus braços um Comendador, morto pelo chefe dos guardas prisionais, e interpretado pelo também director da Prisão. Em 2018 vestiram-se de Dons Alfonsos e enganaram, mais uma vez com a partitura [...]

Algunes Qüestions Al Voltant De L' Escriptura Del Llibret D'una Òpera Comunitària Sobre El Raval Victoria Szpunberg, Photography by Curro Palacios.   Victoria Szpunberg is the author of the libretto of La gata perduda (The Stray Cat), a community opera which is to be staged at Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu in November 2021. In this article she describes what the commission meant to her. In order to write the libretto, which forms the basis of a community creation process, she drew on interviews with [...]

Interviews with the consortium Image taken from YouTube video https://youtu.be/puIL0lmedJo As the first in a series of interviews with the TRACTION consortium, here is project leader Mikel Zorrilla of Vicomtech answering questions about social inequality and the role of technology in TRACTION in terms of co-creation and in light of the circumstances that have come about due to Covid-19. The interview is answered in Basque, contains integrated audio description in English and subtitles in English, Spanish and Basque. To learn more you can see a full playlist [...]

A New Urgency OPERA 2018, at Estabelecimento Prisional de Leiria - Jovens (Prision) © SAMP used by permission For thirty years, Jonathan Dove has been composing community operas with and for non-professional performers. His reflective essay on his experience – which is now available as a downloadable PDF – offers rich insights into changing practice and his own evolving ideas. The tension he identifies, between local specificities and universal themes, is at the heart of many community art projects and, in different ways, the three Traction trials. [...]

The Monster in the Maze More than a year ago, as part of the new educational program Liceu Aprèn, the Gran Teatre del Liceu decided to promote a participatory opera project in order to give high school students the opportunity to participate in the process of creating an opera with a professional artistic team: El Monstre al laberint – The Monster in the Maze, with music by Jonathan Dove and a libretto by Alasdair Middleton.This is not the first time that LICEU has involved young [...]

Who needs community opera? Part Three: It could be a model of international collaboration Jonathan Dove Jonathan Dove, The Monster in the Maze, 2015 production by the Berlin Philharmonic, photograph by Monika Rittershaus, courtesy of Stiftung Berliner Philharmoniker I sometimes ruefully observe that, whatever I do, Benjamin Britten got there first and did it better: mainstage opera, television opera, church opera, children’s opera, community opera. But he didn’t live to see the internet – here was my opportunity to do something first! Britten also didn’t [...]

Who needs community opera? Part Two: Telling a universal story Jonathan Dove Jonathan Dove, The Monster in the Maze, 2015production by the Berlin Philharmonic, photograph by Monika Rittershaus, courtesy of Stiftung Berliner Philharmoniker One drawback to co-creating operas with their community performers is that you can end up with pieces so precisely tailored to their communities, in the stories they tell and the forces they use, that no-one else will perform them. All that creative endeavour may yield just one glorious moment: a week of [...]

Who needs community opera? Part One: ‘Let’s take over a whole town!’ Jonathan Dove Jonathan Dove, In Search of Angels, 1995 © Richard Davies courtesy of Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. ‘Let’s take over a whole town!’ I suggested to Glyndebourne in 1988. ‘Everyone can be in an opera.’ I have been writing community operas for thirty years. At first, it was co-creation, shared with hundreds and hundreds of people. Eventually it led to an ambitious attempt at a networked performance of a community opera on three continents. [...]