Royal Opera Research Articles

Opera-ting on inequality: gender representation in creative roles at The Royal Opera

ABSTRACT Despite an international focus on gender inequality in the cultural and creative industries in recent years, there remains a lacuna of empirical data on the gendered dimension of work in opera. This paper establishes a baseline for understanding gender inequality in opera through a case study of The Royal Opera, Covent Garden. Drawing on a longitudinal analysis of the company’s production credits from 2005/6–2019/20, we analyse the gender profile of credited stage directors across production type, repertoire, and creative teams. We find that women practitioners experience gender-based disadvantage in the creative roles central to opera production with negatively compounding effects on their visibility and prestige in the sector. Based on these findings, we assess The Royal Opera’s pledge to achieve 50:50 gender balance for all creatives on new productions by 2022 and evaluate its ability to produce meaningful progress toward gender equity.

Performance History Revealed: The Performance Databases of Rambert and the Royal Ballet

Dance archives were instrumental in the development of the first performance databases produced in the UK. This article examines the conceptual frameworks and practical components of the performance databases created by two of them: the Rambert Archive and Royal Opera House Collections, which holds the archives of the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet (up to 1997). It outlines their work-based data models (contrasting these with event-based data models), the contents and cataloguing rules of their ‘work’ and ‘performance’ records, and their online presentation of the data.

The Virtual Opera House: hybrid realities in lighting design processes for large-scale opera

ABSTRACT Digital visualisation tools – virtual models – are increasingly used as part of the creative and production processes of large-scale theatre and opera. These technologies not only enable the modelling of the performance space with its scenic and lighting scenographies, but also facilitate the modelling of production processes and human relationships. Focusing on lighting at the Royal Opera House, London, I examine how digital visualisation allows designers and production teams to manipulate not only virtual space, but also virtual time. I show how the ‘Virtual Opera House’ allows multiple possible futures to be modelled, reviewed and selected. Further, the limited time available on the opera stage for lighting and technical rehearsals can be supplemented with additional, virtual stage rehearsals inserted between the physical ones: interstitial time. Away from the pressures of stage rehearsals, the lighting designer, lighting programmer and others spend time developing and nurturing the working relationships that are critical to the successful realisation of design intentions. Using primary evidence from practitioners, I demonstrate how the Virtual Opera House is not only a virtual model of the stage and physical production, but is also an environment where processes and relationships can be modelled and remodelled: a hybrid-reality collaborative environment.

Gavin Higgins and Francesca Simon, The Monstrous Child, London, Royal Opera House, Linbury Theatre, 21 February–3 March 2019

Melting blocks of ice drip from the ceiling. Sounds of wind, rain, and shrieking howls accompanied by rasping trombone pedal tones and wailing clarinet glissandi build to a cacophony of death-noises. ‘Oh, enough local colour’, retorts Hel.

Philip Venables 4.48 Psychosis, Royal Opera House at Lyric Hammersmith, London; Liza Lim Tree of Codes, Musikfabrik, Cologne Opera, Cologne

As the first Doctoral Composer-in-Residence of the Royal Opera House and Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Philip Venables has – some might say bravely – chosen to adapt 4.48 Psychosis, the last play by the late British playwright Sarah Kane. Brave for several reasons. Kane's work is renowned for its naked, sometimes brutal, expression and themes, and the nihilism and violence of her plays have caused critical uproar in the past. Moreover, her estate has until now been understandably protective of her legacy; Venables's opera, premiered in May, is the first adaptation they have permitted, and came with instructions to remain as true as possible to the text.

Georg Friedrich Haas Morgen und Abend, Royal Opera House, London

Morgen und Abend is Georg Friedrich Haas's seventh opera, a co-commission by the Royal Opera in London and Deutsche Opera in Berlin. It is an hour-and-a-half long, and its libretto is adapted from the novel Morgon og Kveld (2000) by Norwegian author Jon Fosse, whose work Haas previously adapted in Melancholia for the Paris Opéra. Morgen und Abend's two continuous scenes present the life of fisherman Johannes by focusing on its two most salient moments – Johannes's birth (in the morning) and death (in the evening). In this strategy there is a slight, if inadvertent, echo of the lights on/lights off of Haas's In Vain.

