Top 10 Pandemic Pivots No. 10:
Opera Of, By, and For the People

Under the artistic leadership of director Graham Vick, Birmingham Opera Company has been bringing cutting edge work to the U.K.’s most diverse city for the last 20 years. Engaging local communities, it presents opera in found spaces from power stations to nightclubs. Its' reputation for innovative programming, and especially its' approach to outreach and participation, have has won plaudits over the years.

A scene from BOC staging of Sir Michael Tippett's Ice Break

“We perform with hundreds of people from the city of Birmingham who represent every class, every color, every religion in the city,” Vick explained in a recent One to One interview. “The audience is standing in a promenade-style production where they find themselves at the heart of the performance…. Soloists are diverse, the chorus is largely volunteer…There are no boxes, there’s no grand tier, there’s no booking for drinks at the bar. That levelling out has been enormously democratic. And, of course, our ticket prices are low.”

Not surprisingly, BOC’s response to the pandemic has been determined with an inventive as well as a politically and socially conscious approach.

10 District Program

Birmingham is divided into ten districts of approximately 100,000 people and each year BOC commits to a series of activities in each of them through its 10 District Program. Anyone can attend or participate. Right now, BOC is  working towards Wagner’s Das Rheingold—or “RhineGold,” as it is labelled. During the U.K.’s first lockdown from March 16 to mid-June the program was available digitally with online events exploring creative writing, relaxation, and voice, and poetry and music sessions inspired by Wagner’s opera led by Empress P, a local Black poet.

“We advertised events for people to take part and teamed up with an FM community radio station to do a ‘you didn’t think this was opera’ slot,” says BOC Executive Director Richard Willacy, explaining the importance of free-to-air broadcasts for older people who might not be digitally connected. “We didn’t want to be seduced by the fact that it’s easy to do stuff on Facebook and get a load of seven-second views,” he adds.

Pop Ups

In between the end of the U.K.’s first lockdown and its second in November the company did a number of live pop-up performances with a pianist, a director, and four singers, two of whom are involved in next year’s RhineGold. Light-hearted events in a botanical garden included tenor Amar Muchhala in a panda suit as “Pandarotti,” complete with white handkerchief, singing Puccini. Others took place in the industrial gallery of a local museum and the check-out area of a shuttered supermarket café.

Ritual Weekender

With Birmingham’s popular carnival weekend cancelled, the company collaborated with Culture Central—the collective voice for culture in the West Midlands—in an August 29 digital event on the theme of rituals, which involved 50 non-opera artists and drew an audience of several thousand. “We live-hosted that as a way of engaging people in the West Midlands who might not have heard of Birmingham Opera Company but who might be interested in the work,” Willacy explains. “It was a way to opening the door, platforming work beyond opera, and engaging lively and creative minds who we might not normally get to engage with.”

#ItGetsLighterFromHere

The company’s newest online offering, “#ItGetsLighterFromHere,” is a series of 10 commissioned 60-second films inspired by the prelude to Das Rheingold involving a cross-section of artforms and artists living and working in the West Midlands.

Pandemic streams

BOC’s most visible presence internationally has been its streams of past productions, all carefully chosen to reflect the times. “Black Lives Matter is perhaps as big and important event this year as COVID,” said Vick. Willacy persuaded the BBC to stream a recording it had broadcast of the BOC 2009 Otello production, starring tenor Ronald Samm, the first Black to sing the title role in the U.K., and Keel Watson, also Black, as Iago. The staging was  ground-breaking, not least because it would be six years before the Royal Shakespeare Company cast a Black actor as Iago. Verdi’s Otello ran on BBC iPlayer for a month in June.

Ronald Samm and Keel Watson in BOC staging of Verdi's Otello

Willacy also licensed back from the BBC the recording of the company’s 2012’s Fidelio, an opera about isolation and hope set in an enormous circus tent and featuring over 200 local participants. For the streaming, BOC collaborated with OperaVision. “We opted for a third-party, non-commercial arrangement just to get viewing figures,” explains Willacy. OperaVision also streamed the company’s 2015 staging of Tippett’s The Ice Break, the first production in the U.K. of this socially prescient work since its premiere in 1977. With its themes of racial conflict, rebellion, censorship, and community, it was another important, not to mention relevant, streamed event.

After gaining permission from the artists involved in its 2012 world premiere staging of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht, BOC put the recording on its Vimeo channel in July and added it to the Théâtre du Châtelet’s digital festival. With demands including a string quartet divided among four helicopters, the opera had struggled for 20 years to find a company to stage it. Willacy was delighted that the stream of such a challenging work achieved average viewing times of around 50 minutes.

Shoestring operation

As Vick explains, Birmingham Opera Company is “four people and an office, and all of the money is spent on the work.” With an annual budget of around £1 million, full-time staff includes a development coordinator, a general manager, Willacy himself, and an artistic associate. All other employees are freelance. Four professional singers were engaged for the pop-ups with four or five technical or admin staff involved in the digital activities.

Viewing figures for the streams have been excellent with Mittwoch notching up around 8,000 views and The Ice Break around 15,000 (compared to the 2,000 that saw it live in 2015). Fidelio is already up to 7,000 views on OperaVision where it can be seen until February 24, 2021.

Although Birmingham Opera Company is not in it for the money, for the streams of Mittwoch and the Ritual Weekender event it encouraged donations to a pair of third-party charitable organizations, the Musicians Hardship Fund and the Black Creatives Fund.

Looking ahead, Vick is certain the BOC approach represents the future. “Our aims, I think, are essential,” he reiterates. “I don’t see how anybody making art coming out of COVID cannot feel the need to… make sure that the work they make is accessible to everybody.”

Middle photo: Tenor Amar Muchhala as "Pandarotti"