Georg Friedrich Haas Atthis and Matthew Rogers The Virtues of Things, The Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House, London

The Linbury Studio Theatre at the Royal Opera House in London has hosted an impressive range of intimate experimental music theatre works over the last few years. The 2014/15 season, for example, has featured prominent premieres of new works by Harrison Birtwistle and David Harsent, and a ballet staging of John Adams' Shaker Loops, amongst a range of other interesting concerts and shows. The late-April premiere run of Matthew Rogers's The Virtues of Things and an early-May staging by Netia Jones of Georg Friedrich Haas's song-cycle on fragments of Sappho, Atthis, showed how well the Royal Opera uses the smaller space and shorter runs common to the Linbury to programme in quick succession such distinctive pieces from across the spectrum of contemporary music. Atthis, which I attended on 24 April 2015, was perhaps the more intriguing of these two shows, since in conception and execution it was so bold; though Virtues has its own qualities, to which I'll get in a moment.

Humour and the Representation of Fascism in Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg: Adorno contra Brecht and Hanns Eisler

Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler's Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg occupies a key but under-recognized place in debates about humour in anti-fascist art in the late 1950s and early 1960s – debates largely dominated by Theodor W. Adorno's critique of Brecht's satirical plays on the Third Reich. In this article Anna Papaeti examines the artistic strategies and reception history of Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg in the context of such debates. Focusing in particular on Eisler's musical additions for the parodic ‘higher regions’ interludes, as well as on the controversies sparked by the 1959 West German premiere, she analyzes the play's role in stimulating key debates, showing how Brecht's play and Eisler's music attain a more complex and defensible position of resistance to fascism than was allowed in Adorno's critique. Anna Papaeti has a doctorate from King's College London, has worked at the Royal Opera House, London, and as Associate Dramaturg at the Greek National Opera, Athens. Her postdoctoral research includes a DAAD fellowship on Hanns Eisler (Universität der Künste, Berlin, 2010) and a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (University of Göttingen, 2011–14) on the use of music by the Greek military junta. She has previously published in such journals as Opera Quarterly, Music and Politics, and The World of Music, and in edited scholarly volumes.

Dancing against History: (The Royal) Ballet, Forsythe, Foucault, Brecht, and the BBC

On 5 July 1997, The Royal Ballet danced William Forsythe's Steptext as part of a final programme at its Royal Opera House home before the theatre closed for an extensive Millennial programme of rebuilding. Filmed by the BBC, the performance was televised as part of the 1997 Christmas schedule. This paper explores the striking parallels between the institutional critique staged by Steptext and the literal deconstruction which the Royal Opera House was about to undergo. It considers how the programme debated Covent Garden as British cultural institution just as the reconstruction of the Royal Opera House was imminent. Focusing first on Steptext's post-structuralist desire to excavate, disrupt, and disavow the apparently logical structures which have shaped the governing institutions of western performance, it moves to consider how the BBC programme makers co-opted, and extended to the fabric of the Royal Opera House itself, ballet's same potential to critique its own institutional history enshrined in Steptext. Having argued that Brecht might be an especially apt ally in Forsythe's realisation, through performance, of some of the fundamental tenets of Foucauldian theory, those relating to Foucault's re-conceptualisation of history especially, this paper moves finally to propose the performance and televisual adaptation of Steptext as a portal into new modes of reading the post-war Royal Ballet as Foucauldian subjugated, or effective, history.

Reviews

Abstract Eugene Onegin, Kaspar Holten (dir.), London: The Royal Opera, 14 February 2013 Playing Cards 1: Spades, Robert Lepage (dir.), London: The Roundhouse, February–March 2013 In the Beginning was the End, Dreamthinkspeak, London: Somerset House, February–March 2013

Meaningful measurement: a literature review and Australian and British case studies of arts organizations conducting “artistic self-assessment”

Funding bodies, donors and boards around the world increasingly require arts organizations to conduct performance measurement. This often extends to measuring an organization's artistic excellence, or, in Australian terms, “artistic vibrancy”. In some countries, such as England and Australia, funding bodies require major arts organizations to “self-assess” their own artistic excellence and vibrancy. But can such a thing really be measured? In 2009, the Australia Council for the Arts conducted research into the concept of measuring artistic vibrancy. As there had been little formal research in the area, the Australia Council conducted primary research into what might represent “good practice” in artistic self-assessment amongst major performing arts organizations in Australia and the United Kingdom, in the art forms of opera, orchestral and chamber music, dance and theatre (including circus). The researchers' key finding was that there is no “one size fits all” approach to assessing artistic vibrancy. Arts organizations will adopt a variety of methods that suit their unique environments, both across art forms and within them. However, in general, it was found that good practice in artistic self-assessment almost always involved: a frank culture of feedback, within the organization, and with audiences and external stake holders; a meaningful engagement with assessment as part of a performance improvement process, and a related aversion to “box ticking”; a genuine commitment to peer review; and acting on the outcomes of artistic self-assessment to improve future work. This article will examine the Australian policy context of the research, review the literature in relation to measuring “artistic vibrancy”, and present key, good practice case studies of “artistic self-assessment”, including the Royal Opera House and Scottish Opera, United Kingdom, and Circus Oz, Australia. The article will conclude with an analysis of the findings from the case studies, and suggestions for further research and policy directions for other funding bodies grappling with the issue of how to measure artistic vibrancy.

Lighting Boris Godunov with Andrei Tarkovsky

It is early spring in 1983, and I am lighting a revival of another of the myriad productions that the Royal Opera at Covent Garden has at its disposal. A very excited production manager comes to the production desk and whispers in my ear (rather loudly), “We have Andrei Tarkovsky to direct Boris Godunov next season.” I was familiar with the name Tarkovsky, but my filmic experience had been shaped almost exclusively by Hollywood and British cinema, particularly as a young boy in the Second World War. Russian film had passed me by—something to be remedied. However, sometime after this, Andrei Tarkovsky and the set designer Nicholas Dvigubsky duly arrived in London to begin the tortuous process of designing Boris Godunov. As a film director, Andrei was clearly a very visual being, and Nicholas, as a painter, was equally visual. Unfortunately, their visions did not always coincide, resulting in a lot of heated Russian expletives. I was not party to all of this, but the word came down from our model room that “all was not going swimmingly”! They did eventually arrive at a solution which, by and large, still stands today as a monument to their perspicacity and originality (fig. 1).

Birtwistle's The Minotaur: the opera and a diary of its first production

AbstractHarrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur, to a libretto by David Harsent, was premiered at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in April 2008. This article offers a synopsis, a diary of rehearsals for the opera (for all of which the composer was in attendance), and an analytical essay. The diary chronicles the development of the production, with its diversions from, and clarifications of, the text as well as the composer's reaction to these. The essay presents The Minotaur as a departure for Birtwistle, from narrative (as in the earlier Gawain) to characterisation, its basis being a trio of protagonists. While a predictably heroic Theseus and tragic Minotaur are characters fashioned by the libretto as much as the music, a multi-faceted Ariadne is primarily the composer's creation.

Tony Hall: Fighter pilot, enter stage left

Interviewed by the editor, the former Head of News at the BBC and now executive director of the Royal Opera House, Tony Hall, talks for the first time about the events that led to Andrew Gilligan, Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke leaving the Corporation and says that crises in television "have helped concentrate minds wonderfully" but that broadcasters must work overtime regain public trust. And as a non-executive director of Channel 4, he comments: "I believe that as a public service broadcaster we can do something that will really have an impact on people's lives. We can stand for something and I think that is really important. The debate about Channel 4 now is actually about public service provision, and about plurality of public service provision. I think it is inevitable, inevitable, that the licence fee will be contested - part of it will be contested - and that in the next five or six years Channel 4 will have a pitch at the licence fee [to obtain a share of it]. The notion that there should be competition in the provision of public service broadcasting is absolutely fundamental - Channel 4 is there to add perspectives and an edge and to support new talent and new companies in a way that the BBC doesn't."

The Bridge of Aspiration, Covent Garden, London, UK

The Bridge of Aspiration between the Royal Ballet School and the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden comprises an aluminium beam of highly complex geometry and a series of aluminium and timber square frames forming a twisted box arrangement (Fig. 1). This paper describes the design and construction, and addresses the reasons for selecting aluminium as the primary structural material. The innovative design had to deal with several complex issues and permit installation in a single operation to minimise disruption to the function of the Opera House.

London, Royal Opera House: ‘Sophie's Choice’

Few contemporary operas achieve the newsworthiness of Nicholas Maw's Sophie's Choice. Even before its 7 December première at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the piece dented public consciousness thanks to a barrage of press coverage surrounding the production, the cast, and the subject matter. The irony is that it was the other names associated with the opera – conductor Simon Rattle, director Trevor Nunn, and William Styron, author of the 1979 novel – that made Sophie's Choice a news story, rather than the fame of its composer. Yet Maw's was the ultimate responsibility for the creation of this ambitious, large-scale work.

Opera, education and the role of arts organisations

This article describes three projects organised by the Royal Opera House Education Department between 1985 and 1997. Following the descriptions each project is analysed in terms of students, artists and teachers with a view to placing the work within an overall conceptual framework suggesting that arts education provides an interface between the professional work of artists and educational settings. It proposes that arts education can be most effective when students are encouraged to see themselves ‘as artists’ and by creating their own work they can then engage with the work of other artists, both living and from other generations.

West End rambling: gender and architectural space in London 1800–1830

This paper is a theoretical and historical study which explores aspects of gendered space through the early nineteenth century urban ramble. It is argued that the activity of rambling represents a dominant mode of urban masculinity concerned with the physical and conceptual pursuit of pleasure, specifically sexual pleasure. The male rambler constructs his masculinity socially and spatially, through gendered codes of vision and movement. The author's concern as a feminist architectural historian is to develop methodologies which describe, explain and critique how space is gendered and gender spatialized. The notion of gendered space, of concern to architects, geographers, anthropologists, historians and cultural critics alike, has, despite differences in methodological approach, tended to focus on critiquing the paradigm of the separate spheres, ‘deconstructing’ this binary, showing its ideological underpinnings in patriarchy and capitalism. The author's work in architectural history has been informed by these strategies, but suggests new ways for thinking about the gendering of space as physical and conceptual urban movements of display, consumption and exchange. The ramble featured in a number of key texts published in the 1820s, including Pierce Egan's Life in London (1821), represents London as a gendered place of pleasure and enjoyment. This paper follows the route of the rambler, focusing on a number of spaces in the upper class and masculine district around St. James's - the Royal Opera House, Crockford's Gambling House, and several streets in the vicinity - the Haymarket, Pall Mall, Regent Street, Bond Street and St. James's Street. The ramble provides us with a conceptual map of urban space, one which rethinks the city as a series of gendered spaces of flow rather than a series of discrete architectural elements.

The real obscenities

As the old joke goes, I always thought that cunnilingus was an Irish airline until I discovered the Royal Opera House. Having just spent 20 odd glorious hours sitting through Wagner's Ring Cycle at Covent Garden, I have read as many reviews of this disputed production. What puzzles me is that while these get all excited about the Oxfam shop costumes and cardboard box sets, all have studiously ignored the three separate instances of oral sex which Alberich bestows on a Rhine maiden during Das Rheingold. It occurs to me that the director escaped controversy because the tight knit opera community closed ranks to prevent the tabloids mounting a salivating and rabid attack with …

SENIORITY SEATING AT THE ROYAL OPERA HOUSE

This paper examines lotteries and seniority queues as forms of commodity bundling price discrimination. There are good and bad seats, and two types of potential purchasers. Offered the choice of a high-priced good seat and a moderately-priced bundle of good and bad seats, customers self-select into high and low valuation types. For single-period purchases, the bundle is a lottery over good and bad seats. For repeated purchases, monopolists such as the Royal Opera House can do better by setting up a seniority allocation system.